Kathy Nida

One of the hard things about going back to school is adjusting to the new caffeine allowance. I drink tea whenever I like during vacations, weekends, and summer. Now that I have no break from about 8:30-12:30 (and when I say no break, I mean no chance to go pee), I can’t drink very much tea in the morning. Yes, I’ve been having the headaches from hell, but NOT in the morning…I get them at the end of 7th period, into my 8th period prep. I am going to take tea makings to school tomorrow so I can have a cup of tea during my prep…otherwise I’m basically useless for that hour because of the internal headbanging.

School has started, by the way. I was glad to be there today because it was 102 here and I don’t have air conditioning at home. The classroom temperature was quite nice. Yeah. And there’s all these kids there. Aren’t they amusing.

One thing I noticed is that over the summer my brain deleted ALL the names of kids from last year. ALL of them. I see kids from last year and they wave and say HI! and I say HI! (holy crap…what is your name?). It is really sad. Sometimes if I wait a minute, their name comes back to me, but not always. One of the girls said hi this morning before school and I Just Now remembered her name, 10 hours later (yes, OK, I was doing other things like TEACHING). And why do the kids who drove you nuts last year, the ones that told you they hated you over and over, why are they the ones coming over and talking to you and telling you how much they miss you? What is up with that? Meanwhile, my brain is trying to learn all the new names without messing them up too much.

These guys were in my cupboard at school…

Actually, I noticed a sac of eggs before school started (and mom, I’m assuming), and today, when I went to get my bag out of the cupboard, they had hatched. I know. I should do something about it, but I don’t really use that part of the closet, so what the heck? Maybe they’ll get big enough to dispatch the rats.

Evenings, I’ve been exhausted. Enough energy to just make dinner and get kids where they need to be and print out whatever I need for the next day, but not much else. Last night, I finally got around to sewing up the girlchild’s shirt. Smart girl sent her scissors through the wash and put holes in a bunch of her clothes and mine (sigh). Her creative instinct had her cut out these leaves from fabric in my stash and Wonder Under them on, but after the first wash, they were coming loose. She asked me two months ago to sew them on, and I finally got around to it.

I wouldn’t let myself put the next quilt under the machine until I finished that for her. So hopefully tonight, that’s what I’ll be doing. If I can quilt for even 30 minutes a night, I will get stuff done. Of course, right now, I have enough energy to type, as long as I don’t move too much, and I will need more than that to quilt.

The girlchild has hit exhaustion mode. The boychild and I have too…it feels like Friday and we need to sleep more, but we’re not screaming at everything in the house and bursting into tears because of pre-algebra (although it did cross my mind, because not only have I already PASSED that silly class, but I had to teach math support in pre-algebra for 2 years and it almost killed me). She hates school. She hates math. She hates when it’s hot. She hates being tired.

I’ve spent what little energy I’ve had the last two nights trimming bits of fabric, on the off chance I might iron down a quilt or two this weekend and next. Here’s what’s left…

Oh wait. I did some of those last night. It does seem endless, though. I may finish tonight.

Calli is learning to play piano.

Yes, the keys are dirty. What do you expect, if dogs keep climbing on it. She seems to like music; she licks the person playing.

Kitten is helping print pictures here.

Yeah. Right. Sure she is.

I have quilt class (aka Quilt Socializing) tomorrow night. Not sure how I will stay awake through that, but I should be able to get something done (like sew my block to my pants, maybe). I’m going to pull the next quilt top in the pile out right now and stitch it down…set the timer and see if I can get something done.

I finished grading. This is very exciting. Except now I feel like I’m on vacation, because I finished grading, and I’m not on vacation. I have 5 more days of school. I have to clean my room (sounds like my kids, eh?) and probably fill out some paperwork and try to track down the librarian so I can give her back the two sets of encyclopedias we borrowed. She’s only on campus two days a week, and I’m never sure which days those are, so it really will be pure luck if she gets these back.

So I still have work to do, because I have kids in classes all week, except for the field trip on Friday. I’m finding it hard to get motivated. Shockingly.

Yesterday, I finished around 2:15 PM, and went to school to sort some stuff out and bring the wilting bean plants home to try to grow them. I’ll either have all dead plants in a few days or I’ll have 17 tons of beans in about 2 months. Not sure which is worse. Then I hung out at a friend’s new house…brought liquid refreshment, chips, guac, and salsa. It was nice. Then off to Ray at Night, which is still hanging on, despite the economy. A lot of the galleries have sized down or added a framing component to the shop or have just plain old closed down. It wasn’t totally dead though, which was nice. There was one artist whose work was interesting enough for me to grab a card…for Keith Greene.

