Wow – you all have been fantastic! Thanks so much to all of you who have ordered Skirties, or emailed me to tell me how much you like my site! That’s been terrific – and I really appreciate all your kind notes!

One question keeps coming up – so I’ll just go ahead and answer it here. Yes – I’m hoping to expand into dresses. But before I fire up and start having dresses produced we’ll just see how it goes with the Skirty. But I’m so glad to hear from all of you who like the dresses – it makes me feel like there might be a market for them!

Here comes another of my regional observations. First of all, there is now at least one Skirty in 3 countries. (Way to go Australia!) But my regional observation this time is about our own dear 50 States. I had a feeling that this might be the case . . . and it’s turning out that I was right. The South is absolutely thumping the rest of the country in their appreciation of the Skirty. I’ve gotten orders from a number of different states – and the northwest is holding it’s own, the Midwest definitely has a presence, and the northeast has just a pitiful showing so far. But the South has everyone beat hands down. Are there more women in the South who are still concerned with the concept of being a lady? Do modesty and decorum still actually exist down there? Is it striking some sort of chord with the Southern Belles? Whatever the reason for it, I wholeheartedly approve of their enthusiasm – so go for it you southern girls!

So the other day we had a fireman come knock on our door. I answered it and all the kids swarmed around to see what was up. He told us that there has been a lot of arson in our neighborhood lately (we live just outside what is apparently one of the roughest parts of the city) and particularly there had been a lot of fires started just across the field at the neighboring farm. He was wondering if we had happened to see anything suspicious, or any shady characters “skulking about” lately. I told him that no I hadn’t seen a thing – and he left me a little packet of materials about arson and his phone number in case we saw anything that should be reported.

And that was that. I took the packet inside and plunked it on the counter and went off to finish whatever it was I was doing. But later that afternoon I discovered that the children had been occupying themselves for the last few hours by planning what they would do if the fiendish person named “Arson” showed up at our house. They had worked up all kinds of elaborate schemes with which to foil his plans – and they told me that they even knew what he looked like because there was a picture of him in the packet of literature that the fireman had left.

I thought it was so funny that I postponed the crucial moment when I would have to tell them that there actually was no such person as Arson – I let them finish telling me all the ways in which they would make him wish he’d never been born and how he’d think twice before messing with the Merkles again. But eventually I thought that I needed to clear up this misunderstanding. I explained to them that “arson” was an activity and not, as they were all assuming, a proper noun. I told them that it’s like murder or stealing or cheating . . . it’s something that you DO.

At which point, one of them said, “Wow. No wonder his name is Arson then.”

In the interests of full disclosure, I’m giving fair warning in advance that I’m about to have a little snigger at the expense of the English nation. Don’t get me wrong – I admire the English people group for many and sundry things. Their mallow tea cakes for instance. But for all their admirable qualities, they act downright strange when they are collected together in a crowd. I would go so far as to say they don’t know how to behave as a crowd at all.

Last year, Oxfordshire was having a celebration of 1000 years as a county of something. So in Broad Street in the middle of Oxford they had set up Luminox – a really unbelievable amount of “fire installations.” There was a terrificly huge chandelier, dangling from a crane and hanging out right over the street, and it was holding an outrageous number of fire pots. In what I thought was a little dubious taste, it was hanging almost directly over the spot in the street where Cranmer, Ridley, and Lattimer were burnt at the stake in the sixteenth century.

However, that is not the point. The point is that this huge chandelier hung over the street and there were flaming pots strung from wires all around the Bodleian Library. Large bonfires were raging away all over the road. The crazy firelight and shadows in front of the huge beautiful buildings created a truly amazing spectacle. But I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly was giving the whole evening such a creepy and ominous feeling until I realized that it was the crowd itself.

We were packed into the road like sardines – absolutely shoulder to shoulder. You had to literally shove your way through the group to move anywhere . . . . and yet the whole road was eerily quiet. People were talking to one another, but not loudly. Some people might have said, “ooh!” in a hushed tone as they looked at the displays but no one whooped, no one was yelling, no one was calling to their friends over other people’s Read More

Furnishing a house completely from scratch while you’re living in it is no day at the beach. Problems arise and snags occur. For instance, how do you prioritize which is more important . . . beds for kids or kitchen knives? This is a harder question than it looks. Kids are perfectly happy in their little bower of cushions, and yet attempting to cook virtually anything at all with only one very dull steak knife is a near impossibility and can almost (note I said almost) reduce a person to tears of exasperation. And yet somehow it seems frivolous and self-centered to go out on a shopping expedition for kitchen knives when the kids have no beds to their names . . . you see what I’m saying?

And things get more and more complicated because, say you’ve decided that the most important thing to be working on is the beds. So you do that. You work on the beds. You check every website, visit stores, look on ebay . . . and while on ebay you find a stunning deal on a piano, right here in town only 2 miles away! Steal of the century, and the kids are going to need lessons anyway. What to do? Well of course you buy the piano (and then commence with the headache of how to move it across town).

But meanwhile you still haven’t gotten kitchen knives OR beds . . . and then a friend takes you to a “swap shop” where you can take what you want for free. And there’s an almost unlimited supply of absolute junk, but tucked away under a pile of old dead Tupperware and ugly curtains there is a completely gorgeous antique side table. So you snag it, take it home, and now you have a side table, a piano in name only, and still no beds or knives. Then two days later you find a perfectly terrific floor lamp – carved mahogany with a barley twist post – for less than 2 pounds. So in it comes, and there you have it. More items that were WAY down the list . . . but then again, there they are – so you grab them while you have the chance. See what I’m saying? It’s a tricky business. Read More

Here I am again, blogging in the car. It appears to be my preferred method at the moment. We still don’t have the internet at home, so among other things this means that I can’t see the comments on my last post. So if there were any particular questions that I’m not answering, don’t take it as an uppity silence . . . it’s just me being blissfully out of touch with the rest of the world. And why don’t we have the internet? Don’t ask – it’s a long and painful tale of trying to get service in a socialist country when you have to get the government phone agency to hook up your phone and they don’t feel like they can be bothered with it. I’ll spare you the gory details – no one really likes to sympathize with other people’s tales of being on hold for hours and no one returning their phone calls. So suffice it to say, we’re working on this whole project and in the postmillennial vision you will one day hear from me from my living room and not the minivan.

But right now it’s dark and we’re parked just outside the gates of Tom Tower, Christ Church. It’s pouring rain and there are huddled groups of soggy students hurrying along the pavement under their umbrellas, those Read More