It took a little bit, but I got the archives moved over. I have to say, it’s nice to have some tech support people to help out. They were great and I’m thrilled to have the archives over here. Because I didn’t really have official blog-enty headers over at Blogspot, the headers are both redundant and a little odd, but oh well.

Things here in Montana are good — I had a wonderful dinner last night with some new and old friends, one of whom came in and gave me a big hug and told me how much he loved my novel. Which was fabulous in itself, but even more fabulous is the fact that he’s a real live movie producer who is also interested in maybe seeing if he can sell it. The rights are tied up until next spring, so it’s all sort of vague right now, but I came home walking on air. Since the poor little book is out of print, I’m just thrilled any time someone has managed to read it, or still even wants to talk about it like a live thing …

Cisco still has me chained to my desk editing like a fiend, so blogging will be light the next few days, but I’m hoping to come out of the tunnel soon.

This is still just a test, but I’m moving the weblog over to Typepad. I wanted comments, and easier ways to update the blogs and reading lists than over at Blogspot. So, check into the comments and let me know what you think of the new design …

Busy Busy Busy

My day job is in one of those crunch cycles, so no blogging for a little bit because my head is cluttered with the technical details of running telephones over the internet. Back next week …

Weather is hot, Blogging is slow

I am not a hot weather gal. One of the things I loved about living in Telluride all those years ago, is that it was almost never hot (not at 9000 feet, it wasn’t). However, it’s hot here in Montana. High 90s by midafternoon, and since the sun doesn’t set until almost 9:30 — it stays hot. Now, I realize this isn’t someplace really brutal like, say, New York City (where I sweltered away two summers of my 20s, too poor to afford a summer share, just sweating in my tenement), but nonetheless, the thermometer goes up and my brain shuts down. I’m off to Bozeman today in search of a portable swamp cooler … should I succeed, I’ll try to give you all a summary of my recent reading — I’ve read a bunch of good stuff lately, and have been meaning to blog about it.

Blog in Progress

I loved my old template, but alas, with my new laptop, I can hardly read the text … it’s a very faint grey and my poor eyes were having a terrible time with it. So, for the next couple of days I’ll be fussing with the template. I know, change is hard … but after my Powerbook died on me last week, I’m in that state where one must get used to a lot of computer change all at once. That said, I must admit I love my new iBook — it’s so tiny, so compact, so light. It reminds me of my beloved Mac 180 laptop, a warhorse of a machine upon which I wrote my first novel. This one has the same “I can sit on the floor and type away” appeal — but unfortunately I have to change my template. Be patient. Like everything else, it will evolve.

Music Madness at LivingSmall

Music– I’m in a music zone. I am not one of those people who buys CDs on a regular basis. In fact, I’m one of those annoying people who plays the same CD over and over and over again — which is one of the many reasons it’s good that I live alone.

However, every year when the Oxford American Magazine Music Issue comes out, I wind up buying a glut of CDs, and this year, the Music Issue happened to coincide with both the death of Nina Simone (go, right now, and read Jeanne d’Arc’s brilliant piece on Nina Simone here), and new CDs by three of my favorites: The Be Good Tanyas, Lucinda Williams, and Roseanne Cash. And then, while wandering around looking for CDs by folks like Steve Earle, Will Kimbough, and The Blind Boys of Alabama, all of whom have great tracks on the Oxford CD, I also happened to stumble across a couple of other astonishing things, like this CD from Willie Nelson: Crazy, the Demo Sessions. Oh my oh my — Willie and his git-ar, just the two of them, without the terrible overproduction that too often makes him sound campy. And as a die-hard Patsy Cline fan, it’s wonderful to hear Crazy and Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow in these stripped-down versions. So, add that to the stack. Yikes. This is not living small at all.

So, after coming home with this ridiculously large pile of CDs, it became clear that I had to re-organize my CDs in order to fit them all into the allotted space. I had organized them by subject — Alt Country, Jazz, World, etc … but due to space considerations, I decided to put them all in alphabetical order. I know, I’m beginning to sound like a real music wonk (if you think this is bad, get me started on how my library is organized), but there’s a point here, really. The point is the marvelous juxtaposition that alphabetizing them created. Who would have thought of Sinatra and Springsteen if it wasn’t for their proximity in the S drawer? Coltrane and Shawn Colvin? Dinah Washington and Gillian Welch? And although I have that sort of icky feeling one gets after spending too much money, it was on music, which like books and art, is inherently good because without support, all of us in the arts would wither up and blow away. And it’s probably my CD consumption for most of the year. And I have a new outlook on my old CDs, so there’s a whole new world of 5 CD combinations to explore. For a person like myself, who gets stuck in musical ruts, this is a boon. And as a technique for LivingSmall, it kind of works … that is, by giving one a new perspective on the stuff one already owns, it makes it kind of new again, interesting again.

Plus I have a whole bunch of new, soulful, wonderful music to listen to, music that will filter down into my writing, music that just makes every day here in my little house so much better, music that makes me turn off the TV because it’s just better to be sitting in my living room listening to great music and reading a book.

