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Prime Cuts of Unicorn Apron




How do you know the people you love love you, too?
Let's share....

Things that are awesomer than anything I'm going today

Well, I mean - never mind - today is for applying for jobs. Get into the habit, youngish woman! Yes.

However.

Scatterwood - new comic type excitement from brilliant artists who've been sharing character sketches for a while and then decided to up the ante. Loving this.

Coilhouse showed me this today:


Warren Ellis has a Three Panel Open happening.
This one won it for me.

LibraryThing (the wonder and hope and addiction of the readerly world) has Legacy Libraries set up for over 130 used-to-be-living readers. Ah, the strange sense of flipping through a dead person's library catalog. I like thinking of A.A. Milne talking about moving his library, understanding that sometimes the book turned with its spine to the wall is shelved just as it pleases.

Lovely day, darlings.

Busy doing ... stuff

... like walking around in the world a little bit, doing the laundry, going to the library to pick up another book to read - did I mention that I've started reading a new book series? Yeah. It's gonna take a while. There are swords involved. And TV movies. with sweat and gratuitous shirtlessness (which, btb, is not sex-specific, just so you know)(you know)

Also, the date for the move in is tentatively Saturday. Oh, and I can't find my wallet.

Here. Watch this instead of being here:



um, or this:


Little Boat from nelson boles on Vimeo.

or maybe this, because there is no day that cannot be made more with John Cotrane.

My favorite things - John Coltrane from A JAZZ SUPREME on Vimeo.

Up 1, still stymied & deja vu

I have an apartment in St. Louis.
That is to say that once my check clears, I have the right to sign a lease on an apartment and move into it. As far as looking for jobs goes, it is the same thing to me.

However, I read something very cool in my Reader this morning and now cannot remember it because I did not click the thing with the star and so must wander through my day nagging the memory banks and staring occasionally at the RSS list to see if something - anything - will dredge the memory back to the surface and let it shake off a bit before I read it. icky memory sludge pool bits. icky.

EDIT: Found it! You will, of course, notice that reason this struck me as awesome is that I totally do that! (Thank you, Warren Ellis, for having fantastic guest week.)

Oh - as for staring: She's still at it. And the walls have begun staring back.

Now that that's sort of done (the place to live thing) I get to find a job. Woo.

And my attempts to write fictionally yesterday were - sputters. Sputtery is the best word for it.

The deja vu left once the post title was typed.

There will be more. but not right now.
Right now, I need to do other stuff.
With food, I think.

Be well, be safe, be joyful.

The sounds of things in the world

There are many elements of my childhood that I find it almost impossible to abandon. Some of them I even enjoy - reading aloud, or being read to is definitely at the top of the list.

Winter evenings my father read to us from Tom Sawyer and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books (in the living room by the fireplace as we sat on the floor in our pajamas with the dog and our stuffed animals (you may now gag, but remember - this is my reality)) (also, hot cocoa). In the third grade, our teacher read Caddie Woodlawn to us, and my young adulthood holds afternoons spent with friends and The Phantom Tollbooth and The Princess Bride floating around in words that landed on the walls and the chairs and our hearts more real than laughter.

I loved La Lectrice (The Reader) almost instantly because of the whimsical nature of the serious business of reading aloud from the page to someone else in the room. Also, it's just funny. (aside: I saw a lot of really good movies one spring. Just a thought.)

Knitting and crochet and macrame and all of those crafts that end in -ay or something like it are enjoyable and productive and creative and kind of quiet. I am not so enamoured of my own voice that I have to be surrounded by it at all times, but I do like the sound of someone's voice. Music is almost too intense to hear while creating, but learning or landscape or mystery or magic, these are welcome to my home - not through earbuds, but played out to fill the space.

O Jerusalem turned the futon on which I knitted my poncho into a goat-skin tent with cups of gritty coffee and air thick with stories so layered no one knows where one tradition could even begin to begin.

Inkspell is sheer ear candy. The story is dark and difficult and weighty with storytelling matters and yarn turns to lace very easily to Brendan Fraser's voice.

I'd been reading the Lectures volume of the Harvard Classics out loud in the house in Maryville. The cats were not so fond of it, but I liked the exercise of speaking well turned sentences and different rhythms. My writing got better and my voice started finding more creative ways of interpreting the words on the page. I miss it.

