Xena, Warrior Princess!

Good things and not so good things and great things in the last couple of days.

One excellent thing was the arrival of my share of a celebration swap emanating (posh word, note that) from Ravelry, the huge and wonderful site full of talented and friendly people.



This is from a friend in Oklahoma, thank you so much Carol, and boasts pecans, coffee, chocolate, fruit butter, from there, local items, wonderful to have. And beautiful little stitch markers, tiny artworks in themselves and the case they come in. I have to ditch my cut up drinking straws now! and English tea, for afternoon tea taking purposes. AND a wonderful headband about which more anon.


I threw vanity to the winds and took a pic of me, using the mirror to see my camera screen, disregarding the distortion that was the inevitable result, because I wanted to model the beautiful beaded headband that was part of the parcel.

One view of me cracking up laughing at the attempt



I'm easily amused


and one a better shot of the band itself,



and I hope you can see the beads. It's really an artwork, and the choices of the rest of the parcel were all Oklahome-centric and wonderful, great to share with HP. Note the chocolate map of OK!

So that was good. Then this morning frantic bellringing at the door, and my neighbor was there telling me I had a flat tire....oh-oh. Then he followed up by saying he'd searched for his own inflating device, realized it was in his truck in the city where his daughter had had it in a collision, so he ran to a neighbor and borrowed his, and had set up ready to inflate the tire before telling me I had a problem.

There is simply nothing as good as having a neighbor who sets the solution in motion before worrying you with the problem! aside from having a flat right in your own parking space, no stranding involved, we found there was a nail in the tread, and when the tire was up again, he promised to look in on HP, who can not be alone, while I nipped over to the gas station to get the tire plugged.

And the guys there asked me could I manage to wait ten minutes? please? and had the tire off, nail removed, hole plugged, tire back in less than that, chatting at me in a friendly way the whole time. Wonderful change from the olden days in gas stations....

I was only mildly jarred to see that their terracotta tiled floor was the same as the one I put down in my condo and was very proud of. Which means either I have the taste of a gas station decorator, or they have very good home decor instincts. No prize for deciding which solution I prefer.

Then, on the way home, only a five minute trip, I found myself behind a minivan with a vanity plate that read XENA WP. And I thought, yeah, that's me!!! very appropriate.

Well, I think so, anyway.

The Dollivers Knit for their Friends

The little present has arrived at its destination, so now I can show you the picture.
At least the Dollivers can. They not only claim to have designed this scarf, but insisted on modeling it in a gangshot.

It's a scarf, designed (adapted from another one I made) using the short row method. If you like the technicality of this, the Ds. explain that they knitted it to within six stitches of the end, then turned, and went on short rowing from there until within six stitches of the other end, then proceeded back again.



You start with a triangle before embarking on the short rows. End with another triangle.

This was knitted from part of the fiber share of homespun and hand dyed yarn that Heather gave me, one of the nicest presents I ever had, from Shepherd Susie's flock. This fiber share has now gone into more than one knitted FO, parts of several tapestries, and into renovation work. Talk about multi tasking.

Wonderful yarn, great to handle, and when I blocked it, having rescued it from Duncan in the middle of the night, when he seized it in the bathtub where it was drying on a frame, rolled about with it madly like it was dyed with catnip, it went very pliable and soft and just nice. I think it will wear forever, too.

So this is a Good Thing! and the recipient likes it, always a big plus, say the Dollivers. Who insisted on a second shot, just to milk it.

Aran sweater transformed

Ages ago, I received via Freecycle, on a day of 100 plus heat, a couple of beautiful, brand new handknitted Irish Aran sweaters, one a sleeveless vest, one a long sleeve. Now that the weather is cool enough to try on, I've done the alteration that made the vest into a sleeveless coat, which almost reaches my knees, warm, lovely and approved by Duncan.

What I did was cut right up the center to the V neck, leaving bobbles evenly on each side, then run basting stitches to stabilize the end loops, then turn under and hem in a way that now looks like a lapel. The thread I used to hem was the handspun from the fiber share Heather gave me. That is the gift that keeps on giving! Excellent match in quality and weight to the knitted yarn. As you see. This will soon be in use. If you want to see closer up, click on the picture, then click again on it once it shows up in its own screen.



Next I have to do similar work on the long sleeve sweater, which will not only yield a coat for me, but legwarmers from the excess sleeve I have to cut off, for HP. We'll match.

