Book Review: I Am the Mission

One of the things that drives me crazy about this series is the fact that every book has two titles and it’s called the Boy Nobody series, but that’s not how he’s referred to in the books, so there’s this huge disconnect. Oh, and on this one, it’s called The Unknown Assassin Book 2. DUDE. Whether it’s you or your publisher, you are shooting yourself in the foot by not making a decision about the titles and the series title. PICK ONE. OK, I Googled this mess (and this isn’t the first time I’ve done it, so apparently I typed in the right string of words this time, which is problematic already, because ALL the possible strings should give me this answer), here’s what Zadoff has to say about it, which basically distills to follow the titles with Assassin and Mission in them. Because of marketing. Or something.

That said, the series is relatively good. The books are short, and this one seemed even shorter than the last one. Which is strange, because it’s apparently 432 pages, 80 pages longer than the first one. OK, so it’s a quick read. Seriously, he does keep the action going…

Enough that he has to start writing about the mistakes the main character, a teenage assassin who is questioning his missions and his bosses, makes because HE isn’t sleeping…because we’re not sleeping either because there’s no down time for this character. So there’s always some questionable science in these books, but it’s not enough to really throw you off, and it’s definitely written towards a YA audience, I would think male or female into assassination and rebellion and finding yourself (sort of, but not really). This one touches on terrorism and anti-government sentiments, which is interesting, because the character is supposed to be PART of the government (or IS he?). But we’re left with yet another cliffhanger so we have to read the next one.

You can’t fault Zadoff for his tense, driven writing. You can fault him for his female characters. They strip their clothes off at a moment’s notice. Mother is the closest to a normal female in the series, and she’s kind of a hardass herself, which is fine, because she doesn’t get naked on him. That would be creepy.

Sure, I’ll read the next one…in about 2 hours by the pool or at the gym on the elliptical. It’s not deep fiction, but it’s entertaining enough.

What It Takes to Iron an Owl…

Yesterday would have been my 25th wedding anniversary. I had actually gotten to a point in my life where I wasn’t reminded of the date every year post-divorce, but my parents’ anniversary is 25 years before mine, so it was the big five-oh for them this year and I forgot…or did not remember…or blanked it out…or something. So that kind of became an issue and reminded me of my own lack of anniversary. I apologized. Some part of my brain is still trying to figure out what to do about it. Apparently if I had planned ahead, I could have had the White House send them an anniversary greeting. That would have gone down well, I’m sure.

Failed marriages are not uncommon, and mine was not any more or less tragic than any other. I do wish that I had the support and relative stability of 25 years of marriage right now, between teen angst and one kid going to college (and leaving FOREVER!). But that’s not part of my life. I think, I hope, I believe it would make the daily struggle easier to deal with, but I have friends in not-so-good marriages who argue that it doesn’t. I’m not pro or con marriage…but a stable, loving relationship that provides support for the really bad days, the days where I really almost want to grab my keys and my purse and run the fuck away, just get in the car and drive and drive and drive and maybe come back in a week or two. Yeah. That. Because what really happens is that I internalize all of that, and sometimes I cry about it, but I’m really carrying it around inside me and I don’t know what to do with it. There is no one I can turn to and say, holy hell, I can’t do this, and they say, it’s OK…I’ll deal tonight. Go take a bath. Go to a book store. Just go. I’ll deal.

I figure I’ll just keep doing what I can to move this brain in the right direction and at some point I will be able to get through a day without it hurting. Like a WHOLE day. I can get through short periods of time, like on hikes or while ironing fabric down, but there’s no long-lasting effect. The chemistry in my brain is the stronger…it wins at the moment. And by then, the teen drama will have moved to a college dorm, where I’ll still get bits and pieces of it, and hopefully I won’t have to fly or drive somewhere and put all the pieces back together…hopefully, by then, she’ll have it all together and be able to deal on her own.

I’ve been watching my mood the last 4 or 5 days and realizing even more what affects it…the biological flows of receptors and hormones and all that crap, plus blood sugar wavering in response to all that. I can have brief periods of time when I can change those, with exercise or some moment of separation from the sad, maybe during a conversation or a good book or while painting a wall. And then it’s back. It’s no wonder that the book I’m trying to write is about biogenetics and human body chemistry and how to fuck with it. It’s what fills my brain. I keep having to research stuff for it though…I’ll think of something really cool, but I don’t want there to be bad science, so then I have to go Google things for the next three hours to make sure I’m writing accurate science, or at least believable science. At some point, I need to have a long conversation (or 10) with a geneticist. Or a botanist. Or both.

We finished painting the last of the walls yesterday. That should be a party in itself. We did two coats because we were painting over the plaster and the mastic. One area of the mastic actually needed three coats. So that part is done. It took a LONG time. I’m looking at my bedroom and the hallway, and anyone who thinks they can bang it out in a day, I will feed you pizza and beer while you do it. While I lie on the bed reading a book and eating bonbons (not really, because I’m allergic to chocolate). Because it gives me a giant-ass headache to even think about it (although it would be somewhat easier…just push everything into the center…as long as I don’t have to deal with carpet too…which of course, at some point, I will have to do that too). Now we can seriously concentrate on getting everything out of that space for carpet next week.

Meanwhile, a woman has art to make…Bird number 6…

I ironed the fabrics for 4 more birds…I only have the owl to go. I didn’t have the energy for it last night…it’s the most complicated one in there I think. This one isn’t…it’s the bird from the Mammogram quilt, which I hope to start stitching down today. That’s the next step in the quiltmaking process. This is Bird number 7…

I mimicked the colors on the original quilt…not quite exact fabrics, because that was too much like work.

