Outlined

So the plus is that all the outlining is done. The minus is that I want to finish the fucker and I have to go to school today. I think that is the core problem with my entire life (not really), that I’m always interrupting my art with that silly job thing that pays the bills (and honestly, gets me out of the house and dealing with people, which I really don’t like at the moment, because otherwise I’d be a giant hermit who only comes out for groceries once a week and snarls at everyone when she does come out…oh shit, I think I already do that).

Fucking Sigh.

Anyway, I quilted for another 3 1/2 hours yesterday, not starting until late again (maybe I should just dispose of that notion that I get any work done in the mornings at all, because I don’t) and only stopped because I knew how early I’d have to be up this lovely fucking morning (can you tell how thrilled I am by the prospect of 7 hours of professional development?). And then realized that I wasn’t tired yet, that my brain was speeding along, all excited that the quilting is almost done (Is It? Is It Really? Or do I have hours of filling in the background to go. C’mon brain. Figure it out.), so I didn’t go right to bed, which is what I should have done, because I’m “awake” now and my brain is significantly impaired by the lack of sleep I got anyway, despite stopping early.

I was quilting the upper torso, head, a giant eyeball, a dog, and a chastising thought bubble. In fact, I think I’m going to make a small quilt just of that thought bubble and call it Chastising Thought Bubble. It would also make a good band name.

I had to do a lot of careful stitching through this section…I’m over 12 hours in at this point, but remember, I guessed 20. I think that’s an overestimate at this point, but I could be wrong. That’s the heart.

It doesn’t really matter. Time is time. It gets used up one way or another. I was looking forward to the detail of the line stitching on the face. It always brings the face to life. I don’t always use fabrics with a lot of contrast on bodies, especially the face, because I expect the line to be a major part of the image. So here’s the face before stitching…

And during stitching. I went really slow with the eyes because of the details. Even the whites of the eyes are filling up with tears.

This quilt is all about the sad. The lost. The losing. The changes. A friend of a friend posted a link to an article about menopause, a humorous article about the blood and the irritability and the facial hair and all those things that come with being a woman approaching her 50s, and her husband posted a beautiful remark, and I thought, “Wow. That’s what it should have been like. That’s what you’re missing. That’s what you didn’t have. Support. Unconditional love.” And all that’s in there too. This notion of what a woman is and should be, this crap from the 50s about the perfect housewife providing for her man in this way is still an expectation in the backs of many men’s heads, even as they say all the appropriately modern things about women being equals. I read elsewhere about “nice guy misogynists”…guys who are generally nice, but harbor these feelings deep down about women cooking and cleaning and always perky and happy and men needing things done for them after a hard day at work (think Mad Men, which I can’t watch at all). All that’s in there. Plus a broken heart and a lost something. Just plain lost.

There’s her face with the stitching. See the difference?

There isn’t actually a lot of background on this quilt…the image does a good job of filling the fabric, but today’s activities don’t leave much room for quilting, so maybe that will have to be Thursday. The schedule adjusts yet again.

There are a lot of tears on this quilt…both in fabric and real-live ones that fell while I was working on it. Drawing it, tracing it, cutting it out, ironing it to fabric…I cried. I cried when I trimmed the fabric, when I ironed it together, when I stitched it down, and when I quilted it. I will probably cry while I bind it too.

When I stopped quilting to go to sleep, my brain did not want to comply. It often just fucking ignores me, which is greatly annoying, but what are you going to do? No idea. Let me know if you figure it out. So I only had the sleeve left to stitch on the Mammogram quilt. So I did that…

Not an official picture, but it’s officially done as of August 6 at about 1:30 AM. Fuck. Not enough sleep, people. Not enough sleep.

Rethinking…

Triggers: places where I have no definitive purpose. I had to limp the car in to the car guy, stopping every 3-4 blocks to get it to stop overheating, girlchild following me, turning the engine off at every signal. She had an early appointment and was tired and cranky, so she didn’t want to go back home. She needed makeup for her senior photo today, and though I had tried getting it last month when I was in a store I visit approximately once every 13.5 months, she didn’t answer the text in time, so of course it was my fault she didn’t think of it until 9 PM last night. So she argued I could drop her at her appointment, go to the mall (aaargh, shoot me now), buy it, and come back in time to pick her up.

Sigh. I hadn’t eaten. I thought I was going back home. But I pick my arguments these days, and sometimes it’s just easier to go along with her.

So to the mall I went. And realized Walmart and Target are here, so I might as well get school supplies off my list (your friendly neighborhood public school teacher just spent $150 of her own money on your kids…one woman thanked me for my service when she asked why I was buying so many folders.). Because that’s not depressing. Half the mall stores aren’t even open until 10 though, so I’m typing this on my phone in Panera (better than Cold Stone for breakfast), where Wyatt cheerily and spacily took my order (oh my lord, you dear sweet boy…who hired you?). But I still have 25 minutes until Macys fucking opens and the muzak and early morning mall people are driving me nuts. And I just realized the kid who told me I could keep the plate that he did his cell model on must have stolen it from Panera. Ok, probably not. I don’t want to accuse someone of stealing just because it looks exactly like this plate in front of me that had over 500 calories on it that I will have to burn off later.

And you know what? The mall, by myself, is a fucking trigger. It makes me sad. It makes me depressed. Sitting around and watching mall people in the mall doing mall things, all being mall-like, I shouldn’t be there. If I go in knowing exactly what I need, like a target strike, and get the fuck back out quickly? I’m fine. Or with other people, I’m OK. Mostly. Depending on the purpose and the people. But this really fucked my mood for the day. I was doing OK yesterday. Not great. Just OK. Bearable. Not drowning in anything. Today. Today is different. Tomorrow is another day. Tomorrow does not include the mall.

At comic book club, we decided we didn’t like the book…Pretty Deadly, Vol 1. The art was nice, but the story was just not present. Or coherent. Sigh.

Or should that be comic-book book club. Or comic book² club. No one knows.

I did quilt a lot yesterday. I got everything done up to the breasts. I only did about 4 hours though. I wanted at least 5, but when I got home, girlchild wanted help picking her photo outfit, which turned into “what’s my favorite color”…

(yes, that’s a snake on her head and no, that’s not what she wore for pictures, although I did double dare her), and I needed to draw something for GISHWHES, and my SIL called and I talked to my brother, because he remembers “write me a note telling me WHY,” from middle school, and then it was really late and I knew I had to get up early to deal with the car. And tomorrow is a total loss (first professional development of the year, expect nothing and you will only be surprised by whatever it is, although the over-2-hour long movie presentation planned for 1-3 PM will make me sleep…is he fucking NUTS?). And now it’s after 4 PM and I still haven’t started quilting today. FUCK.