It is a very grounding experience, something that cannot be pretended away: the sound of a voice, a human voice, making human sounds out of humanly created letters and words and sentences. It is always around a fire/kitchen table/hearth.There is a magic to the noises made, to the act of making them - I am not alone when I am reading out loud the words of someone I will never meet.

I am excited to try to participate in the BYOB events at Subterranean Books once I get to St. Louis. I loved the day long reading of Paradise Lost at UNL to commemorate Milton's 400th birthday. One of these days, I will find the time and resources to read for Librivox. The last time I checked, there were still very many titles in the public domain without recordings in the archive.


We read silently. We read publicly. We read dispassionately. There is difficulty reading aloud, it is a thing to be practiced. Fortunately, even though the cats don't like hearing me read aloud, I can always scratch that up to a deficiency in feline nature. :)

Durant & Bohemian cave artists

Once upon a time, 2009, I think it was, when I was still writing the fictions, I came up with a story for the origin of the 7 Dwarves. It fit into a poem thing, like a ballad or a really long story-song only fit for performance by Arlo Guthrie, you know? It was not long after that I found that I had been preceded in telling that story (not entirely the same, but close enough) by someone much more well known that I ever hope to want to be. (also, dead, so, yeah) Unintentionally derivative. There were feverish texts to a friend (it warranted that level of immediate attention) and finally it occurred to me that it is no shameful thing to have found a similar narrative question answerable in a similar way. Storytellers do not have the luxury of copyright on asking and answering narrative questions - we come and go, the stories last.

I read of young scholars consulting texts at random as part of a kind of prophetic parlor game with much the same sense of wonder at connection. It pleased me more than sherbet. I picked up the habit from Next Stop Wonderland, although it struck me as an entirely correct thing to do when I saw it happen in Career Girls, a movie I saw while I was trying 'dating' after my first divorce. The movie was delightful, even though the company was a bit, um, dull.

Prophecy bores me. I can never see the point of caring much how the story claims to end as eventually all books must be closed and life continues regardless. I am much more interested in the turning of the tides and the pages and all the wonderful things that get in the way while the writer is desperately trying to make an end viable or at least less contrived than the one she knows will win her an audience. Turning the pages of a book to wherever they will open allows me to delve quite briefly into something I may or may not want to pursue - it is how I decide which of two novels to purchase, whether I will commit to all of the poems in a collection or exactly how well decorated 5 or 10 minutes of my life will be in someone else's words.

All of my books thus far have one slight disadvantage: someone else wrote them or arranged them. There is this pervasive sense of order in things that gets a bit chafing. I see no reason not to discuss Egyptian philosophy and romantic capers from the 1970's in the same breath (provided a random and suspect connection). As I haven't got around to making myself a book of my own words (that I'm willing to flip through at will without the aid of tequila and King Arthur - i.e. journals don't count), I've turned one of my blank books into a quotation and bibliography collection.

This is not an academic sort of thing; there is no consistent style of bibliography and the passages I've written down are not the stuff of papers or presentations, they just make me happy.

Also, I can open the book almost (as it is not yet full) anywhere and read something like this:
Bogin, Meg. "The Women Troubadours: An Introduction to the Women Poets of the 12th-century Provence and a Collection of their Poems." WW Norton & Co. 1980 - Someone wrote this book, and it can be bought and read. What joy!

I've begun Volume I of Durant's The Story of Civilization and while there are 80 very meaningful years between him and me, I get to find and save little (some less little than others) nuggets for future random inspiration.

The whole interpretation of history as progress falters when we consider that these statues, bas-reliefs and paintings, numerous though they are, may be but an infinitesimal fraction of the art that expressed or adorned the life of primeval man. What remains is found in caves, where the elements were in some measure kept at bay; it does not follow that pre-historic men were artists only when they were in caves. They may have carved as sedulously and ubiquitously as the Japanese, and may have fashioned statuary as abundantly as the Greeks; they may have painted not only the rock in their caverns, but textiles, wood, everything - not excepting themselves. They may have created masterpieces far superior to the fragments that survive. In one grotto a tube was discovered, made from the bones of a reindeer, and filled with pigment*; in another a stone palette was picked up still thick with red ochre paint despite the transit of two hundred centuries**. Apparently the arts were highly developed and widely practised eighteen thousand years ago. Perhaps there was a class of professional artists among paleolithic men; perhaps there were Bohemians starving in the less respectable caves, denouncing the commercial bourgeoisie, plotting the death of academies and forging antiques. (97-98)

 * see page 17
** see page 45

Open Library: I love that you exist.