A couple of these took 30 minutes to choose fabrics for, because they were actually semi-complicated. This one had 60 pieces in it. It doesn’t exist in a quilt yet…I’m not even sure what drawing it came from…Bird number 8…

This one is in a quilt and I looked at the picture because it’s a pretty old quilt and I didn’t remember what color I did the bird (um. Kathy. Really? It’s black.). Bird number 9 came from a quilt of my son…back when he didn’t have long hair, I think…

Here’s the drawing with the fabrics cut out…

I wrote the next paragraph before I went to the dentist and then came back and dealt with screaming and spiders and the cable company and a new modem and 9 bags of thriftshoppery and 37 pounds of clothes shipped to the cousins in Seattle and moldings that don’t match the old ones because they don’t make them any more and piles and piles of dust and going through a container of stuff to be filed from 2007 and 2008 and finding that damn title to the old car, which I was sure I didn’t have, and crying because I saw my itinerary for Alaska.

Fuck. Can’t even CLEAN without getting upset. That is just dumb. It’s lame. It’s stupid. I am not dumb, lame, or stupid. One part of my brain is. And it can just fuck the hell off.

So. You’ll see my plan for the day below…and then you can laugh with me…

So today I’m going to iron down the owl and start stitching the two quilt tops down. I’m hoping to have the presence of mind to draw tonight, so I can really get focused on the next big quilt…I need to be tracing Wonder Under by next weekend, which means about a thousand things need to happen first. I think I will cut out the fabrics for these birds tomorrow at my stitching meeting. I might be able to iron a couple of them down as well…I think I only have an hour and a half between the two stitching meetings, but these babies are small. We’ll see. Maybe I will pick backgrounds before I go over to my friend’s house and I will iron them there. They are not very complicated.

Most of the birds, it took about 15-20 minutes to pick fabrics. The most complicated one took 35 minutes.

Yup. It’s 5 PM, I’m sweaty, tired, and dusty. Every Single Thing in the kitchen cupboards where the moths have been reproducing has been removed. Everything with a trace of mothiness or that has expired got tossed out. The brown widow that was living in there (hence screaming) is dead (the cable lady got to hear the screaming while she was trying to help me get my phone and internet working again…I asked her to kill the spider too, but apparently she does not have the technology for that). The cupboards are clean of moth leavings, dirt, spider guts, and oh my god are those EGGS? Of WHAT??? At which point, the girlchild gave up, left everything on the counter, and left for soccer. The only reason I am in here now, typing this fucker out, is because I’m waiting for the cupboards to dry, so I can go back in and put everything away.

Plus I’m fucking tired.

OK. Going to put things away. No more excuses.

Then maybe I will come back in here and iron a fucking owl…

Thanks for Asking…

I’m trying to get back on my planned art and remodeling schedule this week…I had a real hard time last week being motivated. It was too much, I think. But finishing the ironing on that big quilt and realizing how many hours of stitching down, quilting, and binding remain on that one and the other one, PLUS needing to do some other art things, made me realize that I have to stay focused. I’m not really ON vacation. This is my other job and I have to take advantage of the time I have to get that work done, because it will become increasingly harder to do that as the summer progresses into that crazy hell we call Fall…it really is FALL…from sanity (what little I have).

So Focus Goggles on. It’s easy to say that right now, because I’m not actually awake yet. I mean, yes, it seems like a reasonable hour for people to be waking up at almost 9, but I really can’t get to sleep before 2:30 or 3 at the moment, and I had to get up early to go to the lab and have them take my life force (aka blood). Fun stuff. Now I will freak out at regular intervals during the day when I check my results. I’m not expecting them to be good right now. Oh well.

So I had wanted to have some small quilt tops of birds ironed by this Thursday…that was my original deadline…so I started ironing Wonder Under to fabric yesterday. The plus with these is that they’re small and quick…

The minus is that they are so small that it actually takes me longer to pick the fabrics because there’s only like 5 of them and I get fussier about their going together in the way I want, because there’s nothing else to distract you from them. In a huge quilt with 80 fabrics, you wouldn’t notice if one gray was slightly off, but in something this small, I would. Maybe you still wouldn’t. Anyway, so that’s slowed me down. That said, I got 5 of them done yesterday…which isn’t bad.

I start with the drawing and the tupperware with those Wonder Under pieces in it…

Then I lay those pieces out and try to figure out what colors I’m using. I picked these as possible backgrounds, but there are more…

I’m trying to keep it simple, so I am reusing some of the fabrics in more than one bird, like the beak colors and the whites of the eyes.

This one actually really threw me with the grays for a while. I thought about finding a picture of the original quilt and trying to copy the fabrics, but I didn’t.

On this one, I actually pulled up the picture on the iPad to try to figure out what I had used in the previous quilt, but that’s because the person who likes this one liked the original bird…

Not all of these birds are in existing quilts. Some were just pulled from drawings that are in the quiltmaking queue.

On the next version of that bird, I changed it up and used different fabrics.

Eleven fabrics for this one…amazingly small number of fabrics for a Kathy quilt. Granted these are smaller than I ever work.

This one is very muted…looking for a different background for it.

So 5 down, 5 to go today, once I get my refi signed. Oh yeah, and the wall painted…

I’m just going to paint and see if the texture is irregular enough to pass with a couple of coats of paint on it. I’m not sure I care enough to spend more time on it. The wall under the window doesn’t show at all and most of the rest of the wall will be covered by bookshelf or art. Plus it will all be a lovely unifying white. I put a second coat of plastery stuff on it yesterday and then sanded it and washed it down.

We have to paint this little section too…

Not a problem with the texture here…it did much better for some reason…no mastic maybe helps.

Once all that is done and the carpet is in, I will still need to deal with putting in shelves to the right of the fireplace and finding something for a mantle. I have a decorating friend who might be able to help with that, but it’s going to have to be cheap…in fact, I’m thinking of raiding my dad’s wood supply and just throwing an old barn board up there. Not really. But I don’t want fancy; I want natural.

This is looking back at the rest of this area, which is been in chaos since school got out.

It’s getting there. Slowly. Sitting on the couch is not happening much at the moment, unless you’re willing to climb in and be crowded…which we all have done (we are nesters). We’re still eating dinner on the deck. We started moving boxes and some furniture out of this area, just so next Tuesday will not be so heinous, but it’s hot and trying to find room for stuff is challenging. Girlchild just exploded all over the place when I asked her to deal with her stuff, so that makes it so much more fun. We did get the giant box of my CDs down into the garage, and then in trying to find a shelf that it would fit on, boychild started tossing stuff (he did ask first), so we filled a trashcan with stuff and found 6 boxes of clothing that either needs to be sent to the cousins up north or to the thrift shop…so that is girlchild’s job today, to go through those boxes.