They were mostly fairly large women with foreshortened parts, so the legs and feet were huge, and they were covered with tattoos. I draw like that sometimes, the part where the parts are covered with stuff. Shockingly (or not), Keith is a tattoo artist. I spent some few seconds at the gallery trying to figure out what guy standing around the gallery might be the artist, and had guessed this tall white guy on crutches who was giving info on his iPhone to some goth-type chick. So I was wrong. Check out his MySpace page if you want to see what he really looks like (which meshes a LOT better with the art I saw last night than the wimpy white guy)…none of the stuff in the show last night is on his MySpace page, though, and I think it’s considerably better than what IS on there. Couldn’t find a real website for him. You can see most of one of the pieces in the card below.

I then had a decent dinner at a restaurant I’ve never been to, Urban Solace (sounds nice, doesn’t it?). It was OK.

Photos of lights and wine. Got to eat outside.

That was nice.

But I do have to settle my brain down enough today to plan this week. I do actually have to be a teacher for 5 more days and I have to present content and not just shove a video in and call it the end of a long school year. I have to watch about 30% of our school’s teachers pack up their entire classrooms and drive away without a job (I was lucky to get most of mine back). I have to wonder what I’ll be teaching next year (won’t find out until August some time) and consider how to get through the summer on only one paycheck. I have to spend 8 weeks with two middle-school kids who only like each other sometimes.

I get to make art.

I had an idea the other day to write a post about “A Day in the Life of a Teacher,” but I realized I was setting myself up for legal issues if I even went there. I try to be vague about my days and issues with school, because I realize real people are involved and school districts might take action. Teachers have no private life. Today, of course, is one of those vague days.

When you teach in middle or high school, you might see this…

well, except students are involved. It might look like this…

Or this…

And hopefully it never looks like this…

I hope that is some famous picture…I was unable to find credit…because that’s the only reason I want to think about that all those naked people are curled up in behind someone else’s butt.

I guess it’s really more like this…

I’ve never taught anywhere that there weren’t fights. And where there are fights, the kids race toward them like someone’s giving out thousand-dollar bills. They run faster than they do to get off campus at the end of the day (actually, strangely, that’s when they move the slowest); they move faster than we ever see them move; I think it’s faster than if I were offering free candy. I’d love to have aerial video of a school fight…it must look choreographed, the movement, the swarm toward the center. Well, except I wouldn’t love the fight itself.

What’s sad is the reactions of those not in the fight. “Cool!” “That was so funny!” “Did you see that…it was awesome!” “Who do you think won?” There’s a winner? I didn’t get the memo.

I realize the front parts of their brains are not fully developed yet. I realize they have a lot of growing up to do. They got mad at me when I said that it was sad that a fight was the most exciting part of their lives. I guess it’s no different than slowing down to see the accident by the side of the road. Drive on, people…drive on.

As in “what grade you will have if you are more interested in pencil sharpening than in using that pencil.” Post-Spring Break is when teachers have to work really hard to keep students’ attention. In 2 weeks, we start state testing, which should be entertaining as well.

Teacher Rant: It is frustrating as hell to rework an entire lesson to make it more “engaging” and to match the content of the new books and to hopefully try to make it more interesting AND technological AND possible to keep in a 13-year-old’s head, and to have it all ready to go and bust your butt to do so, ONLY to get to school and be unable to USE the damn lesson as planned because the bloody computer and the idiotic doc cam and the bipolar digital projector can’t communicate.

It’s even more frustrating when the kids don’t care that they failed the test AND the booklet AND didn’t turn any work in for the last month AND want to know why they’re failing. I told them they had 9 weeks to bring their grades up. One girl raised her hand and said “Nuh uh, Ms. Nida. We only have 44 days.” Today was brought to you by the letter F, the sound of pencils sharpening, and My head. Hitting the desk. Repeatedly.

Teacher Rant over…until day 43.

I changed my mind on the binding. Why? It was bugging me. I still didn’t go shopping, though. I pulled out every 1/2-yard plus I had in the relevant color range and had a go.

Too splotchy. Cat in the way.

Much as I liked this one, it kept drawing your eye to IT, instead of the stuff in the middle, and since I’d already decided the plan was to have the binding STOP the background, the last thing I needed was people wandering off into the binding and never coming back.

Yes, I think THAT hard. I just do it really really fast and no one ever knows.

