The Pay-It-Forward Store

If you live in or near Tucumcari, New Mexico, and your Christmas budget is a little tight this year, this post is for you. I have 100 about 30 remaining handmade gift items to give away on a first-come, first-served basis to anyone in town who is broke but feels pressure (internal or external) to buy a gift for someone.

If that’s you, look through the galleries below, pick some stuff you like, then scroll to the bottom of this page and leave a comment to claim it and make arrangements for pickup or delivery. (Comments are moderated, which means I’m the only one who will see yours. NOTE: You do NOT have to log in or sign up for anything to leave a comment, but please be sure to include your email address so I can get back to you.)

If you feel weird about giving presents you got for free, you can pay it forward by donating a few bucks or a few hours of your time to Paws & Claws, Ministry of Hope, or some other local organization. (If you can’t do that, don’t worry about it; just be nice to somebody this week instead.)

A list of available items appears below, with a slideshow for each category. I will try to update this post as items are claimed.

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Art:

Hyperrealist neon-look paintings:
One 8×10 “Budget Prices”
One 12×12 “Free TV”
One 4×12 “Odeon”
One 8×8 “POOL” quadriptych (four separate 4×4 paintings that can be displayed together to make a single picture)
Three 2×2 hearts with magnets on the back (1 aqua, 1 pink, 1 purple)
One 2×2 peace sign with magnet (1 aqua)

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Personal care:
One pint jar “Earth Mama” bath salts (scented w/patchouli & cedar EOs)
One 2-oz. beeswax lotion bar scented w/teatree & mint EOs
One 3-pack of mini lotion bars (same scent)

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Stuff for kids:

One sock monkey (lawn gnome pattern)
One bottle strawberry buttercream scented bath salts w/toy dinosaurs in bottle
One bottle berry scented bath salts w/toy dinosaurs in bottle

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Stuff you can eat:

Two ranch dip mixes (ingredients layered in small glass jar to look pretty)

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Necklaces:

1 child-sized green necklace w/Shrinky-Dink sunflower pendant
1 “Bee Kind” necklace
1 “Love is Love” necklace — black w/rainbow accents
1 small necklace w/pink & green beads
1 pink & black necklace w/clear crystal-look beads
1 “peace & love” necklace
1 green necklace w/clear stones

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Home decor:

Two fake succulents in small “weathered” green pots (comes w/earth-tone macrame hangers)
One wire-wrapped hanging jar tealight (beach themed
Two dinosaur mini-terrariums w/green macrame hangers
Two freestanding beach-themed jar tealights (1 w/stones; 1 w/seashells)

Things I’m Doing

Here are things I am doing at the moment:

1. Getting ready for the first day of school. The jury is still out on whether this will happen from my office or from my classroom, but either way, I have to learn Google Classroom and digitize (read: rebuild from scratch, using the mandatory prefabbed software) my entire curriculum as soon as I find out what I’m teaching. Which I still don’t know, because my boss asked NMPED a question May 20 and didn’t get an answer until Tuesday night, after calling umpteen people and bugging hell out of them until they deigned to respond. I am not surprised; I’ve dealt with our state bureaucracy before. I realize the pandemic creates uncertainty, but our question was unrelated to that, and if they didn’t know the answer and didn’t have time to research it, they should have just said, “We’re not sure; hold off this year, and we’ll send this up the food chain and get you an answer next spring” instead of keeping us in limbo all summer. I really needed enough lead time to do some advance planning this year, because I am also …

2. Taking three grad-level classes. In a moment of weakness last summer, I let my boss talk me into enrolling in grad school. We’ll see how well I can juggle a full-time master’s program and a full-time teaching gig, all while …

3. Fostering a four-legged abuse victim. Shelters aren’t great places to work through PTSD, so Fionn the Chiweenie is now curled up under my desk, giving my feet a wary look. We’re pretty sure somebody kicked him hard enough to break a couple of ribs.* Riggy and Walter politely welcomed him to the pack, Tootsie is ignoring him, and Ramona reallyreallyreallyreallyREALLY wants to make friends and can’t figure out why he keeps snapping at her. (She will win him over. She wins everybody over. She is the consummate Hufflepuff.)

Emily

* Dog abuser, if you’re reading this, please understand that “Fought a descendant of Boudicca” sounds much more impressive than “Kicked a 15-lb. Chiweenie,” and I would be DELIGHTED to help you upgrade that line on your resume. You’re welcome. Happy to help.

I hope to God it’s good.

“Finished this day — and I hope to God it’s good.”
— John Steinbeck, upon completing The Grapes of Wrath

It’s not likely to be as good as Steinbeck, but I have just finished the second draft of my sequel to Greetings from Coldwater. Surprisingly, it bears a closer resemblance to the draft I posted here this spring than Greetings from Coldwater’s second draft bore to its first. This probably has something to do with the fact that I was working from an outline and actually had an idea of where I was going this time.

I’m still not completely happy with the last chapter, but the rest of it feels solid, and a friend from church who very much enjoyed Greetings and the first draft of this still-untitled prequel/sequel has agreed to give it an edit. I’m looking forward to his feedback.