At which point, my dad asked me when I’m going to clean out the garage. Holy crap, man. I can only handle so much chaos at a time. I need to get the art stuff done. I have another quilt I haven’t started yet that needs to be significantly started before school begins. I need to DRAW that. I can’t even trace Wonder Under until the carpets are done, but I need a drawing soon. Like before next week.

Yeah. So. That. Not happening right now. But thanks for asking.

OMG Finished!

I think that’s the level of excitement I’m supposed to have for finishing the ironing part of this big quilt. That Fake It till You Make It crap. You know. Smile until it’s natural. I actually smile all the time, when things make me smile, like goofy dogs and goofy kids and even Grumpy Cat in the Honey Nut Cheerios commercial, which is significantly dumb. So my smile is working…it just doesn’t stick. I can laugh at jokes and stupid puns too…I actually had someone tell me I couldn’t be depressed because I laughed at her jokes. They were still funny. It just didn’t stick. Depression means you can’t hold on to that feeling.

So. In my head since about 1:07 AM last night, I’ve been thinking OMG I’m FINISHED! See. Not really. I tried that last night and it didn’t work and then I had distinctly troubled and fucked-up dreams all night and I totally blame the OMG. That fake-it crap.

Not really. That’s just what my brain does.

So I finished the ironing yesterday (did you get that part?). I didn’t have much left anyway, about 100 pieces or so. I kept telling myself this thing had 1800 pieces, but it was only 1700 and something (ha ha ha…now see, THAT was funny).

This is Ivy. She’s dead two years now, so that’s why she gets wings. She’s the familiar, the protector animal in this quilt. Whenever the phone rang, she would jump up from wherever she was lying and race around the house, like it was an alarm for her to protect me.

She ends up ironed in front of the giant weeping eyeball.

I got those done before we went to dinner at my parents, and then came back to the tentacles…

Those crazy-ass tentacles. These were a bit of a challenge just because the pieces were tiny. I’m a bit confused though. I knew I had lost two of the larger sucker parts, and I looked for at least 20 minutes through all my fabrics trying to find the fabric I used for that and I just couldn’t find it. This is why I usually try NOT to put everything away until the quilt is ironed down, but they were just taking up too much room.

So I adjusted things so you can’t tell that two suckers are missing…

But if I was missing two of the larger pieces, why the fuck do I have four of the smaller darker pieces left over?

Seriously, you cannot explain that away. I tried. I gave up. It was not worth it.

In the end, I found all the missing pieces (and more! seriously, I found two pieces that must belong to another quilt, because they don’t belong to this one) except one, an elbow shadow, which I recut. I almost didn’t, but its absence bugged me.

And then I ironed the tentacles down where they belong.

At that point, a smart person would have looked at the clock and gone to bed. The total ironing of all the pieces was 21 hours and 15 minutes, but I still needed to iron everything down to the background. I don’t actually know what time that was, because I am NOT smart, and I did NOT look at the clock, and I was still wide awake. So you can’t give me shit about that.

I had two fabrics for the background and I laid both of them out and put some of the big ironed-together pieces on them and picked the one I liked better, which happened to be the darker one. Honestly, the lighter one probably was the better choice, but whatever. My brain kept yelling darkER! darkER! darkER!, so I caved.

The biggest problem was that normally I would iron this on my entryway floor, but that floor is Hoarder Central at the moment. So that wasn’t happening. I mean, if I’d been patient enough to wait on the ironing until today, which also would have meant going to bed at a semi-reasonable hour, then we were planning on clearing that floor anyway as part of the pre-carpet prep work. But NOOOO. I must iron immediately. So I started on the ironing board, which was probably a mistake…I tried to get the bottom section straight…

An hour and a half later, I had laid it out (sort of) on the floor of the studio, realized I was crooked, but had already ironed major bits down and couldn’t be bothered to fix it. It will be OK.

Total ironing time: 22 hours and 45 minutes.

What have you done lately that took that much time? Here’s the top section.

No pictures of the whole thing. First of all, there’s nowhere big enough to hang or lay it out where I could photograph it all…it’s about 43″ w x 80″ h. I actually have no clue what the vertical measurement is…that was a total guess.

I’m not stitching it right away. I’m going to pick fabrics for the bird quilts and then I’m going to stitch down the Mammogram quilt, and then this one. Stitching down doesn’t take as long as ironing, though, so hopefully I’ll have a chunk of all that done this week. I did add up all the hours on this thing so far and I’m at a little over 109 hours. Wowza. It ain’t small. It ain’t simple.

Yup. This is my crazy. I do this because I have to. I don’t do it to make me happy or to change the world. I do it because I have a drive inside me that is completely out of whack (instead of the mostly out of whack that is my current existence) if I don’t do it. I know a lot of people don’t understand…they think that being able to make art should make me happy, but it doesn’t. It just decreases the unhappy. It’s like the people who think my losing weight should magically cure my diabetes. Nope. It’s deeper than that. I know what I need to be happy; I also know I can’t get there until I can get more of the unhappy to wander off. So I will laugh at your stupid jokes and smile at the dorky cat lying upside down on my pillow and think good thoughts when the bad dark cloud sinks down over my face. And at some point, my brain will respond the way it’s supposed to.

Book Review: Virgin

As you are surely aware, I read a lot. And sometimes I read for NetGalley for the purpose of reviewing books. I get lots of emails from them suggesting book titles, and when I’m totally buried in books, I often ignore them…but you know earlier this week was bad for life, so I was reading a lot. One of the suggestions sounded at least intriguing, so I read Radhika Sanghani’s Virgin.