My scheduling has deteriorated into a WTF moment. I am losing it. Deep breaths. I achieve small things each day; some days the achievements are smaller than others. They are still achievements.

I think I need to go crawl into a ball shape and put a pillow over my head, and then maybe my eye will stop twitching and faeries will come and organize the hoard, plus make a reasonable schedule of all the tasks that need to be completed before August 31, and if I’m lucky, they’ll suss out my personal life as well so I can feel more human and less like everyone’s mom. EVERYONE’S mom. Yours too. Or a sad ball of snot. That’s not your mom.

So quilting…

And more…

And even more…

Not much to say, except wow. There’s a lot of quilting on this sucker.

Learning to think differently about things is not the same as positive thinking. When people tell me to be more positive, I think actually it is more useful to me to have a neutral response to things that might normally cause me to stress excessively. For example, when my credit card number was stolen, in the past, I would have freaked out and stressed and verbalized all that. Instead, I had a very neutral, calm response. Shit happens. Go through steps 1-3 and shit will go away. And I did that. And it did. So as more stressful things are popping up this week with school coming closer for me and the kids, and the thought of sending boychild off with all the stuff that goes along with that, I’m better off thinking about major stressors in a neutral way. It’s in my nature to want to be prepared, so I have a couple things in my brain for one thing that’s coming up that is causing some PTSD related to authority figures. There’s a mantra in my head from a recent stressful event…”don’t say anything until they’ve talked. don’t freak out. don’t say anything.” One friend said I wasn’t being true to my self, but I’m not sure that my self is particularly helpful in these situations. Sometimes she just needs to calm down and hear all the words…and all the NOT words, because there seems to be a lot unsaid. I spent the last few years feeling attacked for having the wrong feelings and saying the wrong things, and feeling like no one was listening to what I was saying, even though I was the only one actually communicating. But what I said was never heard. It was never considered. In multiple parts of my life, that is still the case. I feel a need to guard my self more carefully now. She needs more protection than she used to, and it’s possible that communicating what she’s thinking is not in my best interest at the moment. Maybe I just need to hold what she’s thinking carefully in my head instead of putting it out there. For now. I’d love to be able to trust someone enough to not feel that way, but I don’t.

“If we decide to think positively, that may be useful, but it is not meditation. It is just more thinking. We can as easily become a prisoner of so-called positive thinking as of negative thinking. It too can be confining, fragmented, inaccurate, illusory, self-serving, and wrong.” Jon Kabat-Zinn

To me, all that overly positive thinking, the cliches and cute little things on Pinterest and Facebook, it’s just a mask. It’s not real. It’s hard for someone like me to read them and think, oh yeah, if I just THOUGHT hard enough (because I don’t think hard?), I would be happy. It’s magic. I’m just not doing it right. No, ma’am. You’ve spent two years being told you weren’t doing it right. I was doing. I was talking. I was thinking. I was watching. There is a change that needs to happen, and it is, slowly, like a snail traversing gravel, but it’s not about cute little maxims. It’s about changing the response. Letting the big bad stuff just roll over into the swamp behind me. Pushing forward through hanging vines and snakes without letting them grab on and trigger that fear, that fight-or-flight response, that adrenaline rush caused by stress. Or even that sad wave, so different than the fear, more of a washing over your head than an electrical charge to the heart.

OK. With all that in my head, it’s probably best that I quilt for the next 10 hours before talking again.

Plans Shmans…

So much for planning to quilt, eh? Sheesh. I don’t think I even started quilting until almost midnight. Oh wait, I lie. I did 17 minutes and 51 seconds before I went to the girlchild’s soccer game. So no, I didn’t get much done. I was tired too. Maybe an hour and 15 minutes. That just sucks. It means I am on a mission today. I am going to quilt my ass off. I would take a picture right here of my ass before and after so you could see it, but I’d probably get in trouble for that. It does help that I have no car today…one needs fixing and is mostly undrivable and the other one has been bogarted by the girlchild.

Here’s some highlights of things that were quilted Sunday…electrified monitors…

Lots of octopus tentacle suckers…

This is what it looks like all piled next to the sewing machine…it’s a really LONG piece, so shoving parts under the machine to quilt in the middle is a pain in the ass.

She’s all done though. Down in the water.

I’m almost done with the water section and I’ve done the two larger things on either side of the main figure. Today I’m going to hopefully get a good chunk of the torso done. Seriously, I’ve got somewhere to be tonight, but otherwise I have no excuses. Well, I do have lots of other things I should be doing as well, but I’m blowing them off. Here I am telling you that I’m blowing them off, so no, no shelves in the living room, no hanging art in there, no starting my lesson plans, no getting that other drawing done or doing anything with the 5 birds that now need to be done or that house thing, no clearing all the living room crap out of my room, and certainly no yardwork.

I am trying to do at least one GISHWHES item a day. Yesterday involved Legos, and despite the boychild adamantly refusing to be part of anything, wow. There he is. On the floor. Aged 18 and playing with Legos. Now he didn’t try to build a lot of novel stuff like the girlchild and I were doing, but whatever.

Again, photos of these challenges will go up when I’m allowed to do that (maybe next week?). And yes, me (age 47), my daughter (17 next weekend), and son (18) were all playing with Legos for at least an hour. There is nothing wrong with that. Calli was remarkably useless. At one point, she tried to eat Hedwig (you can see the small white thing about 6″ from her nose), but then she just gave up and slept.

Soccer was interesting, in that another almost-fight happened. Fun stuff. Girchild was funny, said something about how they’re all almost 18 and this is how they’re behaving? Like a fight will help? Love that kid.

When they go to head the ball, they all close their eyes and leap into the air. The ball often misses all of them completely. Interestingly, the ball hit girlchild’s head and she headed it into the other player’s head. Yes, it all sounds very dangerous. Because it is.

This flew over.

I don’t know why I took a picture of it, but it came out better than the other 72 soccer pictures I took. Sad but true.