Oh my god no, that’s awful. Actually, this was the second choice and it was only millimeters behind the first, which is below.

Yeah. I know. How can you tell? How the heck do I know? Can’t help you. But it’s a done deal. This was bought to be a background and was rejected, so it has told me that it is quite pleased to be chosen as a binding, rather than to languish away in a drawer, having tiny bits hacked off it for the next 15 years.

Speaking of languishing…

By the way, maybe we made the news again, I don’t know, but it was 103 degrees F here today. It’s freakin’ April. Then I remembered that the weekend after school got out in June last year it was 113, but then it didn’t get warm all summer after that really, I mean, not like 113. So I should shut up, because it’s probably snowing in Michigan or Colorado right now (yes, I watch the news, obsessively, but only the bits about the weather, which is ironic, considering where I live.).

Back to the All Around the Town quilt. I found three more blocks in progress…this one only needs two sticky bits sewn on and it’s done…

Must be a corner block, eh? And something probably needs to be written on the sign.

This one needs a hill and some other bits (like a roof)…

And maybe some more watermelons…that one looks a bit lonely.

And this one needs its hill and its chimney…

Yes, it has a giant cat on its roof.

So that’s three more done, and looking at the master picture, I think I have three more blocks to go. Or maybe two. Can’t tell. Too hot to see through the shimmer. Maybe I should actually get out of the chair and go look at the picture. OK. There are possibly 11 or 12 blocks. Hard to tell. I have done possibly 6 of them. Block 7 is almost done. Block 8 is mostly done (there are many more watermelons…), and Block 9 is very close to done. The last three (which include a chicken on the roof) are not even started. So yeah.

NO. I don’t know why I gravitated to this recently. It was easy. I picked it up. I like the quilt. I want to finish it.

Now for the cows.

La Jolla is hosting the Cow Parade, which exhibits the cows and then auctions them off for a worthy cause, in this case, our local Children’s Hospital, which has hosted the boychild and girlchild for a variety of painful and torturous, but necessary procedures; AND the San Diego Zoo, of which we are members, and maybe should be residents. I realized if I didn’t go now, I might not make it after being sucked into the teacher-grading vortex that exists between now and June-whateverth.

No, I didn’t write artists’ names down. I was lame. I apologize. Since my blog has such a WIDE following, if you are an artist or the child of an artist or the parent of an artist or the cow who posed for the artist who painted one of these, please let me know and I will make you famous by posting your name and website on my blog.

There are about 30 of them (and I think I actually saw all of them), and it was a beautiful spring day in La Jolla.

Maybe today was also brought to you by the word Moo.

It would be cool to have a yardful of these.

This one had piercings on her nipples (OK, teats, yeah yeah whatever). She also had them in her ears and nose. Must have hurt.

OK. If you go to the website, it has all the artists’ names. I’m too hot and tired to go through them all. Maybe some other day. Sorry.

And what crazy person got to my blog after searching for “what teachers say to kids who say ‘you can’t make me’”? They’re right. I can’t.

When I buy fabric without a purpose, I buy 1/2 a yard. I do a lot of applique (whether hand or fused), and I don’t usually need bigger pieces than that. In the old days, if I saw a flesh-colored piece of fabric I liked, I might buy a yard of it. I’m finding that harder to use up, so sometimes it gets stuck in a backing. I like having new stock coming in…otherwise, all my quilts would use the same 80 fabrics.

That said, the 1/2-yard purchase causes a math problem. Most of my quilts are in the 50″ square range for some reason. Therefore, the amount of fabric required to bind a quilt that size is approximately 20″…or 2″ more than a half yard. I rarely have enough of any fabric to bind a quilt. I have pieced bindings before, but it has to be the right quilt to handle that. This one isn’t. I figured I would have to go to the quilt store (damn!) today to get binding fabric, which seemed really stupid, because I really only wanted something mostly black with a little pattern to it, to go with the background but kind of STOP it. Because the background is so busy and it needs to be STOPPED.

I found it in my stash…

I have no idea why I have a yard of this, but I do. It might have been the end of a bolt or on sale…you never know. So I don’t have to go shopping (damn…I mean, great!).

Instead, I’m going to go look at cows. I’m going out in the nice warm spring air with my pale body parts. I’d like to take my sweatshirt with me, just in case it’s breezy near the beach, but I can’t. It’s being used…

gratuitous cute kitten picture. Oh, and I found the “lost” quilt in the previous post. More on that later. I have somehow more AND less done than I thought I had. Figures.

