Diesel and the Love of Writing

My Quickutz class on Saturday was - apparently - a hit. (I don't say this lightly. I've been out of teaching for a while and felt quite rusty in the face of 12 class participants.)

But.

They--each and every one--signed up for more...so something must have been OK.

Big deep sigh of relief here.

My successful class also yielded my purchase of the new Quickutz Grand Diesel. Man. Those babies are big. The card shown here is a 6x6 card and these are the lower case letters...

I've done a whole series of these red-on-black cards, just because I love these letters. I think the series is up to 7 now. I would share them all but my camera is having a temper fit and I hate scanning. So this taste will have to suffice.

The camera - It won't register the card...and of course, I can't find the right USB cord, which, come to think of it, kindof goes against the term "universal service" doesn't it. I have a USB cord, but not the right USB cord.

Go figure.

My camera is only saving photos to it's very minute internal memory chip and is refusing to save to the very sizable card that I have been using for years. Just suddenly. Won't read. The card reads on the computer fine.

I'm not feeling the love right now. I can not do a cruise in one month without a dependable camera. Can not. Rarely does a day go by that I don't use my camera. I really need it to be healthy again. Today would be nice.

In other news, the laundry closet that caught on fire is all put back together now, thanks to my handy husband and his electrician friend. I'm still grateful that it wasn't any worse.

If I could just get by without any sleep, I think I'd be a more productive person. Yes, it's 2 am and yes, I'm blogging and scrapbooking and catching up on the laundry...I need to go to bed because tomorrow is going to come really early and I have much to do...but I would just rather enjoy the quiet.

A few days ago, Rebecca blogged about keeping a diary and I really related to what she wrote. I started back to journaling (the grown up word for keeping a diary) a few days after Christmas and I must say, it's like coming back to an old friend after years of neglect. Yes, blogging is a form of journaling, but there is something so much more life-giving and sensual about the feel of a pen in your hand and a page of a book that is filled with your private, unadulterated thoughts and feelings. I thrive on written words - hand-written words, pressed with thought into paper, scrawled in ink so there can be no after-thought editing. What is written, stays written. There is no editing. Not now. Not ever.

A diary isn't very technical, in fact, it's very un-technical. It's a pen on paper. Slow and sweet. Scratchy or smooth, depending on the kind of pen and the kind of paper. It is also very emotional. Words and thoughts flowing freely--being taken out and played with, as if they were toys. Being examined deeply and thoroughly, turned over and over, looked at from every angle and explored from every facet. It's freeing. It's also self-discovery. Sometimes that's not pretty, but it is honest and mostly worthwhile, I think. I hope.

Writing is a slow task for me--significantly slower than typing (and I am not a very good typist), but it seems that the forced slow-down gives me a chance to think slower too. When I'm writing with a pen, I tend to choose words with more care and even a little more creativity. Somewhere I read that for his first few novels, John Grisham wrote on yellow legal pads. I can see how that would work for him. Can you imagine what those papers are worth?

The act of writing is slowly slipping away from our culture--it's becoming a secondary skill and I'm not sure I'm entirely comfortable with that. There's something very personal about handwriting. A person's signature...so valuable, even sometimes collectible. Does anyone really write letters anymore? When Joal and I were dating, we traded handwritten love letters on a daily basis. Sixteen years later we trade sweet notes written on the insides of cards a few times a year. His sweet letters from those early days of our love are some of my most treasured possessions.

My mom is (and always has been) an extraordinary letter-writer, although even she has resorted to email lately. Her penmanship has always been impeccable and her letters so filled up with who she is and how things are. I have every letter she's ever written me and again, I treasure them.

Let's write some letters, shall we?