This land is my land

As Kim lamented, it's hard to pick just one thing I want to learn because pretty much everything interests me! I got my hair colored and cut yesterday. When my hairdresser James started adding some liquid to the bowl already containing the color for my head, I asked "what's that for?" He looked at me indignantly (he does indignant well) and said, "Don't you trust me? Don't tell me how to do my job!" followed by a big grin. I told him I wanted to learn. "I might need to be your assistant one day and need to know how to mix color!" James rolled his eyes, "Oh, Lord, that's just what I need is one more person to work with!" and grinned again while he applied this mystery goo to my hair.

I've been going to a new chiropractor that we affectionately call my witch doctor. The details of those visits are a whole other story (and a really good one) but needless to say he does something new and wacky each week to help me feel better and every week I keep interjecting "what does that thing do?" or "how is that gonna help?". He soon learned I wasn't questioning his judgement but just genuinely wanted to understand. So he smiles and patiently explains how all these parts of my body work. Maybe I"ll be an applied kinesiologist one day. If nothing else I understand more about what voodoo he does.

There are tons of things I've forgotten and wouldn't mind re-learning. I know just enough music theory to be dangerous, but I'd really like to branch out from 1-4-5-1 chord progressions one day. I am a decent cook, but I'd love to have a wider repertoire of recipes up my sleeve. I watched Julie and Julia the other evening (thanks for the recommendation, Harry!) and it made me want to really grasp the science of baking powder versus soda instead of just blindly following a recipe.

I took horseback riding lessons long ago and thought it would be a fun hobby. I've learned that horses are more of an obsession than a casual hobby and it's hard to squeeze that into my week in the city with everything else. But maybe I'll live on a farm one day and need to ride horses out to check on the fences. Not likely, but you never know! My father assumes that everyone knows the basic of internal combustion engines. I'm not sure where he thinks I should have learned this, since it's not really something they teach an AP class on in high school and he did all that work himself in our house. You can only learn so much while "holding the light" for him. So I know enough to not flood the lawnmower but can't really troubleshoot it on my own. Cars have become too complicated for me to really care about maintaining, but I could get some joy out of being smarter with our yard equipment.

Pretty much anything I come in contact with I want to know more about. Curiosity helps us evolve. And most of my previous examples are things that I know enough to get by but would like to learn more. One thing lately has really grabbed my attention and I am completely ignorant of it.

I want a garden. I want to learn how things grow. I want to till the ground myself, I want to figure out how to get water back to that part of the yard. I want to know how many tomato plants we really need versus the 50 my brother tenant farmed in my yard last year. I want to know when squash is in season and if it's worth the trouble to grow corn.

I know absolutely nothing about horticulture, though, other than water and sunlight are good. I had a spider plant once but even that didn't last but so long. Despite that, I'm excited about having a basil plant versus paying $5 for a bunch at the grocery store. I want fresh mint for mojitos. I want tomato sandwiches this summer. I'm also excited about being involved in the creation of our own food. I'm not going to mill my own flour and I'm not going to hunt and slaughter my own meat, but I can handle the fruits and veggies.

I'm looking forward to the learning process. It will be hard not to have my father "help" a little too much, but I want to screw up on my own. I want to look out back and be proud of the things I grow. I made a person, I should be able to nurture and grow a damn cantaloupe.

I've got a piece of land. I've got a book on vegetable gardening. I've got a shovel. That's enough to start. Wish me luck!

Oh Canada!

For all our worldly travels, I had never been to Canada before until last week. I've been to Munich, but I haven't roamed to our own bordering nations. But all that changed last week when Rich and I took off for the frozen north of Toronto. Rich was concerned about the weather as Chicago proceeded to get the shit kicked out of it while we flew over Wednesday. But our flights were super lucky. We landed Wednesday afternoon and made a leisure drive into the city.

I saw more snow plows in our commute from the airport to the mall than I think the entire state of Virginia has. Personal cars with blows on them. Sidewalk ATVs with plow on them. Little dog sleds with plows on them! Ok, maybe I made up that last one, but there were a lot.

With our AT&T plan at work, international phone calls are $.79/minute. But international data is $15.39/MB. Needless to say, we didn't use any data while we were there. The first day I was a bit fidgety but by Friday it was sort of freeing. I couldn't check work emails on the way to dinner because it would have been $472 per word so I had to just sit in the car and chat with my husband. It was good for us.