So. It’s short. I read it in one evening. Is it good? Eh. I did go back and read all the other reviews after I had read it, and I’m confused about what book they read, but then again, maybe it’s because I’m old. Her issues seemed really lame. I mean, I don’t doubt there are girls out there in their last year of college who are virgins and who are stressed out about it, and the bit about the waxing was amusing, and as a science teacher, my incessant need to yell out, “It’s not your fucking vagina, you dumbass…it’s your vulva!” during the whole book is probably an issue. But I just wasn’t engaged with the story or the characters or any of it honestly.

So there we are. I gave it a 2 out of 5 on Goodreads. I did finish it; it was a quick read. Maybe someone else will be more amused by its pithy girlishness than I was.

Under Construction

I’ve been trying to adjust my mood. It doesn’t help that it’s hot during the day or that I am at the most frustrating part of the renovation (although moving furniture for the carpet install might also be frustrating…we just haven’t gotten there yet) or that yesterday was the day when I am alone for the longest period of time. Strange how being alone is both good and bad. It messes with my head, but then I NEED to be alone to do some of the art stuff I’m doing. There must be a different version of alone that works better for me (you know there is. you had it once.).

So summer is turning out to be difficult, and I finally stopped avoiding that and/or trying to bully through it, and tried to do some things that would actually change it. Going on the hike was the first one, and it was fine. So I signed up for another hike next week; I might do two…kinda depends on the weather. I also signed up for a few more meetup groups that were doing things I might be interested in, like writing sci fi. I think I have to admit that the story I’m writing is more science fiction than anything else. I have 7000 words. That’s more than I had last week. If I get a chance today, I have another 3000 or so roiling around in my brain that could be vomited out onto Google Docs. Or is that INTO Google Docs. Webspace. Not real space. Typed characters. I also went to a movie with a meetup group…will write about that further on. I’m not sure that was successful for a variety of reasons, most of them probably in my head.

So I have been ironing, about 2 1/2 hours yesterday. I started with the face…

This is actually like a thought bubble that’s yelling at her and crying. It’s easier to iron the eye as a separate unit and then iron it on top of the already completed face.

Maybe that’s my brain. Or some part of my brain. It’s true that with depression and perimenopausal symptoms that often you hear things in your mind that don’t make sense, the irritation for no or very little reason, the sadness, the moodiness, and then your brain gets in your face about that as well. Demands an explanation. Honestly, I don’t know how much of that is just me and how much is some symptom of any of the things that might be affecting my mood. Even the thyroid has been screwed up lately, and because I’m not on a school schedule, I keep forgetting to take my thyroid meds (symptom of underactive thyroid? Memory issues. Seriously.), so that doesn’t help. Excuse me. I’m getting up right now to take them…late.

OK, I’m back. It won’t work as well because there’s tea in my stomach, but it’s better than not taking it at all.

There’s a wolf…I kind of think of it as a protector, her familiar maybe.

Usually I have cats as familiars in my quilts, but it seemed she needed something bigger and more wild. I’m not sure. I know there’s no cats in this one.

Bird attacking the snake that’s in her…

I actually researched the coloring of hawks to make sure I was doing this one right…the red-tail hawks who hang out in the tree outside my studio. Beak’s wrong, but whatever.

So I’m done with the 1500s…I don’t actually have much left to iron (if you ignore the fact of the octopus tentacles from hell). I could finish today. That’s good. A week later than I wanted, but still good. Deep breaths. I might actually finish it this summer. Easily could do that. With the other one (wait, panic moment). And…and…don’t let the brain think about the ‘ands’. You will lose it.

Someone commented that I should get a tall stool for ironing (and tracing probably too). I have one. It even rolls. And has padding. Came from a thrift shop or something like that. It’s old. But I can’t seem to keep my butt upon it. I just slip right off. I’m not that comfortable sitting for long. I am used to standing all day for work. Plus, here’s the available space when I’m ironing…

The pieces are to the left on the white table and there isn’t much room between it and the ironing board. I suspect the tired-of-ironing feeling is more because ironing is difficult at times, trying to get all the pieces in the right place and figure out where the missing pieces are (I found two more missing pieces yesterday). One of the biggest issues I have when I start stitching is all the sitting. And tense shoulder stuff. Which doesn’t help. So the rolling chair has become a rolling storage depository for stuff like lead for mechanical pencils and tape dispensers, which is probably not a good use of it.

I didn’t iron more yesterday because I was trying to make this wall work.

Fucking wall. I started with an online recipe for texturing and used a small roller to apply it to the patch sections. It wasn’t right. I fussed with it, sanded it a little, and tried it again with a thicker mix. Still not right.

Fucking wall. So then I rolled the whole thing…

Which is what I did on the wall next to the fireplace, rolled it twice though. This one, I’ve only done once…and there’s some issue in that the part where the window is has the original texture. Do I care? I might. I have to make that decision today. I have to sand the whole thing just to knock the peaks down and then probably put a second coat on the whole thing, and then maybe I just paint it tomorrow and assume that’s as good as it gets. Do I really care that much? There’s an entirely different texture on the dining area attached to this, as well as the wall behind the piano, which is also part of this room. It’s all white. Is the world ending because of the texture?

No. Stop freaking. Just do it. But it’s hot and I hate sanding. Really really hate it.

So. I love going to the movies. Always have. In college, I would buy one ticket on Friday at the first matinee, student matinee price, and then I would sneak from theater to theater until I had seen like 3 or 4 movies in one day. I missed the first few minutes of some, but I didn’t care. I just loved hiding in the dark with the big picture in front of me. The last year has been mostly movie-free, not by choice. I tried in the beginning to keep going, but it made me incredibly sad being there alone and silent and I stopped. Plus it’s expensive, ticket plus parking. And I have to be picky about what I spend money on these days. College is going to kick my financial ass (which was already kicked to the ground by divorce, single-momhood, teaching not being a well-paying career, expenses for school, etc.). So I stopped going. I went to Catching Fire with the kids, but that was the last movie I saw, and that was back in November. I hate that. I hate that the one piece of my life that I absolutely loved has been so damaged by all this shit that I can’t enjoy it any more. OK. Not just one piece.

