Ironic conservatism

I used to submit articles to an online site called Helium, and before they dramatically changed their submission rules a couple of years ago, I was making decent pocket money from it (enough to cover what I send my husband each month and contribute to the flight costs). Then in 2011 they changed their rules and decided that they only wanted articles written in passive 3rd person tense. I find that really difficult to read - it's like an instruction manual from 1930 - and equally difficult to write because it's not a natural style. They also now demand a 1-year exclusivity agreement on all new submissions and editied older submissions, which I am not prepared to agree to because it's my work, not theirs. So I stopped submitting, and now just enough to keep the page view earnings open to me.

Today Helium deleted an article of mine that has been on there since around 2009, with the explanation that is it a knowledge article written in the first person. I'm actually quite pleased, because Helium wont let contributors delete their own work. Given the subject matter of the article, I do wonder if there is some other conservative bias at work, but it doesn't matter. I'm going to post it below, see what you think.


How to make the world a better place using just $100
Though I'm sure many people will be writing from a prospective or hypothetical viewpoint on this topic, this year I have already spent a little over the equivalent of $100 and if just one cent of that goes towards making the world a better place then it will all have been worth the time and effort I have given to it. However, I doubt that I will ever personally see a return on my investment. That's OK with me, just as long as someone somewhere does.

This year I decided that instead of just sending Christmas cards to people I know, both here in the UK and overseas, I would reach out to some people I don't personally know as well. It is an extension of something I took part in last year, a Christmas card circle organised by a lady in Germany, that collects and distributes the names and addresses of American inmates, mostly on Death Row, for those with compassion to send cards to. You can submit and accept as many names as you feel able to deal with. Last year I offered to send 10 postcards to assorted inmates; after writing my name and address (most Department of Corrections don't accept mail without a return address on it somewhere, although you can use a post office box) along with their details on the cards, there really wasn't room for more than a couple of sentences on the cards, so I just put that someone was thinking of them across the miles and that I hoped their holiday season was peaceful.

To my surprise, I received 6 replies. As I already have incarcerated penpals, I had to think hard about the consequences of taking on any more. I made the decision to look up their crimes, which ruled out a couple of them from my own boundaries of people I will correspond with. After some deep thought, I ended up with just one name, who over the past year has turned into a real character and I have no regrets at all about continuing to write to him. It turned out that just before I sent the card, he had been moved off Death Row, and in the past year has managed to make it into the Honour Dorm at his prison. I don't know if I have had any influence in that, directly or indirectly in his behaviour, but we have come to be friends and I know from experience that mail call and dependable correspondence is a useful tool in encouraging an offender to make better decisions.

So this year, I reached out on my own. I offered to send Christmas cards, and also Yule cards to those who do not observe Christmas, to the incarcerated loved ones of several women that I talk to regularly on a web forum. This takes a certain amount of trust on the part of the ladies; to give out the details of their loved ones means that in Texas at least I would be able to look up their crimes as well, and also as a woman myself, there is a worry that a new female writing to a loved one may trigger some romantic interest on the part of the inmate. I understand those worries, because my husband is also incarcerated and I too am wary about giving out his full name and number. But I put the offer out there, and received a good response, amassing some 20 names. To this I added the names of some of the inmates my husband has mentioned over the past year as guys he works with or gets along with, and of course my existing penpals.

I bought cards, none too religious in sentiment or picture, and wrote a few words of encouragement in each. I signed them from both myself and my husband, so there would be no room for misinterpretation of my intentions. The postage came to around the equivalent of $50, so with the cost of the cards on top and the extra small gifts for my penpals, I have spent approximately $100 on making other people's holiday season just a little more personal and brighter.

But it could go deeper than that. Just as dropping a stone into a pool creates ripples, so does the act of giving and passing on a kind thought. If just one of those cards find an inmate on a day when they are feeling forgotten by society, their friends and family at a time of year when traditionally people get together, that card may be enough to keep them from sinking into a depression, giving in to feelings of hopelessness, or attempting to end it all. If one of those cards touches the heart of an otherwise cold man, and is enough to stop him lashing out at a guard for just one day, then perhaps that guard can return to their family at the end of their shift and enjoy Christmas without doing so from a hospital bed. If one of those cards renews enough hope in an inmate to try one more time to contact their own family, or build or mend bridges that appeared to be long gone, then perhaps next Christmas that family will be closer and stronger than before.

The ripples don't end there of course; in a very small but no less important way, those cards have kept people in employment. The artists, manufacturers, paper mill workers, shop assistants, postal workers and mail room staff at the prisons all depend on people buying and sending those cards throughout the year, but in the current economic climate, good sales figures this Christmas may be the make or break point.

So those little cards, this year I hope, will help show the world that someone cares enough to make it a better place.



Sneak peek

I'm almost ready to put the first batch of commercial yarn up for sale on my Etsy shop, Hare's Moon Yarns, but I thought I'd give you guys a preview :)

It's wonderfully squishy and soft, a blend of merino and another unnamed wool.

I also made some aran-weight shetland yarn for a friend's birthday recently:

TDCJ/eComm Direct care packages - chocolate teapots?

For weeks now I have been looking at the eComm Direct website to see if there was anything I could purchase for my husband. He doesn't eat a lot of junk food, and I was hoping to just get a few things that he would normally get for himself. One of those things is coffee.