OK. My ass. Quilting. Because if we’re still looking at my original plan of finishing tomorrow, I have about 15 hours of quilting to do in two days. HA! Laugh all you like.

Notes on Life Drawing

One of my goals for the summer was to go to a local life-drawing class once a week. I miss the focused time with a sketchbook, plus the looseness of pencil and quick poses, just to get your hand and brain talking to each other again in that free and loose and wiggly way. I’m pretty constrained and tight when I draw…not in a bad way, because my brain is fairly loose about it, but the drawing itself is not very freeform. It’s very focused. And that’s on purpose. So life drawing is different, but useful to keeping the drawing progressing or developing or something.

I went over Spring Break and it was good, and I had done one or two Dr. Sketchy’s Anti-Art School events last year (haven’t been able to make it to one since then), so summer seemed like a good time to try to go regularly.

Basically I suck at that. Mostly that’s because although I have a good time (in the dead silence with my pencil sharpener and only that really weird slightly mentally maybe ill or I don’t know what woman talks to me, and she’s not all there) and it relaxes me and I enjoy it, it’s not always what I want to be doing. The summer is so tight with deadlines, because the school year is a bitch when it comes to making art, and those deadlines make me NOT want to leave the house for any reason at all, especially to do something I already know how to do.

Except it’s not about knowing how to do it. It’s about keeping those two, the brain and the hand, in close contact, communicating with each other.

There is a Saturday morning class I could go to all year long if I wanted to, but if I don’t have something like a hike planned for Saturday morning, then dammit, I want to still be asleep for once…especially during the school year, when waking up gets downright painful. So I go to Thursday morning, which because it is a work day for most of the normal world, is full of old men, a few old women, and some college kids. Lots of old men. Did I mention old men? And some are very nice and even smile and say “How are you?” like they might even care, but most of them are crotchety growling old crankballs.

Things that happen at life drawing:

Once the light fell down on one of the artists, bonking him in the head. That caused a lot of frantic chattering for a while.

There’s no air-conditioning, and they have to place the fan so it doesn’t ruffle paper or overly dry watercolors or acrylics or push pastel dust across a drawing. Difficult to do.

Someone talked about playing music while we drew and one of the old guys (there are lots of them) said it would be OK if we were basket weaving or knitting, but not for figure drawing. The guy then said, what about classical music? And the old man went off on types of music and not wanting to hear all that rabble. UM. First of all, music is OK if we’re working with FIBER? I’m fairly sure there was a sexist thing going on in there, and now every time I look at that old guy (because he’s there every time, probably because his wife kicks him out of the house because she’s annoyed by him) I imagine him yarnbombed. Seriously. Just his eyes are showing and we left his hands free so he can paint or draw without any noise whatsoever but the sputterings from his constrained mouth.

There was once a long discussion of the merits of ten 2-minute poses vs five 3-minute poses.

There are lots of old men. I said this already. A few 20-something’s. A couple of old ladies. A gay man with his spiky-red-haired woman friend. I know he’s gay because he keeps pronouncing all these things about gay men and then reminding everyone around him that he IS one. If a straight man did that, he would be called a homophobe, so I guess this guy is a heterophobe? I don’t really believe that. He won’t shut up though. One woman whom I suspect of having a mental disorder. Hearing aids. There are a lot of hearing aids. I think I’m going to try Dr. AntiSketchy again soon…because it was more fun. Although trying to draw all their costuming is a pain in the ass. I’d really just rather deal with the body without all the clothing crap (as I’m sure is obvious by my own art. Fuck the clothes. They’re a pain and I’m all about what the body is doing, inside and out.).

I don’t like sitting at a table in a chair. I’m short and I can’t see over other people, plus you’re looking at the model from underneath because of the staging situation. So I sit on the counter around the edge. This disturbs most people. They feel a need to comment. It doesn’t seem to be against the rules though.

Models are always pretty young girls and one older tattooed guy. I have been doing life drawing since I was in college, that was starting almost 30 years ago, and there is always only one guy and he’s older and significantly muscled and tattooed. Honestly, I wanted to draw his tats. They were more interesting, but I needed to be closer to do that, and then you’re just drawing someone else’s drawing, and that’s just weird.

One of the older women is wearing a University of Mars T-shirt. The old men are cranky or wearing suspenders. Or sometimes both.

So I don’t know if this is something I really need to do every week. I’ve done it twice during summer and I’m running out of days I can continue to do it on Thursday. But did I mention that Dr. Sketchy events are always held in or near a bar (drinking while drawing!) and later in the day so I don’t have to get up early after staying up until the roosters crow AND, here is the most important thing, you crotchety old man: There’s fucking music. So. Unfortunately I can’t go in August or probably September even, but at least I know what my preference is. I will keep doing life drawing on and off (I really miss the class I used to do way back when I was still married…the organizer did an awesome job of getting a variety of models and it was always interesting and not silent and just more fun. That was the class that significantly upset my then-husband. He didn’t like me drawing naked people. They’re NUDE when they’re up on the platform. They’re NAKED when they step down, and they always get dressed before they step down.). I don’t need entertainment, but I do need to feel like if I’m gonna sneeze, people will bless me instead of cursing me.

Head’s in a Weird Space…

I’m sitting here at midnight on a Saturday listening to the rain pour down through the trees outside my office window. It’s been so warm the last week, and although it is still warm (and now abnormally humid for San Diego), the air has that rain feel to it. It’s nice. It feels good to my heart. Deep breaths of that rain air. Makes up for a long silent day of sitting on soccer fields and not feeling connected to anything or anyone. It’s a tournament weekend, obviously.

I really wanted to get a lot of quilting done today, but soccer was not helping with that. I realize I could send my daughter, who drives, off to these games by herself, but this is her last year in high school, the last year she’s home. Plus it always irritated me that my parents blew off most of my sports events once I was old enough to drive. Her dad has his own club team this year, and all the games are conflicting and at totally different fields, so he’s showing up for about half her games. She needs someone there. And she? She really does.

I did quilt today. I wanted to do 4 hours. I did 2.

This quilt is so detailed and complicated to quilt. I’m still down in the water section, although I’ve started one of the things that sits on the water on the left side…I still have to finish the seaweed, fish, and water on the right side. I’m still sticking to my 20-hour estimate though…

I just may not get 20 hours in total by Tuesday PM. At this point, that would mean 5 hours each day, and I just don’t think I can pull that off. We’ll see. I’m a little obsessed with this art stuff.

