10 Random Facts Which Are, In Fact, About Me

So, Blog, at the kind invitation of my friend Tameri Etherton, today I am participating in a Ten Random Facts About Me blog thingy. I would have been happy to post Ten Random Facts about You, Blog, if the list was that long. But really, there's not too much we know about you except:

1. You are a disembodied anthropomophized being.

2. You are gender-neutral with a masculine vibe.

3. You occasionally like to interview other anthropomophized beings like our cookie jar, Professor Snowcaps.

And that's about it.

So while I may not be as fascinating as, say, Ashton Kutcher or one of those Jersey Shore peeps, at least we can come up with Ten Random Facts about me, Blog. So tally ho!

1. I can do ecclesiasical embroidery.

2. From 1998 to 2002 I published a weekly ezine called "Hockey Snacks." (Remember those? Today we call it blogging.) It consisted of original humor about the NHL and was hosted by Shinny, aka my right index finger wearing a miniature goalie mask.

3. When I was in the fourth grade I wrote and directed a musical puppet show called "Soggy Wheat." I am truly not making this up...it made sense at the time.

4. When I was in my 30s I taught myself a couple years of piano and composed a theme-and-variations piece for pipe organ which was performed publically (although not by me, because I didn't know how to play the pipe organ).

5. My first celebrity crush was on Michael Rennie as Klaatu in "The Day the Earth Stood Still." That movie was made in 1951 so that gives you a hint how ancient I am. My latest celebrity crush is Christian Kane who plays Eliot Spencer on "Leverage." The only thing they have in common is the ability to kill people at will. I can only speculate on the psychology happening here.

6. I maintain a biligual biographical website about the French Canadian hockey star Guy Carbonneau, which is currently at 316 pages of material. I've talked about it on Quebec radio and TV, in French, even though I am terrible at speaking French and was terrified.

7. I love to make things. The smallest thing I have ever made--it was out of polymer clay--is the blue bird from Angry Birds. For scale, this is my cat Selke with all the Angry Birds.

8. When I was in junior high I mixed cream cheese with green food coloring, made it into balls dusted with cracker crumbs, called them "Moon Marbles" and brought them to my social studies class (which also made sense at the time...sort of). Everyone agreed they were disgusting.

9. When my husband and I were first dating, we invented a sort of death-metal rock band called "Ham Carving." We thought up all the members and their histories, the names of their albums, song lyrics, etc. It was a poor man's Spinal Tap, but we liked our band.

10. I am pretty obsessed with LOL cats and cat videos. Okay, totally obsessed to the point of pathology. I have not succeeded in making a funny cat video of my own yet but I did make this just sort of nice one.

And that, Blog and dear readers, is as the kids say "all I got." Again, I never promised you Ashton Kutcher...and thanks for reading.

Blizzards have gotten so much better

Hey Blog, I have to tell the story of a time long before you were born, before there were any blogs at all. The year was 1981, the place was Deer Creek Township, Iowa. Sound like the boonies? Well, this photo shows you where that is, Blog, and it was the Boonies with a capital B.

Just how boony was it? Well, here’s the view I saw of the road there, when I went to get the mail.

But I want to tell you about a time when it was almost impossible to get the mail, because it had snowed. And snowed, and snowed. The winter of 1981, my first winter as a pastor’s wife, was a time of blizzards. Blizzards that made our tiny parsonage howl from the wind, wind that knocked out our power for hours on end, cold hours that made us close off the bedrooms (on the north side) and drove the temp in those rooms below freezing. Blizzards that buried our house in drifts six feet high, which had to be tunneled through before I could get the mail.

There was a period when I didn’t see a living soul outside my family of three for ten days. But that was not the worst of it: the worst of it was, there was no Internet. My companions for that blizzard were the four channels on our TV. Yes, no cable, no VCR, Blog, but believe me, the worst of it was, there was no Internet. A person living in Deer Creek Township could have used the Internet every day of the year, but especially during the cold and lonely isolation of a blizzard.

Fast forward to the great blizzard of 2011, aka the Groundhog Day Snopacalypse. I will rush to say that it helped that the power stayed on, it helped to have cable TV and DVR and streaming Netflix. But more than anything, it helped to have the Internet. Sure, 60 mph winds howled around our house as if to take the roof off. Sure, we had snow piles reminiscent of the Alps. But the mood remained cheerful throughout…and why?

Because all during the storm and its clean up, I shared the experience with others. I watched videos and real time blogging on local news sites. I emailed with loved ones in various places. And most of all, I hung out on Facebook, where people I knew all over the country commiserated and reported and joked, and people I knew all over the world sympathized.

We kept abreast of each other’s locations. Even those without power updated via their smart phones. And everyone--including me, of course--posted photos and videos of their little slice of Winter Wondergeddon. Digging out a buried car wasn’t such a hardship when you could share it with friends and get their sympathy. Living in a world suddenly dominated by snow was kinda cool, since you could photograph it and impress friends living in Florida and California. For all of us, to one degree or other it was a pain, but we turned it into a party too.