The girlchild has dominated the guest bed the last two nights. The first night, I tried sleeping with her, but it was as I remembered…she kicks the crap out of me and then pounds on me, and then I get no sleep. Last night, I just slept on the couch, because it was easier than carrying 125 pounds of hormone out and dropping it on the couch. Tonight, I show no mercy…she sleeps on the couch and I get a proper bed.

We return home tomorrow, no stops in any crazy Northern California city that reguarly stops, delays, or disappears our flight. I’m hoping it’s straight through, no problems (unlike previous trips). While I was gone, my hallway got half-painted (so far), my kitten TRIED to get painted (green), and my pool guy burst my hose and flooded half the yard. Yippee! Could be worse. My ex has been anally checking the water meter every 24 hours to try and determine if I have a leak (I was supposed to do this, but never got around to it…apparently he is bored with the children gone and feels a need to contribute. More power to him…and the water data will be useful when I yell at the pool guy).

We went to the Pike Place Market, the Seattle Aquarium, and out for dim sum yesterday. We missed fish-throwing at the market, but we did see the quilt store there (Undercover Quilts). I did not buy fabrics, but I was impressed by two of the quilts in the window…this one of Mt. Rainier…

If you look here, you can buy it…and its Puget Sound friend, both by Mary Downes. She has no website, and the topographical quilts of hers were not on the Undercover Quilts webpages (although some of her other work was). Wish I had the money for the Rainier quilt…sure my dad would love that. I’m fascinated by topographic art, and though I’ve drawn a bunch of topo-type and contour-map type work, none of it has ended up in a finished quilt yet.

I haven’t drawn the entire time I’ve been here. Don’t know why. Wanted to last night after listening to the lecture Secrets of Shangri-La with Peter Athans, in the Mustang Valley, now part of Tibet. I did listen to everything Peter told me, but needed a vocab list with pronunciations to write intelligently about what I had just seen. It seems it will probably be a documentary some time soon. Lots of Tibetan art. Interesting lecture, but missing key bits of info. I felt like I hadn’t read the right chapter before coming out.

My kids are not necessarily adventurous eaters, and their auntie tries to challenge them every year. Yesterday it was dim sum, which they did well with, but not nearly as well as their 2-year-old cousin, who bravely ate a bit of almost everything AND used chopsticks.

Speaking of octopi…

oh wait, we weren’t…

I’ve been doing a little crazy quilt stitching. I had packed the neutral block from previous posts, expecting to stitch on that, but shoved the ocean one in at the last minute, after transferring an octopus onto it.

I don’t have the right colors for stitching more, either between the tentacles or on the seamlines, because I mostly packed threads for the neutral piece, so I’ve stopped for now…

He’s not pure yellow…it’s got a pinky-orange tinge. Not sure what other color I will use, but I’m sure I have something at home that will work.

We also went to the Olympic Sculpture Park, which I really wanted to do the last time we were here, and we just ran out of time.

Except in the case where you’re allowed to sit on the art.

I took about a million pictures of the ampersand…why? I liked it…that’s why.

The boychild skipping merrily through the sculpture park.

My lovely children poking an eye out…

Yes…we did leave all the mini-cousins behind today. At some point, my two start to need time away from the noise and chaos of little ones (hey, true for all of us), so we try to have some of that time integrated into the trip.

Speaking of which, I think it’s officially naptime. I should take advantage of that before the screaming begins again. (My own two had a timeout earlier this afternoon after beating and throwing toys). OR. I think we are going to get the girlchild at school? Maybe not. I vote for the nap.

But so far, it hasn’t rained much. We are in Seattle with my brother and his lovely wife and three kids aged 6 and under. Yesterday, we made berry muffins that fell apart but tasted like heaven. We went to the EMP and Science Fiction Museum, where the kids really enjoyed the Sound Lab. They did vocals…

Guitar…

Drums…

And then collapsed in exhaustion. Oh wait. That was the adults.

I did not see enough guitars…

We did actually miss the guitar gallery. This is a sculpture.

Today we will tiptoe through the (mud) tulips and there will be plenty of photo opportunities. I have been stitching an octopus, which is not photo-worthy yet (not that it’s stopped me before). It may rain, so there will be more (mud) tulips.

There is a bead store I might be able to visit, but honestly, I will survive if I don’t. There is a glass museum that I would like to visit too…that I think is on the list. Tomorrow we will negotiate Easter in a different house with different traditions. We did dye Easter eggs yesterday, despite my SIL’s paranoia about dye flying everywhere. It was pretty mellow…as mellow as it can be with 5 kids who are always hungry.