Spring Up North

May 28, 2014May 28, 2014 Shirleyjdietz1 Comment

NOTHING compares to a fully loaded lilac bush

flowers seem more exciting and glorious after 6 months of winter

I’ve been “up north” waiting to see spring come, hoping I had my timing right. I think it’s here. The children have lessening interest in their schoolwork, rain has made greenness appear everywhere and swollen the ponds and marshes. The woods are full of trilliums and fiddle head ferns. Mosquitoes follow us in clouds and dandelion seeds float in the air like snow. The garden is 80% planted and the reliable onions and radishes are already making their rows visible. Tulips and petunias are in place. And the lilacs have purple buds almost to the point of opening up – one of the things I wanted most to experience. The sun brightens up the horizon at 4:30 am and it’s still light at 9 pm, reminding me that the longest day of the year is less than a month away. It’s spring, but only for a little while.

There are no days to waste, no extra hours in the spring. Last night the weather cleared after an all day rain. My brother had bought seed corn and potatoes and was not willing to wait until today to plant – after all, he had to work at his “other business” during the day and there was no guarantee that it would not rain again. Best to get at it. He could hardly sit still through supper. We planted 12 rows of corn and put up the electric fence to keep the deer from eating the tomato and squash plants. I know it works because I tested it accidentally. The gardens have a good start this year, almost two weeks ahead of last year’s schedule. Hopes are high. It’s hard to realize that it still could freeze and one cold night could set everything back.

But today is beautiful and sunny, alive with birds (and mosquitoes) and plant life. Spring up north, how I have missed it and how wonderful it is. Just sayin’…

garden, with precautions for possible freezing weather (No, no, no!)

Change, bring it on…

May 10, 2014 Shirleyjdietz1 Comment

I have to say that things have begun to change for me already, but that will continue. Since last August I have been following an inner directive to be free for helping my immediate family should they need it. There are extended times in the ordinary progression of life when everyone is on the young side, fairly healthy, moving forward and enjoying independence. And then there are those other times that are not all those same things. If the family is like a wagon train heading across the plain, there are times when they need to circle the wagons. That’s a bit of what I feel.

Time is not a limitless commodity. I want to make conscious decisions where I spend my time and who I spend it with. As much as I love and appreciate my present friends and my community, I kind of arrived here out of financial necessity. And time spent here has been good, but I am also blessed that I love to spend time with my family, every one of them. They are all people I would choose to spend time with, lots of time. Instead, it’s been limited to a week here and there while on vacation, a reunion every few years, sometimes a holiday celebrated together. I am ready to choose a closer connection.

That being said, I don’t really know where I’ll be a year from now. Hey, but until I’m ready to do it, I don’t have to worry about where I’m going. I just have to get ready to go somewhere. The husband and I have made great progress toward this – at least I’m proud of us. Every week we get rid of some of our “stuff” that would not be worth taking with us. We are both thinking about our present jobs and how our work would continue in a different place. I jumped the hurdle of signing up for my social security benefits yesterday (believe me, it was a mental/emotional HURDLE). I am scaling back on commitments I make and not jumping into new ones. I am waiting to see what God will do with my readiness. And there is a peace in not knowing the timing but just doing one thing at a time as the possibilities become apparent.

No not now, not ever, never…

May 8, 2014 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

…is a home owner ever FINISHED working on his/her home. As much as we love living in our home in the oneacrewoods we know there will come a day when we will sell, move and downsize. It’s on my mind these days and just this morning it was also on the husband’s mind. He came to me asking about a list that we should make of all the needed repairs. The list is in my head – no problem there. The problem lies in finding the available manpower.

Several years ago when the husband and I were talking about our future goals and bucket lists I mentioned how cool it would be to build a house of our own, with all our ideas for energy saving, all our favorite features, the perfect abode. He said he was looking forward to working possibly for another decade and wanted to come home each night and avoid stress, rest, watch TV, read. No house building. No, period. This is just a clue as to how interested he is in tackling any project involving crowbars, hammers and other such weapons of war.

That leaves me. I was reading my niece’s home renovation blog, http://www.missmeadowlawn.blogspot.com, and remembering how all my DIY projects had nearly ruined important parts of my body. One’s own labor is easiest on cash flow but there are definitely other costs. And of course, in making a decision on where manpower should come from you have to factor in the fun of it all. Definitely, hire someone.