Still raining. So nice to hear.

I have to admit, it was a hard day today. I wrote sci fi for a while before the first game, only a thousand words or so. I’m stuck in this place where I want the science to be good, but I don’t know enough about it to make sure that it is. I will have to deal with that at some point. I kinda wish there was a plant scientist sitting right next to me sometimes. I write comments to myself (I’m using Google Docs to write), reminding me to check this scientific process or vocabulary later on. Right now, it’s probably more important that I just write.

That is what my document is called by the way: JustWrite.

Girlchild had two games today.

She also broke up a fight in this one. First time I’ve seen the girls almost come to blows, and she yelled out in this deep voice to get them to stop…I recognized that voice. It’s the one I use at school when I see a fight about to happen. Or when the kids are just getting out of hand. Deep. Guttural. They pay attention. It worked. The ref? Sigh. Take control, man.

So one of the things that started today was GISHWHES (The Greatest International Scavenger Hunt the World Has Ever Seen), which is a goofy image/video scavenger hunt with over 150 items. Teams of 15 people work to get the images and videos uploaded over a week’s time, and many of them require some feats of magic, honestly. I’m part of a Geek Girls Meetup group (yeah, laugh at me. I am one.) that had I think 9 members willing to play, and then we were combined with a group of college girls out of Illinois. This is the stuff that Old Kathy loved. I’m not allowed to post pictures of my items until after the event closes, but I’m saving them. I’m trying to do one a day, although there are some we will try to do as a local group maybe? I tend to pick the more artistic ones (shockingly), but there might be a duet between the girlchild and I, if I can figure out how to pull it off. She sings better than I do, but I have heart and soul. Or something.

She totally is willing to assist, but the boychild is adamantly against helping in any way, shape, or form…which is funny, because it’s totally a college-kid kind of event. Anyway. This is who I am. The wacky creative sort that can figure out what condiments mix together to make flesh colors. Not to mention, we have a lot of Legos.

Please try to figure out how many people are in this photo. I count 7 legs in the pile-up. That seems wrong.

We won one and lost one…

It rained for most of the second game. It RAINED. In San Diego in August. So fucking delightful. I put sunscreen on for the first game, because I will fry in overcast skies, but for the second game, that’s the umbrella and my stitching underneath it. Humid and warm, but wet…

I’m not actually getting much done on the birds, because she’s playing a lot of the games…lots of injuries on the team at the moment, so more opportunities to play. They played the team she used to be on in the second game, which was a little weird…

And unfortunately, that’s the game they lost (by one silly goal). If they make it to the finals tomorrow, they will probably play them again.

Because my brain is not working properly again (fuck me. When DOES it ever work properly?), I thought we’d have time to go home in between the two games and we really didn’t, so we found a weird little Starbucks with crappy Wifi nearby and ate lunch and hung out there. I wrote a little, read the worst book ever (I have to write a review later), and filled in the GISHWHES chart we made so that we could each sign up for specific tasks. By the way, if you know a friendly professional barista in the San Diego area who wants to conspire with me on an artistic activity, let me know. I’m not a professional.

After the second game, I was a good girl and went to the gym. And there are games tomorrow. And maybe tomorrow I can handle the Lego task for GISHWHES. And quilt for 5 hours. I haven’t talked to another human being since 4:42 PM. That’s the stuff that drives me bonkers. I think I already spend way too much time in my head for that shit to be healthy. In fact, the girlchild was trying to listen to an audiobook on the way back from soccer, and I was talking, and she got all irritated because she was trying to listen to the book, and I told her, “Hey. I have no one to talk to until tomorrow…19 hours or so from now.” She felt bad and talked to me on the way home. I wasn’t trying to guilt-trip her. It was reality. I really didn’t have anyone else to talk to. I needed to quilt. I also needed some human connection before I went into the cave that is my antisocial silent world. Talking to the cats and the TV doesn’t count.

Tomorrow? More of the same. Head is in a weird space. It may never come out.

Yarnbombing the World and Other Fiber Stories

I spent a lot of time with fiber today…

I went up to Oceanside and Vista to see some quilt-related stuff, and that led to yarn bombing stuff…

Like this yarnbombed payphone that is actually an iPhone…

Pretty well done, actually…Wait. Actually it’s NOT an iPhone. It’s not even a payphone. It’s an empty space where a payphone used to be. Actually.

This is in front of the Oceanside Library, if you want to see it…

And the other cool stuff that was there…like sweaters for hamsters hanging out to dry.

Lots of yarn was used up in this endeavor…

As well as all those bits and pieces that you started knitting and crocheting and don’t know what to do with them?

Now you know.

Plus. If it has eyeballs…

Then odds are I’m going to take a picture of it…

But since this is the entrance to the library, you know the kids are gonna love it too…

Or be totally creeped out by it and refuse to go in.

Cool feet. And eyeball.

I used to knit AND crochet. Regular Renaissance woman, I am. Now I stick to being a modern woman. Except minus the pointy bra and the Mother’s Little Helper in the cupboard for afternoons post-child.

And yet I don’t yarnbomb. I’m kind of a fan of trees. But also of the absurd. I think it would be cool to yarnbomb a single tree about 20 miles from any access point, like way out in the mountains. But someone’s probably already done that.

So we went to the Rancho Buena Vista Adobe for some quilts that were there…

It had been a while since I’d been there, so I probably have a picture of this mosaic from a million years ago…

And no, it’s not like I needed inspiration to persuade myself that lots of pieces is better than not very many.

I really like that sun. And I liked her…

especially her face up close…

A level of peace I find hard to come by. Plus…waterspots. And this sign…

Too many words for drunk people.

From there, we headed to the Oceanside Museum of Art, where one of the traveling portions of Quilt National opened this last week. No photos allowed, but what’s funny is that I don’t remember some of the quilts. I must have gone through that exhibit 17 times over the three days we were there, and I didn’t remember some of them. There are some wonderful pieces up there, though, totally worth the $8. I would pay $8 just to see Susan Lenz’ graveyard rubbings and Paula Kovarik’s round piece again. Oh yeah, and Brooke Atherton’s journal/map piece. Drop dead gorgeous. So that was nice.

