Insert Quote about Tomorrow…

Stitching down. I had to negotiate with myself to keep stitching tonight. I started late…today was exhausting and I didn’t sit down at the machine until almost 10 PM. Tomorrow will hopefully be better. I have 3 1/2 hours into the stitching-down process and I’m about a third of a way through. I could finish tomorrow. Maybe. If I’m crazy and don’t listen to my chiropractor. Place your bets now.

I had to re-iron some stuff because it won’t stay stuck. It’s humid here; in fact it was raining yesterday afternoon and misting this morning. So the Wonder Under is releasing.

I’m still down in the water section…I think of it as the aquarium section, like she’s sitting in front of a giant aquarium, except I think she’s really IN the aquarium. There’s a lot of stitching in there…

Those damn octopus tentacles…

Those fucking beautiful octopus tentacles. So I made a deal with myself that I would stop when I finished the water section, except then it made more sense to finish the silly boat above the water…

So that was the new deal with myself, except my self kept trying to say I’d stop at midnight, because I have to be up early to deal with carpet people, but mostly because this stitching-down stuff is mentally and physically difficult and I get upset and bored. Anyway. I finished the fucking boat. That boat that is the bane of my existence. All my pain rides in that boat. And it can’t even face me.

Sigh. Have I told you how much this month sucks? Please time travel me to a new place and time. I’ll even deal with Dr. Who if I have to, but only if it’s this one…

He looks like a nice guy. The others, not so much.

Hey, signs that you raised a Geek Girl (besides the fact that she’s seen every Dr. Who episode): She wanted me to sit with her on the floor this afternoon (I actually fell asleep down there with the dog curled up next to me…she was also freaked out by the lack of furniture)…and was reading me stuff from a Harry Potter Pinterest board. Yup. That’s a geek.

SIL, she says change is good. I don’t argue. It’s usually true. Except when it’s not. I know the change in my house WILL be good; right now, though, it is sorta hellish. Maybe the change is good once the changing part is done, and the process of change is just painful and torturous.

All the furniture is out except that damn light table (and the girlchild)…

The light table would have to come apart to get out, and it’s just not worth the work. They say they can move it around as they work. It’s not that heavy. It’s lighter than the piano and we moved that.

It took us about 2 1/2 hours to get everything out…on the deck, on the driveway, and in a variety of rooms…and as soon as we did, girlchild brought in a pile of pillows and blankets and complained that we hadn’t reconnected the TV properly. There was a web of cords back there, and we untangled it, but I’m not sure we’ll ever get it back right. It may not matter. There were two cords that were attached to one thing but not another.

Why I fell asleep on the floor with the dog? Stayed up too late last night, plus all that work. I was tired. My doctor called me her hero because of my blood tests. My A1C is normal. Let’s ignore my daily blood sugars. But we’re reducing another med. My liver says thanks. My diabetes is CURED! Not really. No one cures it. Stop telling people it’s cured.

There’s at least two places on the walls that are already damaged and there’s a molding issue and boychild’s damn dirty feet already made one wall dirty (seriously?). I think I’m going to hang a sheet where his dirty feet go. The kids want a new chandelier (and so do I, because this one is uncleanable), but that’s not on my list at the moment.

Although it’s fun to Google those…

Maybe I should make my own…

Because these aren’t wild enough…

It’s a big space.

All those white walls, all they do is make me want to go grab a bunch of spray paint cans and graffiti the shit out of them (reasons why you shouldn’t let me help you remodel), but then some sense of reality takes over and I realize I don’t ever want to do this again, so I leave it alone. White will do. I actually HANG art on my walls, unlike most people, so it will not look this blank for long…although the boychild likes this and girlchild complains about the dark furniture.

The great Rift Valley…where the carpet seam was, where the dogs nibbled and feet wore away at it. These carpets are from the early 80s.

I did actually sit in the middle of the floor by myself for a bit to eat my dinner. I’ve been sitting at the table on the deck since we started painting, but it’s hard to get to at the moment. I was visited by two different cats, seriously confused and perturbed by the lack of furniture to (a) scratch, (b) hide behind, and/or (c) lie on.

You can see we managed to get the piano into the entryway. Boychild likes the acoustics there (less fabric, higher ceilings), but I’m not leaving it there. Maybe I should take up piano again.

Tomorrow we get carpet. Then we move everything back. Well, I’m reconsidering some of the everything. But I’m not sure how much I can really not move back in.