There's another item, not related to the Aran haul, though, in the mail to someone who ought to receive it maybe today, so I will refrain from showing a picture in here, not to spoil the surprise.

Dreams and other movies

Do you find that when you eye a scene with a view to a photograph, that you think, hm, that would make an intriguing book cover? in fact it supplies the raw material for a novel or a poem cycle or something. Like today's pix. Henry James would have loved this -- you remember he used to say don't tell me any more, that's enough to be working from. Actually, I can see Mary Wesley making good use of this raw material. That's okay, it's not protected.

This Moslem couple, unusually, were walking holding hands.



Then they duck across into the shrubs



and he is joined by a couple of male friends and she strides ahead.



Later in my walk I saw her rounding the park, and he was now alone and strolling, evidently waiting for her to catch up.

So my imagination ran riot, of course.

I often wonder how people dreamed before they were influenced by movies and television techniques. I used to work in the tv industry, not as a hands-on producer, but I learned production in order to know what I was asking other people to do, always a friendly management technique. And I have for many years had my vivid dreams, often nightmares, influenced by the quick cut, the dissolve, the pan, the zoom, all kinds of rapidfire modern techniques of movies and video.

Just last night, I won't bore you with the plot, but I was in a group, there were establishing shots, then a quick zoom in to the face of the speaker, then a pan around the group to take in the other responses, etc. When I woke up, which I was glad to do, since I was never going to find the proper gate for my flight to Yokohama, I cracked up laughing at the production values that found their way into my very dreams.

Inward freecycling

Just to show that freecycle works both ways, it occurred to me that since I've been giving a lot of nice stuff to nice people, most recently a lovely suede Chanel style brown jacket that needed wider shoulders than mine, and an Italian made crystal ceiling light on behalf of a neighbor, it would be okay to put in a request of my own.

My ancient scanner had finally decided she wanted to retire from active service, and having done all the first aid I know, I agreed with her. And I put up a modest request for a scanner, no need for an all-in-one, since I have a good printer. And instantaneously I was offered an almost brand new scarcely used HP scanjet.

And shortly after, another offer arrived in case the first one didn't work out. So yesterday I picked up the first one, and HS was here and kindly downloaded the applicable software, and installed it for me. I could probably have done this, but it would have taken hours and cursing, rather than the peaceful 20 minutes, humming quietly that the knowledgeable Son put into it. And did a test scan. And it worked fine. Yay. So, pausing only to thank the giver, and the would-be giver, too, I set about taking a picture of the new arrival. Mainly to show HP, in fact, since he can't get to where it lives, and was curious about this new electronic thing.

Funny coda: after I offered my old scanner on freecycle, in case anyone can use the parts or the cables or the installation disk, etc., I got an email telling me that there was someone yesterday looking for a scanner....I didn't like to make the sender feel silly by saying, yeah, that was ME! so I just said, thanks, I'll check into it...

And now that my friend Maureen whom I visited the other day, after not seeing each other for ages, showed me her new Kindle, a birthday gift, I wonder if I dare ask on Freecycle if anyone has an older Kindle they would like to part with if they got a new one....hmmmmm. Marketers say that once you've handled an object you're a lot more likely to want to own it! this may be true. Anyway, we'll see!

I have now become the Official Neighborhood Freecycler, since the neighbor I freecyled the light fitting for and various other good items as he reno's the house, and HS, who has very little time at home for freecycling but has some items to pass along, are both active in this little enterprise. As is my own forays into the dumpster enclosure from which I freecycle all kinds of great kitchen and children's items. It's a kind of volunteer activity in a way. Says she virtuously. Actually it's fun, too.

Upcoming adventures in art

Our local library gallery is about to celebrate the new building in December, having been opening in segments for months now, with a blowout exhibit of self portraits of artists and others. But this is going to be a virtual show, very exciting, don't ask me how to visualize it, it's a high tech deal.

What's going to happen is that the jpeg pix artists have sent in will be projected on the highest part of the building, the tower, to be viewed from the town center! How this will happen I do not know, but that it will happen is a certainty, given that Jinny B. and Donna S. are in charge of it.

I'm used to having work exhibited on the internet, have been in more than a couple of international showings and been featured in various zines online, but this is a new departure.