And afterwards, we had Thai food…I don’t know that I’ve ever had Thai, because…well, let’s just say it wasn’t a choice I made…to me, Asian food is all very similar, plus this spice or that one, minus this grass or that one. Then again, the only food I really can’t handle is fish…well, and chocolate, but that’s not usually the main dish.

Van Gogh was checking the time…

I love these Van-Gogh-esque trees (so much drawing inspiration…like I need MORE of that).

Even the tulips on the utility box…well, one of them anyway…

The other one was very bad and didn’t deserve tulips.

I didn’t start quilting until late…I know I have to finish this one up quickly, because I’ve got lots more to do before school starts…and this one is a big bad beastie of a quilt…this is the back…

Luckily, the thread isn’t breaking very often and it’s quilting well, but there are just a LOT of pieces and fiddly bits, so it takes time.

I made it through all the dirt parts, I think…Calli was incredibly helpful, of course.

This is where I gave up…I realized how early I have to get up in the morning for the soccer tournament, and my car overheated today, so I was down in the driveway at almost midnight putting coolant in the radiator, and I still don’t trust it to drive to UCSD tomorrow morning, so we’ll take the kids’ car, but it needs gas. Sigh.

I wanted to get like 5 hours of quilting in today (probably somewhat unrealistic). I managed two.

Eighteen (at least) to go. Realistically? I could finish quilting her by Tuesday maybe. I could do sooner, but only if girlchild doesn’t make it to the finals on Sunday. And I’m probably not supposed to hope for that. There’s no time between games tomorrow, but I have most of the afternoon…although I need to go to the gym and I’m blowing off any possibility of a social life to make quilts. Now there’s a decision for you. So I could realistically get maybe 3 or 4 hours in tomorrow. Sunday, maybe the same, depending on the final and grocery shopping. Monday could be the last bit. If I buckled down and worked my butt off. So I’m sticking with my Tuesday estimate. Of course, I’ll probably have to go back to the fabric store for binding again. Maybe that should just be my Tuesday thang. Buying binding fabric. Whether you need it or not.

Then I have all the materials for the house thing I need to do, plus now I need to do some birds for that as well, plus potentially three more birds. And the gender equality drawing needs to get done and numbered and traced. Plus I might need to actually think about and prepare for school. Nope. Fuck that. I will figure that balance thing out if it kills me. I did OK with balance last year in terms of art v. schoolwork. I just need to make sure I take care of myself too, and that was difficult last year. I have permission from my counselor at the moment to cry as needed, to do what I want, and to take care of myself for the next two weeks without dealing with school. It’s not a very realistic thing, that, but it’s nice to keep it in the back of my mind for when I’m feeling a bit crazy about going back and losing the boychild and coping with my existing life. I’m so incredibly busy, but so incredibly alone in that incredible busy-ness. Not good.

Working on this quilt though? Good. It’s powerful. Of course, that means it won’t get in anywhere, but whatever. It will still kick ass.

The Giver

I’m re-reading The Giver for book club. It’s amusing because (a) I used to teach it to my students (homeroom…it could be argued to be a science book, but only with a significant stretch) and (b) when I tried to get a copy of it, the library had 47 holds on 7 copies, so I turned to my teacher friends. Before, though, I realized that I have read it and both my children have read it, but we do not own it (no one really liked it). Almost every teacher friend I knew was sure they had it but couldn’t find it. One found it but didn’t have time to drop it here on the way to Alpine, and I could have driven out to her, but the timing was off, so another friend went and bought a copy for her classroom (because the movie is coming out and she is actually the language arts teacher so it kinda makes sense) and left it on my doorstep for me. Nice friend. I suck as a friend at the moment, I think. Meditation is asking me to look at how I’m being kind to others, and I don’t think the cats count. I’m not being UNkind, but I’m not putting anything out there, I think. Can’t. Can’t handle kindness back.

So Meditation has turned into Weepitation. Latin word for cry, the verb, is fleo. Meditation = Fleotation? That just sucks. I’m sticking with Weepitation. Sobitation. WAIT. Tears is Lacrimae. MUCH better. Lacrimaetation. There we go. Dear Mr. Meditation. I’m doing it wrong. Seriously. We’re in the Happiness module and the whole last 10 days have been about Kindness, and all I’ve done is CRY. That’s not kindness. That’s just plain mean. My kindness for yesterday? Girlchild forgot her gym pass…I had just dropped her off (already nice of me, at the drop of a hat) because of the Nida Car Shortage (which ends in just three short weeks when the boychild wanders off to college), and then I had to drive BACK here to get her pass, because she won’t go in and tell them she forgot it, it’s too embarrassing mom. As I handed it to her (and I didn’t even get angry or stressed or anything), she said, “Sorry. I’m retarded. Love you.” Huh. That made me cry. See? Kindness makes me cry. Please be mean to me. We’ll all be better off. There will certainly be fewer tears. Maybe I could go back to Meditation then.

Many things conspired to make yesterday what it was. Nothing was fixed. Nothing got finished. Things I meant to do didn’t happen. Whatever. Move on. What it meant was that after I ate dinner, after my stomach said, “Yes, you may eat. I will allow that now.” then I needed something really low key and not very demanding, yet artistic to do. So I did something REALLY low-key.

Yup. I taped an enlarged drawing together. And while I was doing that, I updated all the Microsoft shit on girlchild’s computer, which prompted a flurry of disdainful texts from the boychild, who does in fact think I’m an idiot…this from the kid in long pants in Southern California in July (it was still July yesterday) with a Golden Retriever on his lap…

Yup. Not listening. Also lots of texts about how he’s not going to do all the required things for orientation at college (you can raise them, but you can’t make them do mandatory things). Yup. I taped that fucker good. The drawing, not the boychild. Or even the Golden Retriever.

And then I couldn’t deal with anything else. Sad but true. Not measuring it and adding to top and bottom, not even TAPING more paper on for the drawing. Nope. Not doing it. Could not handle it.

The Mammogram quilt is almost fully bound…just have to put the sleeve on it, but I’m busy today, so maybe tonight. I could easily have finished it last night if my brain didn’t get in the way. And I didn’t start quilting the other one at all. LAME. Whatever. The brain’s in charge and she’s a dumbass at the moment. I will welcome her back with open arms when she gets out of the quicksand mud again. Until then? We do not speak.

So I gave up and went to bed.