I’m trying to keep control of the emotional landslide I’m currently living in, so I’m being good about food, exercise, and meditation. I suck at sleep, but there are other factors that affect that, like my thyroid meds, which I’m trying to be better about taking as well. Because that was the one number that was off…STILL. Meditation has gotten easier, in that I don’t have to focus on someone I’m not happy with any more…instead I’m taking on the whole world and taking in all their pain and suffering and “sharing my feelings of joy and happiness.” Um. Mr. Meditation, I don’t have any of those. I have feelings of relief sometimes. Some mental peace at times. Some thoughts of, Oh, Thank God, That’s Done (when the couches made it out of the house and no one died). That’s all I got. Perhaps someone else who is meditating can forward me some of their joy and happiness so I can share it out.

Things that made me cry today:

1. The season finale to Sons of Anarchy (yes, I’m behind in watching stuff). Dammit, SOA, I count on you guys for a good dose of violence and none of that pulling at the heartstrings shit. This is why I watch you and X Files. Don’t fuck with me. Oh yeah, and that fork thing? You jumped the shark. Plus I knew you were gonna kill her. It was the meanest thing.

2. Elton John (goddamned Pandora)

3. Meditation (see above)

4. Random shit at the gym, including a sweet kiss between two people I used to work with in a former life, who weren’t together then but now are. It wasn’t a bad thing that they kissed. It was sweet. So I guess that’s my issue. Sometimes things that make me cry are all about what’s missing.

Tomorrow I stitch. Tomorrow, the world rights all the wrongs in my living room. Tomorrow, I can start putting it all back and the Hoarder house will go away. I’m hoping that helps.

Never Feel Bad Anymore*

So Friday night, I was going to iron more birds, but I like to watch things while ironing (it keeps the bad/sad parts of my brain occupied so they don’t make me cry) and the kids were hogging Netflix. So I decided to stitch stuff down instead, because I’ve got plenty of that to do, and I listen to music while I’m doing that, but it doesn’t do a very good job of occupying the bad/sad brain. In fact, I think it brings it out more, which is not necessarily a good thing. That said, this part of the quilting needs to get done and I’m just going to need to suck it up and stitch…and let’s be honest here, I cry while stitching. I try not to. I try to distract myself with stuff in my head, I try to pseudo-write the story I’m working on, I try a lot of fucking things that don’t fucking work at all, so maybe I should just accept that this is the crying stage. And just make sure I am well-hydrated.

I started with the mammogram quilt because it’s got fewer pieces and will take less time, and my plan was to get it done and sandwiched before the carpet guys come Wednesday, so I could quilt Wednesday if I wanted to. Not that I’ll be done with everything else, probably, but it’s good to have plans…

I got about halfway done before I got tired. It was late at night, almost midnight when I quit.

I fold it up on the machine, because otherwise I will find a cat laying upon it at the first opportune moment, and then I will have to remove all that cat hair. It will take about another hour to finish this, so hopefully I will get to that today. I’m sitting here, only sort of awake (sleep is a real bitch at the moment…can’t fall asleep, then nightmares wake me up, then can’t fall asleep again until early morning. HATE IT), trying to persuade myself to go to the gym, and the quilt brain is like, “Don’t go to the gym. Stay here. Sew. You know you want to.”

It’s true. I want to finish that one and then do all 10 birds. But I need to go to the gym as well. Grr.

So yeah, I finished ironing birds yesterday…Number 6 was a strange one…

but its shape appealed to me…

In the actual drawing, there’s a face next to it. That drawing does not exist as a quilt. Then I did number 7, which is actually on the Mammogram quilt that I’m stitching down at the moment…

I think this one has the fewest pieces…

Number 8 has the most pieces, with 61, and is also kind of the weirdest one…

Jul 13 14 010 small

I liked the feathers though. Making these little quilts is really about my messing around with pieces of my work, which I don’t usually do, but someone liked a bird and thought they might like a small bird quilt. So I figured it was worth a try.

I don’t really know whether I like this process or not…it’s quick, but it’s like Quilting Lite to me. No depth to it. I’ve always had that problem with smaller quilts.

I think that’s why I don’t make very many of them.

They’re too easy and I don’t engage in the process.

That might be why I made 10 of them…it makes it a large enough project for me to have to pay some level of attention. And I think it’s funny that one of the most complicated birds is the one that’s getting the most attention…

First owl I’ve ever done was this one on the Celebrating Silver quilt. I looked at a bunch of owl pictures to draw this…and decided there’s definitely a Harry Potter feel to it as well…

Anyway, the next step is to stitch them down, hopefully today. These will all be for sale, and some people are already in line for choosing one, but I’m not allowing any of that until they’re finished and priced, because I know that might be an issue. I do value my time and although these are small, so far the smallest ones have taken almost an hour to do (not bad, but only about halfway through, if that) and the largest ones have taken almost three hours to do. So I’m trying to be fair to myself and keep track of the time so I don’t rip myself off.