Americans drink a lot of coffee. TDCJ inmates drink a lot of it too. I thought maybe that was why the eComm site never has any available, that it just kept selling out too fast for me to see it. Imagine my surprise then to be told on a forum a few weeks back by someone who claims to work for TDCJ, that they would not order extra supplies of coffee to be delivered to the unit commissary stores "because it might go stale". We're not talking premium freshly ground coffee beans here folks, the coffee available to inmates is your average cheap and cheerful instant stuff, sometimes freeze-dried and sometimes powdered. I took a look at my jar of coffee in the kitchen; the best before date is 2 years from now. That person was seriously trying to tell me that TDCJ thought they might not sell the coffee they had ordered within 2 years.

Another of the items that seems to be missing for no good reason is deodorant. Apparently it is a very scarce commodity at many TDCJ units at the moment. OK so it's not a food item, and it's not essential to life, but how much more dignity can a system deliberately remove from an individual? Yes you can have your visits but you're going to smell and your family might think twice about visiting again..... I can see the mindset of TDCJ at work here.

I was talking to a friend who has penpals in other US states a while ago, and mentioned that TDCJ has a care package programme now. She asked what kind of things we could buy and I told her only what is already available to the inmates through commissary. Her response, "What's the point of that?" Honestly, I don't know what the point is, besides dividing inmates into those who have people on the outside purchasing for them and those who don't. I've wondered if it might be a way of TDCJ to electronically gather information about who is interacting with the inmates, and possibly electronically take a portion of deposits before they reach the inmate, but TDCJ isn't usually that up to date.

The comments I've had on previous posts on this blog relating to the eComm system seem to be as dissatisfied with the "service" as we are. Hubby has told me not to bother with it, simply because if his commissary is out of stock by the time his order comes to be filled, he wont get what I've asked for anyway and is unlikely to want something I haven't ordered.

But what really gets me is the sheep mentality out there of people who say we should be thankful that we now have this service. They say we shouldn't complain in case there are retaliations again the inmates, or that a second-rate service that looks like it was designed 20 years ago might be withdrawn. I'm not going to be thankful for something that is as useful as a chocolate teapot.

Let the spinning begin

In a previous post, I said that if you doubt the existence of the Gods, tell them your plans. Most people take this to be a negative thing, like if you give voice to your plans, they wont come to fruition, and obviously that happens a lot. Sometimes you have to accept that though your plans may be what you want, they don't fit into whatever bigger picture there is for you or your family. I believe that if something is not right for you, then no matter how many ways you approach it and how long you keep trying, it simply wont work.

So imagine my surprise when just after my previous post about wanting to learn to spin and hopefully get myself out of the job I really don't like and can see coming to an end, I heard of a spinning wheel that might be for sale locally.

Over the past couple of weeks I have been making arrangements with the owner, and this week I took delivery of the wheel on Monday and the rest of the accessories arrived this morning. I handed over money that would have gone towards a flight to see my husband, but he is as excited about this new venture as I am and he just said I need to get spinning and selling that yarn so I can see him asap :) That's all the incentive I need!

The wheel is an Ashford traditional, looks like it was made around 1975 so almost the same age as me. OK, so I'm a little older, but we're both 70's babies :) I have given her a polish and some oil to her moving joints and she moves well. Took me a while to work out that the bobbin had been put on the wrong way round, but once I'd realised that everything fitted perfectly.

 

In the bag of accessories that arrived today were a niddy-noddy, a pair of carders, 3 spare bobbins, a ball winder and the best thing of all, a Jacob fleece! Good thing I got a book on spinning a while ago so that I could start scouring the fleece straight away :) (beware, the following photos make my bath look filthy, but I assure you it is just crud from the fleece)

 

 So you know what I'll be doing for the next couple of days.....

First of a long line

I've spun odd bits of fibre before but never created a complete yarn. Until now...

  

This is merino and mulberry silk plied to make the yarn. The silk was easier than the merino to spin, but another couple of hundred grams of merino and I think I'll have it at the thickness I really want.

Go me! :)

If you doubt the existance of the Gods......

....Just tell them your plans. So lets see, shall we?

I have a kinda, sorta plan for this year. It's possible (likely?) that I could be made redundant this year as things are changing at work and people are being shed like yesterday's chip papers. I never imagined I would ever work in an office, so my 7 and a bit years in this job has been somewhat of a blip in an otherwise more craft-filled existence. Parts of it have been fun, and I've met some nice people, but the physical reality of sitting down for most of the day and staring at a computer screen is beginning to take its toll on my body and frankly if they decide to pay me to leave, I wont be arguing with them.

I will almost certainly have to find other employment working for someone else, but I also want to invest in myself too. I want to learn to spin properly using a wheel (I can already use a drop spindle). I want to start dying fleece and fibre with natural dyes. I'd like to be able to sell what I produce too, and hopefully get to the point where I can offer work experience placements for youngsters who need something to put on their CVs. But that's jumping ahead a little!

To start with, this first half of 2013, I intend to practise spinning with my drop a bit more, and gather some more bits of equipment. I had a browse round Amazon the other day and picked out about 10 books that looked like they would be useful in this new endeavour. I've been asking around to see if any fleeces might be available locally and it seems like there are several possible options.

The thing is, I don't want to wait until the redundancy notice drops onto my doormat before I get started with a new Plan A. I need to get my skills updated and get some networking in place first so that the transition, if and when it happens, is not so much of a culture shock.

Lots of people knit and crochet. Not so many people spin and process fleeces and fibres. I want to be one of them.

Just finished

And ready in time for my not-step-granddaughter's 1st birthday in a few day's time. Meet Tippi: