Art Before Chaos…

It’s funny. I finished grades around midnight Friday, and then I resolved to do no work all weekend. I mostly held to that, except I had to do a minor bit of prep and send the team email, but otherwise, I refused to sit down and grade last night. Then sometime around 1 AM (yes, I was still awake dammit) I realized the kids would need one of their turned-in assignments in order to get ready for next-week’s test. Dammit. That means it needs to be graded ASAP. So I’m back in school panic mode. Which truly sucks.

The pro is that I moved a good chunk of stuff back into the studio in the last few days and I did get a bit of art stuff done. I made it to two art openings yesterday as well.

But really, I wanted to focus on getting some bindings on so I could move on to the next project, especially after getting another rejection yesterday. Giant sigh. It’s OK. That piece can go somewhere else.

Here’s the first of the two hearts (still traveling in backwards order apparently). I needed a red fabric for this one that didn’t zap too much with the blue, so that’s what made me move half my studio…just to get to the reds.

It worked, because before that, all I had done was this…

Some of the bookshelf put away, the drawers below shoved in (one of them is empty…I don’t even know how that’s possible).

But with moving reds, I had to move all this stuff in…

Because the red drawer goes right next to it. So I did. Yes. All that fabric needs to be put away, except I’m using it at the moment. These are all the fabrics from making the small quilts, and I try to use those fabrics for the bindings when I can. The red…the red, I couldn’t. It was too much.

But for this little guy…

Although that’s not the green of his eyes, it came from the pile I used on one of the other quilts. I finally started going in order with Cat 1. I thought it would be strange to finish Cat 7 before Cat 1.

So this is Cat 2…

Easy enough to pull that gray for the binding. I don’t always have enough to do that, but this one I did. She will be straighter and flatter when I finish the hand sewing.

You can see my model hogging the chair. Every time I sat down to sew again, she’d have to shift around, and sometimes she’d leave, and one time she full-on attacked me.

Such a sweet beast.

Cat 3…

Another gray binding. Calm like the kitty.

Cat 4…

Not so calm. I had three choices for the binding, but I liked the randomness of this one.

So that’s five more bound and ready for hand-sewing. I only finished the one last week, so I have six total. Plus three more cats to bind tonight, if I get to it.

I had other stuff to write about, but my coteacher just texted me that they added 6 kids to my classes, starting today, and I’m doing a lab…and there’s no way I’m prepped for 6 new kids, so I’m kamikazing out of here to school. Pissed off. Because how hard is it to tell us that 6 kids are transferring from the newcomers’ classes to ours? Seriously? I just quickly tossed all of them on Google Classroom. They can learn how to use a virtual microscope before I let them on the real thing.

Welcome to chaos…the teacher world.

Taking Care of Myself…

I would love to report numerous small quilts bound and ready for hand-stitching, since I know Mad Max: Fury Road arrives from Netflix today, but no such luck. I went to a big contemporary art show last night, just a quick runaround to look at mostly big brightly colored crap with some bits and pieces of nice. A group I’m in has a booth there. I could have been in it, but I don’t work particularly small and there were 11 artists there, so not much space…and even then, very expensive.

Then I came home and graded. I had one period of a very nasty assignment. Well, I thought it was a perfectly reasonable assignment, but apparently their brains left the building and they forgot that living things are made of cells and things inside cells must by definition be smaller than cells or they won’t fit. So I spent the last 24 hours bleeding red pen all over these papers, hoping they would get it. Might be a waste of time. It’s been a rough week for our team. Not a lot of work completion. Frustration with trying to get kids to turn in makeup work. Wondering why the parents are so checked out. Dear Politicians: You can’t have any accountability for teachers until you get parents to buy in and be a part of the team. There’s no way I can make a kid give a shit when the parents don’t. Occasionally I’ll get one that rises above it, and I hope more of that happens in high school and college as their brains mature, but 12-year-olds? Not happening. Stop threatening me with accountability if you’ve never been a teacher. You don’t have a clue what you’re talking about. This is not a job where if I work harder, magic happens and kids produce. Some kids are just checked out. I can work my butt off trying to get them to check in, but sometimes it just won’t work.

So my goal this weekend is not to look at school stuff for as many minutes as possible. I have two art openings tomorrow and some relaxation time scheduled for tonight. I need to do some cleanup in here too, try to move more stuff from the boychild’s room. If I can get the bookshelf restocked with whatever was on it, then I can move the larger furniture/storage pieces out of there. The chaos is bugging me.

