the busy heart

I got an iPad some time back, and I am loving it.  But I needed some kind of cover for it.  There's a little special cover that they sell with them, but it flops open if it's in your bag, and I can't have that , so I was using a plastic gallon-size ziploc, and thinking I would have to buy another cover and thinking it was going to cost me 40 bucks or something to get a decent one, and then it hit me: I sew!  I know how to do that thing.  And I have fabric that I fell in love with sometime back and haven't put to use.  And 30 minutes later, I had an iPad case.  I can't describe how happy this made me.  To have a problem, and to have made my own solution and carried it out and had it be pretty to boot.  I kept walking around my house saying, "I made a thing!  I made a thing!" and Sam kept saying, "Yep, you sure did."  It was a happy evening. I took pictures.  And Sprouty insisted on modeling.  She is the queen.  We mu...

I'm not good at cleaning.  I mean to be.  I want to be.  In my daydreams I am.  I often spend time mentally cleaning my house, imagining putting things away, moving through the rooms like a whirling, order-insisting robot, arranging everything in its pristine position.    But that's not actual what I'm like.  At all.  Chaos and entropy reign in my house, especially when I'm working full-time. Occasionally I pretend to be that robot and I spend hours upon hours and more hours cleaning everything, and by the end I'm exhausted and cranky.  And here's the problem with not being the robot, with having a messy house: it makes me sad.  Not like in a literal sense.  I don't look at the messiness and sorrow for it, though a little of that might be involved.  I mean that I've noticed that if I come home on Friday and everything is a dadgum disaster, I feel hopeless and overwhelmed, and I won't even realize it has ...