And my own part of the exhibit is seen here. It's actually part of a work that's almost life sized, but the head part is best for this purpose.



It's made from telephone wire, copper wire, artist made beads, found object beads, fabric, knitted, woven, stitched and hand molded. And I immodestly add that it won a Best in Show on its first trip out. So I figured it would work for this show.

And of course the Dollivers were quick to point out that why, it's a big Dolliver! even then She knew! we need a family portrait here.



And Marigold evidently agreed, and inserted herself into the scene. She's part Dolliver. Either that or Dollivers are part Burmese cat. Aside from a lot of grumbling about the poor set lighting and the photo shoot carried out with fewer than the usual technicians, the other Dollivers being busy with their gift knitting for various friends, it turned out as well as can be expected.

So now that the entry has been made, easiest show selection and entry I ever did, all that remained was to take a lovely brisk walk in the sunshine and catch a few pix of trees and clouds in various stages of turning leaves, changing shape, and generally acting like some of the Powers That Be's better compositions!

Hanging in There, survivors

After a few frosts which have stopped most of the tender outside plants in their tracks, and enabled me to prune outdoors, no further growth to be expected on shrubs, I see there are still a few hardy survivors, hanging in there.



There's the last of the cornflowers, from my wildflower collection




and the last johnny jumpup, same collection





and the last sweet alyssum, same collection


and the perennial chrysanthemums


which seem to have liked the torrid summer and floods of this year, since they're doing better than they have for years. Go figure.

Tweeting and texting and the One Minute Manager and the Thirty Second Dressmaker (actually that only happens when you fire the first thirty-one, but oh well, I think it's funny. Like how long is the ninety-second psalm? um, a minute and a half?) anyway, as I was saying before I rudely interrupted my own train of thought, I've been thinking about those four word life tracks, as in Life is a Verb, you know the kind of thing.

Nutritious bitelets of thought or something. Or those six word autobiographies that are popular in geezer, I mean mature reader, magazines. I notice however that the ones I see are almost universally miserable and angry! hm, not much to show for a life well lived, or lived at all.

Anyway, I thought I'd give it a try myself, and would you like to join me? just post your versions, this will be fun.

Seventy-two. Not wise. Who cares??

Two cats. Play, sleep. Good life


And so on, take it away!

Old man, young man, old stairs, new stairs

This scene on a walk a couple of days ago reminded me of the old riddle: what walks on four legs in the morning, two legs and noon and three legs in the evening? since the ten month old crawling baby down the street was not available for a photo shoot, I had to skip morning and give you noon and evening, reading right to left.

And today the kitchen floor was redone, and the two flights of stairs and the hallway that connects them, all done, in, amazingly, four hours. Beautiful job, very friendly workmen, full of stories about how their little kids like birds, as I was moving my bird out of range, and who made the art, and so on, and it was really a good time.

Heard all about the supervisor who came with, and his art career and life, very interesting discussion on the meaning of art. This almost always happens when people come to do skilled work in the house. They are all artists in the evening, it seems.

The only drawback was that as the men arrived, banging and crashing and hauling equipment in, HP started to seize, and I ran to get one of the calming pills to head off major trouble. Rescue Remedy for me, too. I'm pretty sure it was the stress of the workmen's noise and disruption that did it, HP being not so good at change at the best of times, really wasn't sure why the ragged, ancient 21 year old rug



which has survived many animals, needed to be replaced. And the kitchen floor, much worn by dog nails and the years of wear, though the picture is kind to it




But that was several hours ago, and I don't see any further seizure trouble.

Anyway, we now have a lovely cushiony kitchen floor,



much warmer and easier to walk on, and the stairs actually look bigger, can't figure that out. The color didn't show up well on my camera, but it's a nice gentle green, peaceful.



I love green in a house. And this goes right from the foot of the stairs to the loft two stories up, to the entrance of the studio.

So it's done. And I assured HP we are only doing this once! I say this every time we have a major change made, to keep him calm about it. He gets very anxious about will the cats run out, will it all work out, etc. And I always remind him that the first thing the cats do when strangers with vacuum cleaners and noisy staple guns arrive is dive into my bed and burrow under all the covers until the coast is clear, no matter how long it may take.

Shakuhachi, shakuhachi, my mantra, along with SERENITY NOW. Try singing shakuhachi to the tune of La Cucaracha. It fits. You could also squash serenity now into the opening of the Fifth Symphony.