I also want to get more of the small quilts done and maybe start tracing Wonder Under on Bathtub 5. Here was the original drawing back in April…

You can see the owl in the top right is like the one I just finished. I added stuff below and in the top right. I also had to add some lines to break up the edge of the bathtub, so I wouldn’t have to find a piece of fabric big enough to go all the way around the bottom, like I did last time. Big white and off-white pieces of fabric for bathtubs…the last one had more bathtub showing. This one doesn’t have much. Not as much water showing either. But these two huge rugs on the side. Gotta wonder what I was thinking.

That’s the key though. When I draw, I’m not thinking about the production or how much of a pain it will be. I’m just drawing.

This is one of those days when I want to pretend that I am not a teacher at all, that I don’t have a frustrating week of microscopes ahead of me (actually, my co-teacher gave me an idea about how to manage the frustration and I’m totally going to use it, because otherwise, some kids will take 5 days to look at a newsprint e under the scope. And that’s just wrong.). I’m going to act like the end of the trimester doesn’t even exist. I’m going to turn off the teacher part and let the artist part just ramble. If I can.

That’s the other part that drives me nuts…when people complain that teachers don’t care about kids and that’s why we won’t (insert crazy-ass comment here about spending more hours than we already do unpaid or something about how THEIR husband doesn’t get paid overtime, which is nuts, because I don’t even get paid what their husband does and I work monster hours at this job). I care way too much about my kids. Even the assholes. And yes, there are assholes. And I tell myself repeatedly that a 12-year-old does not become an asshole without parental (or guardian) involvement or environmental shit, that they are still redeemable, that the parents aren’t doing their jobs. I care even about the assholes. And I spend hours calling home and putting together makeup work and getting in their faces or encouraging them or whatever it takes to get them to stop sitting there and actually DO something. I don’t care? My ass. Fuck you. My job is not a corporate job. I’ve had one of those. I know what that looks like. This job sucks it out of you. And if you let them, they will take even more time. I had about 20 student emails last night, panicked. I had a parent yesterday blaming me for her son’s computer not working, demanding that I fix it, or excuse her son from the assignment they left until the last minute. I just walked away from all of it. I answered one email. I ignored the rest. Most of them didn’t need anything anyway.

Yeah. Today. Going to gym. Straightening things. Putting stuff away. Playing with fabric. Hanging out. Not school. I have to be able to go back on Monday and be in a better mood about it. I just have to. I have to take care of myself…

Numbering Around the Cat Butt…

So first of all, I finished one of the little quilts. This is Owl 2.0, actually the 18th bird I’ve made.

Nov 6 15 003 small

She (he?) is 17″ wide x 10 1/2″ high ($235). These are for sale…would make great holiday presents. They have a sleeve on the back and I deliver them with a dowel with eyebolts for hanging. Shipping costs are included in the price, unless we’re going abroad, in which case, we may have to negotiate.

For some reason, I seem to be completing them in backwards order, which only matters to me because I list them in order of completion, and when it comes to the cats, they’re numbered in opposite order from what I seem to be doing. I probably could fix that though. Maybe. The owl has quite a few pieces in it, so besides Cat 6 (the one with the eyeballs), most of the other small quilts will cost less than Owl. I’ll post them as I finish them…and then put them up on my Recent Work page…or I’ll continue to debate having a page titled Small Work for Sale. Because almost all of my work is for sale…but I guess most of it is not small and relatively affordable.

Anyway, so that was my achievement for yesterday…except for this one. Do you know how hard it is to number a drawing when the cat is sitting on it? And I moved her about five times, then started sliding the drawing around with her on it until she got a clue and moved her furry butt.

I’m actually quite pleased, because it only has 773 pieces in it, and that’s not so bad.

So I just went rock climbing in the boychild’s room (no, I haven’t moved everything back in here yet…I’m trying to go through it and I was too tired to do any of it last night) because I wanted to find the drawing for Bathtub 2 to see how many pieces IT had, because I know how long it took to make (the cats love watching me kamikaze through his room, because apparently everything I really need is on the bed, which means holding onto the dresser to maneuver around the chair and then walking on the back of the bed after climbing up onto it). Well damn. I thought it was 800-some pieces, but it wasn’t. It was only 568 pieces and took about 64 hours. So. Hmn. I think I need a database of my quilts that includes number of pieces and hours to completion and size, and then maybe I can come up with a formula. Ventura was 891 pieces and took 89 hours. So I think I’m looking at about 75 hours total. Before the end of January. But really, earlier than that, because there’s another one I want to get done by the end of February, and it doesn’t even exist yet.