When life gives you lemons, you get out of bed after tossing and turning for an hour and you make yourself a nice hot cup of tea, because you’ve been British-trained to think that tea fixes everything, and the caffeine doesn’t really have an effect on you any more, in fact, you think tea runs in your veins instead of blood, based on how much you’ve drunk just to make up for the super late nights in the last year, but you did actually go to bed at a reasonable time last night because you knew you’d have to be up early this morning, so that totally fucking backfired says 4 in the morning, so at 5, you get up and make that magical cup of tea and grab the book you were reading for book club last night, because it’s easy and you’ve read it before and you know how it ends, unlike your own life, which is currently a badly written George R. R. Martin slashfest, except no one dies, they just disappear, and you read The Giver (yup, that book) for about an hour until your brain admits that it might like to go to sleep again, even though your neighbor just fired up his dumptruck and drove off to work, but he gets up REALLY early, and you put the bookmark in and when life gives you lemons, you don’t make fucking lemonade, because it’s always too sweet or too sour, it’s never just right, and you don’t even really LIKE lemonade, you only drink it if there’s no water and the only other choice is soda, so you make lemon chicken instead and you sit down at the table and you eat it by yourself.

After you fall asleep again, you dream. And as it often is lately, when you remember your dreams, they are happy and perfect, because everyone got rid of you and you were the problem. You know better than that, but you still feel it in your gut when you wake up and start yet another day where it will end with you trying to sleep and not doing a very good job of it.

I didn’t really make lemon chicken at 5 AM. Everything else happened though. And that damn book? It is really well-written, I have to say, even though it’s so pat and perfect that it kinda drives me nuts. Even the parts that are supposed to NOT be perfect…they are. Of course, I’ve read the damn thing 5 times and taught it to 6th graders, so I’m probably not capable of reading it with a fresh eye any more. I will, however, be able to discuss it at book club now without saying things like, “I don’t really remember anything but the snow.” Although the snow might be the most important part.

Purple’s a Bitch…

I’m fairly sure the guy who runs my meditation app did not expect me to be using the breathing/thinking exercises to deal with purple thread. But that was the most useful thing I used it for yesterday, and you know, it wasn’t REALLY about the purple thread or running out of the purple thread with only 8 square inches of quilting left, or that I also needed binding, and I couldn’t get the binding in the same store as the thread, and that I had just been to JoAnns (hate that place) the day before for OTHER thread and things that I probably didn’t need (is now really a good time to relearn crochet? I think not. Shut up, Susan.) or that the girlchild wasn’t home yet from the beach and she had been on the phone with me (on her friend’s phone, third time in the last week her phone has died and she has called on a friend’s phone…I laugh about this) because she was convinced her soccer shoes were here (they weren’t) and that I had purposely moved them. Because when I come home from the gym at 8 PM, instead of showering, making dinner, and quilting…I move soccer shoes.

I don’t, by the way. So once the hurricane blew out of here (ie, the girlchild…I was still on the phone with her dad, who had located the shoes at HIS house, when she blew into HIS house with the same level of screechy noise, so I got to hear it again), I was able to leave for thread and binding. But by then, all that shit had settled in my gut, my chest, plus people are emailing me and texting me about school, despite my constant requests to Leave It until August 1 (which is tomorrow, yes, I am quite fucking aware), so I started to breathe in and out. I breathed the purple thread IN and breathed the irritating crap OUT. Seriously. Meditation. It’s good for you.

So my goal (ha ha ha!) was to finish quilting the Mammogram quilt in the morning (I did actually START in the morning) and get it bound early and then start quilting the Menopause quilt.

I guess technically I did finish in the morning…it was just the NEXT morning and before I ever went to bed. Cuz that’s how I roll.

You’ll notice a black cat in lots of these pictures, because apparently she wants to help out with the quilting. It took a lot longer than I thought it would. A lot of that was breaking thread.

I finally changed the needle (again) and that didn’t help at all. Sigh. Never really sure what helps. I can go for hours with no problems and then they just start up and I clean and replace everything and it doesn’t seem to matter (wow, kind of a metaphor for life there).

So here’s the deal with purple. It’s a pain to match. Yesterday was about two hours of trying to match purples and either giving up and going to an entirely different color or making an effort and getting the same purple. I actually had three or four dark purples that I thought might work, so I started with one, and then I got this bad feeling (my poor stomach yesterday), so I stopped, pulled the quilt off the machine, and went to find some real light. Out on the deck. In the sun. Yeah. So that was not going to work. It was too blue.

So then I went to the quilt store, which I had been planning to go to anyway for binding. I had enough of the purple to bind it, but it doesn’t really finish the edge if it’s the same color. I like something a shade darker in that case, so I folded the quilt up and headed out there. And then spent about 45 minutes trying to find that dark purple binding fabric.

Purple’s a bitch. She’s either red-tinged or blue-tinged or even brown- or gray-tinged and there’s never enough choices. In fact, if you find a good solid purple, you should just buy it, because it won’t be there again. I tried many purples. They all sucked. So then I laid the thing out on the floor somewhere that people weren’t hanging out, because GIANT BREAST is why, and I realized that either red (to go with the arteries) or blue (to go with the lungs and the bird and the giant eyeball) would be good choices. I had already tried gray and black (FAIL).

So I pulled a red or two…GAACK. Not happening. Then I pulled a turquoise batik and it was…OK. So I went back into the main part of the store and hung out in the blue section, trying to find something close to the blues in the quilt. I was there for a while. I had the quilt on the floor, but folded up so you could just see the face and the bottom of the hips, but nothing else, and I was putting fabrics underneath to see how heinous they were (sigh, really searching for that perfect blue…at least there were more choices), and a nice old lady came over and said, “How lovely! Can I see the rest?” Oh dear. Um. You look very nice and I don’t know whether you can handle the GIANT BREAST. So I said, “It has nudity, if that’s an issue,” and she continued to smile beautifically (I can’t wait to be old enough to have that smile all the time, like you’ve gotten past the nasty shit and you realize you’re old but it’s wonderful to be out and about and in a fabric store and no one is going to scream at you when you get home and if they do, it doesn’t matter because you can take your hearing aids out), so I unfolded it, and she clapped her hands together twice and clasped them to her chest and said, “Oh that’s FABULOUS. It’s WONDERFUL.” Wow. OK. Thanks. Smiled at her? I did. And I said thank you. Because my mom raised me right. And then I went back and got the turquoise batik that didn’t send my heart into paroxysms of wonderment, but would probably work.

