Greetings Dear ones!

We did it! We made it a whole year together! I am so excited and proud of myself and immensely grateful to all of you who continue to read, comment, share, and support. Exactly one year ago, my dear friend Emerald Rae challenged me to drop what I was doing and Make This Happen. Because, when you have a Dream, that’s when Life is about to Happen. (It’s also when someone lets you know you snore too loudly!)

So! Let’s recap. Have we learned anything?

Time for another quiz:

1. You write your very first blog. As per the instructions of your in-house tech-support (which is any resident under the age of 32) you manage to get it to “publish” without having to call a variety of hot-lines, break the internet, or speak directly to anyone in Asia. You then immediately:

a. Feel sick, think “what have I just done?!” and need to lie down.

b. Get up and go to your “real job” and try to behave normally.

c. Step in dog poop because someone didn’t let the dog out.

d. All of the above.

2. When your loving and supportive friends read your first entry, their responses are, conveyed as kindly as possible:

a. To express concern that you will never keep up the quality of writing or storytelling because there is “just not that much to write about with sewing.”

b. To write you long emails, worrying that your intention is to make body-shaming the purpose of your literary endeavours.

c. To remark that your writing is “self-indulgent,” “shallow,” and that you are “worthy of better things.”

d. All of the above.

3. After you ugly-cry yourself into a snot-snuffling mess, feeling totally unworthy, untalented, inept… you then:

a. Watch inspiring Ted talks and recite affirmations until the urge to guzzle scotch directly from the bottle passes.

b. Decide to buy a Celtic harp, for no reason what-so-ever

c. Say, “F**k it. Who cares what they say? I know who I am. I know my intentions are kind. If I run out of stories, sure, I’ll quit. And yes, damn it, I AM Self-indulgent. So what? I have teenagers, incontinent pets, and a Vitamin D deficiency. Who the hell ELSE is going to indulge me?”

d. All of the Above.

4. You find the harp is extremely good for

a. Practicing scales and discovering that all the F strings and C strings are the colored ones. (This only takes a five days to figure out!)

b. Distracting you from doing other Things You Should Be Doing, like sewing 62 snaps on an airline stewardess’s blouses.

c. Holding laundry that’s too dirty to go back in the drawer and too clean to go in the wash.

d. All of the Above

5. When more of your friends say lovely, kindly, complimentary things to you praising your efforts, you:

a. Try to believe them but still feel the need to eat a quart of Ben & Jerry’s “Cherry Garcia” ice cream to cheer up anyway.

b. Lapse into fantasies of trying to write something “better” next week

c. Ignore them because you have a dead sheep in your garage that needs burying and you don’t have time to dwell on your insecurities.

d. All of the Above

6. We each manifest, with our own time, unconscious intentions, and energies the Universe of our choosing. In some Worlds:

a. All the clothes fit, the socks match, and the cars run

b. All there is to do is watch T.V.

c. Infant farm animals are using the living room couch as a playground

d. (Guess which two worlds are totally incomprehensible to me)

7. When you say YES to Life, to doing fifty things that make you more “you” because you just turned 50 and it seems like as good a time as any to start such nonsense, things will happen like:

a. You might find two lambs bouncing around your cottage in the woods, getting tangled up in yarn from your spinning wheels until one lamb manages to drag about forty feet of yarn off a spindle and knit all your furniture together in a giant cobweb before she falls over, giggling and kicking her hind leg.

b. People you never suspected will turn out to be amazing friends and co-conspirators.

c. There will definitely be More Poo.

d. All of the Above

8. Choosing to stretch yourself beyond your comfort zone

a. Will be really fun and wild and exciting at times

b. Will make you feel like you move forward like an amoeba

c. Will make you look like a total loon

d. All of the Above

9. This blog is in desperate need of

a. Better editing

b. More quizzes

c. Cash prizes

d. All of the above

10. In my stories, to protect the Insolent, I always change:

a. The customer’s physical description

b. The customer’s garment

c. Everything except the core “kernel” of the story

d. All of the above

11. This is because

a. I protect and cherish my customers and sincerely wish for their happiness and satisfaction

b. I want to poke fun at Ideas, not individuals

c. I have enough angry people coming in snorting fire about bloody hems coming down—I don’t want an influx of irate customers who don’t like how they look in print any more than they don’t like how they look in the mirror.

d. All of the Above

12. I write:

a. Whenever inspiration strikes—whenever a story pops it’s head around the corner to see if I can hem a “quick pair of trousers” before closing time

b. When I am supposed to be doing other, more Useful things like cooking supper, cleaning the house, or interrogating the residents to see who left that laundry in the washer until it grew fur

c. At 4:44 am, in a bleary, sleep-deprived, last-minute frazzle

d. All of the above

13. If I have learned anything yet in my short fifty years, it’s that:

a. Pretending I can sew/dance/cook/play music/write is a hell of a lot more fun than pretending I can’t.

b. Sometimes we are going to fall and make fools of ourselves and that’s ok as long as we learn from it and apologize to those we hurt when we crash.

c. The yellow jellybeans really do taste like vomit.

d. All of the Above.