Yeah. There’s some crazy in there. I still need to finish all these little quilts; they each have about 2 hours left in them, maybe. So that’s about 17 hours right there. That’s a lot more than I thought. Sigh. OK. Hunker down. Figure it out. Grades are due. Life doesn’t stop because you feel like you’re hurtling through the days. You just have to take deep breaths and keep working. You can do it. It’s all possible.

Whether It Makes Sense or Not…

Interesting thing happened yesterday. I did grade like a banshee and I made risotto from scratch (high five! by myself! without the girlchild to do all the adding of liquid and stirring!)…in fact I did both of those at the same time for a while (see comments about risotto stirring), but it was taking way too long. And I went through all the books that were in the bookshelf I had to move out with the hot-water heater death, putting away what I wanted to keep and piling up the rejects. There weren’t many because I went through it about 10 years ago and I haven’t bought a lot of books in the last 10 years. Then I moved all those books into the bookshelf. Does the boychild’s room look better yet? Fuck no. And now I can’t quite remember how all the furniture/storage shit fits in that space, so I’m kinda freaking out. I think the stuff I need to go through next is what’s on his bed, and I can’t actually get to it. Minor issue.

So I did pick up the car, give blood for my pre-MRI evaluation, so they know they can inject me full of stuff again without hurting me, and then enlarged the drawing I had decided to do next, one of the Bathtub series…number 5 in fact. I wonder how it feels to be one of the Bathtub rejects. Like I jumped numbers 3 and 4 and went to 5. Are they butthurt? Are they sad? Do they know I might come back and do them? Actually, I will never do 3, because it was a superfast drawing and kinda sloppy, and 5 is a redraw of the idea, so I don’t need to do 3. And I picked 5 over 4 because 4 is really depressing and I like 5 better moodwise. Don’t even ask about 1. It’s currently headless. I did enlarge it, but it needs work.

After all the grading and cooking was done, I only had about an hour and a half til bedtime, so I could have come in here and put binding on at least one, maybe two of the small quilts, but I’m tired of them. They don’t ring my bell. Whatever that means.

So I went back out to the living room and starting cutting the copies and taping them together…

I enlarged the original drawing 250% on 11 x 17 paper. Then I try to fit them together. I hate copiers because it’s never exact enlargement. There’s distortion. But this is the cheapest way to do this…less than $5 for this one. And it works most of the time.

The reason I had held off on this one before is because it didn’t feel finished. It was unbalanced. This top left corner was too empty for one. So I gave it a bird. Birds show up pretty often in my drawings.

I actually penciled him in first because I wasn’t sure how to fit him in the space. I was pretty close the first time. I just didn’t want to fuck it up.

Once I enlarged a drawing and wanted to add a head to the figure in the drawing…it just had the bottom part with the chin and lower lip. I drew the whole new head…and then cut it off. Taped a new piece of paper on there and did it again. Got it right the second time. I really don’t think of my drawings as precious pieces of art…they’re a means to an end.

The other part that bugged me was the bottom. I thought about just cutting it off under the bathtub, but it felt really unbalanced to me. I stared at it for quite a while.

And then I drew some books and embroidery stuff…

Which made sense to me when I looked at the rest of what was on there. So I did the original drawing in April of this year (fast turnaround!), more drawing last night, and now I’m ready to number and trace.

But the most interesting part was how I FELT while I was drawing and afterwards. Wow. Way better than putting a binding on a small quilt that I’m making to sell hopefully, but I really don’t care about. I realized that since the beginning of October, I’ve been working on stuff I don’t really care about, and it’s silly. I mean, I need to do it for financial reasons, but I really would rather mentally be making the art I care about, these big beastly many-numbered pieces that kick my butt while I’m making them, but allow my brain a level of peace. Of balance.

So speaking of balance, I still need to finish the little beasts, and grades for first trimester are due Tuesday, so balance is the name of the game, but I think I’m officially starting the next big quilt. Like as of yesterday. Whether it makes sense or not.