Then I came home and decided to use the turquoise fabric I had lying around from when I did the bird quilts. It’s OK. I can use the other turquoise for something. It’s that standard Turq Batik color, but the one at home was darker and slightly…um…stronger. So shopping for binding? Waste of time. It was here. That is ALSO a metaphor for life.

There’s the 8″ square that still needed quilting…I got to it around 10:30 PM.

Because I didn’t get home from JoAnns hell (quilt store didn’t have the right thread, so I had to go out there again) until after 6:30, and then I had to cook dinner and I did all the dishes that had piled up that can’t go in the dishwasher and then I exercised AND meditated AND did physical therapy. So it was late. I did about 3 hours of quilting yesterday, for a total of 8 hours. I was thinking it would be more like 4 or 5, but I think all the outlining is slower than background quilting, and this sucker is mostly image, not background.

At that point, it was almost 11:30 at night and most of my friends and family were asleep in bed. Well, neither of my children were. And I knew what my plans were for the next few days and what I needed to get done and the limited time I would have, so I laid it out on the entryway floor…

And I trimmed it. Yes, that’s a really dark picture. My camera likes to make random decisions about when it needs to flash. It trimmed really easily (nice quilt). And then I cut the binding and started sewing it on.

Yup. It was late. And then I pinned it down so when I’m at my sewing meeting today, I can do the handsewing. This whole sleep thing? Yeah. Fuck it.

But if I finish her today, she’s a July quilt. Otherwise, she’ll be an August quilt. Probably gonna finish tomorrow. I’m still significantly behind my original schedule for this week, but that’s reality for you. Slaps you upside the head. And then I meditate through it. Because none of it really matters. I’m glad to have this one done. A year and a month from drawing to finish (there’s reality again for you). Got tons of stuff in the mix at the moment. It all wants to be made, and since the rest of my life is such a clusterfuck, especially with school LOOMING the fuck around the corner again (funny how that keeps happening), I need the art to be the balance. Last year, I took very little work home on a daily basis. I made art almost every fucking day, even if for only 30 minutes. It saved me. That and Brussels sprouts. And my kids. So that’s still on the table for my sanity.

OK, so it’s time to go out into the world and runneth the errands of the kingdom. Or something.

In the Silence

In the silence, there can be peace. There can be lies. There can be fear of the truth. Silence can be golden. It can be heavy. It can be loaded. It can be beautiful. It can carry memory. It can remember. Silence is painful, awkward, and deadly. Silence is a relief. Silence is torture. Silence is a treatment.

Three nights a week here it is silent, except for the sounds of my cooking, the cats complaining about my presence or lack thereof, not petting their bellies or actually doing so. The TV is on, so people are talking. Sometimes they are something I have on to just fill space while I cook (tonight, it was Real Housewives of somewhere richer than here). Sometimes it’s something I am actually watching (tonight, it was The Lottery…how can they set it just a few years from now? Not realistic. I was eating while I watched, AND reading a book. Too much brain stimulation needed these days.). Sometimes it’s something I like but don’t really need to watch because I’ve seen it enough times (tonight, it was X-Files…again…still). It’s not that I want TV as a companion. It’s that that’s what I have. Sometimes it’s music, if I’m quilting, although tonight, I chose X-Files over music, because music has more emotional triggers for me. I had been listening to music before and it was causing issues, so I chose not to tonight. It’s easier during the day when the kids are around. They are my emotional buffers. Yes, I often think about what it will be like when they are gone.

I quilted for about 3 hours today…

This thing has about 4 hours in it at the moment (quilting, that is). I probably have another hour at most of outlining to do, if that, and then there isn’t actually much background quilting. The image pretty much fills the space. I’m hoping to finish early tomorrow so I can get a binding on it and move on to quilting the next one. That of course presumes that I have an appropriate binding fabric for it (I’m pretty sure I don’t). Road Trip! To the fabric store. Which is a whopping 5 miles away. I’ve been good, though. I haven’t gone for a long time.

Quilting blood vessels. I wonder how many miles of blood vessels I’ve quilted. When I posted a photo on Instagram of where I was in the quilting, girlchild liked it. I wanted to tell her it was past her bedtime (because it was). She’s not here. Hence the silence. Last night, it was all girls giggling and yelling and TV on and squealy girl noises. Tonight? Tonight is so silent. I can hear the fan. The computer keys tapping. The computer humming. Occasionally there’s a cat-related noise: scratching, mewing, hissing.

The first part of quilting involved not stitching through the cat’s tail.

See Midnight behind the machine? I just draped the quilt over her and she would occasionally twitch, but she wouldn’t move. Whatever. Remind me again why sleep is so important?

If these lung bronchioles and alveoli (if you don’t know what those are, you didn’t have me for 7th-grade science) don’t look just like Dr. Seuss’ trees, truffula trees, I don’t know what does.

It’s hot here during the day. The house was 90 degrees when I went to the gym at 5 PM. There’s not a lot of sleep happening in that heat, so I just stay up late anyway. Plus I don’t sleep. Bad brain. So cats and dogs sprawl…

Wherever they think it might be cool. Temperature cool, not attitude cool. Although with Babygirl, you never know.

I’m officially doing physical therapy on the knee for a month. He thinks it’s a sprained LCL…possibly an IT band issue as well. The right knee is definitely weaker than the left, and he’s given me strengthening exercises to help. I’m not allowed to hike for a week, but after that, it should be OK. He thinks it’s a very solvable problem.

I wish I were a solvable problem.

I also got the materials for the weird-ass project I need to do for my local art group, not quilting at all. Well, that’s not true. I think they want a wall quilt too, but I’m just not sure that will happen. It kind of depends on what I get done this week. If I can get both of these quilts quilted and bound, then I’ll think about a wall quilt too, but right now, I’m designing a 3D floating house. It’s been in my head for months. It needs worry dolls. It needs organza. It needs coathangers and wire. Wire tomorrow. Then build this sucker. Worry dolls go on last. They’re getting mailed to me. But I have to finish the rest first. I shopped in the fancy fabric section of the store. It’s been a while since I’ve hung out in there.

I wanted to draw tonight…got drawings pawing at me at the moment to come out…”Please Please Ms. Nida. Let me out. I’ll be good. I promise. Just let me out.” Pleading. There are only so many hours in the day. So I quilted instead. Sometimes I’m not sure if letting more drawings out of my head is a good thing.

