becky haycox

Month: January 2010

  • red letter day

    Good news all over the place today.

    My e-friend Pollyanna Cowgirl is a guest blogger over at ReadyMade, holy crap! She is a talented Etsy girlie, to boot.

    My friend Rodney’s documentary got boingboinged today. [definition of “getting boingboinged” here]

    Me, well, I just found out both my Junk and Science quilts got accepted into the exhibit “Becoming Art at the Seams: Contemporary and Art Quilts” at the Ventura County Museum.

    My friend Christine just got a puppy and I got to tag along for the puppy pickup and squeeze a whole lot of cuteness:

    So that’s some good stuff, right there.

    What’s your good news? I want to hear it — big or small or even made up!

  • tumblr roundup: drums, home edition, the art of not working

    Here are some words I posted to tumblr over the past few days. There’s lots more of music-y, linky, video-y goodness over at the hambox tumblr space, including a video I made of our 4-day rainy season.

    drums in the sky

    We had some wild weather this afternoon, including a thunderstorm — rare to these here parts. When the storm was right overhead, and a thunderclap cracked the sky, I made a startled yip sound that sounded exactly like my childhood dog, Maudie.

    I was one of those sorry suckers that believed that Maudie was “sent to live on a ranch” in Texas after my parents’ marriage exploded and no one could take care of her anymore. I believed it till about my mid 20s.

    to my neighbor across the way

    Now that I saw the “must vacate in 30 days” notice on your door, you shall never divulge the solutions to these mysteries:

    • Is that chick your daughter or your wife?
    • Who coughed every morning at 11am for about half an hour?
    • What’s it like being a mailman?
    • What’s it like dragging your leaking garbage downstairs without cleaning it up?
    • Why did you continue to slam the pool gate after the landlady told you to stop?

    That’s the extent of intrigue around here these days. Guess it’s better than other neighbor situations I have been in:

    • Big Ed, the downstairs wifebeater
    • The filthy child upstairs who threw garbage out her window (which piled up in front of my window)
    • The parents of the filthy child, AKA the floor-sanding-at-3am people
    • The freaky screamy afternoon sex couple

    stupid idea

    Wouldn’t it be horrifying if Facebook turned into Meanbook for the day, and it would show all your previously-hidden actions — like ignoring friend requests, hiding friends’ news feeds, blocking applications? Also, Meanbook would display a clock of how much cumulative time you’ve been on Facebook. And maybe it would figure out a way to extract the meanest and/or most salient bits of your emails.

    I hate Meanbook.

  • i’ll tumble for ya

    I have joined tumblr. They call themselves as a “short-form blogging platform,” I call it

    the place for all the runty snippets that are too small and weak to become blog posts, but seem to thrive in this odd hothouse.

    This is where I’ll be posting stuff that has no other home, and that really doesn’t deserve its own blog entry. Already, I’ve posted a couple videos I like, and a rare Love audio track, and a photo of a friend.

    I think this is a great solution. For example, I love music, I know about music, I think about music a lot, and I hardly ever write about it. Because really, the world doesn’t need another music blogger gasbag. Now, I can post video and audio without any big stress. In other words, I can share neat stuff without feeling the need to craft a whole damn essay around it.

    And I have a lot, a lot, of neat stuff to share.

    I guess you can also follow your favorite tumblr blogs and comment and stuff like that. You can also subscribe via RSS.

    So here it is: hambox tumblr blog. The feed is here.

    This will not impact the hamblog, I promise. I still like to be a writing gasbag blogger on a regular basis.

  • turn turn turn

    Aunt Pat and Mom

    That’s my tiny mom, being hugged by her big sister way back when. Or perhaps she’s being throttled by her big sister?

    Man, they were a pair. Best friends and true love their whole entire lives.

    January 18 marks another year of my mother’s passing. That’s all I want to say about that, except that I miss you, mumsy.

    I’m having a lot of complicated feelings today but I’m feeling a lot of gratitude for mom and for Dr. King, whose day we’re marking, too.

    Hatred paralyzes life; love releases it. Hatred confuses life; love harmonizes it. Hatred darkens life; love illuminates it.

  • key finding

    mystery key

    The car I now drive, post-accident, is a station wagon that’s been kicking around in my family since the early 90s. It belonged to my mother, then my aunt, then my stepdad, now me.

    I’m trying to embrace the vintage feel (and smell) of this big ride. This big ride that was manufactured before cup holders, CD players, or before power windows became a more common thing. It is a light brown color, oddly long yet squashy looking. The license plate contains the word FIG so it written. It’s the Fig from here on out.

    There are a variety of puzzling hidey holes in and around the dashboard of the Fig. They are too small and square to hold anything drink-like — or anything useful, for that matter, except for a small bottle of Purell and a pack of hypothetical smokes.

    I recently found this key in one of the Fig’s less-accessible holes. I suspect the key was lurking there, forgotten, for a long, long time. This key bears the very distinctive stamp of style that is my mother’s.

