The text of the poem is copied below for those with visual disabilities.
Ramblins
You may as well be wonderin'
Why this rose is here.
Well, I ain't gonna tell ya
If you're guessin' very near.
So you might just as well go home
And leave me to myself.
For I am very tired and
Would like at least a shelf.
-Darcy Smittenaar
Crafty people of the world, please take my survey!
I am a great proponent of learning to make things by hand. Often, things made by hand are better quality and last longer, because of the maker’s attention to detail and potential weaknesses. I have made a couple of wooden storage boxes by hand, as well as knitted products such as sweaters, socks, gloves and hats. I even knitted myself a dress once. There have been various plastic canvas and cross stitch projects, and when I was younger, my grandma helped me to make a short-legged, short-sleeved jumpsuit. When I write, I prefer to do a draft by hand, especially for fiction, before revising and typing up the story. Maybe one day, I’ll be able to build an airplane or something from a kit. I wonder if there’s such a thing as a motorcycle kit, or if I could just build one out of my imagination.
A “diet” is the combination of the types of
foods someone eats and the amount they eat of each type. Even eating junk food and ice cream is a
diet. It’s a bad one, but it’s still a
diet. Each different diet has a
purpose. There are diets to help someone
lose weight—or to gain it—diets to help build muscle, diets that include or
eliminate a certain type of food, and diets that only include one type of
food.
That said, I have never tried a
specific, named diet, like vegetarianism or the Atkins Diet, but I have tried
to keep track of an adjust my own generic diet to try and lose some of the
extra fat on my body. It would probably
work better if I actually used enough self-discipline to stick to that plan though.
A lot of people think that
prenuptial agreements are defeatist and show a lack of faith in one’s partner
and the potential longevity of the relationship. I am not one of those
people. When done properly, a prenuptial agreement is a safety net.
The signers do not expect divorce, nor do they anticipate wanting it.
Instead, they plan for the possibility that—despite all of their efforts to
keep a marriage together—it may still fail.
The prenuptial agreement is there to
help them avoid some of the heartache involved in the allocation and separation
of assets during a divorce. It is done before the marriage is solemnized
so that the agreement on the necessary terms is made while the couple is still
in love and wanting to provide for each other as well as themselves, whereas in
most divorces in which a couple did not have a prenuptial agreement, either one
or both parties tends to try and take everything from the other, or to stab
them in the back to get revenge.
A prenuptial agreement can at least curtail the
possibility of one partner actually getting more than their fair share of a
marriage’s assets. That is why I signed my prenup: to protect both my
husband and myself from possible—if unlikely—future backstabbing.
Depending on my mood, I drink either
tea or coffee. The coffee, whether hot or iced, is almost always the
same: no surgar and at least one ounce of half-and-half per cup of
coffee. My perfect cup of tea changes depending on what’s available,
whether it’s a caffeinated or uncaffeinated tea, and the flavor of the tea
itself.
The best hot tea I have ever had was
the Oolong brew at Chong Yet Yin Chinese restaurant in Mount Airy,
Maryland. The lady who served it had made it nice and strong, as I like
all teas, and the flavor was excellent; I would drink that tea with no
additions all day long if I could. A good, someone expensive substitute
that I drink sparingly as a treat is Teavana’s Four Seasons Oolong, also
without additions.
I usually drink English Breakfast
with half-and-half, herbal teas containing either mint, chamomile or both with
lemon juice and honey, and green tea with either lemon or nothing. Depending
on the blend, I may or may not add half-and-half, or I may try something else
entirely.
I’m not a tea snob, but I do like good tea,
preferably hot, though iced is good too.
I have only ever been to six beaches
in my entire life, but that is more than enough for me to have learned that
every beach is different. Ocean City, for instance, I would not like to
visit or live near, because it is too crowded and commercialized. The two
beaches I have visited in Michigan were either too cold or too full of trash to
enjoy, despite their isolation. The beach at a lake in Utah that I
visited when I was seven doesn’t count as a “real” beach to me, because it was
on a lake and not on the coast of an ocean or sea. Even so, it was too
crowded for my taste anyway. Miami beach is a fine place to visit, but
the large city so close by and the high price of living in that area would
prevent me from wanting to live there.
Would I ever want to live at a
beach? If the circumstances—and the beach, of course—were just right,
then I absolutely would love to live at a beach. I even have the perfect
beach in mind: Waihi Beach, on the eastern shore of the northern island in New
Zealand. If I could either make more than one trip back to the States to
visit family and friends every five to ten years or find some way for all of
them to be there with me, I would absolutely live at Waihi Beach, particularly
at one of the more southern stretches, where there aren’t as many people who go
there even in the summer months. I would like to live a mile or two just
south of the town of Waihi Beach itself, within a block or two of the water’s
edge.
Why Waihi? Well, the water is clear and a
perfect temperature in the summertime, the people are very friendly, and it
doesn’t get too cold in the winter. Also, in the few places I have
travelled outside Maryland, Waihi was the only place I have really been able to
feel comfortable enough to talk to and make friends with perfect
strangers. On our honeymoon, my husband and I stayed at a small bed and
breakfast in Waihi run by an older couple. They were the nicest people
I’ve ever met, and I would gladly move to Waihi Beach (as long as I could still
be near family, of course) in order to be able to call Greg and Ali neighbors.
Most people describe success as making a lot of money, but I disagree. Success is getting to the places you want to be in life, whether that means having a career, starting a family, or even just finishing a personal project or being a good parent. Even if two people have the same goals, the steps they take and their definition of success when they accomplish those goals will most likely be different.
There is no real “secret” to achieving success either. In other words, you can’t just do something specific, or take a shortcut that will result in success.
The real path to success has three steps.
The first step is knowing your goals. You can’t be successful unless you know what constitutes success.
Second, you have to do your homework. Find out what you know and what you still need to learn, or what organizations and people can help you accomplish those goals.
Finally, in order to be successful, you have to have the discipline to keep working toward your goals, learn the skills and knowledge you need, make the contacts you have to make, and—most importantly—do the work that has to be done in order to get where you want to be.
If I were to start a new business right now, it would be a home-based, online, knit goods shop. I would need to create a business plan and figure out how much money I would need to start the shop, but the way I would do business initially would involve keeping as few supplies as possible in my house.
First, I would purchase a knitting machine and setup an online store, probably on a site like Etsy to start with. Once business picked up, I could hire someone to design a separate website with a catalogue and shopping cart system for me, but I won’t need that to begin. I would list off all of the products I am able to knit, and include an option for customers to get a quote on the cost for a custom item by email.
I would charge, for each item sold, an amount of money equal to the cost of the yarn and other items (buttons, zippers, etc.) used, plus a flat rate for my having to use my knitting tools and the federal minimum wage for one quarter of the number of hours it would have taken me to make the item with just my hands and knitting needles.
I would buy yarn and other supplies as needed for each new order. When I could not fulfill orders in a reasonable amount of time anymore, I would buy a second knitting machine and hire a second person on commission to help me fulfill them.
Common sense is almost never based on fact, but is usually used to explain away "things that we've always done" as normal or more acceptable than the alternatives. Rarely, common sense actually aligns with whatever research may or may not have been done on any given topic, and that is "good" common sense.
Often, and unfortunately usually, however, people don't bother to ask themselves why what they think is right, and will not listen to arguments against their own beliefs. Or, they will listen to the arguments, but then respond with a completely illogical answer, such as, "My religion says it has to be this way, so you can't do it another way, even if you don't believe in the same things I believe in."
In other words, "common sense" is often neither common, nor sense.