At least I can, but that's me.

Robins, shadows and waiting

Election Day, and we voted weeks ago, seems like history to us except that it's not counted yet. And while we wait hoping and hoping for the best, and looking forward to the end of the advertising and being glad of the secret ballot -- and people who know me know that I value the secret ballot to the point of thinking it's the ultimate in tacky to ask someone how she voted -- today's walk yielded quite a bit of thought.

One of those brilliant Fall days with no wind, just brilliant cold sunshine, and the shadows were eloquent.

The robins, mobs of them, were busy stocking up on berries while the stocking is good, and bold enough to ignore people with cameras



The shadow of the snowfence looking like a huge downtown building until you realize how flimsy the structure is




The permanent etchings left by leaves which have been rained on and frozen into blacktop, natural art



The reverse, a leaf with open areas




Shadows on blacktop



These images are meant to sustain us all as we see what unfolds!

Anyone who thinks this year's campaign is the bitterest ever clearly doesn't know her American history! to wit: check into Jefferson's shenanigans in the course of stopping Adams from getting a second term. Just for starters! So I'm not shocked by it, it's just part of the big mosaic. I may wish it were otherwise, but there you are. Democracy is a lot of things, but pretty is one thing it isn't.

If there are any readers whose polls are still open and who get to vote in the US, please do remember to do so, okay? Or the Dollivers will be on your case...

Another Hallowe'en survived

Every year I say how I don't like Hallowe'en, hate the ghoul motif, can't stand the endless attention to it everywhere and the awful pictures I can't bear to look at.

Then the day comes around, I stock up with candy, and we are invaded by the most wonderful gangs of kids, neighbors, who are so funny, so cute, and so altogether nice that I'm fine with it again.

This year it started early with our first arrival, about three thirty, a handsome little Chinese neighbor with a face like a flower, and when I asked for a picture, instantly put on this mask, heh, so you see before you a diminutive power ranger or alien or something.



Many kids later, a huge group appeared, had been partying together, and one of the boys said "we're a PARADE!" These kids all take one piece of candy, say thank you, and wish me Happy Hallowe'en. I love them. And word about mischief night, once dreaded around here, has not permeated the Indian community, an real plus since mischief night fell on a Saturday this year.



The picture shows only the front of the parade -- the various lights running down the walkway are all other kids, with various costumes, some of them quite aggrieved because protective moms made them put warm coats on over their outfits! chilly night tonight for Hallowe'eners. And there are a lot of tiny kids clustering around their elders, but invisible to the camera!

A welcoming committee of Dollivers, having won a short but nonetheless vigorous argument about who was to be on candy watch, set up the candy just in the nick of time before the first alien arrived, and were duly admired, their main motive in all this.


Happy Hallowee'en, everyone!

L'eau et le soleil!

Warm, windy sunny day, perfect for the sun to play with the dancing fountain in the town center.




Mystery animal swimming in midair



Trees and jets, dancers and poodles



Giacometti lives!

Looking, hearing, learning...

As I promised there's a new trove of reading to recommend to you all.

First and,well, definitely first, is a small piece of fiction written by a young Canadian writer with a big future. Anthologized as the lead article in the current collection of Awkward Press, this collection being on the theme of brevity, is An Open Letter to Our Valued Clients, written by our own blogista and blogger in her own right, aside from being an up and coming fiction and fantasy writer, Heather Clitheroe!



Catch her at lectio.ca, too, but get your hands on this collection. There are twenty five pieces in it, but my money's on Heather, not that I'm biased toward my friends, of course....Heather has already earned residencies, prizes and awards and at the tender age of nemmind how young she is, it's young, has done public readings of her own work. Yes, I'm impressed, how could you tell?



Calming down a little, there's the new work from Oliver Sacks, another friend in fact, and this time it's The Mind's Eye, about visual concepts and memory and discoveries. Like a true researcher, this time this neurologist uses his own life-changing experience with cancer in the eye to explore and explain the visual world in terms only a neurologist could conceptualize and only a gifted and good humored writer could convey. Complex and not easy to read, but well worth pushing on, just because of the sheer beauty of his prose and the elegance of his rhythm and phrasing.