My dad lives 15 miles away. We both knew we were fine and we didn’t feel cut off, because we could email and share links and photos and other cheery bits. Transfer the 2011 Blizzardathon to 1981 Iowa and we would hopefully have had the phone, intermittently.

So I say to the young folk out there, who can barely remember a world without texting and Skype and Twitter, be thankful for the Internet, especially in times of crisis. Sometimes it saves lives. Sometimes it spreads truth when cruel regimes want that truth stifled. And sometimes it simply makes hard times much, much happier.

Happy like our cat Cody was after Davie shoveled, and he could see out the patio doors again.

Contest winner...And you go, Seth Green!

Yay, Blog, we have a winner in our who-was-your-celebrity-crush-when-you-were-15 contest.  Rachel Bland will receive a paperback copy of my novel The Resurrection of Captain Eternity.  And I think our Random Number Generator was tapped into karma or something, because she was having a bad day and really needed some cheerful news.  So double yay for that!  By the way, Rachel's crush was the inimitable Michael Jackson, and who can argue with that pick.

Between the comments on the blog post and my Facebook page, Blog, I heard some wonderful and fascinating stories about how these infatuations affected the lives of young women ever after.  Some of them had as much impact on their lives as the Captain did on the heroine of my book!  Very, very cool.  It was also interesting for me, being super old aka 54, to learn how many of these young'uns were drawn to the very same guys I was.  Clearly Rick Springfield crosses all age boundaries!

But it would appear the guy mentioned most often was, of all people, Seth Green.  15-year-old Devin is mad for him right now, and another Rachel adored him nine years ago when she was 15, and heck, about that time I really dug him too!  I was an Oz ("Buffy the Vampire Slayer") fan but you can also enjoy Seth as Scott Evil, Mitch from "The 70s Show," or any of his dozens of other roles in film and TV. Never underestimate the power of the cute and geeky guy.  Although he shore don't look geeky in this photo, Blog.  Swoon.

Thanks to all who entered, and if alas you craved a copy of my book, on this page on my website you can find all the info to order it from your favorite retailer.  But remember, if you want the paperback, you gotta order from the publisher!

So, let's spend some quality time today thinking about that cute guy we were so into in our adolescent years.  Oh sorry, Blog... I know you're just not anywhere near 15 yet.  Although I wonder how exactly one calculates age in blog-years...

Ecclesiastical embroidery, huh?

Blog, one of the more unusual experiences I’ve been privileged to enjoy was learning the art of ecclesiastical embroidery. If you had a tangible face, I’m sure I’d see it wax puzzled right about now, Blog. But hang on, here’s how it all went down back in 1979-1982, and what it means for 2010.

And during my story, you’ll learn about these four liturgical stoles that you see here, in the four traditional colors of the liturgical year of the Christian church. (For those of you keeping score, green is for “ordinary time,” the majority of the year; red is for the power of the Holy Spirit, the Pentecost season; purple is for penitential seasons, Lent and Advent; white is for Christmastide, Easter season, certain feast days and weddings.)

My first husband studied for his Masters of Divinity at Concordia Theological Seminary in Fort Wayne, Indiana. One of the benefits of this was that I was able to partake of the seminary wives’ courses, things like apologetics and dogmatics. Way fun, actually. I also took ecclesiastical embroidery, the art of sewing Christian symbols onto vestments (clothing) and accessories for worship services. I took this class circa 1979, and it was not easy stuff. (By the way, the course is still taking place there these days.)

The difficulty of it is my excuse why it was not until 1982 that I actually finished making these four stoles. Why did I finally get my act together a year after my husband was ordained? All the credit goes to the Milwaukee Brewers. That fall was the team’s glory days, when Robin Yount, Paul Molitor & Co. had their great playoff run. At our parish in rural Fort Dodge, Iowa, I had a lot of time on my hands. So during the MLB post season, while we Milwaukee transplants watched the Brewers ultimately lose in the World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals, I finished the stoles.

My husband left the ministry some years later, and in our divorce gave me custody of the stoles. They languished in a storage bag for the past two decades. Recently an idea came to me for what to do with these stoles, which took me dozens of hours to embroider (two symbols per stole, Blog) and sew (also very tricky).

Our good friends Liz and Dave are devoted members of a lovely parish, St. Mary’s Episcopal Church in Dousman, Wisconsin. This congregation was founded in 1836, and its first real church, which still stands today and until this year was the sole building of worship for the parish, was built in 1870. That history alone is inspiring.

St. Mary’s takes part in The Haiti Project, a joint effort of the Milwaukee diocese of the Episcopal Church, and has a sister parish in Haiti. I couldn’t think of a cooler home for my stoles than this. So I took these farewell photos of my handiwork and will be donating them to St. Mary’s this weekend. It’s an honor and a privilege, and just thrills me to think they will find new life in a country that certainly needs love and support.

I still think ecclesiastical embroidery is an awesome hobby. If our readers would like to know a little more about the subject, this site has some good information. My stoles are very traditional, making use of ancient Christian symbols, but more contemporary designs are also created using the same techniques.

I’m sure I’m making use of the practice I got during the 1982 MLB playoffs for stuff I still do today, like Herbert G and my sock creatures. Funny how life works, eh Blog?