I had joined a couple of movie meetup groups, thinking that would help, I wouldn’t be there alone and there would be people to discuss the movie with afterwards. Sounds good, right? Except they usually schedule them during the week or Sunday evenings, and it just wasn’t working for me. Finally someone scheduled one for a Saturday night and it was something I would actually consider seeing, so I took a deep breath, thought about trying to change the summer mood, and signed up. Got there and introduced myself, and then realized they were all going to sit together as a group. Oh. Yeah. I hate sitting in the middle of the theater. I’m a 2nd-row person. I went on a date after the divorce with someone who told me they couldn’t continue dating me because of that. He liked the back row. That shit is never going to work. So I suggested that since we were a relatively large group, maybe some others would want to sit up front. I got one. No problem. We talked for a while before the movie, it was totally awkward, made more so by the fact that her mom wanted to sit way in the back. I’m not entirely sure why she sat with me. She said she likes being IN the movie, that feeling that being up front does for you (that is why I sit up front by the way), but it was weird. She sat still and upright for the entire movie. I fidgeted because I can’t sit still that long. I felt weird fidgeting, wondering if I was annoying her, wondering how she sat STILL for all that time.

Then afterwards, she got up during the credits and left without a word. I’m weird. I watch all the credits. When I got up, the theater was empty. Yup. I’m really weird I guess. I went out to the lobby and there were groups of people talking about the movie and I tried to join in, but I was getting texts from the girlchild about her code for the AP tests earlier (scores came out yesterday) and I knew she was expecting me to send her that soon, so I left. It was weird. And what was worse was how I felt afterwards. I love the moviegoing. I love being in the theater and experiencing another world for two hours, but the after feeling is fucking awful. I cried all the way home and into the house and found her the code and then logged in as her (like you do) because she wasn’t answering (apparently she gave up on waiting and went to a dance instead, which I am totally OK with her doing). And texted the boychild to see if he had checked his scores. I guess I’m glad I had that distraction when I got home, because the after-movie feeling was just really bad. Like crawl into bed and put the pillows over your head and sob like the world has ended bad. I have been getting better over the last few months, but this whole experience threw me back about 6 months and it sucked. I can’t live there. I can’t be like that.

So we had 7 AP tests between the two kids: they scored 3 4s and 4 5s. I texted the girlchild that she rocked (she’d been so stressed about these, thought she would be crying herself to sleep over her scores), the boychild the same. I’m proud of them. And some part of me realizes that despite the divorce years ago and all the emotional mess I’ve been this last year, that they still were able to fucking rock it academically. And as yet another person told me congratulations last night at the movies for raising a kid who’s going to Cornell, that I have smart kids, but that I had something to do with their successes…and I hope they keep having them, because I can’t do a lot about it from here on out except be the crazy mom who’s texting them at midnight about stupid stuff. The mom who stays up until 3 ironing because making art is important to her. The mom who is depressed and jokes about it and apologizes for being such a lame-ass. My house may not be clean (hell, it’s a fucking disaster at the moment), I may be a mental disaster myself, but I did OK with them.

The movies? Yeah, not so much. That part is still under construction…

Celebrating American Independence with an Iron

Yesterday, I ironed. For like 5 hours. So shockingly, I got significant portions of this beast done…because that’s what it takes, standing in front of an ironing board for 5 hours. In case you were wondering about my process. Yes, it’s mostly crazy. Trying to explain it to non-art people, they mostly just nod their heads carefully, like people do when they think you’re crazy, and then they say something about how they could NEVER do that, because they’re not creative.

OK, well, I disagree with that. You obviously don’t have the fucked-up, obsessive mind that I do, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing at the moment. Me and my mind have not been getting along. I started by working on the ribcage. The uterus was ironed separately, to be placed properly later.

Sometimes it’s just easier to do it that way…I can’t see through fabric once it’s ironed on. And this whole central torso is pretty complicated…

There’s lungs and a heart and two hands and that uterus…I still do the whole thing while watching X Files…finally made it to Season 6.

I started ironing in the morning, then continued during the afternoon in between sanding plaster and filling holes and waiting for them to dry and washing walls and then starting all over again, although not in that order. There’s more of that happening today. Ugh. Tired of remodeling. Can’t really stop now, though. Not motivated. Until I walk into the room and realize I can’t stand the mess. It’s easier to hide in my studio/office/room at the end of the hall where all the animals congregate.

I have the same problem with ironing…if I get to a really hard bit, a complicated section, it takes will power to keep myself standing at the ironing board and working. It’s easier to walk away and come up with something else to do. You saw how many books I read earlier this week…total avoidance of ALL things, art, house, etc. Just make it all stop. I’m doing better with it right now, but that’s also because I got through the really hard bit yesterday with a whole lot of bitchy persistence.

Sometimes I don’t know where that comes from. Sometimes I know it’s genetic. Sometimes it’s just the drive in my head, the artist finally coming out of the cave where she’s been hanging out with depressoid brain. She hasn’t been around lately. She claims she was tired, that the end of the school year and boychild graduating and all the shit that came with that…she couldn’t deal. And that often happens at the end of the school year.

I’ll give her a break, as long as she doesn’t wander off again. She needs to be here. She’s got a lot of stuff to do. No excuses.

I posted these on Instagram/FB last night to see if anyone could tell what they were…

I often iron all the bits and pieces (lungs, heart, etc.) off to the side and then assemble them all into the big picture in one go, because otherwise this is overwhelming, trying to fit everything in there with limited view of the drawing below.

Here’s the heart…I cooked dinner somewhere in between the last picture and this one…or maybe I prepped it even before the last picture. I got halfway through the heart when the timer went, so I stopped and ate with the boychild, who actually stuck around at the table with me after he finished eating (oh my god, he DOES have manners) because the girlchild isn’t here and I guess he decided it would be rude or mean to leave me out there on the deck alone (we’ve been eating out there because the kitchen table is a disaster…I thought we would only have to do that once or twice. Yup. It’s been over a week. Whatever. I always underestimate home renovation time.). Then I realized we were leaving for fireworks in 20 minutes and I still needed to pack up water bags and find my hiking boots from yesterday (you’d think that would be easy), so I speedily finished ironing the heart together…

Got some crazy colors in there. My hearts are never simple. Ironic that.

