Yarn Thing

I’m going to be interviewed on a live podcast on Thursday! Eek.

Yup. Marly, Yarn Thing, will be chatting me up on the air on Thursday afternoon at 4 pm Mountain time. I’m excited, scared, nervous, honored, totally blown away… I’ve never done anything like this before. It’ll be fun. (It’s my new mantra: it’ll be fun, it’ll be fun, it’ll be fun.) Marly’s great fun to talk to. Dave and I met her at TNNA in Long Beach in January, so I won’t be talking to a faceless voice, which would probably make me more nervous. I’ll be able to see her smiling face while we chat. I just hope I don’t stutter too much, forget simple things—like my name—like I sometimes do when I’m nervous. Eek.

I just got off the phone with Marly, doing a pre-interview chat. She thinks I’ll be fine, and that we’ll have plenty to talk about. Fingers crossed.

Tie tacks

Back in October of 2005—I can’t believe it was that long ago already—I became the proud owner of a cottage cheese contained filled with old tie tacks from the railroad tracks that used to run behind the house I grew up in. Dad has since passed on, and Mom had the shed rebuilt, because the poor old thing was termite ridden, and threatening to come down on its own.

What does that have to do with tie tacks, you ask? I’ll tell you. Starting at some point in the mid 1970s until that shed was rebuilt, there was an old chunk of wood hanging over the shed door with holes drilled in it. In most of the holes were large, odd-looking nails with numbers on the top of them: the tie tacks. When Mom had the shed rebuilt, that chunk of wood and its tie tacks were put in the garage and forgotten until Dave unearthed them when we were visiting last month. Since the tie tacks belonged to me as much as to Dad, I made the executive decision to bring them home where they’d be treasured instead of forgotten.

As you can see, most of the tie tacks were dated in the 1920s and 30s. The oldest one is from 1912, and the newest from 1944. Can you imagine? 1912. Wow. That tie had been there for more than 60 years before Dad and I found it. Totally cool.

I both love and hate having this little bit of nostalgia here at home. It should be hanging over the shed door, and Dad should be inside making or fixing something, whistling, and otherwise being his cheerful self. But time marches on, and things change. Now I have the collection. In ways it’s difficult not to burst into tears when I look at them sitting there on a shelf in this room.

Because of the large number of big, old trees around Mom’s house, there are places that get very little sun. One of those places is the front of the shed. Because of the lack of sunlight, and the abundance of water to keep the foliage alive, there’s quite a bit of moss. I brought home a bit of that moss along with the tie tack collection, as it is growing on the piece of wood that’s home to the collection. I think it looks pretty cool. I wonder how long the moss will last in dry southern California.