Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now

Stuff gets done here

recent posts

  • Too many notebooks?

    Look, I can quit anytime, OK? I don’t have to buy a blank book every time I see a new color/style. Just yesterday I bought an inexpensive one (less than $4!) to take traveling. Does this mean the spiral bound is my travel journal? Oh no no no. The travel journal is the hard-back green one, top right. The cheap spiral bound is for free-writing, in other words, not meant to be saved.

    The dark green, top left is a sketch/watercolor book so I can play with really seeing things while traveling. The pink book is a calendar of what got done, a way of taming the inner dragon when it begins a self-defeating rant. The yellow book? My new fav. I got it so I can write my own sewing machine manual in language I can follow. Much as I love my Brother embroidery/sewing machine, its manual speaks in sentences that don’t appear to have been crafted by anyone who’s thought about how people acquire new skills.

  • Realist/optimist

    Getting ready for a three-week journey, I’m thinking about fresh ways to think. In that, I’m helped along by writer Pico Iyer, a fascinating author who at first blush seems to be writing about travel, but has something to say about various qualities of human experience. Here are a couple of quotes to give a flavor:

    On travel: We travel, then, in search of both self and anonymity — and, of course, in finding the one we apprehend the other. Abroad, we are wonderfully free of caste and job and standing; we are, as Hazlitt puts it, just the “gentlemen in the parlour,” and people cannot put a name or tag to us. And precisely because we are clarified in this way, and freed of inessential labels, we have the opportunity to come into contact with more essential parts of ourselves (which may begin to explain why we may feel most alive when far from home).

    I also like this, part of an interview he did published in Nautilus in January: I am an optimist, though my sense is that optimism is only as useful as the realism it’s based on.

  • A note about my dad

    Byron Cazier Palmer had a great laugh, a kind heart, a rational mind and a questing soul. He grew up in a small town in southern Alberta, Canada, became a civil engineer specializing in water, and worked all over the world: in Canada, the United States, Venezuela, Colombia and Kenya.

    He was the kind of dad who’d build an ice rink in the back yard (because the neighborhood rink was a few too many blocks away), who’d take his family camping and on cross-country road trips, who made up the best bed-time stories, and who specialized in making time for each of his four kids so they’d know they were special in his eyes.

    He dearly loved his wife Irene and among my cherished memories was seeing him hug and kiss her, particularly in the morning in the kitchen when she was busily working to get us all fed and headed off to our various destinations.

    He was a delightful raconteur, loved to tell a tale and hear a good tale told well. He loved funny stories and would laugh till he cried sometimes while reading Mark Twain or Patrick McManus.

    After he passed in 2017, I would occasionally dream of him. Mostly the dreams were unremarkable. But at least three of the dreams came when I was worried about something, and his dream message was always simple: “You don’t need to worry about that.”

    He would have been 99 today. The picture with this post is from 2002, me dancing with my dad at the 50th wedding anniversary for Byron and Irene. I’m blessed they found each other, and twice blessed to have been shown the ropes for living by them.