    Stars and stripes key on a cheapie keychain. Classic. Mom always loved maximum flair in her accessories. The stone on the keychain appears to be green agate and the closure is pretty retro — I venture to guess that this is a souvenir from the American Southwest, maybe even something acquired when we lived in Phoenix back in the 70s? I don’t doubt something like this could have survived many moves, surviving in junk drawers, until someone like my mom fished it out, seeing its potential.

    Now, when did colored, patterned keys come around? That has to be a 90s thing at the earliest, right? I may have to ask a locksmith this burning question.

    But who cares about these lesser mysteries — what is this key for? It’s for a door that deserved its own keychain, that’s what. A storage space? A neighbor’s house? A portal to an alternate, glitter-filled universe?

    Alas, the family members that are still around are unable to answer this question. But maybe that’s for the better! The mystery is pretty tantalizing.

    related hamblinks:

  • trueblue friend

    I just found out today a dear family friend died several months ago — back in May, a day after my birthday. I must have missed the obit.

    His name was Archie. He was my father Jim’s lifelong friend; they met as small children, at the start of the Great Depression, not too far from where I live now. My dad’s dad was chauffeur to Archie’s grandmother.

    In later years, Archie and his wife and my mom and dad were rock-solid friends. You can read a little about their friendship here. They’re all gone now and my heart cracks a little at the thought. The end of a huge chapter.

    When my father died in 2006, Archie sent my brothers and sisters and me a packet of papers — copies of various letters from and to Dad, as well as a simply amazing document titled “Remembering Jim.” In it, Archie offers incredible, startling, and hilarious revelations about Dad’s younger years.

    It’s a fabulous read — it’s a deeply visual account of a time that doesn’t exist anymore, when two little boys could explore nature, conspire and be (in Archie’s words) “really god-awful pests”:

    [Our early friendship] was a wonderful, magical period for Jim and me, being granted so much freedom to unleash our unbridled energy and creativity, unfettered by almost all of the constraints typically mandated by one’s family and broader society in general. … Today, I look back to this time as perhaps the most important time, and the most enjoyable period of my life.

    In a letter Dad wrote to Archie in 1998, he marvels at the fact they still could bring out the kid in each other. When I knew him, Dad was a funny guy, and could be silly, but always had a certain stoic control on things. That’s why finding this snippet, where dad is positively giddy, is just delicious. The exclamation points are his:

    Oh, gosh, Archie. Here we are in our seventies with so many vivid memories and things to think about!!!!!!!!!!

    Wow. Happy and free. What a gift.

    May we all be blessed with an association with someone that brings out the best in us. Someone whose outlook on life makes us pause, and appreciate, and wonder. Someone who makes us look great. Someone who is, and always will be, a true blue friend.

    Dad at age 13
    My dad at age 13.

  • What’s on deck for 2010?

    Shoe on razor wire

    Answering Regina‘s question — a good one at that. I’ll show you my resolutions if you show me yours. By the way, this is the closest I’ll get to composing a life list, the fungus-du-jour of the internet.

    1. Floss.
      Target: daily.
      So far, so good. Four days in and my teeth are feeling frisky.
    2. Move with intention.
      Target: daily.
      Down with the sedentary lifestyle. I have a gym membership and access to free yoga classes and no excuse to ignore them any longer.
    3. No fast food.
      Target: forever.
      I don’t even like it, but crappy time management made me eat it a few times last year. I already put this resolution to the test at the airport on January 1st, when I was hungry and in a hurry. I reluctantly turned away from the arches and spent $15 on a sandwich and yogurt elsewhere.
    4. Ease off on the exclamation point use.
      Target: forever (maybe).
      Just an exercise in reducing the breathlessness with which my updates come across on the internet.
    5. End my relationship with Farmville.
      Target: forever and a day.
      Done. My friend Shana and I took the leap together, following Regina’s bold defection last month. If you don’t know what it is, good. If you do and are rolling your eyes reading this, tough. I’ll miss it.
    6. Get a hold of my debt.
      Target: ongoing.
      Blach, boring. I know.
    7. Take at least a week off every year.
      Target: forever.
      My recent trip to Boston and New York was transformative. Unplugging, relaxing, playing — oh yeah, I remember that.

    2009 Roundup

    I did not make most of my last year’s resolutions public, but I made some and kept a few.

    • Be friendlier, AKA smile and make eye contact with strangers.
      This has been fantastic. I have made my default Becky-at-large persona someone who is in a friendly place, smiles and says hello, especially in customer service situations. It’s not always a love-fest (see: Two-Month Phone Fiasco with my Webhost that Often Involved Tears), but starting things off on the right foot, I think, has garnered riches. And it’s not insincere — at least it doesn’t feel that way.
    • 2009: Year of the Hug.
      I don’t have any hard data to indicate if there have indeed been more hugs for the hambox in this past year. It has felt huggier, so we’ll leave it at that.
    • Giving till it hurts — well, stings a little.
      I feel that I will remove karma by talking about it too much, but I have tried to donate time and goods to worthy causes throughout the year.

    Let’s see what this year brings. Maybe more rock and less suck for all?