Molly Crabapple puts elephants on the door.

Geeks are made of win at Dragon Con.

Be well, beloveds.
I have more date with learning.

Foggy Day. With damp

Stillness is an ever absurd event. There is paralysis in stillness, and also landscape and surface and the smell of peas.

Yes. Peas.

The library is closed until Tuesday, but nothing closes sidewalks or hides the outside walls of buildings and the walking is pleasant. It is only a few blocks to the river and the lighthouse and the pier and the freezing plant for peas.

The experience of 'getting focused' is one that does not always take a whole lot of energy, but does take time and patience. I miss the writing of the last few years where words happened in a rhythm that led itself into images and impossibilities and ridiculous metaphors that required nothing more of me than my hands and a few bits of technological magic to share with the world, or whatever part of the world happened to land here for a while before heading off on stumble to some other set of recipes or book reviews or art work. It will not happen again simply because I wish it, and there is no magic spell that will turn the heartbeat back into a poetic foundation for the larger thoughts of the larger world that find such outlet in the marketplace of my inner mind and have such difficulty finding their feet in the air. Even in the air of typing.

Outside was damp. Cool and quiet. The whole town is shutting down for the weekend. Not just one day, but the whole weekend. I am unaccustomed to such diligence and find it more aggravating than I need. Next weekend sees Sputnikfest, Lobsterfest and the 9/11 Remembrance ceremony. Perhaps the town, not unlike the people in it, finds stillness in focus the way to face the days ahead.

As for me, I read.
I will grab my quote-book and add to its pages.

And occasionally find myself here, checking to see what Molly Crabapple is doing during her week in hell.

Blog of love, anyone? Oh, Yeah...

Found this at Wooster Collective. I've watched it multiple times. Because it is beautiful.

PINA - Dance, dance, otherwise we are lost - International Trailer from neueroadmovies on Vimeo.

Discovered that 9 Chickweed Lane is syndicated in the St. Louis paper. SWOONTIME. I mean, if I could find Pibgorn in print everyday, now that would be ... crazy talk. I have mad cartoon-succubus-crush on Dru.

Don Cheadle as Captain Planet. Best. Thing. Ever.

Warren Ellis tells me/us about a tomb found at Stonehenge's quarry site. Which prompts me to remember that I need to go to the library soon and swim about in Archaeology and also Biblical Archaeology Review and also History Today. Brain crack! BRAINCRACK.

This is happen now:

"Welcome to the Big Experiment...here, twice weekly, you'll thrill to the ongoing exploits of Asher and Spittle in their yet-to-be-officially-titled comic by Scott Morse and Skottie Young. We've decided to make a departure here at SkottieScott from the re-imagined character designs you've come to know and love. Instead, we're opting to CREATE. We're opting to OWN. We're opting to contribute to the entertainment spectrum with something original and hopefully a load of fun for everyone. It is for us, anyhow."

It is looking delightful fun.

Also, remember this guy? The one who's been traveling like a crazy person? Turns out, yesterday was the day to be stuck in Milwaukee. My mother and I lost about an hour of travel time there and this guy lost rather more than that, more importantly, his travel plans got all borked.

I've been thinking about how I finally made the decision to stop making plans and replace them with goals. It sounds all sorts of business, I know, and I can't really deny it. But here's the thing: making plans is how you make the Goddess laugh, right?

Um.
So.
I watched this.

Coilhouse also has this to watch, but I wouldn't if I were you. Or me. Or anyone, really.
(I've also taken time to assure Miss Ethel that I will not have her stuffed.)(...)

The propitiation continues

The Moving Gods are fickle and demanding things that follow more closely Douglas Adams' theory ("There is a theory which states that if ever anybody discovers exactly what the Universe is for and why it is here, it will instantly disappear and be replaced by something even more bizarre and inexplicable. There is another theory which states that this has already happened.") than the changeless nature of changeable things. You know you will sweat. You know something will be broken. You know that there is such a thing as things going too well. You know this.

But you have no idea how any of these things will manifest.