Thunderstorms and Nucleotides

I think I spent most of the night with a terrified Golden Retriever on my feet, hiding her head under a Justin Bieber blanket. Calli doesn’t like thunderstorms, and we had a big one last night, rattling the windows and shaking the house. Please don’t ask me why we have a Bieber blanket. I can’t explain it. There was lots of rain too, which is good, because we always need it. It did make it hard to grade efficiently though, and since my goal is to grade one full assignment a day until grades are turned in, I didn’t get much done while calming a giant dog who wanted to alternately climb into my lap and dig a hole under the couch. Or through it at times.

I did eventually make it in here, the studio, though. It was late and honestly maybe I should have gone to bed. I hate all those articles about how lack of sleep fucks you over every step of the way, but not sleeping is what gives me time to make my art, which makes me mentally a much more stable person. There needs to be an equation for that…some way to show that the balance is in the positive direction, even though it seems illogical. Of course, last night I was trying to figure out if it made more sense to make the God gene (the gene or string of genes that makes someone more likely to believe in a god or gods than us flaming atheists) the dominant trait or a mutation. And yes, I know the God gene is controversial and unproven, but it’s really hard to look around the world and see all the people for whom religion is such a significant part of how they live their lives and try to figure out what in their brains makes that a survival trait or something they need, when my brain is so opposite of that. There has to be a brain part that handles that, a brain part that’s created by a string of nucleotides, and there are variations in the string so you get a range of behaviors related to religion from crazy cultist (which might be a whole ‘nother string of nucleotides…and then there’s environmental factors) to an atheist like me who has never believed and never will, who just can’t see the sense in it at all.

I mean it all comes down to the nucleotides. And the environment in which they exist.

Anyway, you can see how my brain wallows in scientific shit on a regular basis, right? Luckily I know how to Google shit (unlike my students apparently) so I can read about theories and studies and crazy shit instead of sleeping, right? I know. Whatever. There was a lot of shit in the last two sentences.

So anyway, it’s going to take me days to get through all of these at this rate. Here’s the 2nd heart in hands (going backwards now)…

Pinned, ready for handsewing. It’s a dark dark blue, not black. It was actually hard to find something that worked well with this color, which is not a good sign, because half the quilts in there have that color background. Sigh. It’s always so hard to believe that I have all this fabric and still have a hard time picking matching stuff sometimes.

Eight more to go. Plus all the handsewing. I was stuck at school for hours yesterday with detention and tutorial, and two parents showed up, so impromptu parent meetings, and then I had to go to the school board meeting as a rep, because the district doesn’t want to pay us for our work…so today, I’m outta there as soon as I can be, I swear, although I have to get a blood test, pick up the fixed car, copy stuff, and I can’t even remember what else. All the stuff I didn’t do yesterday, right? If I can get more of today’s assignment graded at school, then maybe I can get more quilting done at home tonight. I can always hope. (I say that a lot.)

I think my nucleotides are scrambled.

Stop Making Art and Go to Bed…

Things might be getting under control. Knock on wood. Presumably there’s a dryer arriving soonish, within a matter of days. I have no idea when, though, which should be interesting, because I’m rarely home for deliveries of anything, let alone large appliances that need installation. The car is fixable and should be done today or tomorrow; meanwhile, the kids’ car is done and bouncing around with me in it (needs new shocks, so not bouncing well or happily). I might actually catch up with grading sometime soon, although then I will be promptly behind again, because that’s how it works. One of my coworkers is already done and I might need to kill her. I’m obviously doing it wrong. It rained last night, but I managed to get the dog walk in before it did…it was a nice walk; that monster hill no longer kicks my ass. School does, though, and it’s really because it seems like this year’s batch of kids doesn’t understand turning work in, and their parents don’t care. So some days are significantly frustrating, because work completion means you can’t just stare at a computer screen and wait for magic. You have to go DO it. It’s funny though. We used to have kids take notes from powerpoints and then maybe make or draw something or fill something out, but now we tell them they have to go create their own meaning. You figure it out. I’ve given you guidelines…now go do work. And they don’t. They beg for notetaking because they don’t have to think. All they have to do is copy from the board. So it’s torture for all of us. I haven’t given up yet though. It’s only first trimester.

I planned to finish grading one assignment last night, and it was so long and drawn out, the answers so tortured themselves that I felt like crawling under the couch to escape them. I finished though and then came in here to do whatever I was gonna do. Oh yeah, finish quilting the owl.

