It's not a glamourous-sounding name, but a murse is a murse.
Though I do suspect that a guy wouldn't be caught dead sporting one across his manly chest. I think that maybe I should change the size to make it more like a camera bag. What do you think?
I'm normally not a gray duct tape kinda gal, but this illustration from last weekend's New York Times made me reconsider it. And simply put, it's a lot more manly than the sky blue duct tape I used for a friend's utility bag-- despite the fact that I mixed in some black duct tape. (Please excuse the horrible photo. It reads "STUFF" on the front with an arrow pointing to the opening of the bag.)
My daughter Masana has also been searching through the newspaper for pretty pictures, though I am not quite sure what her intentions are. Sometimes, she'll squirrel away a page with interesting type or photographic images. Other times, she'll leave a stack of her findings on my chair as an offering to the crafting gods. Last week, I found the front page of the NYT Science Times section smiling at me from my perch. Well, maybe "smiling" is the wrong word. Take a look.
I am laughing as I write this because it has now dawned on me how appropriate this nonsmiling/smiling illustration is for my lovely daughter. And if you're a mother with a girl or (heaven forbid) girls, then you'll understand that the laughter is laced with a little anger, sarcasm, and heartache.
We had a rough few days. Did I mention that she's 9 years old and testing her boundaries? And that she's got mood swings that could give a person whiplash if you tried to follow them? I won't say exactly what she did to get me going because that wouldn't be fair. So let's just say it was a public display of her dissatisfaction for something she perceived as a slight, though for the life of me I cannot figure out what it was that I did wrong. I barely said anything to her before the metaphorical daggers came out.
When my husband Dave came home, I already had relegated the offending child to her room without dinner and the non-offending child (my son Mack) was sitting obediently on the couch reading a book. The eery silence immediately set off alarms in Mr. Dave's head and he found me sipping a beer in my work room. That night, dinner and dessert for the boys were gotten outside of my usually busy and warm kitchen.
The ups and downs of the mother/daughter relationship. That was certainly a down. And today I'll be spending some one-on-one time with Masana (or, as we call her when she's exhibiting bad behavior, Boo-sana) to change the trajectory of our arc. May it swing upward today.
And thanks for letting me vent.