People whose moves are always easy are people that I cannot bring myself to trust; they do not move through the same dimension of this world that I do and are suspect. Usually I run into problems of time and space - needing more of the former and not quite enough of the latter. I start packing too late and do not enlist enough help to make the move timely.

We started packing in June and half of my things were already in boxes.
Everything of mine (with the exception of the backseat's worth of things traveling with me and the cats (not owned by me, but traveling with me (can't own cats)(they are the rulers of the living space)) is in one of two storage units.

There is also a discomfiting amount of stillness in moving: sitting in cars, waiting in lobbies, filling out applications at tables, hoping for phone calls, etc. When all of that is added to the frenetic race to get all of the boxes up the stairs before your legs fall apart and all of the kitchen stuff unpacked before your stomach growls through your colon that it is revolting and will now start eating your brain and all of the bathroom stuff out so that you can take that shower that you've been promising yourself for the past I don't know how long and finding all of the screws that put the bed together because there will be sleep tonight, dammit! - it seems like a balance, but it isn't. This is the closest that most of us will ever get the constant imbalance of a life unplanned and unscheduled but very definitely lived.

Will Durant provides me with a certain degree of background awesome.

The cats have learned to hate their afternoon walks, except for Horace who is constantly in need of going to the other side of the front door and then just not really doing anything.

And tonight, there is a social event. Mama made deviled eggs. I haven't eaten any of them.


Yet.

Plan ... Fibonacci

For the last few days, I've been very aware that I am starting a whole new thing in the life of me without a backup plan. I am not known for being excessively controlling, but I do like to be aware of my circumstances and the options that are available to me should the airplane I'm jumping out of decide to blow up with my purse in it. You know?

I forget about Mother Nature. She does not care that my backup plan was about a place to live. She delivered the smack down to Nodaway County in the form of a hail storm that devastated crops; dented homes, cars and picnic tables; ripped rag top roofs on cars and soaked the floor of my former workplace.

The domino effect of which is that moving is put on hold for a bit.
Not long, just a bit. (Given the struggles that many people that I know and love have to know by name, this is hardly a tragedy for me.)

It feels like one of those "One of These Days" kind of times - you know, for when you need to go through old files, or read Tolstoy, or memorize the monasteries of Ireland in the 8th century. There's that list of extremely specific things to do that require special circumstances outside of one's control. Time that is not to be spent doing anything else, as there is not enough time for it.

I have no idea what to do with the time. My list is in a box. In a storage unit (that did not get its roof blown off, thankfully).

This is the part where my issues are the most well-defined. The part where I get too thinky and not do-y enough.

Altho, there are nine more books in the series of Durant left to read, and I've got an Eco and a Le Guin in my bag.

I miss my typewriter right now.
Something a bit more personally creative may be in order.

Anyway, best to all who are packing today!
Best to all who start back to school today!

Digital Alphabet in Stone - Dom Hans van der Laan/Autobahn 2011 from autobahn on Vimeo.

Found at Wooster Collective

Untitled from Timothy Lane on Vimeo.

Found at Subterranean Books. It's a snippet from their first Whirling Gypsy Comicarouselesque Revue & Burlesque: "Featured St. Louis graphic novelists will read their works in character while projecting the novels slide by slide. It's like story time with pictures!" (The calliope music is a bit loud, but the content is good.)

Two and a half days

I am revising cover letters today and doing internet research on book stores and other possible places of employment.

The laundry is done.
The list of items that must be not left behind is made.
We have a plan of driving and where to stay.
Tomorrow I make phone calls.

Lists exist and are relevant.

My nerves are not buying it. This is not the normal move. There is usually this zen that follows the zany of finding a place to live and budgeting and finding a new job and meeting new people -
wait, what?
I don't have time to think about meeting new people, I've got way many other things to worry about!
And yet.

My zen tells me that it's on vacation and I need to find some other coping mechanism. Most of my best friends are also moving or going through massive life shifts. The cats do not let me too far out of sight most of the day. I keep reorganizing things and packing things and we are not in a place that has all of my/their/our stuff.

I keep channeling thoughts of my friend who is so excited about working with other scientists that she joyfully introduces herself at conferences and writes emails with enthusiasm and I believe I'm going to try it. I may not get any jobs out of it, but I may very well meet some people who are doing things that I want to be a part of.

My parents are off on a drive in their new town that has welcomed them gently and with ice cream.

It is time for a shower and then some more tea and then I will write.