I had persuaded the boychild and ex to try a new firework experience. We’ve been going to the same park for the same display for the last 16 (15?) years, with a few years off to go to Lake Arrowhead’s display. Actually, we probably started going to this one after the divorce, when Arrowhead was no longer the family destination, so maybe 12 years. Anyway, I wanted to hike up a mountain to see fireworks, multiple displays. I liked the idea of working for your 4th of July. And they crazily agreed, so at 8 PM, we were at the bottom of the back side of Cowles Mountain (Barker Way entrance). I had mapped everything out trailwise and my ex had been up one of them with the boychild before, so we weren’t completely blind and stupid. Plus we weren’t the only people doing this…which is kinda cool, if you think about it.

It’s a 1000-foot gain no matter where you start.

This is halfway up, looking back at El Cajon. It’s getting darker, but no need for flashlights yet.

The sun definitely went down.

All the local fireworks displays start at 9 (the big ones, anyway), so that’s what we were aiming for. There were a ton of people at the top, mostly facing west towards the bay. We decided to face east, towards what we usually see in El Cajon, plus we could see Santee, Poway, Mira Mesa, and some smaller ones as well, plus it must have been Viejas Casino (we are totally going there next year…not the casino, but somewhere nearby, because from what we could see behind the hill, theirs was freakin’ awesome).

Night pictures have their own weirdness.

And it’s honestly not the same as being right under the big booms and cascading lights…

And we wouldn’t have known that if we hadn’t tried…that’s the display we normally watch.

Getting blurry. It was a good experience though. Burned 750 calories for the day, so you can’t argue with that. We got a little lost on the way back because we are a family who is easily irritated by other people, and the groups that were stretched all the way across the trail and giggling like drunken maniacs (really, carrying your drink in one hand down a steep slope while you carry your child on your hip? Whatever.) annoyed us, so we sort of kamikazed our way down. Saw two baby scorpions on the trail (don’t think I’ve ever seen those in the wild before, at least not since I was a kid). That was cool.

And when we got back, after 10 PM, I decided to keep going on the ironing. That might have been a bit crazy, but if you’ve been here for a while, the crazy will not surprise you. I got it to here before we left…

All those bits and pieces ironed down, except for the Fallopian tube that lies over the hand on the left…it’s not attached yet because the hand goes under it…so when we got back, I did the hand and the stuff on the right shoulder/arm.

We had closed Calli up in the girlchild’s room, because she freaks out over fireworks. The ones that went off the night before, apparently she hid under the computer desk and then tried to climb into the boychild’s lap. So when we got back, there was a lot of crying and neediness, and this is where she slept for the next 4 hours…

RIGHT under my feet. A little annoying, but she was better afterwards…hard to concentrate on ironing, though, when you’re trying NOT to step on a dog.

Yes, I ironed for the next 4 hours. I was a little obsessive. I started on the face, which meant trying to find tiny little pieces in another box, because the face straddled two boxes.

I eventually found all the parts and got the whole thing together.

So now I have the whole bottom section ironed in one piece, then two side sections that sit on/in the water, then the entire torso is one piece from knees to clavicle. Then the head is separate. I’m about 17 hours in and I made it to the middle of the 1300s…it was a logical place to stop. Unfortunately, it was about 2 AM and then my brain wouldn’t shut down. It was fully in art mode, and although I was too tired to keep ironing, I couldn’t shut my brain down enough to go to sleep, so I read blogs for a while…but Ms. Needy was on my lap requiring attention.

Could have been fireworks. Who knows. I gave her what she needed and eventually made it into bed before 3. Not good for today’s brain, but it needed to happen for yesterday’s brain. I’m trying to wake up enough now to handle the gym and more ironing and painting or texturing or something. Not sure of the order. One thing at a time. Another ironing day like today, though, and I could be done. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can pull off that level of focus today. We’ll see. It’s progress anyway, significant progress.

I found a list last night (ironically while trying to shut DOWN the creative brain) of 37 creative books to read…Here. I’ve read 7 of them. I don’t really need help with the creative brain. When it misbehaves, I know why and I know how to get it back, although it might take me a while. Those aren’t artists’ blocks or anything…it really is just a matter of what I can handle. You need times of fallow to counteract the times when the brain is going like gangbusters. It’s rest, just like sleep at night (which I also suck at doing properly). So. I might read some of these. I might not.

Cowles Mt Hike from Lake Murray Blvd

This is the first hike I’ve been on in a few weeks; I tried a short, easy, flat hike in mid-June, but my knee was still bugging me, so I’ve been paranoid to try again. I’ve done Cowles Mt from the Golfcrest access about a million times and don’t really like it because of the huge number of people, but this was supposed to be longer and sparsely peopled. I brought my poles just in case. We left at 6:30, which was good, because it was still in the low 80s and not a sweat-free experience. This access is from Lake Murray Blvd, which deadends at the trail entrance.

It’s a nice, big, wide service road at this point, on the shady side of the mountain, although the sun was distinctly in our eyes for part of this section.

From the service road, you turn left on Mesa Trail and take a narrower path across a stagnant creek and up the hill through manzanita and ceanothus. It’s steeper in this section, but still very doable. The next turn was a T-intersection, and we went away from Big Rock in Santee, toward the Barker Way service road. This is that intersection, so you can see the amazing view behind us of Santee.

Following the service road, you then look up to see the peak of Cowles Mt from the east, not the way most people come. You can’t see the trail on the mountain here, but it’s pretty brutal…at least my body, which hadn’t hiked for real in about 5 weeks, thought it was brutal, but it was starting to cool off, and as long as I can stop a few times, I can make it up anything apparently.

This is looking towards La Mesa and El Cajon…a lovely hazy summer’s evening.

Here’s what the climb looked like at the end…

Pretty steep. Thanks to Steve for the pictures of me sweating. Because I was. Because that’s what I do. And I turn red too. It’s very healthy.