He learned quite a bit over the course of his research into vision and into his own brushes with serious loss of vision, and one of the endearing things about him is his capacity to admit that he was unaware of some things until he experienced them himself. One loss he suffered was that of binocular vision, which means his depth perception is gone.

So he sees two dimensionally all the time. And he is surprised to find that now he understands a lot more about two dimensional art design, because he begins to see how an artist sees and designs his subjects on the two dimensional surface. The difference being that the artist summons up this vision as needed. It's one of the challenges of teaching adults to draw, to let the eye show you what to do, and ignore the brain telling you the eye is wrong!

He talks about kinds of visual memory, too, and discusses the kind of eidetic, or "photographic" memory which some of us are blessed with. I remember lovingly one time back at the Uni when I was sitting on the steps outside the building in which I was to write one of the vital final exams based on which I either would or would not get a degree, the British system being quite brutal in this regard.

I was nervous and dropped an armful of notes and books on the steps and as I picked them up, I noticed two hitherto unrelated ideas in my notes, and that set me off on a wonderful new train of thought, which I hoped I could use on the exam. All essay, no such thing as multiple choice, you sank or swam on your own raft of knowledge.

All the papers and books had to be left outside the door, of course, no such thing as open book exams, either, and I nearly shrieked with joy when one of the three sink-or-swim exam questions gave me the chance to use this terrific brand new idea! which I read back in my head from the pages I'd dropped, just as if I had them present in my hands. Terrific outcome, too.

Of course that gift could play you a bad turn too, if you forgot to take notes or were just too lazy. Then during the exam I could visualize the blank page with only the heading on it, and hope desperately to recall what I ought to have putten if I'da remembered to putten it.

Sacks would understand this perfectly. In fact he is very consoling in that he comments casually on having observed and accepted phenomena that I'd been told were not possible, or were just an invention! not so. But to be validated even many years later is a wonderful gift.

And speaking of terrific prose, is The Great Silence, by Juliet Nicolson, about the years after WWI, and by anecdote and quotation from a huge range of English people, including some still living at the writing of the book, sharp and cheerful Londoners past 100, old memories still intact, she constructs a narrative you can't put down.

It's painful and difficult to read but illuminates the frantic partying amid the losses and hardship of the twenties and the grinding misery of the thirties. The writer is connected enough to read the diaries and letters of people we've only read about, and she's the daughter of Harold Nicolson and Vita Sackville West -- heck, she lives at Sissinghurst, avid gardeners will know that place.

But connections aside, she's simply a great narrative writer, and you understand so much you didn't before you read this book, even though I had heard a lot of the events and fashions and tragedies mentioned, but without this illumination.

Friends who are aware that today HP had what my old aunties would call "a nasty turn" will be happy to know that he's feeling much better, ate supper as normal, did his evening exercises and is sleeping peacefully even as I write. We'll live to fight another day, though I wondered for a few minutes there.

Chop wood, carry water!

A Modest Plan

So the squirrels are busy stuffing on walnuts in anticipation of bad weather, at least that's their story, and the leaves are drifting down



and the miniature dachshunds are in training for the big winter race in the park



he's coming up on the rail, ready to go all out, one furlong and he's leading the field by a doxie length...and chez Boud some Christmas, ssshhh, stuff has been accomplished.

There is nothing like tension and anxiety to fuel the knitting needs, and the current crop of three hats, one belt, one tiny purse and two scarves are there to prove it. One hat to respite student, one to HS, and the third as you will see



The picture is of the future presents for our wonderful cleaning couple and their teen daughter who was not too proud to come out and join in the cleaning team in the summer. I always add in a little actual cash, but some stuff is good, too. And they're out in all weathers, so these will be nice.

The scarf is the yarn harlot's one row scarf, looks much more complex than it knits, made from the lovely harvested lambswool sweater which has yielded half a dozen nice things to date, and there's still some to go. The scarf I followed a pattern, but the others I adapted or designed from scratch, more fun that way.

The hat for the man of the couple is knitted in single rib followed by shaker rib for the main pattern part and stocking stitch for the tapered crown, in superwash wool.

And the teeny purse is crocheted in some yarn mix, just a fun item really, but you can put your keys in it, or your cellphone or your MP3 player, or whatever else they will have invented by the end of the year.

And on the household front, the carpet man was here today to measure the kitchen for a new floor, vinyl, and commented hm, about time, really, to which I heartily agreed, and the measuring and pricing for stair carpet for front door to loft, two full flights and one long hallway's worth.