My best to all.

Carravaggio, The Calling of St. Matthew
1599-1600; Oil on canvas, 10' 7 1/2" X 11' 2"; Contarelli Chapel, Church of San Luigi dei Francesi, Rome

The cat, she makes me nervous with her calm

First and foremost: please be safe in the path of bad weather!

The Beat has an article about the hurricane with useful sorts of links.

In other news, Ali Ferzat, a Syrian cartoonist, was attacked by thugs who beat him and broke his hands. As stated in The Beat's article: "Ferzat is recovering. In the meantime, please visit his website, and do what you can to promote and protect freedom of speech, even in countries where the government actively suppresses this freedom."

Artist stuff: My friend Christopher Wilson's photographs are now available for purchase through his Capture My Chicago page. Go there! Buy some! Send me one!

Today I write more cover letters. I've decided to write one to my potential future landlord as well. I think it smacks of over-doing it. Which is a thing at which I excel.

Researching where I want to work (not who is hiring, where I want to work) has fired my enthusiasm for my not-yet-city.

Subterranean Books! Their events are worth the drool I dripped, and I haven't even been there yet. BYOB is inspired. I am so jazzed to explore this place.

These days are going to be tense ones. I've just eaten the leftover Hamburger Pie. Out of the dish in which my mother cooked it. At the computer. Shameless, I know. Planning forays into the outer world and reading of the possible joys and horrors I may find there do not help to end the tension, but they do help spend the time less unwisely.

Speaking of unwise: I am Still Not Done with the damn book*. I have like 20 pages to go and just can't get there - it's like there's this sense that once this is finished, everything changes. Which is so silly, because everything changes all the time no matter what, so what the hell do 30 pages mean more or less? Anyway, I have another book to finish after that, so the cycle remains, as ever: unbroken.

The British Library maintains a number of blogs through its website. One of them speaks of science fiction. Today, specifically, of library and science fiction. Through the magical realism of Borges. And it gives me this beautiful parting line:

... there is no higher life form than a librarian."
THE SCIENCE OF DISCWORLD: Terry Pratchett, Jack Cohen, and Ian Stewart, p. 10.

*just Vol. 3 of the set.

The thing where nothing is really happening. Yet

Because it will be happening. It will be happening in carloads - quite physically. There will be mapping directions and planning interviews and apartment viewings and then interior figuring and domestic economy engineering and finding places for all of the books (mind you, I am only bring 9 (maybe 10) boxes of books to the new place)(not including the ones that have books as padding). This will all happen.

Starting Wednesday. Not yesterday Wednesday, next week Wednesday.

I'm also less than one hundred pages from the end of the Big Book that I'm reading and less than 200 pages from the end of the Other Big Book that I'm reading and have resorted to writing letters and thank you notes. I rewrote my cover letter once this week, and will spend time this evening and tomorrow doing the same. Probably Saturday, as well. Resumes are flexible. I am happy about this.

I don't even have enough dirty clothing to justify the 2USD expense and time of doing the laundry.

This is not my favorite thing in the world. I did this for months last fall and it was not good. People didn't like talking to me very much, or, more like, the talking to me was just confirmation that I was not enjoying things like I like. As I am not in a position to indulge in long-term bleh, I self-medicate with cat-cuddling, gentle thinking and wandering around twitter and Whitechapel for electric jolts of "If you want to do a thing, then do it" and that helps. The doubt thing - it waits outside the office door and slides in like Ethel when she wants to get something you don't want her to have. Ethel is furry and warm and sweet to me. Doubt is infinitely less so, and a terrible conversation partner.

I think it is time to see if I can find something beautiful to look at and share it. Yes?
Good.

Here: Aljoun Castle in Jordan.

Robin LeBlanc took a picture with a mantis in it.

Kickstarter shows me fun card games.

There.
Go.
Live.

How I find myself on Google

I am not always super brilliant (never dull, but sometimes not entirely brilliant) and when I created my blog's URL was a not-super-brilliant moment. Not because it isn't hipster level clever, but because it's so freaking long.

Have you ever read it?
I mean, really read it?
www.independentthoughtavailable.blogspot.com
Do you see how rife with possible misspelling that is? Not to mention that I never remember what order the bits go it.

Generally this is not an issue, but a few weeks ago, I discovered a way to get around the not remembering. And I discovered it quite by accident.