This is only a partial list, I’m sure. Josh, you know who you are, you need to come over and give us a house inspection so we can get all the rest of the crucial things on it.

ugliest door ever, that never got painted with the rest of the room.

backsplash area that never got tiled when kitchen was redone... — backsplash area that never got tiled when kitchen was redone…

something has eaten this for lunch... — something has eaten this for lunch…

Oh, and the master bedroom still has only a temporary, painted, concrete floor because we want to renovate the master bath first. That is the logical order of doing things if you don’t want to mess up a nice, new cork floor. We decided that four or five years ago when we tore out the aged bedroom carpet. Waiting, waiting…

It really is a wonderful thing to own your own home and work on it yourself but I’m just sayin’ don’t think you’ll be finished with it anytime soon.

A to Z Challenge: Zenaida

April 30, 2014May 1, 2014 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

I met her several years ago because her son was needing help with his English schoolwork. I was a tutor for the “No Child Left Behind” program and arrived at their home one day after school to spend some time meeting the family and assessing exactly what was needed. Our friendship went from being centered on her son to food rather quickly. She was always cooking something in large quantities and urging me to take some. She packaged hot meals and sold them to workers at her husband’s workplace.

She and her husband were Hispanic and back in Mexico she had gotten a degree in Accounting, I think, but that didn’t count for much here in the States. She did whatever she could find to do in between her children’s school schedules. Her husband worked in construction but this was in 2008 and Florida’s economy was taking a hit. They were barely making their house payments, but they had their own place. It was clean and neat.

Our friendship deepened later on. Hispanic women (and men) have a thing for fragrance and Zenaida signed up with me to sell cosmetics and perfume. We marketed together, got dressed up and went to sales meetings. Later still, when my daughter needed an extra hand in her house-cleaning business, I suggested she try Zenaida and it was a good suggestion. The clients loved her integrity and work ethic. When my daughter moved on to vet school, Zenaida inherited her business.

Zenaida is still the friend who shows up at birthday parties and graduations with a full tray of home cooked tamales (my daughter’s favorite). She still wants to help with my cleaning and yard work and is the hardest one to take any pay for her work. She just wants to be a friend, and she is. And her name begins with Z (for which I am thankful).

Zenaida is a common name for women in several cultures and is also the name given to the Zenaida dove which is our mourning dove.

F for Fingers

April 6, 2014April 6, 2014 Shirleyjdietz9 Comments

um... oh well, you know — um… oh well, you know

etching an award for a deserving teacher

Fingers – think of all they do. Think of what life would be like without them… Think of how awesome it is that they obey orders that start way up in your head without you even having to think about it. We are wonderfully made! Have you ever really looked at the hands and fingers of the people you love? These are fingers from my family and friends doing what they do for fun and for making a living.

Lessons from The Natural World

February 4, 2014February 4, 2014 Shirleyjdietz7 Comments

The Natural World

I could feel the blisters coming up, but I couldn’t stop.

We have a beautiful tree in our yard, a somewhat rare tropical Kapok tree. It’s very tall, having grown up in a grove of oak trees – it had to go up to get the sun. Most of the year we don’t pay much attention to it, other than to admire the trunk.

But in the spring it flowers, and for two to three weeks the ground below is showered with the red blooms. These are not like the delicate white dogwood flower but the type that will put a dent in your car should it happen to land there. We put a parking area under this tree. What were we thinking?!

big, juicy, heavy flower capable of doing damage

The mat of squishy, slippery rotting vegetation is hard to walk on or drive on and it creates a brown, moldy looking paste that is death to a car’s paint job.

I was considering all this while raking the debris into heavy piles of “stuff” and my usual outdoor thought surfaced. What is nature teaching me? Could it be that we are all parked in places in our lives where “stuff” is falling on us that is damaging us? I had no trouble connecting that to some relationally toxic environments that I’ve been in lately. And I had just read a blog post about dealing with self-absorbed people who drop words and thoughts on others without awareness of the effects.

