Maniacal Pencils

First of all, does anyone actually win the book giveaways on Goodreads? I feel like I’ve filled 100 of those things out and I never win. So the competition is stiff for the weird-ass shit I like to read? Seems unlikely. The book I’m reading now, that I just started reading, expires in 1 day and 15 hours. Now I know it doesn’t actually expire until midnight on that day, despite its dire warnings, so I have until midnight on Friday to read it, or to get halfway through and then renew it (except for every copy the library has, there are 4 people waiting for it, so I won’t be able to get it again for a long time). My internet friends have clued me in to turning airplane mode on that device so I can continue to finish the book. I need to remember to do that. Because I don’t think I can finish the book, teach for two days, go to two social events, grade a million things, and sleep at least 5 hours a night, AND get the book done. And so far, it’s an interesting book, so I want to read it. Although I think it’s my book club book from May. Whoops! I know I’ve already read June’s book (it was eh). I read July’s book last year. I’m looking forward to reading all summer, right? It’s about the only thing I’m allowed to take to jury duty if I get called in.

The WordPress app is being cranky this morning. It’s continually refusing to save. It’s not me…everything else here is working. Sigh. On the iPad now. Tiny little buttons…fingerpeck typing. It’s letting me force save it, but won’t do it automatically. Technology is so cool and so annoying.

Six days of school left. I’m sick, but not horribly. I’m tired because I stay up too late. I’m not done with anything. I almost finished grading websites last night…have two to deal with this morning. Imma gonna buy me some maniacal pencils.

We’re going to make some changes to the project for next year…for a better outcome from the kids and less torture on us, hopefully. But I’m down to only two assignments for grading that aren’t just recording whether they did it or not…so that feels very doable. I started cleaning my room yesterday too. Because we will have teachers in our rooms the first day back (hate that…they aren’t always respectful of our space), I have to hide a bunch of stuff. That part sucks.

So I graded until 10 PM, texting back and forth with three other teachers during that time (weird times, people…weird times). And then I ironed all the flesh pieces down. This is fabric number 3 in the run from light to dark.

This is fabric number 1…this is ALL I have of it. So there’s not much left, eh? It’s a hand-dye from somewhere…when I see flesh tones, I buy them.

Here’s everything I’ve used so far…the flesh run on this one is very not pink. Sorta beige.

Here’s everything I’ve ironed so far…

It’s not a huge pile. There’s a lot of little flesh bits in there on the bottom though. They were on the top until I upended the box into a bigger one. So I could start cutting them out at tonight’s meeting, but with the deadline extended, I’m not feeling that scary rush to get it done, so I think I’ll take some of my embroidery stuff. I haven’t done that for a while, except for those Palestrina knot stems…I did more of those last night…almost finished one of the short sides. So 7 more nights should do it on those. They’re pretty relaxing. I’m not measuring them or marking them. I’m all into it being a bit wonky. Wonky is good.

So if you compare this table to Tuesday night’s table, it looks very similar…because basically I took over an hour to iron all those other flesh pieces down and then I ironed like three other things off this pile of stuff and quit.

It was well after midnight. Too well, probably. More tonight…won’t be done tonight…probably won’t be done until Saturday or Sunday. It depends on grading. I have too much to do before Monday.

We’re still at three dogs. I try to get them to stay in one place for photographic purposes and they pretty much see the camera and rush me. I might have food, you know. I might pet them. I might walk them (I thought about it for one crazy minute last night…I got home right at 6 PM and still had to make dinner though).

Poor things…end of the school year is hard on them too.

Thanks to whichever hardy reader told the boychild to confirm life. Here is Lake Erie. He’s alive.

I thought it was the Atlantic Ocean, but apparently not. I guess that puts him a few hundred miles closer. Hope he’s enjoying it. I’m kinda jealous actually. I wanna get in my car and just drive for like a week, hanging out, seeing stuff. Then I remember how exhausting that can be. I want one of those pop-up camper tents so I don’t have to set up a tent and all that…plus food delivery. Not junk food…good homemade stuff. So that’s not happening.