Anyway, more of that today.

On Friday, we also did a lot of moving stuff out of the living room area, prepping for the last bad day before the carpet guys come. We needed the entryway clear (which is why it would be a good time to get that quilt done and sandwiched, because that’s where I do that), so we moved all the boxes and books out of there into my bedroom mostly. Then we moved anything smallish or that would fit in my bedroom or the hallway, plus the piles of stuff we had stored in the little living room as we cleared out the dining area for painting. I am glad to announce that I could in fact have a full Hoarders house, complete with really skinny hallways full of crap.

Seriously, I get totally claustrophobic walking through this…

I could not be a serious hoarder. I would go crazy. My bedroom at the moment is like some sort of junk cave…

The cat is freaked out by it and so am I. That’s the view back down the hallway toward the more open part of the house. I will be so glad when all this is done and I can move everything back and put it away. It will be a pain in the butt, I’m sure, but I am going nuts living like this. No earthquakes please.

I hiked last night, which was nice (will post it later)…still no knee pain, so that’s good. But I didn’t get home until after 10, and then I showered and meditated (trying to be better about that), and then I had no energy for anything after that really, so I came in here and stared at the computer, and the story in my head knocked at the door. So I started to write. And I kept trying to stop, because I was tired, my neck hurt, my fingers were still going, but I mentally was done, but apparently I wasn’t, because I wrote almost 4000 words before I could stop. I seriously tried stopping in 5 different places, and my fingers would keep going. I guess that’s a good thing. I’m hoping to do some more tomorrow, because I wasn’t really trying to tell my brain how to write this thing and it went off on a tangent, which is good, because I didn’t really know where the story was going next, and now I do. Well, sort of. I have a vague idea of what’s next, but it’s turning into something scarier than I started out with. I’m at 12,000 words. Not great, but not bad. A good solid start.

Then I went to bed and read for a while with the heating pad under my tweaked neck…same place as before, dammit. Might have to call the chiropractor again for another emergency appointment. I had to read because my brain wouldn’t shut down.

For the post title, I was looking for a song I knew I had heard lately about “can’t control my brain” and this one popped up. And the video is sweet, all puppies and kittens and wild animal babies, and it’s a nice sentiment. To never feel bad anymore. Weezer: Islands in the Sun…

I think I was originally thinking of a different song, though…not the Ramones, I Wanna Be Sedated (although there is that sentiment), but there’s another one…tickling around in my brain somewhere, but these two are crowding it out. That’s probably a good thing…

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…

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.

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.

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.

I Can’t Opt Out of the Tree-Killing…

Hello Internet. I have talked to very few people in the last 24 hours…in fact, I think all of them were either related to me by blood or they were providing a service for which they were paid. Hmn. That sounds bad. I went to look at carpet for the living room. I said “No Thank You” to the Kohls’ lady who wanted me to get their rewards card, and I ordered a burrito. I said yes to salsa. The guy at the gym talked to me because I can never get my card to scan. Apparently it takes special skills for that. I also talked to my mental health insurance company about the plethora of trees they are killing by sending me three pieces of paper in the mail in an envelope every time I go to counseling. I feel sorry for those who need counseling multiple times/week…I mean, first of all, because they need that much therapy but also because of the trees they are killing.

It turns out I can’t opt out of the tree-killing. I must endure it. I do not understand. It’s like the silly yellow immunization record I’m supposed to bring every time the kids go to the doctor. We lost boychild’s years ago, and I never remember girlchild’s. Why is it not all accessible on the web? Well, it sort of is, but they still want that yellow piece of folded paper in its funny plastic cover.

So the plus with going to work every day is that I often have substantive conversations with humans I’m not related to, and I don’t have to pay them to have those conversations. Instead, I spend a lot of time hiding in books or avoiding the darkly dank bits of my brain. Not fun.

When I woke up this morning and opened my blinds, this is what I saw…

Now yes, I know, it’s a nasty bit of dirt that used to be a lawn, and it will eventually be something nicer, but I’m not planting things in the summer because it’s silly in Southern California when there will be no rain for the next four or five months to plant things unless you plan to water them a lot. You can see where the trees belong though…in the place where I don’t have to stare at my neighbor’s truck. So dad found some trees, maybe, and hopefully later this week we will deal with that. Or next week. Because at least I can plant the trees and something else to block delivery guys from wondering where the fuck my front door is (because that ain’t it). And yes, that’s where they left the box. Right there. In the middle of the dirt.