Then we were at the top…

Too hazy for a good sunset picture…but still, it’s the top.

On the way back down, I took a panorama shot to the east…

I think that’s where we’re headed to watch fireworks tonight…hopefully it will work out and it won’t be too crowded. You never know. Anyway, it was 2 hours, 5.3 miles, 1000-foot gain. A good workout…could have done without the clouds of weird flying bugs that attacked on the way down, but they didn’t seem to leave any marks, although someone commented about those bugs who lay eggs in your eyes…

Yick.

Grabbing That Errant Eyeball

Well, first of all, I found piece 469, one of the tiny fingernails on that hand that is either reaching for or grabbing that errant eyeball.

I still have an elbow shadow, another fingernail, and a droplet of blood that are missing, but I’m hoping they’ll show up in the next 8 boxes. Holy crap. Do I really have 8 boxes left to iron? I am slow. Actually, it might be 9 boxes, but I’ve ironed bits and pieces out of the 1200, 1400, and 1500 boxes that were mixed up in the lower numbers because I missed numbering those pieces and had to go back and do it.

I haven’t ironed the damn octopus tentacles at all, because honestly, that scares me. I might need tweezers. And a magnifying glass.

Today was a much more successful day, and I was feeling pretty good about what I had achieved, and then shit from my past dropped in my lap. I’m trying to ignore it, like you would ignore an old smelly cat, but really, those are impossible to ignore, because they do that kneading thing with their claws in your lap and they’re purring and often trying to bump their head against your mouse hand and it’s just freakin’ annoying. Yes, I have personal experience with this.

I spent some time today at a friend’s house and cut out most of the Wonder Under for the 10 small bird quilts…

I finished the rest tonight. It took from 5 minutes (bird 2) to 16 minutes (bird 8) to trim the Wonder Under…about an hour and 45 minutes total today. My goal is to iron some onto fabric this weekend, but I really wanted to have the big quilt ironed together before I did that, and I don’t think I can do that as quickly as I’d like. The birds so far have taken from 22 minutes (bird 1) to 46 minutes (bird 8) to number, trace onto Wonder Under, and then cut out of the Wonder Under. Bird 8 has more pieces and is larger. The smaller birds are 1-6. Anyway. It’s progress. Progress is good. I put each bird into a tupperware or rubbermaid container (let’s hope we don’t have many leftovers in the near future) for the next step. It’s not a lot different from what I do now with 100 pieces in a bin, except this isn’t very many pieces, honestly.

The next renovation step has a lot of wait time in between the separate tasks, so hopefully I can stay focused and finish the damn quilt things…I’m starting to panic. I really feel like I’m getting nothing of substance done, and I know it’s because each thing I’m doing is so huge and time-consuming that you can’t see the finish line for all the chaos in front of it…like the living room getting done or this big quilt being finished. Even the birds…they’re small, but I’m crazy and decided to do 10 instead of 1 or 2. It’s really because I couldn’t decide…and there’s some argument that it’s more efficient this way. We’ll see if that’s true.

So yeah, I hiked tonight after…well, my last long hike was Memorial Day weekend…I never blogged about it for some reason (end of school brain death). I did a short flat hike in mid-June, with minor knee pain…but otherwise, oh yeah, there was one dog hike. That’s it. So I had been planning to do something this week and just couldn’t commit. Honestly, I was really worried my knee would act up…so I finally picked one that was strenuous but shorter than what I normally do, and in the evening, and that had at least one person I knew on it, just in case. And I packed my poles, in case the knee got really bad.

And then I hiked. And it was good. And the knee behaved, zero pain. And yes. Hallelujah. I felt good about that. So I will try to keep doing at least one night hike a week. I’ve persuaded boychild and my ex to hike tomorrow night to see fireworks (girlchild is in Anaheim and will be at Disneyland for that…scary!).

My success with the hike was enough to push me into ironing tonight…also I wasn’t as freakin’ tired as I have been the rest of this week…maybe because I went to bed at a reasonable hour last night (unlike tonight, right?). Sleep has not been good. I’m worried about upcoming stuff, lots of stuff. And worry is not good for sleep. Neither is being an old lady, but I can’t do anything about that.

So I finished up the pelvic area…some scars and cracks…

And then moved on into the ribcage above it, which is really fucking complicated (goddamned designer is just making it hard on me).

She has two hands in front of her that I haven’t ironed yet (obviously), and she’s holding her uterus (like you do). And there’s a snake that is somehow behind her and in her…so that’s the yellow/green stuff in her middle area. I’m mostly through the 900s. So halfway. Aargh. It felt like so much more, but if you think about it, there’s half the body left, including the face, which is incredibly complicated, plus a bird and an eyeball and a wolf and I don’t even know what else…and those damn tentacles. So I really shouldn’t be surprised. I’m at 12 hours and 38 minutes and I need to start spending more than an hour or two a day on this. So I should assume another 12 hours, at least. If I start now, I’ll be done before lunchtime.

Yeah. I’m a slavedriver. But I know what I need to get done this summer, and I know what challenges I will face in the new school year, so trying to get stuff done AND get my head straight would be a good thing. Damn head…keeps twisting around and trying to figure shit out. It just needs to accept that other people’s shit is not its problem. Sometimes I really hate days like today when I get so close to good feelings all around, not happy, but not shit, and then one thing throws me. I need more resilience. More padding. More protection. I’m imagining this…

Yup. That, except around my brain. Plus smiling. Yeah.

I miss this…

Because she’s gone for days…Key Club convention. Her male counterpart is around…he got his new college computer (grad present from his parental units) and is thrilled to have a computer that will run more than one application at a time. I feel that pain. We have three old and decrepit computers that need updating…so that’s one down. I’m not replacing all three…mine first, because it’s the oldest and makes the most inappropriate noises, despite my earlier fixes of the year. By then, girlchild will need her own super-speedy laptop for college. So maybe that’s how I solve that problem. Just spend thousands of dollars to send them to college instead of fixing the house computers.

Here he is with his last National Piano Guild certificate…a Superior rank.