14. Sewing has taught me:

a. I should have paid more attention in Math class

b. The left side NEVER comes out like the right

c. I have to take all the pins out of my padded bra before I go grocery shopping.

d. All of the above

15. Working with the general public has taught me:

a. People are Amazing, Fantastic and Inspiring

b. Sometimes they are Nice

c. I totally hate people and prefer the company of animals

d. All of the above

16. The people who have been my Best Supporters are

a. Veterinarians (hands down)

b. Believers who operate through (any) Faith, not Fear—the Musicians & Dancers, Artists & Riskers, Darers, Doers & Dreamers, who bring incredible beauty, insight, and Love to the world through their practices and sacrifices.

c. My children and honorary “spirit children” who come into my life to offer tech support and teach me valuable lessons like LOL means “laugh out loud,” not “Lots of Love” (I still think it should mean the latter!!!)

d. All of the Above. I am indescribably grateful to you all!!

17. Completing a whole year, despite all the things a Tuesday night ever threw at me—power outages, illness, escaped reptiles…. Feels like:

a. A Victory! A tribute to dedication, perseverance, and sheer bloody-mindedness.

b. Like an elephant, or a bicycle, eaten one bite at a time. (Burp)

c. An exhausted marathoner limping towards the finish line with blisters, farts he can’t trust, and a pulled Achilles tendon.

d. All of the Above

18. This mile-marker means

a. I can eat all the cookies I want today

b. I just kept a big promise to myself. I’m proud of that.

c. I kind of want to slack off now…but I worry that it will be like when I decide to stop running for “a few weeks” in November and don’t start back up until April.

d. All of the above

19. My goals going forward are to:

a. Keep taking one day/week/month/year/Life at a time.

b. Create more opportunities for writing

c. Vacuum more often

d. All of the Above

20. Hey! If I could pull this off—if I could stick to a plan and hack away at it, bit by bit, usually at the very last minute but still getting it done,

a. Anybody can

b. Even people with an abundance of Dung in their lives

c. You can too

d. All of the Above

Scoring:

If you answered “A” to anything, anything at all, you my friend, are an Optimist. Bless your loving heart. Don’t EVER take off those rose-colored spectacles! This world needs dreamers like you—who wake up ready to play, ready to dare, ready to create and willingly perceive the Joy and Abundance that surrounds them—who exult in the Possible. You are my Favorite kind of people.

If you answered “B” to any of the questions, you are fairly realistic. Like the majority of our customers, you want things done Yesterday but will settle for next Saturday and not complain too much as long as the work is done well. You are my Favorite kind of people.

If you answered “C” to any of the questions, well, it just shows that you were too impatient to read all the way to “D.” You are one of Hell’s tourists who fears the worst of everything. Like Prudence, you are always available to mention “I could have told you that” even though you didn’t. You are the experts we need to keep us safe, who make us check the “sell by” dates on yoghurt. You are well-meaning but a little crochety. You are my favorite kind of people.

If you answered “D” (All of the Above) to everything, you are very special indeed. You are my Favorite kind of people! You appreciate nuances of Wholeness, Balance, symmetry and that there are at least three sides to everything. You know that more than one thing can be true when we are talking about Ourselves. To be Whole is to invite and include Everything. We are Magnificent AND Horrid. And oh, SO funny at times.

Prudence wishes I had done better. She wishes the entries were shorter, funnier, more high-falutin and literary as well as more down to earth and less pretentious; more universal, less personal; more Profound (as in a Pro who is Found) rather than Lost… But here we are—soft and shattered—trying to tie everything up in a neat little bow with a few pins in it, here and there, to keep it in place. The answer to every question is D. Yay! We get a D+. We have NOT failed. D stands for: Dare Determined, Dark Daily Dance, Danger Defended, Dawn Development, Depth Delight, Depression Described, Desire Deserved, Diversity Devoted, Drivel Drafted, Doubts Destroyed… (don’t forget Diarrhea…) And best of all… DONE! (My favorite!)

Thank you, Dear Ones, for taking this journey with me. I am profoundly grateful for the chance to share. I began the blog with a prayer. I would like to close out this first year with a blessing:

May the year ahead be better still.

May we be bright as Buttons, warm as flannel, fun as polka-dots, and sturdy as Tweed.

May our little rips and tears be where we tailor our coats and lives to fit us even better.

May we piece things together with patience, humor and kindness.

May we do Whatever It Takes to be our Best Selves…

And when our work is done, may we look back and be Satisfied that we did our very best.

Yours Aye,

Nancy