It’s so quiet here. I hate it.

Women I Want to Be When I Grow Up

I started writing this post the other day when I read someone’s list of awesome fictional women…actually, I just went and searched around to see if I could figure out where I got the idea, because the blogger LIKES his hits and trackbacks…fellow teacher and sci-fi writer (although I barely qualify) InfiniteFreeTime wrote about that here. The interesting thing about being a GIRL though (actually, I rarely call myself a girl because it’s such a loaded word when you are dealing with an adult female) is that those awesome female fictional characters are also our role models. So from growing up reading and looking at stuff and trying out how to be the most awesomest female in the world, I put together some short lists.

First of all, you have to know that when I was younger, like middle school, I would tell people that I was the reincarnation of Mary Cassatt (in fact, I wrote a whole story about it, which in retrospect, was probably only one page long in a school notebook and was tossed out that summer when we cleaned out our backpacks). The reason I picked Cassatt was because, and this is important, at the time, she was the only female artist I knew about. Sad but true. I’m not sure even now that I have female role models in the art world…there are artists whose work I admire, but whose practices or personal lives leave much to be desired. Then again, they didn’t have any role models either. The crazy-ass balance between mom, provider, and artist is not something to be envied most days.

Anyway, when I grow up, I want to be one of these women…actually, I want to be a composite of all of them…notice the recurring theme of stubborn strength and kicking ass. In some sort of chronological order…

Dana Scully in X Files: Dana is the perfect mix of faith and science, and although I’m not a religious person, I love her cynicism when it comes to Mulder’s belief and her ability to kick ass and still admit when she’s wrong.

Ellen Ripley in the Alien series: Ripley saves the kid AND kills the aliens. She’s tough, but caring, and so nice to her cat. And she recognizes a bitchy alien when she sees one.

Jane Tennison in Prime Suspect (the UK version): a troubled character, but excels despite being surrounded by testosterone-addled males. Plus she solves the cases.

Mrs. Piggle Wiggle in the books of her name: I read Mrs. PW when I was a kid, but it wasn’t until I was reading them to my OWN kids (and teaching middle school) that I realized how freakin’ awesome she is. Always cheery and perky, but the punishment fits the crime. I wish I could be her.

Beatrix Kiddo (aka The Bride) in Kill Bill: There’s something to be said for revenge and for being good at something that is not very feminine (whatever the fuck THAT means…but think about all the stereotypes girls have to watch and then toss this character into that mix…she’s badass, but has compassion), and The Bride does it with style.

Lisbeth Salander in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (prefer the original movies) and the rest of the series: Yup. She’s fucked up. But I love how she gets revenge (ah, a theme erupts). Plus she’s damn smart and sneaky.

Kara Thrace aka Starbuck from Battlestar Galactica (the new one): Starbuck is another troubled woman (she drinks, she smokes, and she fucks up regularly), and she is carrying a HUGE chip on her shoulder, but you can see her fight through her feelings in the series. She is an emotional mess at times, but fights through the crazy and stands strong…not just for herself.

There’s a theme here: troubled, emotional, often making mistakes, but strong in conviction and ability, not bound by gender except when others try to force it on them.

There are other female characters that I love, but who then make a really stupid decision, like Anna in Downton Abbey (don’t keep secrets like that!). I’m always disappointed when shit like that happens. I guess it’s a fine line between a Starbuck or a Jane Tennison and Anna, but it’s my line to draw.

There’s a couple other lists I made while I was thinking about this (and I’ve been thinking about it for days, and I could probably wrack my brains for another year and make the list longer, but this is where it’s at right now).

Girls I wish I had been when I was younger

Hermione Granger in Harry Potter: Duh. Who doesn’t want to be her? Smart, beautiful, strong, emotional, kicks ass around the boys. Thanks JK Rowling for giving my daughter someone to look up to.

Arya Stark in Game of Thrones: Another duh. She’s a tomboy, she uses a sword like a boy (or better), she gets out of situations like a magician, and George R.R. Martin hasn’t killed her yet (knock on wood).

Pippi Longstocking in the books of her name: She’s strong, nonviolent, and a creative thinker. Plus everything she does is cool.

Women I don’t want to be?

Gemma Teller Morrow from Sons of Anarchy: Wants to do right by her family, but is a giant-ass mess. Sure, we all want to be in bed with Jimmy Smits, but we don’t kill people to get there. She’s evil. I realize she’s supposed to be and her circumstances made her largely who she is, and even more importantly, I’m supposed to be troubled about liking her…but I just don’t. In fact, I don’t like any of the women in SoA. I used to like Tara (although that is also pointless now) until she became some PTSD survivor crazy person. Much as I love the show, it’s hard on the females. Oh yeah, and Gemma babysits when drugged out. Bad grandma.

Alicia Florrick in The Good Wife: I have never ever liked her. She wimped out, she used her situation, she’s flaky, she’s fucked up but not in a good way. She just irritates the crap out of me. Take a stand, woman. Please. For the sake of other women out there.

Frida Kahlo: OK, so this is hard because I love her art. But she’s kinda like Alicia, in that she let Diego Rivera be the giant ass he was and she put up with it, and from what I read, that fucked her up mentally in a big way. But she stayed with him anyway. Yes, she made amazing art while she was alive, and some of it may have been precipitated by Diego’s dumbassedness, but I just wish she’d had the balls to tell him to fuck off, and walk away and maybe hang out with Georgia O’Keeffe instead. She might have been happier.

All the women in Breaking Bad, Justified, and The Dresden Files, and possibly more that I’m not even remembering right now. Those are just in my head at the moment. Most of the women on the Lifetime channel, and all of the women in the Real Housewives franchise. Holy shit. Just get rid of all of them.

Women my son wants me to be, but I haven’t actually seen yet

Buffy The Vampire Slayer (it’s on my long long list of things to watch): OK, probably he just wants to date Buffy or someone like her (he would disdainfully snarl at that characterization).

I’m sure this is an ever-changing list as I read more and/or remember more (seriously…the brain is not my friend), but it’s interesting to think about what makes you like or dislike a female role model, because there are certainly some very fine lines between fucked-up and vengeful when you look at say The Bride vs. Gemma, but hey, it’s my list. You don’t have to agree.