Hello right eye twitch. Sigh. Stress off please. (Soon. Very soon. Not soon enough.)

Just Not Today

‘Tis morning and I am ill. Hello summer cold, winging to me from the snotty nose or infected fingertips of some kid who probably got to take a sick day…or three, based on my current attendance rosters. Teachers should be able to request who’s out sick the last two weeks of school…it’s never the annoying ones. Their parents are like NO. YOU GO TO SCHOOL AND MAKE YOUR TEACHER MISERABLE AND SICK. My poor body has been trying to fight this one off since Saturday…that’s when I first started feeling off. Anyway. Welcome to the end of the year. Let’s make it more miserable than it already is.

Today is a long one…teaching STDs and then a union meeting…hopefully they’ll remember it’s the end of the year and make it short. I forced myself to grade 2 1/2 periods’ worth of websites last night…it was a good thing. I only have one period left, so I’ll get that done today. Then I’m down to a few assignments from this week and one from last week. I can see a light! At the end of the 183-day tunnel that is a school year…that’s minus the weekends, so don’t get excited about how many days you have to work compared to me. I worked until 10 PM last night with about a 2-hour break for dinner and errands. So that’s just a 12-hour-day or so. Oh wait, I did take 20 minutes for lunch. 11 hours and 40 minutes. At least 6 hours last Sunday. Sigh. Sometimes. This job.

I’m jealous of people who can just choose to take a sick day without balancing the ramifications of a substitute in there (or not GETTING a sub) who will cause chaos and destruction. And maybe burn the school down. Yeah. Nope. Not this week. Not next week. I’d have to be hospitalized to be that nuts. And I’m not THAT sick…it would just be nice to have the chance to have a sick day. And to be able to pee whenever you need to. And maybe have toilet paper in the bathrooms…that would be a plus.

Here’s our school rooster, Richard. He’s still here. Can’t be caught. Was hanging out by my car.

So you haven’t seen this for a while. I got all the circles sewed on and then floundered, because it wanted 96 stems now, all in Palestrina knots…which aren’t hard, but I had to find the right thread and the book with the pictures, and that apparently was too hard to handle. Until last night. So I got 11 done after dinner, while watching Handmaid’s Tale…

So I guess it’ll be another 8 nights before I’m done with them, at that rate. It’s faster than sewing the circles down anyway. And then each circle gets some sort of embellishment, based on its color (some of them are very close in color). And then it’s done and it can go into the quilting queue with two other hobby quilts I got done in the last IDK-how-many years. I should maybe do those. I COULD do those.

Katie is here. My parent’s dog. Just for a few days. She upsets the equilibrium.

She’s not a bad dog. She just makes a dog herd instead of a pair, and then the cats…she likes to harass them. Mostly just by staring at them and making them uncomfortable. I’ve had the consent talk with her, yes means yes, then the bullying talk, but nothing works…mostly because she’s a dog and has the brain of a 2-year-old…on a good day.

So I spent two hours last night going through the bins of the 200s through the 800s, finding all the flesh pieces. Here they are. All of them. Are any of them ironed down? Fuck no…because then it was after midnight and I’m supposed to go to sleep.

So I piled a bunch of plastic bins on them and I will just hope no cat causes a mess while I’m gone. These two tend to stay off the ironing board, so I think I’m OK.

Then this was the disaster that was left over. This is every piece that is NOT flesh. They’re all in piles by what they are (uterus, lungs, heart, bird, eyeball, whatever).

So once I get done ironing all the flesh down (hopefully tonight), then I’ll start on these. Usually I have some idea of how far along I am in that process, just based on the numbers, but since I literally emptied every bin either on the table or carefully on the fabric to which it belongs, I’m fucked on knowing where I’m at. Not halfway yet, that’s for sure…maybe after I get the flesh done. It doesn’t really matter, because I have time to finish it now.