Snoopy-dancing All Over The Room

Run run run to the nearest good newstand and snatch up a copy of the Oxford American Magazine. This much-beloved Southern Magazine of Good Writing has been resurrected after a hiatus when some of us feared it was gone forever, and is back with the ever-astonishing Music Issue. Fabulous writing and a CD of amazing music. Here’s the playlist:

“Why You Been Gone So Long” by Johnny Darrell
“Total Destruction to Your Mind” by Swamp Dogg
“1952 Vincent Black Lightning” by the Del McCoury Band
“La Chanson d’une Fille de Quinze Ans” by Ann Savoy and Linda Rondstadt
“Swan Blues” by King Pleasure (Oh my G*d — this is a great cut!)
“Run on for a Long Time” The Blind Boys of Alabama
“Evelyn is Not Real” By My Morning Jacket
“Lake Charles Boogie” by Nellie Lutcher
“Hot Rod” by the Collins Kids (very Snoopy Dance, this one)
“No Headstone on My Grave” by Esther Phillips
“El Paso” by teh Gourds
:”Leaving Loachoapoka Behind” by Marshall Chapman
“Grits Aint Groceries” by Little Milton (yes yes yes yes yes! “Grits ain’t groceries, eggs ain’t poultry, and Mona Lisa was a man.”)
“Killer Diller Blues” by Memphis Minnie
“Miss Maybelle” by RL Burnside
“God Moves on the Water” by Blind Willie Johnson
“Nicky Hoeky” by PJ Proby
“See That Coon in a Hickory Tree” by the Delmore Brothers
“Leaning on You” by the Yo-Yo’s
“You and Your Sister” by Chriss Bell
“Columbus Stockade Blues” by Willie Nelson
“A Little Girl from Little Rock” by Marilyn MOnroe and Jane Russell
“Goodnight Moon” by Will Kimbrough

Music that will make you snoopy-dance all over your living room, and if you’re lucky, if you have a talented dog like our Raymond who will jump up, put his forelegs around your waist, and dance along, you may be in the blissed-out state that I was in all afternoon, with this CD on LOUD (not something I usually do). This is also great music to sit on the porch and drink beer by. This is just great music. Go buy it on the newstand. Buy it for yourself. Buy it for your friends. And then go subscribe so we won’t lose this great magazine a second time.

My acupuncturist diagnosed mental overstimulation. Mental overstimulation that has led to low kindey chi, which leads to dried out ligaments, which, along with the amount of time I spend at the keyboard, led to my hand spazzing out last week. What mental overstimulation? Holding down a full time job, writing a second novel (after being notified last week that the first one is going out of print), doing the reading that’s necessary to feed the creative part of the brain that the full-time job tends to deaden in order to write the novel, planning a garden, digging said garden, watching too much CNN and becoming enraged about the war (despite the precepts), and keeping a blog — what mental overstimulation? However, after a lovely 45 minute nap on the table, while stuck full of needles, I did feel much better and my hands once again have a full range of motion. But in the interest of resting my brain, I’ve been turning the tv off, not spending so much time on line, and of course, gardening.

The guys came over and built my raised beds yesterday, and they’re beautiful! I need to go out to the local nursery and order a truckload of compost (if I can get it) or topsoil (which I’m skeptical about since I have such lovely dirt I don’t want to ruin it). By next week I should be able to start putting in cold-weather crops. We all know it will snow again, I have pictures of this house last year when I was buying it with 4 inches of snow in the yard on May 28. But my tomato seedlings are doing quite well under their lights in the basement and my next project is to get the cold frame built — there are a lot of old storm windows around here, and there’s a perfect spot on the south side of the shed.

It’s been in the mid-70s here, and everyone has spring fever. I bought some patio furniture (I know it’s the antithesis of LivingSmall, but I have to admit a weakness for Target. I got a nice set of outdoor furniture, good design, comfy, not expensive), and hung my little lanterns from Ikea in the apple trees. And last night I had the first summer dinner party — six of us, drinks and appetizers outside, and then it got a little dark so we all squeezed into my kitchen for dinner. The food was good (although we had to eat in courses since I undercooked the steak and it had to go back under the broiler), the company was terrific, and our friend Margie who doesn’t drink anymore brought a great bottle of wine for the rest of us.

Carpal Tunnel strikes LivingSmall
Having a random hand spasms and low-level wrist pain here at LivingSmall … will return after seeing the French Acupuncturist tomorrow (he sounds tr�s charmant on the phone). And yes, I ordered a new keyboard.

So, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how to live more locally, how to resist the siren call of consumerism, how to build a sustainable life. I bought a house this year, and moved to Montana. It was important to me when I was looking for a place that I didn’t buy a “ranchette”, that I didn’t contribute to the development creeping across the open spaces of the West. So I found a 100 year old house in a funky town, a house with an old established vegetable plot in back. Planning the garden has me thinking about eating seasonally, about seeing how self-sufficient I can be, about how I can avoid buying food at the cost of fossil fuels. We’re a long way from everywhere here, and although I got spoiled living in the Bay Area, with its abundant local produce, I want to take the lessons of California cuisine — eat local, eat fresh, eat in season, and see what I can do with that up here in the frozen north. Because Montana is still largely an agricultural economy, as well as a remarkably beautiful place with viable wild animal populations, the choices about what and how we eat are a little closer to the surface than they are in more urban centers.
I’m a novelist (there’s a link to my website in the pane on the right), working on my second novel — the autobiographical book I’d hoped not to write, so along with musings about food, and gardening, and the environment, you’ll also find the occasional report on what I’m reading or attempt to define the aesthetic issues that I’m wrestling with as I work through this new project.
Please feel free to email me, I haven’t figured out how to put up a comments link yet, but then again, this blog is all of two days old …