The box was addressed to the boychild and had this lovely tape on it.

Jul 1 14 002 small

Yes, this is how my life is at the moment. Tape is exciting. And uses the word pilfer. I’m betting none of my students know what pilfer means. Although I did teach them irk and vex, so I could have taught them pilfer as well. Next year. I’m also going to teach them how to make a proper British cup of tea, so they can stop asking me about my coffee (if it has milk in it, it must be coffee?). The next most common question in my class besides “Can I go to the bathroom?” which is always answered with, “Yes, I believe you know HOW, but not right now,” is “What’s THAT for?” while pointing at the eyewash. Hate that thing. I bump into it constantly, it’s in a stupid fucking location, whole room is designed by a blind dehydrated poodle, and it doesn’t matter that I demonstrate how and why to use it on like the third day of school, I will get asked about 148 times during the year (there are only 183 school days; you do the math) about what it’s for. I’m thinking of making posters for the most annoying questions so I’ll just have to point at them. Of course, one of those posters would simply say, “It’s not coffee; it’s tea.” Maybe I could have one of the Doctors saying it. David Tennant would probably do that for me. I’ll text him.

OH MY. I can actually have my tea in a David Tennant mug.

Unfortunately, the link goes to a mug with not quite as much handmade character, but here it is…and really, if I got this for school, I’d just have to explain who it was to 95% of my students.

Yes, I need to get out more. I’m going to be doing that tomorrow. Maybe. Because the girlchild started texting me at midnight about her bee sting. She stepped on a bee at the soccer tournament yesterday afternoon, and it didn’t start swelling until last night, and tonight it’s bugging her again (please don’t make me say something about how walking around on a bee sting injury at the Del Mar Fair might have made it worse, because you honestly can’t tell a 16-year-old anything like that…they will just turn it into some drama about what an awful mother you are and did you call her stupid?). I gave her some recommendations (ice, Benadryl, Motrin, cold washcloth), but she’s leaving tomorrow for Anaheim for a huge Key Club convention, so inevitably the foot will go south once she’s up there, probably in the middle of the night, so I’m expecting to have to drive to Anaheim in the middle of the night tomorrow to take her to the hospital. Seriously. Sigh.

Meanwhile, boychild and I finished painting another two walls. All that’s left is the long 22-foot wall where the mirrors are…they come down tomorrow. Worst-case scenario, we’ll have to replace drywall. Which I don’t know how to do. Minor issue. There’s the little piece of wall next to the fireplace too. It has a mastic issue. I’m hoping for carpet installation by the end of next week (I can hope, can’t I?). Then put the house back in some semblance of order, because it’s reminding me too much of an episode of Hoarders at the moment…like the season finale.

I did iron a bit today…but not until late…

These bits are fussy. And very light. I think that was on purpose. I did manage to do the hand on the right side too. Up into the pelvic bone next, then into the torso. The uterus…it’s not in the body. She’s holding it. This is a quilt about menopause and how it fucks with all your systems…including the mental crap. Really, between the hormones and the diabetic stuff, it’s amazing my mind isn’t totally crumbling. Well, maybe it is.

I read a lot today. Couldn’t deal. That’s what happens when I can’t deal. I finished this…

Locas II by Jaime Hernandez. I’ve read some of the Love and Rockets series, and couldn’t find Locas I in the library. It was OK, sometimes really good and sometimes just crazy and even unintelligible, which might just come from not living in that world. Plus I couldn’t always tell the characters apart, especially when they changed hair color. But the graphic style is really nice.

I also read Relish by Lucy Knisley, which is the next book-club selection. I really liked this, and will hand it off to the girlchild, because it’s all about being in love with food…

It’s a really nice story about how Lucy fell in love with food over the years and the influence her parents had on her food connections. There’s even a few recipes in there. Her drawing style is really nice and clean.

Anyway, I suspect there will be less time tomorrow to lose myself in words (I even wrote tonight…over 900 words of the book, plus the 1400 I’ve written here). So all those things should add up to good. My counselor often asks me if things are good, if I remember what happy or joyful feel like. I have some vague memory of it, but I always have to stop and think about it…the third book I started today, Allen Zadoff’s The Lost Mission (or I Am the Mission, depending on what you think they might title it), had this to say: “I’ll give you a hint…if you have to think about it that long, it’s not happiness.” Yeah. I’m with you on that. A lot of it is just filler. And yes, I realize that reading actual books makes me even more of a tree killer…

I Had Cement for Her…*

I cannot find my head. It’s lost in a book somewhere, or under a pile of things to be filed, or perhaps I left it in Google Docs where I’m apparently writing a story of my own (best to wish you aren’t in it). It could be on a soccer field with the girlchild’s flipflops or in the hotel room in Corona where I left my nail scissors (dammit). It’s not here, though. It’s not engaged in anything. It’s performing tasks as told, based on a list. I guess the list is logical: Keep working on getting the living room done. Keep working on getting the big quilt done (and then moving on to the next logical step in the quiltmaking process). Keep checking things off that are supposed to get done. Keep reading, just take up the next book in the pile or the one that’s due back to the library next or the one that has to be read before the next book club meeting.