This is the morning breakfast lineup…three dog butts in a row.

Then everybody goes back outside to pee. Or bark. Whichever floats their boat.

Survival mode, people. I woke up panicking about something that needed to be done, but I’ve completely forgotten what it was. It’s probably better that way. I had called my insurance people back because I tried to talk to them back in March or April about something, and they got me some information, but not all of it. So they keep calling back during the day and leaving messages about scheduling time to talk to the agent, and I finally called back, and I’m sure they think I’m nuts, but every other teacher out there gets it, because I’m like I can’t handle this right now, there’s not enough brain power to manage this shit on top of all the other shit can you just leave me alone until the week of the 18th dammit because I had to really push just to make this phone call fit into the crazy that is my everyday life right now? They were like, yeah, sure, but you could hear in their voices that they totally don’t get it. Oh well. Join the vet and the doctor and everyone else who wants something out of me right now. I’LL FUCKING GET TO IT. Just not today.

Girlchild is alive. I need her to tell me where to buy knives to replace the ones I gave her back. No word from the boychild. If you see him, tell him to text his mom. She worries.

I’m Gonna Make Your Head Burn*

Hey guys, you remember last year? And the year before? And the year before that? That damn mockingbird is back…and it’s right on my fenceline, so it’s loud as hell. I don’t know how anyone else sleeps through that little fucker’s delightful song (seriously, I saw it the other day and was trying to decide how to catch it and move it to another state. Where no one lives. Except other mockingbirds.). I’ve been wrapping a pillow around my head to deaden the noise, but the beast gets through double pillow layers. I tried earplugs one year, but there’s some weird balance between my ear canals and my nostrils that doesn’t work when one of them is plugged up. God damn, he’s loud. Get a woman, you bastard! Or babies! Or whatever it is that’s making you talk to the whole planet on my doorstep.

School is survival mode at the moment…we’re doing the last few days of the sex ed program, so it’s all about STDs starting today. I’ve had a few questions in the question box about the TV show 13 Reasons Why, so I’ve been watching the 2nd season. Ugh. I know it’s trying to deal with the issues, but some of it is really hard to watch at the end of the school year. Or ever. I can’t decide if it’s just really heavy-handed because it’s adults making assumptions about what kids go through, or if it’s just trying to hit ALL the possible issues, telegraphing ALL the warning signs so we know what they are. It’s obviously targeted at a younger crowd than me…but maybe in teaching middle school, I never escape some of the crap in my head that was so inherently middle and high school. Like never-wanna-go-back middle and high school.

Anyway. It’s progressing…and I made it through grading about 17 websites last night before I quit. I got a bunch done at school, but the 17th one started talking about Reagan, and I’m pretty sure he had nothing to do with the plastics industry or the biosphere, so I gave up. Like please stop writing random answers to fill the space because you didn’t actually read the article or watch the video I asked you to read or watch. Grading shouldn’t involve swearing at the computer repeatedly. I have to be done by Monday…I think I’ll be OK. Hopefully.

On the way to work yesterday…I often think I should have business cards for my editing job so I can hand them out to the guys standing out at this allllllley. Or not.

Puppy sleeping on me as I finish up dinner and try to figure out the rest of my evening.

Back to the ironing board! I finished the mountain/land area and then did a jellyfish (purples) and this octopus below…

Then I’m looking at this section and trying to figure out why there’s two sets of hands on that leg. I mean, I drew the damn thing…what was I thinking?