Kind of cool…I remember taking him to the first one a million years ago. He was shorter than me then and had a shaved head. Things change. I bet if I go to bed, things will change again. Like maybe I won’t feel so crappy. Look how much stuff I did today! Brain! Pay attention! Yeah. OK. Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb you. OK, I’ll turn the light out before I go. Closing the door. Sorry. Whispering now. Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the…OK OK. I’m shutting up now. Geez. Brain has no sense of humor.

Not Good with the Waiting…

So one of the triggers for my bad moods, the sad stuff, is not getting anything artistic done. I know this. I tell myself this all the time, but I get to this place where I can’t DO anything…except pick up a book, even though I know I need to. I’m physically tired, mentally exhausted, and the only thing I can handle as I’m standing in the chaotic space that is currently my house is a book. So I’ve read a LOT of them in the last two days. I really just need to shake off the mood and DO, and I think it will be better. There’s a lot of waiting around when you’re doing renovations though…waiting for contractors to show, waiting for things to dry. I hate waiting. I suck at it. Really. I do. I fidget and I can’t get anything started because I don’t know how much time I have, and I hate that.

I don’t wait well. Best if you don’t make me wait if at all possible, or if you do make me wait, give me a fairly accurate time of unwaiting or I will get irritated. I try to deal with my dislike of waiting by playing stupid games on my phone or reading blogs (they don’t take long to read), but at some point, I’m fairly sure I have better things to do than wait. Really, it’s rude to make me wait beyond a certain amount. But there are plenty of reasons why you have to wait…I’m better when I know there’s a reason (like the carpet has to come from some other state or the contractor already has jobs lined up). I get those. I don’t like it, but it doesn’t bug me. I don’t like waiting when it’s just because you forgot or you lost track of time…and yes, I know there are people like that. I gave birth to one. You tell her we’re leaving in 5 minutes, and when that 5 minutes is up, THEN she gets up and gets ready. Which is why I tell her “5 minutes” when it’s really 10. Yeah. Someday she’ll figure out that I’m doing that.

Anyway, this house stuff is a shitload of waiting. My life, honestly, is tons of waiting without really knowing what I’m waiting for or how to make it stop being waiting and instead being. Remember that interview question, “Where do you see yourself in 5 years?” Oh hell. Fuck if I know. With both kids graduated, me completely broke (like worse than now). That’s all I can see. The rest is unknown. I can’t predict it. I don’t even want to hope for anything, because then where are you at when you get there and that’s not where you are? I thought I knew where I’d be this year at this time, and I was completely wrong, and that still feels like shit and probably will for a while. So what’s the point of that question? I know, they want to know what my ambitions are: “I see myself more sane than I am now, and hopefully the house is cleaner because the kids will not be living here.” Beyond that? Don’t know. Can’t see that far. Don’t want to see that far in case it’s just more of this.

So yesterday I waited for the mirror guys…see that wall o’ mirrors, the wall o’ 70s flashbacks?

They showed up with their fancy tools and their hang-loose hand gestures (seriously, he did the hang loose and then said “ciao”…) and in 20 minutes, they had all 4 panels down and out of the house.

OH MY GOD. Why didn’t I do this 17 years ago when we moved in? I thought it would be a lot more expensive than it was. The kids say the room looks smaller, but I don’t see it. I just see a Lack of Mirrors and I have to tell you, that is the closest I’ve gotten to happy happy joy joy in a year.

It didn’t last long, though, because then I’m looking at this.

Giant Sighs of Drywall Damage Hell. The plus is that my college art degree qualifies me to fix this. OK, really, it’s not that hard, right? There is texture all over this wall, so I’m going to have to patch the texture.

The carpet guy showed up in here too (didn’t have to wait for him…he just showed up without calling, which honestly is better). Unfortunately, we’re not getting carpet NEXT week, so I will have to live with chaos through the middle of July. AARGH. Sigh. I knew that might happen and I have a plan to move stuff a bit more slowly and stash it in my bedroom and the boychild’s bedroom (because the girlchild’s room looks like a hurricane hit it, which technically it did, and there is zero available floor space. It’s just damn scary in there)…and then the day before, we will deal with the major furniture issues. But I need to get those two walls done first…

I spent yesterday scraping mastic off, with dad helping, and then when I went off to an appointment, he started patching…the hole on the right had a speaker wire in it. I don’t know why. We don’t have speakers. It didn’t appear to be attached to anything.

I had book club last night, which turned into an interesting discussion of women in science and how it’s STILL an issue to be a woman and to do science, and so many people, men and women, believe that it’s so much better, when really, it’s not. After the last few book clubs I’ve gone to, I find it impossible NOT to evaluate a book’s ability to be fair to female characters, and the comics industry is even worse when it comes to this because of the art involved…you aren’t just imagining what a character looks like and what they’re thinking, you have a freakin’ picture of them. So now I read both comics and literature with this eye towards how we represent women, how we treat them when they are dealing with things that are purely female (periods, pregnancy, sex–which is different for women, menopause, aging). What questions do we ask in interviews of women that we don’t ask of men? Can you tell the gender of an author merely by reading their text? Dan Simmons? Obviously male. Robin Hobbs? I thought she did a relatively good job with males and females. And dogs, for that matter, although she needs to stop KILLING them. OK, it was for the story. I get it. I thought it was interesting to read LOCAS II, because Jaime Hernandez is a male Hispanic artist, but almost all the characters are female, and he does a relatively good job of portraying a wide range of truly female emotions and actions. His men? His men are a little freaky. Ray’s probably the best…

ANYWAY, I came home tired and ate and exercised and read a whole ‘nother book, because it’s all I could handle, and then went to bed and was awakened by the phone ringing, which I ignored, but probably shouldn’t have, because it was followed by dad knocking on the door to finish spackling.

Well, and there was THIS noise…I don’t know what the damn cat was doing, but I came in to this.

And there’s dad, sanding up a storm. He finished all the spackle, but I’ll be spending Independence Day texturing stuff. And hopefully ironing, because REMEMBER?

This is my road to a decent mood. Not the wall. The art. I gotta do some waiting before that though. Sigh.