Nice green gentle color, NOT horrible old beige pile like the stuff in place now, high time that went, too, and they will be in touch when it's all in the shop. Nice people. They've done good work for me more than once, and it stays done and looks good. So. We're on. That's the Christmas present for the house, I guess.

New windows next. In the Spring, though, can't tolerate having them all out at once in the cold weather! but they have to go, original windows put in by builders, being replaced all around here as people can't stand the drafts any longer. But that's Easter planning, not Christmas, if we do home improvements by the church calendar...hm, wonder what I should plan for Quinquagesima.

Meanwhile, I plan to do as little as possible, other than read about which more when I post next, some exciting stuff in the mail today along those lines.

Trivia and other brain games

Now and then I amuse myself with very silly stuff. Such as reading the slips previous borrowers leave in my library books listing all their borrowing on that occasion. I'm intrigued to know how come they borrowed a book to my taste and yet their other choices are SF or fantasy or poli. sci., or whether like me they borrow for another person too.

My own choices must look wild, given that I read a lot of nature, art, novels, cosy detective, regencies, heavy psychology, etc., on my account, and borrow all kinds of astronomy and history and political treatises on HP's behalf. But they would all appear on the same borrower's slip.

When that exciting focus dims, I turn to those weird mixed wordette things you have to copy and type to get into blogs and suchlike entry way items. Usually not words at all, even if you can decipher them, which I often can't, but very very close to words, as if, like me and Swedish, I feel as if I could understand them if I listened and looked better.

Turns out there's a whole industry of people being paid by the wordette to type them and put them to use for spammers to get around. Each new invention spawns a new cottage industry. And new language to describe it.

On to other much bigger brain games. This is one my own brain plays on me rather than my engaging in it voluntarily. It sometimes scares people when I tell about this so if you're easily scared by psychic stuff stop reading now!

What this is, an ability I've had as far back as I can remember, is an odd way of knowing things that I never experienced nor could know about, it being the experience of another person. Not deja vu, where you suddenly have the feeling you've had this conversation before or seen this place before. That relates to your sense of your own experience.

But this is different. I can explain it with a couple of examples: many years ago, I was talking to a man I'd just met who was talking about a trip he'd made to England, a part of it I'd never been to, and was out walking.

I suddenly flashed on the scene and blurted out (before I learned not to spring this on people), oh, I know you turned a corner in the road between high hedges, and suddenly in the garden right ahead of you was a Henry Moore sculpture.

The speaker turned all white and upset and demanded how did you know that? were you there? are you following me? all very upset, and I had to explain no, it was just a mental flash I'd had on the scene, sorry. Never been there, knew nothing of the place, just had an image of it before he went on to say it. He looked at me funny after that, I must say.

And there were other occasions when I knew exactly what he was about to say, but this time refrained from joining in!

Oddly enough he was a novelist and you'd think this might be grist for his fictional mill. In fact I read a novel he published a while after I'd known him casually, and there were chunks of conversations we'd had in a group, whole and entire, but not this one. I think it unnerved him.

Another really lovely one: I dreamed of my eldest sister walking up to me as if to a camera and telling me she was pregnant, had just found out, and it was a boy (this was in the days when you didn't know that until the birth) and I asked her if he would be Andrew. She looked very happy. Ages later I heard she'd given birth, had not heard anything directly from her, hadn't seen her for years, but counting back it seemed that I'd dreamed this right when she'd found out. And the sex and name were right. Some psychic connection, perhaps.

That was unusual because it was a dream, but mostly these are waking events.

Or I've met a person and been suddenly very careful around them, seeing visions in my mind of scenes they were to be involved in, and found later that it did happen. Don't want to get into too many details here.

But you get the idea. I have discovered that some people who don't get these flashes of foreknowledge or whatever it is, are really scared about it if I mention them, as if it's a supernatural event or something! to me it's just part of how I roll, doesn't bother me at all, just added information to the newspaper that is life. But it's amazing how often I know just what a person is about to tell me!

I suspect it might be a kind of mental energy generated by the hyperalertness of being the youngest by a long way in a large FOO. Or extreme illhealth as a kid, which does affect your development when you mind is charging ahead and your body can't keep up. Anyway, whatever it is, I do use my powers for good!

Sign me Glinda!