It’s OK…I figured it out. I often put hands on the skin of the main figure…it’s like who has a hand on her, who makes a mark on her, not necessarily always in a bad way. Think of your kids…they leave a mark. Speaking of kids, one started her summer job yesterday and hopefully will (a) find her rain gear and (b) keep enjoying the job. It sounds interesting so far. If you see her tramping through the woods around Waltham, Massachusetts, wave and give her chocolate. The boychild is apparently seeing the US and might be kind enough to check in with locations and/or pictures every few days. Or not…and then I’ll just sit here and worry that I haven’t heard from him. Typical mom brain. But when I travel now, I always tell someone where I am. From the year my parents went off on a trip and left no itinerary and then my dad’s brother died and I couldn’t reach them. Or the other year when they left and their dog was really sick. Anyway. He’s out there. He might like chocolate too.

I started picking out the flesh stuff…I picked fabrics anyway, and started choosing pieces, but it was already midnight at that point. I know how long bodies take to pick out, and this is not a small body, so I saved it for tonight.

After tutoring. Last tutoring of the year! Oh hallelujah. Maybe I should NOT do tutoring next year? Sigh. I know it’s what’s best. I hate it, but it’s what’s best.

Here’s what I’ve used so far…you can see the jellyfish purples at the top of the left box.

There will be so many more colors by the time I get to the end…

I woke up this morning to Kitten sharing the dog bed with Calli.

It makes Calli nervous, so when she notices, she gets up and lies on the floor instead. Kitten is watching birds and bunnies outside. She’s the one that pushes the slats so she has a little window.

OK, so steady progress on grading and ironing. Both should be done sometime over the weekend…although two night meetings this week will affect that. Meanwhile, off to school and STDs. Hey there’s the one thing I don’t think I’ve seen on 13 Reasons Why…YET…

*Adele, Rolling in the Deep

Always Clean Up Your Mess Before You Mess It Up Again*

I keep trying new breakfast foods…stuff I can prep on the weekend and then eat every morning. My body is not good at early breakfast…it tends to be nauseous and still asleep, so it’s always a challenge. Stuff that sounds good to me while I’m prepping or shopping is notoriously putrid in the morning. Or I eat it once and then like that’s it. I’m good. It’s not good FOR me, though, to go through until lunch with no food, so then I get to school and all I have to eat are nuts…which aren’t a totally bad plan, but I can do better. So this week, I tried an oatmeal bake with fruit and so far, so good (first day only). I can usually handle oatmeal anyway, and this is just a slightly fancier and healthier version…so we’ll see if that gives me vip and vim this morning.

I’m not really a morning person. You may have noticed. I can quietly write here, as long as I don’t have to talk to anyone. Luckily, most of my cohabitants are also not morning talkers. Even when I get to work, the morning talkers are there and they’ve learned not to expect much from me. I’ll talk when the bell rings to start school…and some days, not a moment before.

So I did some relaxing stuff on the weekend, if by relaxing, you mean walking a 4-mile art and music route. I basically did very little art-related stuff on Saturday. I really needed a break from feeling like I had to do it…so I just went in there for the last hour or so of the night before going to bed and tried to clean up…

I had about 5 more piles in there when I started…so I put all this away from the last quilt…

Always clean up your mess before you mess it up again.

And then I had this broken drawer…Midnight used to sleep in there, and I think eventually the pressure of fabric plus sorta fat cat caused the plastic to fail…

I stupidly threw the broken pieces away…so I needed to figure out how to fix it. At the time, I thought it would be easy to find a replacement, but the sizes are all different and don’t fit into that space any more. I did this long-range plan for shelving in that space, but really the whole room needs a makeover and that’s not in the cards this summer…so finally, on Saturday night (yup, I party like the best of them), I put cardboard in there and then duct-taped it to death so it would hopefully hold long enough for me to be able to afford to do something in that space. Because I was tired of trying to pull the drawer open without breaking it more.

So that was Saturday night: cleaning and improvising.

Sunday was a lot of work stuff…I got up and graded 63 emails’ worth of makeup work and another pile of papers. Then input some grades and did the grocery shopping and sent the parent email and all that crap. It’s all time-consuming crap, honestly. I love the summer because my Sundays are free…FREE!