I’m not exactly proud that this was my first evaluation of the nature flower bomb situation, because the next place my thinking went proved more valuable. What if I am the tree? What’s happening to the people who are parked in my vicinity during the hours and days of my life? What kind of clean-up chores are necessary after I’ve been around? Now there was food for thought. It gave me a whole new perspective on spending an afternoon doing crafts with a child, or taking time to shop for my quadriplegic client, or the contacts with people in my study group. There are a lot of people “parked” under my tree of influence and I can make decisions on how I affect them, for good or bad.

Yes, the blisters are there. On other days, it’s a sore back, or a sunburn or just being dog-tired. Is it worth it? I say yes, as I look at the results – a clean drive and parking area and new incentive to interact in a better way with my friends and neighbors on planet earth . Surrounded by trees, plants, sky, dirt and fresh air we open ourselves to hear some really valuable messages. I’m just sayin’, whoever created the natural world had a really good idea and today I get it.

Dirt

February 2, 2014February 2, 2014 Shirleyjdietz1 Comment

I have noticed that I feel so good after spending a day outside working in the yard, and I’ve decided it’s the dirt. Therapeutic dirt. I always make sure I have a lot of contact with it – wear my sandals and shorts, and somehow manage to get smudges from head to toe.

Today’s dirt was AMAZING stuff. Two years ago it was a huge leaf pile and now it is all broken down, dark brown with nice fat earthworms crawling through it. It grows healthy looking weeds, which I pulled out and put in next year’s compost pile.

In Florida it’s the time of year to plant the spring garden. At the vegetable stand where I get the weekly fresh things for our meals, they also had tomato plants so I decided to get some instead of growing my own. An interesting aside – the stand is at our church and is “donation only” for whatever you want to pay and goes to the orphan homes in Cambodia that I visit. I call that a win-win transaction when I can support my special kids and get something to eat at the same time. I know the farmer who supplies it and he farms very successfully. Bet his tomato plants are going to do wonderful things for me this season.

So I pulled my earthboxes to the only sunny spot I could find in the oneacrewoods. It happens to be right near the fence line. The neighbor has cut down a lot of his trees and has a much sunnier yard than I do and some of the light sneaks through to my side of the fence. I think that my somewhat “iffy” results from the gardening I do is because there is so much shade. Good for keeping cool, bad for growing plants.

The other outside chore for today was harvesting my carrots. They have been growing for a whole year and are pitiful. This is what happens when you don’t thin out the seedlings. I’ve never been able to get carrots to germinate in my Florida gardens so I was really excited about all the fluffy greenery and couldn’t bear to pull any of it out. This is probably why they are so small after a whole year! (could also be the shade, or the inconsistent watering, or the general inattention they received).

So, other than the fact that some bug is eating all the leaves off my strawberry plants, things are looking much better in the garden today. And I feel great.

Something I Don’t Get to Do Every Day

January 25, 2014January 25, 2014 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

Checking out a rubber manufacturing plant in Cambodia (please tell me you haven’t done this…)

On a recent trip to Cambodia, our small group of foreigners got to tour a rubber plant in Kampong Cham province. Not only was this something one doesn’t get to do every day, but we almost didn’t get to do it that day either. There were union protests taking place in the capital city of Phnom Penh and the guards at our rubber factory thought we might be coming to incite a riot. Fortunately our tour organizer was from that province and somehow knew the right things to say. We all paid $1 to get in. This was a very self-guided tour. This was the full extent of our supervision as we roamed the premises at will.

I'm glad they told us. — I’m glad they told us.

Rubber tree sap is white and really quite beautiful. It’s collected a little like maple sap used in making maple syrup. There’s the hole in the tree trunk, a little spigot and a pail. I’m not sure how they get the sap from the grove to the processing building but once there it’s put in long storage vats and a chemical is added. The sap solidifies. It looks a lot like cheese (mozarella).

the grove in background, (bananas in front)

The long flats of raw rubber go into a drying machine where they are chopped up and dried. I’m actually making this all up because there was no one to tell us what was really happening but we got a pretty good idea just by the looks of things. These are the drying machines.

The rubber is not as attractive when it is dried – yellow/brown and dense. It comes from the dryers, still on it’s conveyor belt and drops into a compressor where it’s made into blocks.

block of rubber on its way to.... — block of rubber on its way to….

…this guy with the knife who was very busy. I have no idea why he was doing this.