I’m stressed. I know that. There are many things that I am juggling and I don’t feel good about it. There is no relief when one is done, when it is retired from the juggling horde. It seems every time I get rid of one, two take its place.

Where is the part of my life where I lie by the pool with a drink and birds chirping and a nice book in hand? Having an intelligent conversation with someone I enjoy? Feeling at peace with the world, content, happy with my lot in life?

Fuck me. I really suck at this.

I think I need to find more time for exercise, meditation, and drawing. Funny that. It’s vacation. I should have plenty of time. I know I don’t have any peace…not much at the moment. Even ironing tonight gave me fits…

So I didn’t do a lot of it. I’m hoping to do more tomorrow. Hopefully I will feel less tired and more successful at crossing things off my lists. This is part of a leg…a sorta crazy chaotic leg. It will make more sense when the stitching outlines the appropriate bits.

I think what I really need is a new life. Still. All year I’ve needed that. I keep trying to make one, but it just doesn’t work out. I think it’s because I’d just rather stay home and draw or read a book or make another quilt. Even those don’t make me feel good, though. It’s escapism. People are just not in my current life formula.

Escaping your own existence. Seems like a bad TV mini-series. I don’t have the clothes or makeup for that.

Girlchild tells me every time she sees the sign at the grocery store for the shingles vaccine, she reads it as “singles vaccine” and is confused. “Dammit,” I say…”I forgot to get that when I was younger. That’s the source of all my problems right there.” She tells me to shut up, but laughs as well. She doesn’t like it when depressed mom comes out, even when she comes out making jokes about herself…which honestly, is probably the best way to be at the moment. Sure it would be great to just magically slough off the depression, but failing that (and that does fail, by the way, don’t wiggle your pretty little nose at me and tell me how if I just SMILE, everything will be fucking perfect), this is better than the alternatives. Really. It is.

So. Today was the last day of the soccer showcase, driving up to Pomona yet again…

Girlchild stepped on a bee. Because she was barefoot. Because she left her flipflops way the freak over THERE and mom had to go get them. After the bee incident. And then there were tears.

Today was the day I finished two of these guys…

I think that means 11 out of 30 are done. Not great, considering these are from last year. Whatever.

I listened to 10 parents talk about their kids’ college plans. Poor girls. So much pressure. I try to minimize that. I gave birth to a stress monkey, so I tell her I know she will get in somewhere decent and she will be happy wherever she goes, and she freaks out about it, because her brother got into an Ivy and that means that’s what she wants. I don’t know if that will make her happy. I don’t think it would have made ME happy. Then again, I have such a vague memory of that emotion…when it touches me, that feeling, a reminder of that feeling, because I don’t have it now, it just hurts and I cry. I know a college wouldn’t have gotten me there. Hard to tell that to a teenager though. They basically don’t listen to a word you say.

I worked on these guys…

They are closer to done than they were. In fact, a couple of them are almost done.

I also finished this book…

in fact, if I had read less, I would have gotten those damn birds done, but my brain, it was in that bad place (spending three days dealing with soccer games, parents, and girlchild’s related moods will do that to you, unless you have a magical outlet, a rejuvenating place that brings you back to normal)…so I read instead. I’ve always been a Stephen King fan. He messes with his characters like no one else, and this detective story is good, although somewhat formulaic…King-style, though. I still really enjoyed it (and read it really fucking fast, so there).

I’m not sure reading horror is the best treatment for depression, but neither are rom-coms or YA books half the time either. Or 90% of what’s on the telly. I seem to do best with fantasy/sci fi, but even that’s a stretch sometimes. No books that remind me that at one time I had something approximating a life and now, well, now I don’t know what I have. It’s not really there, ethereal and sad, but insubstantial, feather-light in the hands. Whisks away before you can close your fingers on it. It’s not even real.

Cat puke. Laundry. Bills. Mold. Those are real.

Today’s blog title is brought to you by my favorite poet, writer, thinker ever…e.e. cummings…

Seriously. Reading him is the closest to happy I get at the moment.