Then I graded the rest of the student videos and transferred all those to paper and started grading the websites I could find. Puppy was very tired…

Satchemo really wanted to be ON the computer and was rather pissy that I wouldn’t let him be…

Then at around 10:15 PM, I headed into the studio for the fun stuff…the first 100 pieces sorted and ready for ironing. On the far left (hiding in the dark) is the piece I picked for the background of my existing stash…

On really long drawings, I can’t see the bottom without having to lean over to the ground, so I pull the drawing up to the ironing board…

It’s just easier to see that way…

And I ironed almost 100 pieces…at some point, it was after midnight and I was still ironing and thinking I didn’t want to stay up too late because then I’d lose all the sleep I’d made up over the weekend.

So I stopped just short of the snow on the mountains. Not a bad start…

I will have to be grading every night, but this will be a pleasant ending to every day…relaxed…the way it should be.

At Some Point, You Run Out of Hours

I slept. I went to bed well before midnight. I slept. And the dog barked. And I slept some more. And the cat bit me. That pretty much got me up and moving, but obviously I needed like 10 hours of sleep. Like don’t bug me sleep. Like let me just lie here and grow roots into the bed sleep. It was a rough week. I had to be up early every morning and then I wasn’t going to bed early, because my brain doesn’t work that way. Until it hits exhaustion. Hoping to repeat again tonight into tomorrow morning, so I can make it through all of next week. There are nine days of school left. Grades are due in a little more than a week. I can do it.

Really, what helped yesterday? I found out the deadline for the show I’m trying to get this quilt finished for got moved. To September. Oh holy hallelujah, what a weight is gone. I can do that. In fact, all of a sudden, I can do everything. Well. The grading part is still a load of work, but I was able last night to sit down with all the art deadlines I’m looking at for the next 6 months (well, I forgot one, but that’s OK)…and kind of start to get my head around my summer and fall. Artwise that is. It felt a lot more relaxed and sane. I needed that. For some reason, for about 2 years, I’ve been going like crazy and I needed to chill out a bit.

I need to add the other one here and do measurements for the one I just wrote down, but now I can get my head around what next. What order? How?

So that’s good.

Yesterday was our awards breakfast…here’s our amazing English teacher making pancakes. I was on the other griddle doing the same.

Well I had to move to another plug after we blew that fuse, but whatever. Why the library doesn’t have more robust fuses, I don’t know.

Taught about birth control all day…then a walk with just the one little dog…

This walk is one I really like, but I no longer like doing it alone…

We didn’t do the whole three miles…puppy was tired, but here he is pulling, wanting to keep going.

Here’s why it makes me nervous to walk here…there’s two adult coyotes and then two kits out there. The trail we come out on is right next to the green belt…the kits saw us and ran back to their den, but it still makes me nervous to come by myself with the dogs. I can carry one small dog, but it’s hard to protect both if needed. Especially if there’s an overprotective momma coyote around…

Came back and had dinner…Satchemo likes to sit right underfoot. The pattern of the rug with his fur seemed really interesting…

Here’s the drawing I did on the plane on Monday. Not too exciting. I was pretty tired.

So part of the art I have to do this summer is two tiny pieces to go in these boxes…for a show that will open in September…

The next step on this quilt is to iron the Wonder Under to fabric…before I can do that, I need to clean up in here…I need to put all the pulled fabric from the last quilt away, plus I really should try to fix the one green drawer.

It’s broken and I can’t find a correctly sized replacement. My long-term plan is to replace all this section with shelving, but that’s expensive and not happening this year. So the drawer is a pain in the butt, and I need to put a brace in or something to keep everything from falling out.

A little bit of clean up here, mostly getting stuff neatly back in drawers and off the place where I lay out all the Wonder Under.

