It started with an afghan. One of The Commander’s many friends (I’ll call her M) gave her a hand-crocheted afghan for her 90th birthday. It is a beautiful afghan but one of the “rules” I have made up is that when a person dies, special gifts to that person need to be returned to the person who gave them, assuming that person is still around and can be found. M is alive and well and she lives a few miles down the beach from the moomincabin *and* we are facebook friends! Still, getting that afghan to her was an ongoing challenge. We are both very active and travel a lot and…

This weekend, M was here on The Planet Ann Arbor! She and her best friend (who I will get to in a minute), were going to a concert and staying downtown at the Campus Inn. Did I want to meet them for breakfast on Sunday? Well, yes I did. Except… I was stunned when she told me her best friend’s name and it turned out to be none other than my college freshman music theory teacher! Oooohhhhh…. So, could I do this? This woman was a *wonderful* teacher and I *loved* music theory and I’m sure I got a 4.0 in that class (actually I did in most classes). I remembered her *very* fondly. The problem is that I don’t remember *myself* all that fondly at that time of my life. I’d prefer not to go there. Maybe I will when I am 90. Or maybe not. Definitely not now.

I gave myself a pep talk. 1) She *was* a wonderful teacher and I knew that I would be able to tell her that without lying. 2) I was sure she wouldn’t remember *me*! I only had her that one year. She taught squintillions of students and I didn’t finish my college career at that school. Why *would* she remember me? I was right. She was still as lovely a person as I remember. I gave M her afghan and had a wonderful time.

Another odd experience today was when another facebook friend messaged me to ask why animated, noisy(!), pop-up ads were showing up on his feed. Did I know how to get rid of them? This friend is a highly intelligent computer-savvy person but facebook is not the most user-friendly web service. I didn’t know what was causing his annoying problem (I didn’t exactly know why he was asking me except that I was showing up as online in facebook chat) but in looking around at the settings, I discovered that a whole bunch of facebook apps that I have *never* knowingly installed were hanging out there. Bubble Witch Saga? No thank you. I disabled all of that crap except the ones *I* installed — like Twitter and Hipstamatic, etc. He did figure out the problem and it was an app and I am glad not to lose a facebook friend because of an intrusive facebook app. Facebook, take a note.

And then. What did I do this afternoon? Well, it was a relatively slow day. But I *did* sorta get ahead with the whole meal-planning thing that I have been struggling with for years now. No point in crowing about that though because the next couple weeks will probably blow it all to hell. I was casting about for things to sort out, throw out, recycle, whatever. Then I remembered the two big garbage bags of “textiles” in the dungeon. Last time we went north, my “boss” (aka The GG, erp) hinted that it might be good to get the “textiles” out of the moomincabin garage for the winter. And so I threw all of those textiles into two big garbage bags and somehow they survived a rainy trip down the I75 SUV Speedway in the Snowbilly Trailer.

After nitzing around for most of the afternoon — I didn’t feel like sorting thru paperwork, I didn’t feel like dealing with all those damn utensils, yada yada — I finally headed down to the dungeon and… I saw those two garbage bags. Okay, I will sort the textiles today. I threw a significant amount of fabric out (ducking from lightning bolts). I do know fabric well enough to know what to keep and what not to. I have my own blasted collection, after all. I did save a few beautiful silks and things. I kept all of the tablecloths and placemats and napkins and things. I won’t even try to detail everything tonight. What is in the photo is stuff that The Comm wove on her loom. I was confused at first. The three in the photo do not match anything else in the collection. Then I realized she was probably experimenting. I remember The Comm using the loom when I was very young but I know that us kids and then her teaching career, not to mention her many other interests, kept her from continuing to weave. Or maybe she just didn’t want to bother with looms any more…

And that’s the gist of it all. We don’t all know what want to do when we are young. Maybe we are really really really good at something (like I was with music (and math)) but then our lives twist and turn in ways we can’t predict and we end up doing something we never expected to do. In my case, I have a career that didn’t exist when I graduated from college.

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 28th, 2012 at 6:33 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.