Please Don’t Call Freud

Pouring rain. Heaven to California. Won’t be enough. Never is. But I can turn my water off for a week (to the plants…not the showers). I’m going to save water next year by sending the second kid to another state, a state with no apparent water issues…a state that makes its own water. Who thought greening the desert made any sense?

I have the end in my sights…which end? Lots of them. The end to tracing Wonder Under on this piece, which is strangely making my hand sore. I wake in the morning and it’s stiff and swollen. Probably this is more getting old or menopausal effects…because I never had issues before and I’ve traced for much more than an hour at a time. I’m up to 6 hours…

There are too many large, long, and convoluted pieces in this quilt. It makes tracing difficult…I hate wasting Wonder Under. It will make ironing difficult too.

This was the worst piece…

Crazy. Totally should have cut that up into smaller pieces. Oh well. So I’m at about 450 pieces done…didn’t do many pieces last night, even though I worked for over an hour. Of course, it probably took longer than normal because of pieces like that one above. So I need to think about the background for this one and whether or not I want to get more water or bathtub fabrics. Because that piece alone is a significant chunk of a half yard…and I don’t always have that sitting around…certainly not in water color. Whatever water color is.

I keep meaning to go to sleep earlier. I’m tired. My body protests the mornings, but some more than others. You’d think I’d be half dead this morning…stayed up later than the last few nights and it should all be catching up with me on a Friday, but I’m strangely OK. Headachy, but awake. Had headaches all week on and off. Thank you weather systems. Or students. Or financial aid. OK. So headaches could be caused by many things. They are NOT caused by donuts (don’t disabuse me of my notion please).

Totally have drawings rambling chaotically through my head. It was my monthly stitching meeting last night and they plopped a few more in there for me. It’s crazy how much stuff is piling up in there. My artist brain is rushing around, trying to record the ideas on these giant pieces of paper that she piles up in the corners, and then they all slip down and start sliding all over the place. She’s trying to keep them from getting in the way of going to school and remembering the parent meeting I have and that I have duty and it’s currently pouring rain and that I’m giving a test today and there’s that kid who can’t sign into the state testing but we think we figured out why so I have to check that today. All that’s being covered up by these giant slips of paper with intricate drawings of exploding uteri and fetuses reaching towards overloaded pregnant women and crones being pushed aside by perky-breasted skinny beasts with not a creative thought in their brains.

Yes. It’s on overload. Need to deal with that. Please don’t call Freud in on all that. I know exactly from whence it all came.

But it’s always good to just sit and stitch and talk out all your worries and amusements and giggle about stupid stuff, even though I’m old and wrinkly and decrepit and that’s not what society likes.

All I did was stitch feet.

OK. That’s not true. I stitched around eyes too. Two hours of feet though…basically.

Sometimes that’s the best kind of stitching, because it’s just kind of brainless. I can do bullion knots in my sleep now. And we talked about how to make phones do things and I’m trying to figure out how Siri can make dinner or lunch for me, because shit, I don’t have time for that, and she seems to have endless amounts of time. And then we talked about how Kathy can make money and the Other Kathy reminded me that I used to be an editor (crap, I forgot about that…no, I really did), so I’m looking at that possibility for extra work, plus they both voted for small cat quilts this summer for sale. So I need to go pull drawings with cats in them and start reinventing that wheel. Which is stressful, but not as stressful as trying to find hours in the day where I could drive to a job location and work there after being on my feet all day at school. Because my foot is killing me, despite the attempts to rest (ha!) and elevate it (double ha!) and wear an ankle brace, which a student thought was an ankle bracelet and I was on home arrest. At school. Trust me, sometimes that job totally feels like that, like now, with only six weeks to go and the hardest test of the year today and two weeks of state testing looming over us.

Big fucking sigh. I’m good. I can do this.

Thunder and pouring rain. Kids will be absent today because of that. Stupid.