We were talking to friends about a thing called a Toad Suck Shake. It is a kind of food that exists in Missouri (yes, near the Ozarks). I went looking for what it is by Googling "Toad Suck Shake" and did not find the makings right away. Right away I found myself.
Yes.
My blog is the first entry under Toad Suck Shake.

I can't find the description, but from what I remember, it's a Mason (or Ball) jar with layered BBQ and more BBQ and some brisket and I think there's fries involved, and you can eat it in the jar or spread it out on a plate and eat it that way.

Mind you, I keep Googling Toad Suck Shake and then following the link to my blog because, hey - I will make my 15 minutes out of a Ball jar if I damn well feel like it!

In other news:

Want. Go. London this fall/next spring.

Also - everyone is still talking about Rome and Carthage. STILL?

And, Happy 112th Birthday to Jorge Luis Borges.

It is kind of humid here after the rain and gray of last night and yesterday. I am in the mood to wander to the library and remind myself that here there is a lake, and there are bridges and the world is on the outside. It smells so different that I am never certain which way my feet are supposed to land on the ground and I cannot get to comfortable, because soon there will be all new ways to learn to walk and to see and to find the outdoors.

Also, I saw this and my day got better.:

Found at Whitechapel.

Life is good.

Sitting in a office where there are litter boxes

It isn't quite time for food for the cats here Chez My Parents.

They are, of course, dying of neglect and lack of laps and the seemingly endless work of other people unpacking boxes.

You would think the world had ended. It has. But that's really not the point.

My move happens next week. I like referring to it that way. Next week.
*shivers of joy*

Everything is basically up in the air about the move. I do not have a job, I do not know where I am going to live, and I do not know anyone.

13 years ago, I moved to Lincoln in the same situation. Except for the part where I had three times the money I do now and a car and lots and lots of hiding and healing to do.

I feel like the intervening years have been good to me, and I'm pretty stoked about the idea that even if they don't hire me to do minimum wage paying grunt work, the St. Louis Public Library system has got it going on. Holy Master's Degrees! They hire actual librarians to do library work. What?!? I was shocked. Shocked, I tell you.

Also, Laurie R. King is going to be speaking at one of the branches next month. Guess where I'm going to be? Yep - smack dab middle and center. Best view, you know.

I'm taking a book out of my cousin Heather's page and have decided to give STL & I five years to learn each other and see what kind of a life we can make.

People ask me (okay, like 2, but it's still plural) if I'm excited, and the thing is that I'm not, because it's just what is happening next: my life. If I spend a ton of energy getting excited about it, I'll just spin in circles with the excess and make a lot of noise and maybe miss the thing that gets me where I need to be.

Speaking of. It is time to feed the cats. I know this, because they have all flopped on floors, convinced that nothing good can come of bubble warp and cardboard boxes.

Blessings, beloveds.
Be well.

Not exactly sure what's going on out there

The weather and the calendar and my expectations for what they mean are all not matching up. It is May. It is raining, but it is not the beautiful welcoming rain of last summer and the air is cold and still requires blankets at night and slippers in the day.

The beginning of the week was so hot that the cats in our house did not even yell for food from our house/cat-sitter, and Boris is now shedding great clumps of fur at the slightest move. His sister keeps trying to eat them. Cats are not normal creatures.

Today my father and I wandered up into the attic to look at what all we've got stored up there. It is time to start bringing it all back down and sorting it out. Most of my things are still in boxes, or are monstrous pieces of furniture acting useful around the house.

Next week begins my summer schedule. This week my co-worker leaves and another co-worker arrives. People do not replace other people. Our hours are shifting, our responsibilities will also. I will miss my friend. I wonder if I am conserving energy, or at least not using my full allocation in the deluded hope that I can shunt some of it her way as she will need it to entertain and say her farewells.

Much has happened in the last month. There are many words to add to the things that have happened. Today is for some quiet reassessment and observation. We've seen the shelves in the attic and now have a better idea what it will take to get things begun. Tomorrow my parents begin looking for our storage unit. Tomorrow our new co-worker begins. Today I must do laundry and read some more and pet the cats and enjoy dinner with my mother and father as it is my mother's birthday.

These deadlines are always such odd things. They are there for a reason - they define beginnings and ends and that is completely acceptable, but they hum like some over-zealous magnet and it is not always easy to stay out of their way.