One of the hardest parts of this miscarriage is the fact that it happened right after we moved. If this had happened when we were in Modesto, it would have been just as big a disappointment, but I would have been surrounded by people who love and support us. I have no doubt that my fridge would have been full of casseroles, my kitchen would be scrubbed, and my house would have been full of visitors. Mormons are great in a crisis.

Here in Oceanside, I don’t know anybody. I went to church one time, and then we had the scary appointment, so I didn’t go because I couldn’t stop crying long enough to even drive to the church let alone sit through three hours. Then we had the D & C, and I didn’t go because I was in pain and had complications and also, see above. Since then I haven’t been able to bring myself to go back there for two reasons. 1) We’re brand new and all people know about us is that I was pregnant, so those three hours of church would consist mainly of explaining what happened while I tried to make everyone else feel better about it. And 2) We told the bishop what was going on with us, and he has never called us, the Relief Society president hasn’t called, no one has made a single effort to check on us.

I know that the church isn’t a social club, and either you believe or you don’t and friends don’t have anything to do with it, but we’re moving in a month so I don’t feel too guilty about holding a grudge. If we were in this ward for good than I’d sack up and deal with the awkwardness, but we’re not. We’re not even looking for houses in this stake, so I’m pretty much just cutting my losses.

For the past couple of weeks we’ve been church hopping. We’ve been trying out different wards in the areas we’re house hunting to see if that makes a big difference for or against any of the houses we’re considering. We basically show up for sacrament meeting, feel the vibe of the room, see how the meetings are conducted and how the congregation tends to relate to each other, check out the demographic and whether or not it’s heavily skewed in one direction or another, judge people on sight and decide who stands the best chance of being our friends, and then we leave right after the meeting so we don’t have to explain ourselves to anyone. This might not be the most productive way to make friends.

Thank heavens for the internet and email. I actually haven’t been too terribly lonely despite all this because I just spend a gazillion hours a day online. I can’t imagine what shut-ins did before these technological advancements.

I’ve been thinking to myself that now that I have Polly the PT Cruiser, I have to take advantage of her and actually leave the house occasionally. But I don’t have a job to go to, I don’t have kids to occupy, and I don’t have friends to shop and lunch with, so I did what any crafter worth her salt would do. I went on a craft store pilgrimage.

Crafters are the best people on earth. We’re enthusiastic, passionate, and we will make friends with the wall if they show an interest in what we’re working on. I discovered I am surrounded by tons of fantastic craft stores. There are some really great scrapbooking stores here, and tons and tons of bead stores, and just a little way up the freeway is a stitching shop that is entirely great. I had a great time talking with the clerk who taught me how to use Q-Snaps which are like the Escalade of embroidery hoop systems.

There was a gorgeous yarn store that is the exactly perfect combination of yarn boutique and yarn warehouse. The yarn boutiques are the best to shop in until you get to the register, and the yarn warehouses are a nightmare to shop in until you get to the register. This one was the best parts of both. I also accidently found a super cool fabric store with amazing selection, discounts galore and the sweetest little ladies behind the counter who chatted me up about selling the purse I was carrying.

My very favorite find was a quilt shop just down the street from me. I’ve longingly gone into quilt stores many times in the past, fingered all the great fabric, taken their class calendar home and stuck it to the fridge. But every store I’ve been to in the past priced their classes way outside of my range. As in, they were never just doing them for free. Now I could actually afford to take a class and learn the right way to do things instead of the just the, “Ehh, this works well enough, I suppose” way of doing things.

The store was divided into three sections, the front display space, the middle where most of the fabric was, and the back which was all demo and workspace. I happened to have Bear with me when I went into the store, and he wandered into the back as I looked at fabric, but got nervous when he saw a bunch of people back there. He didn’t want to interrupt a class or just look like he might actually be shopping there himself and not dragged there against his will, so as soon as he walked into the room he tried to make a break for it. The little greeter lady teased him about being afraid to come in, so he teased right back about needing his better half as a security blanket because this stuff just scared him. He charmed the socks off all the little old ladies that worked in the store. The clerk started talking to me about the place and I mentioned that I’d just moved here, so she brought me back and introduced me to everyone. When they found out that I was new to the area and to quilting and that I belonged to this big hunky man they were all newly in love with, they descended upon me like loveable jackals, each more eager than the last to talk me into coming to their open work time.

This store hosts an all day Tuesday “sit n’ sew” for $5 where you bring your project and kibbitz and have access to amazing instructors. And then they do it again on Friday night and you just bring a potluck dish. All the women there were telling me how wonderful it is to live here in Oceanside, how wonderful quilting is, how it is an addiction that will take over your life, how I have to come have to come have to come, and I just sat back and thought, “I think I could be friends with these crazy ladies.”

Moving around as often as I have, I’ve often wondered how people make friends if they don’t belong to a church that provides all their socializing for them. After meeting the quilters and the yarn store clerks and the sweet sewing ladies, now I’ll just wonder how the non-crafters make friends.

Working in the creative industry, December is typically the month from hell for me. Every deadline is December 25th. Clients all want their stuff for Christmas, I always end up way overextending myself with homemade gifts and church commitments, both my and Bear’s birthday are this month, plus I would die inside if I couldn’t Martha-up the holiday. Perish the thought! I must be the best, most extravagently detailed, time-consumed, sleep-deprived, OCD-fueled, Christmas festivity provider ever!