It’s been a ride. I know more about Celtic mythology now than I ever imagined I’d need or want to know four years ago, when Miss Shirley began bugging me in earnest for a prequel, or even seven months ago, when I sat down with a stack of real books and a Kindle full of ebooks and began taking notes. If my interior monologue is worth a damn, I owe Beverly Cleary a beer. If my fantasy elements are worth a damn, I owe J.K. Rowling and the late Rudolfo Anaya a beer. If the dialogue is worth a damn, I owe Quentin Tarantino a beer. And if the book reaches its final form before Oxford University’s COVID-19 vaccine goes into mass production, I probably owe the notorious M.L.G. (New Mexico Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham) a beer. That shelter-in-place order lit a fire under me and gave me a nice block of time without a lot of distractions to get this project to this point much faster than I would have otherwise.

As the Dead once said: “What a long, strange trip it’s been.”

Emily

Work in Progress

Amid all my other projects, I decided to create a houseplant-themed mural in my office to use up some leftover paint. I’ve been working on it, a few minutes here and an hour there, for about a week and a half. Here’s how it’s been going so far:

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  The jungle thus far.

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  Burgundy rubber tree.

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  Fiddle-leaf fig. Paint kept drying before I could blend it.

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  I really like the Monstera deliciosa.

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  Monstera leaf in progress.

The big challenge of painting in the desert is that acrylic dries almost instantly, so you have to work really fast and do really small sections at a time to keep it from drying before you finish blending it. It doesn’t help that my office is hot in the afternoons, and most of the paint is several years old. The latex tends to get thick as it ages, which makes it dry out even faster. Still, it’s been a while since I painted a mural solely for my own enjoyment, and this is a pleasant way to use up some leftover paint I’ve had on hand for upwards of 10 years.

Emily

Planning ahead

“We cannot all do great things. But we can do small things with great love.”
— Mother Teresa

During this pandemic, I’ve thought a lot about the best way to leverage the resources I have to bring the greatest possible benefit to the greatest possible number of people.

Three resources I have at the moment are surplus craft supplies, creativity, and time. I am using those resources to stock a sort of free gift shop that will launch in October to make Christmas a little easier for people in my area who may be struggling financially.

My goal is to create classy-looking gift items in a range of sizes/types/apparent price points and distribute them at no charge to anybody who needs them. If people want to pay for the items, I will encourage them to donate whatever amount they deem appropriate to a local nonprofit, but it won’t be required. The fundraising component is mostly just there to provide cover for folks who can’t afford to buy gifts but don’t want anyone to know, and to give them a way to pay it forward if they wish. I use a similar approach with my obedience classes, and it seems to work very well.

Today, I took some small terra cotta flowerpots and dressed them up with leftover paint from other projects. I’m making little macrame hangers to go with them, and this fall, I’ll fill them with potting soil and tuck baby spider plants or burro’s tail cuttings into them.

I watered down some paint to get the weathered effect.

I really like this Southwestern color scheme.

Propagating plants. These will be pretty big by Christmas, but I’ll have more little ones by then.

I hope to offer at least a dozen different products, including houseplants in cute containers, spice mixes, mug-brownie kits, lotion bars, sock monkeys, bead jewelry, paintings, garden kits, hot-process soap, bath bombs with small toys hidden inside, and a few other items.

I’ll be posting recipes and tutorials as I go.

This won’t cure coronavirus, fix the economy, or end racism, but it might make life a little easier for somebody, and that’s all I really need it to do.

Emily

Free time

Here is some of the stuff I’ve been doing in my free time since I finished the draft of the novel last weekend:

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In February, I pulled up our stained, worn-out wall-to-wall carpet to find a beautiful hardwood floor hiding underneath. Instead of spending the better end of $5 a square foot on cork-look luxury vinyl tile, I spent less than $100 on sandpaper and Danish oil.

Before I could start working on the floor, I came down with bronchitis. Then the pandemic hit, and I had to figure out how to teach, put out a paper, and coordinate the production of a yearbook, all remotely, while writing the first draft of my latest novel.

I finally got a hand free Monday to start working on the living-room floor. At my dad’s recommendation, I sanded it by hand and gave it a couple of coats of Danish oil. It was time-consuming, physically demanding work, but I think it turned out well. We used part of the money we saved on the floor to buy a new wood-slice coffee table with hairpin legs. *Swoon*

To keep my neck and shoulders from completely seizing up on me while I was sanding and oiling the floor, I stopped every hour or so to stretch and spend a few minutes working on the new mural I just sort of randomly decided I needed in my office. I’m designing it on the fly, but I think it will look pretty cool when I’m done with it.

I’ve always sort of wondered what I could accomplish if I had a big enough block of time on my hands with relatively few distractions, and the pandemic has pretty well answered that question. I have several other projects brewing. We’ll see how many of them I finish before the world reopens.

Emily

 

Lotion bars

As a beekeeper, I tend to have a lot of beeswax on hand. Every time I harvest honey, I render the cappings, but I rarely get around to using them for anything.

