Right now, I’m the only one awake in our house. I’ve been up for a couple of hours taking some of the administrative blech that comes with being a writer. I expect to hear little feet about my head (my office is downstairs) at any moment, and then the rush will be on to get ready and drive out to the beach. We live about an hour and a half from Seaside, OR, a small, tourist town on the Oregon coast. We used to go to other places, like Lincoln City, OR or Long Beach, WA, but then our friends moved to Seaside and bought a small business there. Go HERE if you want to check that out. Now we find ourselves drawn to Seaside like little magnets following the inevitable tug of metal.
Tara loves the beach, it soothes her soul, so any excuse to make the drive and she’s in. In the past few months, we’ve made the trip a ridiculous amount of times, still our family hasn’t grown tired of it. Typically, I’ll hang out in the shop with Jyn (aforementioned friend) and spend the day chatting and catching up. Tara, who can’t stand to be still for that long, heads off through the town with all our children (and Jyn’s) trailing after her. Jyn is having a baby soon and I suspect Tara is devising a plan for how to incorporate an infant into her adventures through Seaside (Heads up, honey, he needs to get a little older before you put him on the tilt-o-whirl with the other kids).
Today is a special for me for a couple of reasons. First, it’s my mom’s birthday. She would have been 78 today. So I’m going to have fun with my family to celebrate how much fun I had with her when I was a kid.
The other reason is because I have a plan. Earlier this year, I signed up for a Pay It Forward 2013 event on facebook. The premise was simple, I simply posted on my timeline that I would give something handmade (by me) to the first five people who signed up. And each of those people had to promise to give something to the first five people who signed up on their list. This weekend, I’m going to start working on those handmade gifts. I’ve spent the last two months thinking about what I should make, what would be a good thing to send to people I don’t really know?
I want it to be cool and personal, yet not so personal that it doesn’t appeal to the recipients. I thought about doing homemade jam. Or some other canned item. Because, let’s face it, home canned foods are the bomb. But here’s the thing, they don’t know me. They’ve never been in my kitchen. They don’t know my habits when I cook. If the situation was reversed, would I want food stuffs out of a kitchen I’d never seen? Yeah, probably not.
Then I thought of Jyn and her shop, and the perfect answer came to me! Viola! When it’s finished, but after it’s been shipped, I’ll post a picture here and y’all can let me know if I chose well or not.
For now, however, I just heard the first footstep of the morning. Looks like the rush is on.