All I had to do was the background, so it didn’t take long.

The book on Pandas…it’s the right size for the student lists I use to record grades when I’m grading online. It’s in here because I was grading on the iPad in here on Saturday while I watched something (old Dr Who?) on the computer. I was tired of sitting on the couch. Needed a new vista. That’s when I heard the neighbors’ realtor tell someone they could trim my trees. Hence a flurry of emails. The fuck you can. My trees.

It wasn’t late enough then to go to bed, so I decided to try to at least cut out the binding. And then that turned into sewing it on and making a sleeve and pinning it all down.

All that’s left is the hand-sewing. Almost 1 down, 9 to go. Picking the bindings is difficult…I don’t always have enough of whatever fabrics I used in the quilt to bind it as well, so then I have to find something new. Plus they’re tiny little fuckers. I cut this one a little TOO tiny. So I’ll adjust for next time.

But now, I really need to write a study guide before I leave for school (ugh). I have a board meeting after work where the reps all show up in red and look angry that the school board disrespects our work so much that they can’t offer us more. It means being at work for over 10 hours. Not looking forward to it. I’m already tired. That’s my fault, of course, because I don’t know when to stop making art and go to bed.

Stop the Breaking…

I got in the car on Saturday after finishing that post, ready to run errands and buy a dryer. Ms. Efficient, totally handling everything…completely laughed off the repairman’s death sentence on my Maytag. Yeah. I guessed. Because you know. The universe. Whatever. My mantra for the year. What-the-fuck-ever.

I got in the car. And it wouldn’t start.

So I sat there for a minute, because it had done this twice before this week, but the kids’ car is already in the shop, so I don’t have a backup. I was waiting to see if it happened again (and fatally, because the car eventually started the last two times with some tinkering…and it’s not the battery, and my car guy hates it when I bring in the car for nonreproducible problems) and for the Honda to come back.

I tinkered like the last two times, trying my solution and my ex’s solution (it died in front of his house earlier this week). Nope. I call him, hoping he did something I don’t remember. I try it and it doesn’t start. And I guess that was the straw…the one with the camel, you know? I started crying. But my brain’s already a step ahead, trying to figure out the car situation at my parents’, realizing they must have a car there, and I need to go over there to get their Consumer Reports anyway, so I bum a ride over there, grab the book, steal my dad’s car (I did call first but they didn’t answer). Run my errands. Come home and buy a dryer online. Do a ton of grading work, input grades (which is why I have 20 panicked student emails this morning), and then go off to watch not-horror movies.

Mischief managed. Hey, I’m not saying I was calm and collected all day. I was pretty irritated at the universe. I cried quite boisterously for a while. Then yesterday I got the damn thing towed to the fixer guy and left it there. This morning I’ll drive over and give him the run down and the keys. I still have dad’s car. If he needs it, he can come steal it back. Maybe it’ll be something easy, instead of fatal error (that’s what the repair guy called my dryer issue).

I also got everything back in the closet with the hot-water heater, cleaning out years of junk in there. Then I cleaned the cupboards above the washer and dryer, making room for all the crap that’s been stored on the washer for way too long. Then I installed a plastic-bag holder and hooks for the dog’s swimming towels (this swimming habit of hers is killing me). Finally, because all the pantry stuff had been stored in the kids’ bathroom, I went in there and cleaned it. It’s freakin’ spotless (well, don’t look too closely at the tub…I was getting tired). Now I just need to put the studio back together with the same zeal.

I graded for a little bit more last night, until I was sick of it…and came in here and quilted the second heart…well, first I had to negotiate chair space with Kitten.

She allowed as I might have her claws in my butt. Then I quilted it…

And started the owl, before realizing that the clocks had in fact changed already and that was real time.

Dammit. So it’s outlined, but not quilted yet. Tonight. And then I can start trimming and binding…not my favorite part, but the almost-done part. So far, the simplest one has taken 27 minutes to quilt and the most complicated one has taken 61 minutes.

Then before I went to bed, I found all the drawings I’d enlarged so far. There was one I’d forgotten about, so I think it’s next. Maybe. I’m still debating. There’s the one the owl above comes from, but it really needs more on the bottom. I guess I could enlarge it and then decide. Because last night, I thought the decision was made, and this morning, that other drawing is still talking to me. Guess I should listen.

Got a busy day. Hopefully nothing else breaks or stops working or gives up on me completely.