The sewing machine table is doing OK…just some paperwork on the right that needs managing…

I’m not buying a new background…I need to use one of these. I often buy more than one background when I’m not sure what will work…

Although as I’m thinking about the size…I may not be able to get away with not buying more. Huh. Thinking. Mathing in my head is a mistake. I’ll do it later, after a shower to clear the cobwebs from my brain. Anyway, I’m going to grade some and then clean up some today…then we’re going to an artwalk for the rest of the day. Seriously need a break, so that will be a good one. Depending on how I feel tonight, I might get some work done on the ironing. We’ll see. I’m OK now if I don’t. I was seriously looking at having to do about 4 1/2 hours a day and I couldn’t see how that was going to work…because that’s on top of maybe 9 or 10 hours of schoolwork as well. At some point, you run out of hours.

Anyway. It’s moot now. Moving on with my much-more-relaxed weekend. Also trying to ignore the sore throat…hoping it’s from overuse yesterday…and not some viral crap that some sneezer kid gave me.

Needlework and Seedlings*

Tired is catching up with me and passing me on the right, cutting me off so I slow down, and then speeding up to beat me to the finish line. It’s hard NOT to stay up late…I haven’t gotten more than 6 hours any night this week. Some of that is just that my brain keeps going at 900 miles an hour no matter what. Some of it is trying to get everything done. Ah stress and lack of sleep…the things my doctor keeps flipping out over…like I can control those. TEN DAYS OF SCHOOL LEFT. Yeah. That. I’m feeling much better about grades getting done, but I still have a ton left to do. Just not as big of a ton. Some of the not sleeping is that little dog barking his mad head off in the middle of the night…I don’t know what animal is out there, but it was big enough to set off the motion-sensor lights this time. Assholes. And the mockingbird is back, but this is a new one. It sounds like mockingbird-on-crack. Pillow over head. Ugh.

I am SOOOO looking forward to sleeping in tomorrow morning and Sunday morning. Wake me up and I kick your ass. Unless you’re a dog. Because I don’t hurt dogs. I just get irritated with them. And honestly, probably we need to do a better job of getting the little one tired at night. Next week. Next week when I don’t have to be up early every damn morning. My principal has threatened an additional meeting next week. I’m hoping he forgets. Is there a voodoo spell for principals forgetting shit?

Weirdest question in sex ed this year (I teach 7th graders about reproduction etc every year) was “Do you have to do The Sex every time you want a baby?” Um. Well. OK. Yes. And let’s explain human nature and The Sex a little bit. It must be a girl asking? Or a very scared boy?

So I came home and entered an exhibit and ate some leftovers and installed a new Tivo (yeah well, I guess I made that decision) and then sat and finished cutting out Wonder Under…6 1/2 hours total. Pretty much the same as the last one.

I was hoping to save some time on this one…not. Then I set up to sort them, because it was only 11 PM. The big box at the bottom is all the pieces, and then each of the smaller boxes is only 100 pieces…it makes it easier when I go to iron if I’m dealing with only 100 pieces at a time. My process after a million years of doing it this way…it’s pretty efficient actually.

Forty minutes and one glass of wine to sort all 904 (plus or minus who knows how many) pieces…

In bed by 12:15? Not bad compared to most of this week…definitely feeling it this morning though. Tonight I can start ironing to fabric. Based on the last quilt, that took about 12 hours. Yikes. OK…I need to go faster. I can do 3 or 4 hours tonight. I know we will want to do some fun stuff tomorrow at some point…but if I can get 3 or 4 hours in tomorrow and finish up on Sunday (shee-it, when are you planning on grading shit, Nida? SHHHHHH. Quiet. I’ll figure it out. I have a plan. Maybe.). Need to be focused. Like a fucking laser.

Calli asking for some kind of attention. I think she’s got another UTI…sigh. Poor old lady. Her girl parts are kinda freaky for UTIs.

Hopefully she’ll be going to the vet today.

OK, so I have a plan…I am so SO looking forward to being done with school so I can sit somewhere and relax with my sketchbook without feeling like I’m supposed to be doing 17 other things. I don’t know when that will happen, but hopefully soon.

*Iron & Wine, Faded from the Winter