The blocks of rubber are trucked out to other factories where they are made into various rubber things. Rubber bands? I don’t know. This is where our tour ended. There were about eight of these long open buildings but this was the only one that was in operation at the time. It appeared to be off-season for rubber. This is a very warm climate and the buildings are open, as I said, and didn’t have fans – only natural ventilation. The workers were often shirtless, shoeless and definitely were not wearing hard hats or protective anything around the machinery. Evidently there aren’t a lot of lawsuits in Cambodia. We were free to walk around the machinery, through the plant, touching, poking and asking questions without interference. It was really quite interesting.

What things are still made with real rubber? Do you know?

Why Does This Seem So Familiar…?

October 8, 2013October 8, 2013 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

The world is big and full of people with computers. The internet is a busy, complex place full of new concepts, new words, new ventures. And only by having moved my journal from pen and paper to keyboard and cyberspace, I have entered this foreign land. So why do some things seem so familiar?

Today I am going to respond to a welcome confrontation. I was asked “what do you want?” It was an invitation to express my reasons for not joining a business of sorts that I don’t know much about. Who jumps into something right away because it sounds too good to be true? Well, me, in the past. I’m ex-Amway, and although I’m not ex-MaryKay yet, what it has taught me is that I’m not sales oriented.

So after innocently moving my blog to WordPress I have begun to get a few new followers. I look at their profiles. I watch their compelling videos. I wonder why they are following and supposedly reading me? Does it seem odd that young, energetic men would spend time reading about a 60-ish woman cleaning her house? My “you are being marketed” antennae are quivering…

Affiliate marketing is a new thing on my plate that I have to learn about before I chew, and swallow. Maybe a good thing, who knows. Some people are obviously making money through it and I do know that goods and services have to be advertised. Maybe even I will be using affiliate marketing to earn part of my income in the near future.

But what I want, really, is

to produce content that makes people think about their every day life,

to describe those moments that are common to us all,

to suggest they have purpose and value.

And after I have done some of that and know I’m succeeding in what’s really important to me, maybe then I will also earn a following and an income. Maybe. It’s my way of putting the horse first, then the cart. I’m just sayin’ I want to do it right.

Is It Time?

September 4, 2013 ShirleyjdietzLeave a comment

That’s what I’m wondering – is it time to make a change? I’m talking about jobs, not necessarily professions, and there is a difference. This is always one of my hardest decisions and I have to be more than a little bit unhappy to take the plunge. In my career I’ve had jobs that I knew I needed to leave and could hardly wait to do so, jobs that I left because of other changing circumstances (like a move away from the area), jobs that just ended and I didn’t have to decide. The one thing that’s always been missing is the “perfect job” that I never wanted to leave. Do people have jobs like this?

I can vaguely remember writing a post similar to this at least once in the last two years of working. It’s always been provoked by the job I have now, so maybe this at least strike two for this place of employment. I think the reason it’s so hard to leave is that I’ve devoted a lot of effort into becoming good at what I do in this position. I love being good at something and in fact, that’s part of what makes a job fun for me.

It becomes “not fun” when my physical well being is threatened, when I’m not trusted and when the assumption is made that I have wrong motives for actions I’ve taken. Do you ever remember having a fight with your brother or sister when you were a kid? How the accusations became heated and a bit ridiculous because you really didn’t know how to disagree and discuss an issue? You were only a kid, right? I don’t expect that kind of thing to happen as an adult in the workplace.

When it does, I really don’t like it. When it happens regularly I begin to question whether I want to be subjected to it again and again. Even in this economy, is it worth the money to have the mental and emotional stress? Work should be challenging me to think, grow, and problem solve but some environments make that very hard to happen. Problems remain unresolved. I’m getting a headache thinking about it.

So, if it is time, the next question is how? How to leave in a God honoring manner, with kindness, with clarity. Do I want this door to be permanently closed? Is there still something left to be accomplished relationally? I am done in this place, but is God done with me in this place?

I have always felt that God gave me this job, as an answer to my request for provision for a specific financial need. But even God’s assignments can be for a time, a season, and then be over. I’m just sayin’ I think this time is over.

I Just Have to Say…

and I'm sayin' it here.

Category: work

Spring Up North

Change, bring it on…

No not now, not ever, never…

A to Z Challenge: Zenaida

F for Fingers

Lessons from The Natural World

Dirt

Something I Don’t Get to Do Every Day

Why Does This Seem So Familiar…?

Is It Time?

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