Zentangle the Dryer

So apparently I’m shopping for a new dryer this weekend. This is when I wish I had installed the drying tree closer to the washing machine, instead of down by the garage. If I wash my clothes before I go to my parents for dinner tomorrow night, maybe they’ll let me dry them? Who knows. It was over 10 years old. I guess that’s the going lifespan. The fridge will be next. It’s the same age as the dryer. It actually does need a new seal. I should’ve asked the guy about that. Dammit. Multitasking.

Dear house. Please don’t. I can’t handle any more.

So I graded for a million hours with the cats last night. And then I came in here and quilted with the cats. They follow me wherever I go, especially at night. Kitten loves when I quilt, because she can nestle in between my butt and the back of the chair (only slightly uncomfortable for me, you know) and she stays nice and warm.

I quilted Cat 6, the crazy one…

She’s actually pretty complicated for such a small quilt…so it took an hour to do that.

Then I did the simpler of the two hearts in hands.

It only took about 30 minutes. The last two will take somewhere in between those two I guess.

I’m going to finish writing this and go buy cat food and a dryer and see if the next big drawing has been enlarged. I can’t think about all the money stuff and broken appliances any more. I can’t even think about grades, and I NEED to think about those. I can’t tell you how frustrating it is to try to schedule payments for college and property taxes and credit card bills and then have this kind of stuff slam into you.

Kitten has it right. She just found a warm bath of sunny stuff and is lying in it, perfectly happy. I need to find my warm sunny equivalent. Like now.

We had a pumpkin carving contest at school…the kids voted on them yesterday. I carved it the afternoon before, after school, in 30 minutes. It’s a rebus.

Except when I showed my ex, he thought the DNA was celtic spoons. I heart celtic spoons.

I mean I do, they’re very cool and all, but no. That’s not what I carved. So maybe the kids won’t get it.

OK. Off to chores and headaches and hopefully solving some problems so next week can be less of a hump through the days. I know some of my reaction to all this is because I’m overwhelmed, and some is because of perimenopausal hormones. And some is just because once you’ve been seriously depressed for a long period of time, when it feels like things are very difficult, then the brain just slips back into those bad behaviors. In the old days, I’d go fabric shopping on a day like today, but I know what my bills look like this month and I can’t afford it. Maybe I’ll zentangle the dryer when it shows up. Sharpie should hold for a while on it, right? Maybe not. I have plenty of Sharpies though.

Just About Drawing…

Adjustments. I’m constantly making adjustments. To plans, goals, routines, lesson plans, curriculum. Last night, I made it to an art opening and Costco (kind of an incongruous pairing, but it made sense at the time), then came home and made dinner and ate it, and then that was it. And I was sitting on the couch, trying to figure out why I was SOOOO tired, why I was almost falling asleep. You know, it really doesn’t matter why. I needed to sleep. But I felt bad going to bed early without getting anything ELSE done. I mean, I only ran a huge gel electrophoresis lab all day with 150 kids and then sorta cleaned up after school and carved a pumpkin for the school contest and then came home and dealt with animals and then drove halfway across town for an opening and then traipsed through Costco, hauling 42-pound bags of cat litter in and out of the car and then into the garage. And then standing to cook from scratch mostly cuz I’m kinda crazy that way, so much standing and walking. I think maybe I earned that tired.

So I made another cup of tea (those don’t keep me awake, amusingly enough. I think my blood might be caffeinated.) and took my sketchbook (and the dog and one cat) to bed. Now really, I could have just gone to bed and that would have been OK. I was certainly tired enough. But I drew instead. And then slept.

Goofiest totem pole ever. Heart in pieces. Lotsa details…the stuff I love. This is the medium-sized sketchbook, about 9×12″? I usually enlarge 250%, so it wouldn’t be huge if I made it into a quilt. There were a couple other drawings in the book that would make good smaller quilts. But I really want to do a bigger one next. It took about 30 minutes to draw that. And no, I didn’t finish quilting the little quilts, and I probably won’t finish them until maybe Monday, and then they still need binding and sleeves. So a week later than I planned. Oh well.

Really, this was just about drawing. Because I just wanted to. And then I put the sketchbook down on the floor, took my last sip of tea, and fell soundly asleep. Probably a good thing, because today is Halloween at school, and that takes a whole ‘nother level of patience. An extra hour of sleep will probably come in useful. A coupla shots probably would too, but that’s apparently not allowed.