Luckily I was smart about two things this year.
1) Almost no one gets homemade gifts. Notice I said almost no one. I’m not made of stone, people. A few people are still getting homemade gifts. BUT, I’ve taken very smart steps to ensure they’re manageable. Better planning, no afghans, and years of trial and error have made me streamline my process so smoothly I’d put Henry Ford to shame.

2) Very few work commitments. No commissioned scrapbook albums this year, no Christmas Cards for clients, no presents to sell. I am doing one small craft fair on Wednesday, but again, years of trial and error, years of staying up all night painting boxes fearing that I’d sell out and not meet demand only to sell one measly box after being haggled down in price by a nine year old girl, have taught me to be WAY more conservative about my sales goals. AND, this year I’m only trying to burn off old stuff and free up storage space for more Christmas decorations. I still have to assemble things, but that’s nothing compared to the work it takes to come up with a design from scratch.

If you’re in the Modesto area, here’s the info. Drop me a line and I’ll send you a free pass.

And if you’re not in the Modesto area but still looking for cheap Christmas gifts, these and these and these are mainly what I’m selling. I’ll make you a scorching deal. Custom lots or colors totally do-able.

I still have, of course, totally overextended myself with church commitments. Around the country, a lot of LDS churches are hosting a Nativity Festival, where all the church members bring their nativity collections, the building gets all fancied up, choirs sing, and it’s a great festive Christmasy festival. In our ward, the representative in charge of our part of the festival totally bailed at the last minute, so I got roped into joining up and helping out. It turned out to be a ton of fun because we got a bunch of women to help and they’re all my buddies, so it was a big girlfest where we were all fussing and tossing glitter around and playing with Christmas lights.

The problem was, and this explains my latest absence, is that we couldn’t find anybody to donate their nativities. For the longest time we thought we’d have about 10 to show when we were needing 40. So I set to work. For the past three weeks I’ve been up to my elbows in plaster and clay and wire and fabric and paper and any other medium I could think of. I ended up making about 10 nativities, some of which are pretty stupid and desperate, but hey, so was I.

We set everything up last night and tonight Bear and I went to play hostess and security guard. Everything looked beautiful and people were having a great time. It was so much stress, and I spent a ton of money, but it was worth it.

I put a lot of guilt on myself because I have some talents that are easily visible, and I stress myself that I take them for granted and don’t do them service. I can make nearly anything, I sing and write and create and have great ideas (but I have all kinds of weaknesses in the interpersonal skills area. I’d trade a singing voice for a more compassionate spirit any day. Or, for that matter, an ability to use the phone without fear.) and I feel obligated to DO SOMETHING with that stuff. Plus I’m in this unique place where I don’t have kids and if I feel the need to drop everything in my life to spend three weeks covered in clay in the service of my church, then no mouths will go hungry and no sad little faces will be neglected. The other women on the committee couldn’t say the same thing. So even though people kept telling me not to work so hard, that it wasn’t all on my shoulders, we’d make do, I just couldn’t let it go.

Of course, this is all probably just a misguided attempt to make me feel productive in my infertility.

On the last day it was due, I finally finished my Photoshop class and took the final with a 94%. Yeah me! I’m so overwhelmed with relief that I can’t even face sleep, even though I’ve been putting it off for a few days now.

I was planning on finishing my last class late last night, but I got distracted with a new ipod shuffle one of Bear’s vendors gave him, so it ended up taking me a little bit longer than I planned. That left me with one last class and a final, on the last possible day, with plans this evening and no sleep at all at 4 am. So I decided to bite the bullet, power through the remaining Photoshop, and then sleep as long as I could instead of risking missing any deadlines. I’m now completely nocturnal.

Very little in this world gets me as excited as a finished project, and I’m on the roll of a lifetime right now, or at least what feels like one for me now because my standards are so very very low. Not only did I just finish all those home renovations, but now I’ve knocked out this class, and in my breaks between photoshopping I’m nearly finished with that big nasty messy advent calendar project. All that’s left is to glue the tiny hinges on the tiny doors.

Now that I’m drunk on my feelings of righteousness, I’ve made a decision I’ve been putting off. It’s been a while since I wrote for the 50 Book Challenge. Not because I haven’t been reading, oh no. I’ve got books 31 – 42 finished and glaring at me with recriminations every time I sit down at the keyboard. No, I’ve been putting it off because I don’t think it’s fun anymore. I really enjoyed the changes it brought me in my reading; I thoroughly enjoyed reading a book more critically knowing I’d have to have something to say about it afterwards, it was the having to have something to say about it afterwards that I didn’t like. I’ve discovered I’m just not a critic. Books are way too personal to me to bother with all that. It’s too internal.

And critiques are all so wildly subjective, is there even any point to sharing them with someone who didn’t ask? Even critics I like form opinions so wildly far off from mine that I wonder why I bother seeking them out at all. This guy hated a movie I was really moved by, and this girl listed as two of her favorite books two books I hate with a force that defies reason. And a book she hated was one of my favorite finds of the year. It just goes to prove that there’s no accounting for taste. Mine or anyone else’s.

So enough of that. If I find a book I loved, or for that matter one I hated, maybe I’ll still write something, but I never realized how much work it was to come up with an opinion for something totally meh.