Last fall, I used some of my surplus beeswax to make a batch of mini lotion bars to hand out to my colleagues at school. I ended up with way more than I needed, so I stored the leftovers in the freezer. They’ve been a godsend since we started washing our hands approximately nine million times a day to ward off coronavirus.

I realize normal people don’t just have chunks of beeswax lying around, but if you can put your hands on some, you can make your own lotion bars with just a few minutes’ worth of work.

For the basic bars, I used:

1 part beeswax
1 part coconut oil
1 part olive oil

A lot of recipes say to melt your beeswax in a double boiler to reduce the risk of igniting it, but I’ve melted beeswax in the microwave for years and never had any problems. The trick is to use a Pyrex measuring cup; cut the beeswax into thin slivers; and watch it closely, stirring every 30 seconds to prevent hot spots.

(If you ever do have a fire in your microwave, just unplug it and leave the door shut until the fire burns out. It shouldn’t take long, because there’s not much oxygen in there.)

When the beeswax was mostly melted, I added the coconut oil and continued nuking and stirring until it was all melted together. Then I stirred in the olive oil and enough wintergreen and peppermint essential oil to make it smell nice, poured it into silicone molds, and stuck them in the freezer to harden. Once they solidified, I wrapped them in candymaker’s foil and stored them in an old sherbet tub in the freezer.

To use, hold a bar in your hands until it softens up, then rub it over your skin. It takes a while to soak in, but it’s a good overnight moisturizer that doubles as an excellent lip balm.

Emily

P.S.: Hat tip to Mom Makes Joy, who posted the recipe I used as the basis for mine.

Just what the Doctor ordered

“An N95 respirator is the safest thing to put between myself and a virus, but it is by no means the most interesting.”

— The Third Doctor, probably

As a courtesy to everybody he interviews this week, Ron has been following the governor’s advice and covering his face.

With a bandanna.

Which makes him look as if he is planning to rob a stagecoach after deadline.

I couldn’t let him run around like that, so I rummaged through my craft closet tonight and let him pick through my fabric stash to find something he could handle wearing. He chose a blue fabric with Our Lady of Guadalupe on it. He could do worse than to have the Mother of God standing between him and everybody’s cooties, I suppose.

I, of course, insisted on geeking it up. It would take a pretty audacious virus to try to get past twelve Doctors. (This fabric predates Thirteen by a couple of years.)

Allons-y!

Emily

P.S.: Ron also has an N95 respirator to go with his stylish cloth mask. I found it in my craft closet tonight while I was searching for elastic. I think I bought it to ward off migraines while I was painting the kitchen in Cape, so if you see him in it, don’t side-eye him too much. I’m pretty sure the people fighting the pandemic didn’t want a slightly used mask that’s been rocking around in the bottom of a craft bin for three years. o__O

School’s Out

NOTE: This is part of the new novel I am writing. I am posting it here as a diversion for readers who may be living under shelter-in-place policies while the world waits for the coronavirus pandemic to pass. For an explanation of this project, please click here.

School’s Out
5 p.m. May 23, 2019 ~ Coldwater High School, Coldwater, N.M.

Holly watched the last vehicle pull out of the parking lot. Her work was far from finished — it would never be finished; not until she retired, at least, and that was still a good decade away — but the year was finally over, and she could quit worrying over day-to-day crises and focus on getting ahead of the paperwork that had been trying to drown her since August.

She sank into the aging office chair behind her desk and massaged her temples, wincing. She’d been battling a sinus headache for a month, ever since the upperclassmen had decided to hold their own after-prom at the abandoned church near Cuervo and three of them hadn’t made it back alive.

Grand total: 190

We completed our breezeblock inventory this afternoon. By my count, Tucumcari (pop. 4,915) has 190 properties that feature either breezeblocks, shadow blocks, or some combination of the two — and at least 100 of them are within a mile of my house.

I knew we had a lot, but by “a lot,” I was thinking maybe 50. We have nearly four times that number — and I probably missed a few that weren’t visible from the street. Incredible.

Here are some samples from today’s explorations:

We saw this fan-style block atop an unfinished wall in a newer subdivision. The owner appeared to be test-driving samples.

This double square-in-square was perched atop the same unfinished wall as the fan-style block.

We saw this angular riff on the Starlight pattern at the same property.

I don’t know the name of this pattern, but it seems to be the 21st-century answer to hidden circles.

I like this sort of inside-out approach to installing hidden circles, spotted in an alley while we were walking the dogs this afternoon.

The top image is from a house down the street. The breezeblocks appear to be a later addition, as they don’t really match the architecture of the house, but I imagine they’d come in handy if you were fumbling with your keys on a stormy day.

The research for this project has been fascinating. I knew Tucumcari pretty well before I started, but systematically driving every street in town in search of one specific architectural detail has forced me to pay much closer attention to my surroundings. It’s also given me an appreciation for the ingenuity of the people around me, who are sculptors, muralists, architects, landscape designers, homesteaders, and creative problem solvers of the highest order.

No wonder I love this town so much. It’s full of kindred spirits.

Emily