Losing Myself in Art…

I did this DNA extraction lab with my students yesterday and it barely worked. I couldn’t figure out what I was doing wrong. I assumed it was me, that I was fucking it up somehow, water too cold or hot, chemicals in wrong order, something. It wasn’t until the end of the day and an email to the people who supplied the kits that we tracked the problem down…a new supplier of wheat germ that didn’t break up easily, so the DNA wasn’t being released in those nice long snotty clumps…it was just little tiny blobs. Frustrating to say the least, but my co-teacher has the benefit of my experience now (and maybe the supplier will make some notes for future users). Someone asked why I didn’t test the lab out the day before, but we’ve done this lab for quite a few years, albeit usually with a lot of help, and it’s always worked. I had no reason to doubt it. And honestly, here’s the kicker, I didn’t fucking have time to test it the night before. My prep is usually trashed by stupid stuff, I stay late some days but often have meetings or appointments (chiropractor on Monday). I could get up earlier and go in or spend hours on the weekends, but then I get crankier and crankier, because my body really doesn’t fall asleep before 12:30 and that’s on a good night, and I would like to stay away from school on the weekends. Last night I stayed and made sure I mostly knew how to do today’s lab, because I couldn’t remember how to use the micropipettes, but I didn’t go through the whole electrophoresis process. And I don’t have a prep before I teach any more, so I won’t have a chance probably to do that today either. Maybe I can.

Meanwhile, the dryer stopped working. It had to dry all those towels from the water heater experience, and it just died? I’m not sure what the issue is. Checked the circuit breaker, found the book on it, doesn’t seem to be something I can fix. But it’s 10 1/2 years old. Average life span of a dryer is 10-13 years. Life has gotten a bit frustrating in the last week and I’m not handling it well. I think I was already at my stress limit and this stuff is just over the top. I’m also trying to clean up post water heater, go through stuff, throw some out, recycle some, clean up and organize the rest. It’s overwhelming as well. I made it through one pile of damp papers last night. Amusing what some of it was. Don’t know why I couldn’t find time before to toss it. It’s gone now. But some of it was important. Now that it’s dried out, I can find its home.

I know why I couldn’t toss stuff before. I make art. In the moments when the rest of the world is cleaning house and straightening up and organizing and tossing stuff, I sit down at my sewing machine and make. And there’s no one else here to pick up the slack, to straighten that pile up or deal with this issue or that mess, so it just becomes a task I can’t handle. I’d like to say I’m going to spend some time this weekend…or even tonight…dealing with this, and maybe I will, but grades are also due in about a week and a half. And they were totally sidelined by all this water damage etc.

Whatever. Do what you can. Keep making. Because I paid the second kid’s college payment last night, and I still need $8100. More than half of it by March 1. I know where $1500 of it is coming from…and there’s another $100 I know will come in. $6500. Yikes. Dear colleges…

So that was last night. It only made sense to sit down at the machine and lose myself in some quilting…here’s the cat that resembles a fox…

Two things: first, I didn’t quilt in the gap in the middle because I forgot. I did go back and do it later when I realized…and I realized because the second cat is the same cat, so it reminded me. Second, I was aiming for a cat we used to have, Rusty. He came to us because a friend’s daughter brought him home from the store…a woman out front had free kittens. And then their landlord said no. He was a coyote dinner at some point, because my ex was determined that cats should be able to roam free. Rusty was the first one we lost. When Kiwi went, I closed the doors and put my foot down. Rusty was probably orangier than that, but hey, it’s art.

Then I decided I wanted a really brightly colored cat, so I used the same drawing…the color under the machine is apparently really hard for the camera to handle…

And I sewed this one last night as well.

It’s cute…kind of a counterpoint to the quiet cats I finished earlier.

So there’s one cat left, the really weird one with the eyeballs. Then there’s two hearts in hands and the owl. Those are all more complicated, so they’ll take longer. The second one, Cat 7, has taken about 2 1/2 hours so far to make. Still need to trim, bind, put a sleeve on, and maybe give her some whiskers. We’ll see how long that takes. These two are almost the smallest…Cat 1 is smaller.

So even just writing about sewing the cats and the thought process makes my brain in a better place. It pulls up out of the muck and handles life. So I guess that’s why I do that art stuff more than the cleaning stuff. Like I didn’t already know that. The way my brain works, it needs the art stuff to balance everything else out.