January 2020 – Mom's Guide to the Galaxy

Blending hobbies: crochet and karate

Sometimes it’s fun to blend my hobbies. Over the years, I’ve crocheted assorted images into pillows or towels, and even coasters with Space Invaders aliens. You can see some of them here. Some of the fandom-related items have appeared in art shows at local conventions, looking for new homes.

The karate ones have only been created as gifts and donations. I carry a crocheted karate towel in my sparring bag, and a matching one was donated to the raffle prizes at the 2016 World Championships. (I have no idea who it went home with.) A karate scarf I made with all of our belt colors was auctioned off at a holiday party a few years ago.

Blue pillow with white figure doing a flying sidekick to the right; purple pillow with a white figure doing flying sidekick to the left

When Eagle Academy, the karate school I attend, announced that they were going to have a Casino Night with raffle prizes and a silent auction, I crocheted a pair of karate pillows with flying sidekick figures. The Casino Night (21 and over, of course) is a fundraiser to raise awareness about human trafficking. It’s paired with a Parents’ Night Out event, so kids can play in the awesome gymnastics area across the hall while parents play games in the dojang.

If you’re free tomorrow night (Saturday, February 1st, 2020), considering attending the Casino Night in Aurora from 6:30-9:30pm. The address is 881 Shoreline Drive.

Garden planning for 2020

I got an early start this year and accomplished one of my goals already – laying out a garden plan for the year. The work on it this year is fairly significant, because I calculated and mapped out the gardening space for square foot gardening. It’s a method I’ve been using for several years now, but this is the first time I’ve mapped the space ahead of time at this house.

Square foot gardening layouts for the garden beds and an assortment of seeds for planting

As you can see in the image, I have a decent amount of growing space – each square within a bed is a square foot, so I have 30 in the keyhole bed, and 16 each in the squares. The triangle is a bit awkward for squares, so we decided to try something different there instead of figuring out how 8.76 square feet maps out in a triangle. I ordered a kiwi plant, cute little ones that grow on vines and might survive our winters.

Except for the sunflowers, all of the seeds are allocated for an initial planting date (weather permitting, of course) in one of the beds shown above. The sunflowers will be split between the old shed area and the center of the star bed out front.

You’re probably thinking that I have way more planting area than I have seeds… and you’d be right. I decided not to start seeds indoors this year; I’ll be purchasing tomatoes, peppers, Brussels sprouts, and possibly a couple other plants locally once it’s warm enough to transplant them. That and any basic herbs that don’t come back in the star and the garden tower. The chives, mint, and cilantro always come back, and the dill probably will, but I have to see how the basil, parsley, sage, rosemary, and thyme handle the winter.

There’s snow on the ground, so it’s at least a couple months before I can even start the early seeds – radishes, carrots, peas, kale, and mustard greens. But I’m sure spring will sneak up on us faster than expected, and I’m glad I’m ready for it this year, at least when it comes to garden planning.

The Phantom of the Opera

I finally saw a stage performance of The Phantom of the Opera. Back in college, when we stopped in London on the way to my year abroad in Glasgow, it was my third choice, and we only had time to see two shows; my first choices were Cats and Les Miserables. Interestingly, I’ve seen both of those again, multiple times, but kept missing Phantom. When I received a Broadway in Chicago e-mail saying it was coming to town in December, I decided that this would finally be my opportunity to see it. I checked our schedules and bought tickets. Simple, right?

Not quite… my work holiday party was scheduled late, and I ended up flying back from California that day; my sister-in-law got to use my ticket. So I bought myself a single ticket for the following Saturday. I’m glad I finally saw it, I love the music, and would see it again. [Spoilers after this point!]

But holy moly, what a bunch of nutcases! Just looking at the three main characters, wow. You have Christine who is fine with receiving singing lessons from a mysterious voice and initially unconcerned with the acts of violence that propel her to a lead role. Kudos to Raoul for his devotion to his long lost childhood friend, but he ranges from gaslighting her – telling her there’s no Phantom immediately after a violent attack at the theatre – to somewhere between pushy and over-protective while helping plot to capture the Phantom, using Christine as bait.

As to the Phantom himself, having insinuated himself into Christine’s life by advancing her training and pushing out the previous leading lady with seemingly random violence, he throws a temper tantrum when Christine falls in love with someone else. And then he manipulates the entire theatre crew to position himself with Christine on stage, so he can propose to her in front of an audience, knowing that she’s in love with Raoul. Talk about audacity!

All’s well that ends well, I suppose… the Phantom, rejected, eventually allows Raoul and Christine to leave, though he presumably lingers around Paris for a time before moving to New York for the sequel, Love Never Dies.

Cats (the movie)

You may have heard that the movie version of Cats received terrible reviews. This is not one of them, presumably because I went in expecting the Broadway musical… and got the Broadway musical.

If anything, this star-studded version of Cats was easier to follow than the stage show, because they added bits of dialogue explaining the overall plot. They took some minor liberties by adding motivation for Macavity’s actions (played by the amazing Idris Elba) and replacing Growltiger’s song with light action in the story.

Where the movie stands out is by using technology to do what they can’t do on stage. Jennyanydots’s song typically involves other cats donning mouse and cockroach costumes, but in the movie, they have separate actors for those roles, and more importantly, were able to use technology to show the size difference between the mice, cockroaches, and cats. Of course, this allows for the on screen eating of some of the cockroaches….

Technology combined with good sets were used to good purpose when showing cats in human places; the size difference helps the perspective. A human bed is positively huge, even with three cats on it. (That may be slightly flawed… I can tell you from personal experience that the bed is quite crowded when all three of my cats are on it!)

I gather some people were weirded out by the CGI fur. I’m of the opinion they were watching the wrong thing. The fur was neat, and the color variety amazing amongst the cats, but the impressive use of CGI was the expressiveness of the cats’ ears and tails. Those are hard effects to do on a live stage, so I’m glad they made good use of technology to accent how cats use their entire bodies to express themselves.

All in all, three tails up, one from each cat at my house.

Goals we set are goals we get.

We’ve reached a new year – 2020 – and as I do each year, I take the time to look back on my victories from last year and the goals I’m setting for next year. I realized belatedly that a couple of my goals related to organizing around the house didn’t meet the SMART requirement – Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant, Time-based. Specifically, they weren’t really measurable – “organize the shelves” doesn’t have a defined end.

I completed two project management courses as part of my perpetual goal of maintaining my certification; I started a third, which I should finish early this year. I added a new garden bed and grew delicious strawberries in it, had some delightful kale and pea crops, and lost every squash plant in the garden to hungry woodchucks. This year’s garden plan (still in progress) includes planting squash in the higher bed, where the woodchucks are less likely to eat the plants before they have fruit.

My old shed is gone, I’ve re-used most of the bricks that we found behind it, and am expecting to plant sunflowers where it used to be. It’ll be a while before that planting happens, since we’re barely into winter at this stage. My first seed catalog has arrived, so I do expect to have a plan done by the end of this month, but I don’t expect to put any seeds in the ground – not even kale or spinach – until at least late March.

I deferred a couple goals to this year, such as re-doing the master bedroom closet and testing for my hapkido black belt. I added other goals that replace them, at least in terms of me having time to accomplish everything – I think I started 2019 with 11 annual goals, and I finished with a list of 15. I’m starting 2020 with 20 annual goals and 12 weekly ones, which include a minimum number of German lessons on Duolingo each week and using something from the freezer (clearing out old harvests well before the next one needs freezer space).

What are your goals for the year?