There Was An Old Lady Who Lived By the Sea

This week, I've been blessed with a houseguest in the form of my cousin's 4 year old daughter, Lydia.  Now, it's been 14 years since I had a little girl in the house and we quickly discovered that our home was sadly lacking in things like sippy cups and age-appropriate toys.  We've also been re-aquatinted with the incredible energy and determination of the young, and have had the chance to watch The Tales of Devereaux over a dozen times (and counting).  Good times.

Still, it wasn't until about half-way through the week that I thought of singing to Lydia.  I love to sing, but my contralto voice seems awkwardly low and out of place in many settings.  Also, in recent years my teenagers have generally dreaded my singing and have discouraged it whenever possible.  But here I was, tooling down the highway with a little person perched on her booster in my back seat, and I happened to toss out my rendition of There was an old woman who swallowed a fly.  Go figure - Lydia loved it.

Since then, I have sang There was an old woman at least 6 times, always by request.  I've also belted out I enjoy being a girl, which I still think is fun (if cringingly dated and sexist), and On top of Spaghetti and You are my sunshine and Air Force Blue.  I even attempted Puff the magic dragon, although I can never remember all the words.  Lydia tells me that I have a good voice, and she's requesting my singing even more often than Devereaux the mouse.

I love this stuff.  Lydia, I'll sing for you anytime.

I miss blogging

I used to have a blog, and I made it a priority to blog almost every day.  I blogged about my knitting, my photography, my family, and occasionally (very discretely) about my job.  I didn't have a wide audience - mostly cousins who wanted to keep up on my latest adventures and knitters who stopped by for free patterns.  But it was kind of nice to show off my photography, and to receive condolence messages from across the country when my cat died.

But then in January of 2009, I lost my job.  As I did interviews here and there, I discovered that people found my blog by googling me.  Prospective employers were reading my comments about managing stress and my theories comparing the interview process to a somewhat awkward first date.  I stand by those comments and made sure they were phrased tastefully - but I didn't get a job.

Meanwhile, I had been marketing my photographic prints at a couple of farmers' markets with limited success and had done some senior and family portraits.  With the job market looking awfully barren, I decided to pursue the photography more intensely. Unfortunately, the name of my old blog was very similar to the name of my new business, and potential customers kept finding my blog instead of my business website.  Generally speaking, photo customers don't really care about my pattern for knitted Easter eggs which convert to golf club covers, no matter how whimsical said items may be.

The final straw was my change in schedule.  I went from a standard 40 (okay, more like 45 or 50) hours a week in an office, working as a professional in a traditional field, to a haphazard schedule which might have me teaching 9th grade German as a substitute teacher one day and matting photographs of cows the next.  Some days I barely sit down to a computer except to check my e-mail and hack away a little bit on Mafia Wars.    This makes daily blogging less likely.

But like I said, I miss the blogosphere, so we're trying a fresh start.  Unless you're already a family member, here's all you need to know about me for now:

1. I'm an empty nester, more or less.  
1. My son Lucas is pursuing a mechanical design degree but really would be better suited as a librarian - not the person with the Master's Degree in Library Science, just the patient person who reshelves the books and helps the kids find information for their homework and so on.  (Maybe someday he'll be able to compromise and manage a technical library for a firm.)  
2. My daughter Tasha is in her freshman year at the state university, charging single-mindedly towards the medical degree she's wanted since she was 9.
3. My blue-heeler mix dog, Luna, is largely filling the gap in my attention caused when my kids left.  She's 18 months old, 37 pounds, has bi-color eyes (both blue on the bottom and brown on the top), and is training to be a therapy dog.  I dote on her more than may be completely healthy for either of us.
2. My husband and I have been married for decades, and life is still very, very good together.  He's my best friend and the one person on this earth that I absolutely could not do without.  
3. I have a dozen or so different and wildly varied careers in my past, as well as a pile of college education.  In one sense, I'm not using much of it right now; in another, I'm using all of it every day.
4. I used to be a voracious reader, and deeply regret that I just don't seem to get to it like I used to.  (Okay, modify that to be "a voracious reader of books."  I still read dozens of websites and blogs daily, which I find stimulating and interesting but which lack a certain long-term continuity.)
5. I am a highly motivated knitter, although I can never quite catch up with the ambition of my dreams.  I do not crochet.
6. I am semi-vegetarian, in the sense that I eat dairy and eggs and fish but not the meat of land animals.  This has less to do with PETA and more to do with my interest in avoiding the synthetic hormones and other fun things in commercial animal feeds which may be linked to breast cancer.

That's about it for now.  Welcome to it.