We stayed in Guelph since that was closer to our meetings and I was concerned when we pulled in to our hotel in the Middle of Nowhere. But we still managed to have two fantastic meals. The Borealis Grill offered local rainbow trout and wild rice from northern Ontario. And Sushi Choice, while lacking in atmosphere or much in the way of reliable heat, had excellent tuna! So we made the best of it camping up there.

One treat for me was a trip to the Tall Girl store in Toronto. I have been wanting some tall jeans that actually fit and wanted to be able to try on a few styles before picking them. They brought out a husband chair for Rich and delivered a variety of pants to my dressing room. I waffled between getting two or three pair but Rich convinced me to just get three since they fit well and how many times do you go to Toronto? As we were leaving, he said, "let me preface this by saying I don't care, but did she just say your total was $314?" I smiled, "That's why I was waffling! And it's $314 Canadian so that's more like $345 for us. But none of my jeans fit!"

We both got what we wanted, though, in that I have jeans with a 36" inseam and Rich is more interested in staring at my ass now that I have better fitting jeans. I am now going to take all my ill-fitting jeans and set them on fire in the front yard as a warning to other jeans that may think about shrinking 2" into high waters or stretching out into denim sweatpants.

Our work meetings were a great success and we still had enough time to stop by the Hockey Hall of Fame. It was interesting but not something I would have made a special trip to Toronto for. But I did get a Finland hoodie for $15! It's so comfy and even has a secret little pocket in the front for your iPod. As you can see, my focus was on clothes and Rich's was on hockey.

We made it home late Friday night to find our child sleeping peacefully (what a treat!). And when I wore my Finland hoodie the next day, Ian squealed and meowed at the big lion on the front. That kid loves him some kitties.

Living Out Loud volume 25: Always learning

Christmas of 2008, Rich got me a gift certificate for guitar lessons. I still have the certificate but don't know a single chord yet, having never taken a lesson. My excuse was that in January of 2009 I got pregnant, which meant I slept the first three months and then had an ever expanding belly the next six months which made it hard to fit a guitar in my lap. And then we had a kid and ... well, guitar lessons haven't been a priority. Our newborn is now a toddler and has discovered that we have a guitar in the corner of the guest room. He now runs to it constantly and demands we play for him. Rich only knows three songs, and I swear if I hear Dust in the Wind one more time, that guitar is going to be dust in the wind.

This got me thinking about if and when I'll learn to play the guitar myself. My old boss Harry had a project (campaign? philosophy? all of the above?) called Always Learning. To paraphrase him, "what joy to awake each morning with so much to learn."

Rich and I were chatting about German intelligence in World War II (you know, like you do) and while I remembered who Turing was, I didn't know anything about the term Operation Overlord and had forgotten most of the statistics for Normandy. I'm sure I had a class on that at some point in my teenage years, but it's all completely out of my head so that it may as well never happened. I told Rich I could probably calculate a standard deviation with a little trial and error, but can't tell you when the War of the Roses happened. Maybe I should find a history book to peruse.

This leads me to our theme for Living Out Loud this month. Tell us something you've always wanted to learn. If you could go back to school, money and time not-withstanding, what would you choose? Is there something you'd love to master but haven't figured out the logistics of who will show you? Do you think you'll make time to learn these things soon or is it something you're saving for "when you retire"? A friend of mine is teaching herself to sew. Another friend has gone back to community college taking one class a semester for fun.

Details include:

• Write something personal about yourself using the previous paragraphs as a guideline. Do not feel that you have to address each prompt above. The spirit of this project is to share something about yourself; I'm just throwing out ideas.

• Once you have completed your entry and posted it, please email me the link at genie [at] inabottle [dot] org. Remember, if you don't email me, I'm likely to forget to include you in the recap!

• If you do not have a blog to host your story, you can email me the story directly and I will add it here as a guest post giving you credit. The more the merrier!

• The due date for entries is Sunday, February 13th (the second Sunday of the month) at 5pm Eastern.

• Once I have collected all the entries, I will post a wrap-up to list them all and announce a winner. The winner will receive some sort of prize to be determined but all participants will receive fame and glory and a link on our Living Out Loud blogroll.

Note that the first Sunday of February is the Super Bowl and since our household has one HUGE Steelers fan (Rich) and one half-assed Packers fan (me) we'll be watching the game so I'm giving us all an extension til the 13th. So that gives us all a good two weeks to ponder our entries.

Remember, what joy to awake with so much to learn!