Colonial House is killing me. I have been up past midnight for the past two nights watching. It is a great program! Anyone else out there enjoying it?

It is wreaking havoc with my beauty sleep, but doing wonders for my Tied Up Tee project! I have completed the front and am almost through with the back! Interestingly, no one on Colonial House is knitting or spinning. I guess they are all just trying to get by and survive. In last night’s episodes some
sheep arrived, so I have hope of some fleecy activity.

I was in the 7th grade in 1976 – the BiCentennial celebration. I grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia, very close to Valley Forge Park. For one week of that school year, we went to school in a one room school house in the park. It was a great experience. Now that I am in my ‘mature’ years, I cannot believe that the adults in charge even did this. The planning and logistics involved – egads!

We wore full colonial garb – complete with ruffled hats and even took on ‘colonial’ names. I was Prudence.

We got to choose our own names – why I picked Prudence is beyond me. I must have been a sensible young girl – wise beyond my years. (either that, or some other, more glamorous colonial name was already taken!) I can’t remember much more about it – I am not sure if we spent the entire day, or just a couple of hours to give the entire school a chance.

I do remember the port-o-potty. That was definitely there.

There was once a man from the city who was visiting a small farm, and during this visit he saw a farmer feeding pigs in a most extraordinary manner. The farmer would lift a pig up to a nearby apple tree, and the pig would eat the apples off the tree directly. The farmer would move the pig from one apple to another until the pig was satisfied, then he would start again with another pig. The city man watched this activity for some time with great astonishment. Finally, he could not resist saying to the farmer, “This is the most inefficient method of feeding pigs that I can imagine. Just think of the time that would be saved if you simply shook the apples off the tree and let the pigs eat them from the ground!”

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Paging Dr. Bombay, Dr. Bombay! Emergency, come right away!!

Chandra is not PerfectlyFine! She has diasgnosed herself to be suffering a I’m-nearly-forty-and-realizing-that-not-only-am-I-not-hip-now-but-likely-never-was malaise!

She thinks I may have a cure.

such pressure I am under.

I too have been afflicted with that particular malaise. Although in my case it would be the I’m-over-forty variety. Sometime during 2002 when I was in the grip of the I’m-39-and-realizing-certain-truths strain, I decided that a change of mind was in order.

A friend of a friend shared with me an insightful quote. She was studying to become a yoga instructor and one of her teacher’s mantras was ‘don’t push the river’.

don’t push the river.

In some ways I have so completely embraced this notion that I loom perilously close to complete torpidity. So there is a danger here. Proceed with caution.

However, the underlying tenet is very freeing. We lament what was/is/and most likely/always will be, when we could be reveling in the knowledge. No longer trying to be ‘hip and with it’ will free up enormous amounts of time and energy. As always, we are surrounded with images of what we should be. our faces, bodies, homes – there is a crippling amount of shoulds in our lives. Isn’t it great to be able to reject that??!! to be the rejector rather than the rejectee? It is the ultimate stress reducer, ego booster!

I have given myself permission to not be hip, actually to not ‘be’ anything. My new verb is ‘am’.

Things are much better now that I am.

I am much happier – I am not trying to be happier.

To tell you the God’s honest truth, now that I am, I feel much hipper.

A farmer had five female pigs, and, as times were hard, he had decided to take them to the county fair and sell them. While at the fair, he met another farmer who owned five male pigs.

After talking a bit, they decided to mate the pigs and split everything 50/50.

The farmers lived sixty miles away from one another and so they agreed to drive thirty miles and find a field in which to mate their pigs.

The first morning, the farmer with the female pigs got up at 5 AM. loaded the pigs into the family station wagon, which was the only vehicle they had, and drove the thirty miles.

While the pigs were mating, he asked the other farmer, “How will I know if they are pregnant?”

The other farmer replied, “If they’re in the grass grazing in the morning, then they’re pregnant; if they’re in the mud, then they’re not.”

The next morning they were rolling in the mud, so he hosed them off, loaded them again into the family station wagon and proceeded to try again.

This continued each morning the following week until one morning the farmer was so tired that he couldn’t get out of bed.

He called to his wife, “Honey, please look outside and tell me if the pigs are in the mud or in the field.”

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