For Ivy…and Me

My SIL really saved me from myself yesterday and last night. I think she called me about 5 times, not for long, but just to tell me one more ironic or stupid thing about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I know I was trying NOT to sound mopey and shit, but I was, and I don’t even know if she knew that…but just having her sarcastic loving self checking in with me kept me from sinking deep into the low. By the time she stopped calling (No, Really, she said, This is the last call), I was significantly tired so I managed to do a few more things and then went to bed early for me. And got a decent night’s sleep for probably the first time in a month. I know she doesn’t read my blog (she has three kids under the age of 12…I’m not sure she reads anything but text messages), so she’ll never see this. I’ll tell her thanks at some point.

There’s something about the vast expanse of weekend hours that I spend by myself that get me down. One part of me looks forward to quiet and getting to do something I want to do, and the other part of me wants to interact with people, but not total strangers and not in a difficult way. I don’t want to have to work hard at it, because I already do that every day during the work week. I want relaxing and social. Sort of. In small quantities. Maybe. Plus I’m significantly poor, so no cost. Yeah, I know. It’s not very realistic. Even an occasional movie would be nice…maybe when I get past the next Visa bill from hell.

Really, what I did yesterday was fill out financial aid forms. And I did a little fabric stuff. And I meditated.

I have completed 145 meditation sessions. Ironically, I’m having a hard time with the current series, the Creativity series…there’s something about the format of visualizing energy moving through that I can’t hold on to properly. I have no problems with creativity in itself, except for finding time for it and forcing myself to do OTHER stuff that is NOT creative. I am having a hard time relaxing at the moment in meditation…I can’t get my brain to release. It’s been too tied up in financial aid applications to relax…I’m still doing those, by the way. I finished the worst of it Saturday, the CSS Profile, which was way worse than the FAFSA by like 100 degrees. But some of the colleges have their own forms, so I did one of those tonight…and all of them need copies of my tax return, my paystubs, my W-2s, all need to be signed on each page and probably I need to provide a vial of my blood as well. Boychild interrupted my meditation because he had forgotten to turn in an essay online…and then I was talking to him about getting a job. He wanted to know why. Sigh. Ah. Money, dude. Plus hell…you just need to get a job and start being part of society. Feel free to find a job you’d like: politics, bookstore, I don’t know. Something. I will be doing these damn financial aid forms for another two weeks probably…so it seems fair that he should have to work this summer? I don’t know. I might have to work this summer too…who knows. I don’t know how anything is going to work out. Like him, I don’t know what job I could get just for the summer. Delivering pizza?

I also have completed 33 health coach sessions in the last year and a half. They’re stopping my coaching, which has been free so far…apparently losing all the weight means I no longer qualify for the free stuff. I’m OK with that. I think I got the best out of the sessions a while ago. I think there are one or two more. That’s it. I lost 45.5 pounds in that time period. I dropped one med. I upped two other meds and added new ones. Sigh. I’m healthier now despite the extra meds. I can’t help being anemic.

So I went to my local quilt store that carries wool fabrics and got a few more bright fabrics…well, bright-ish. That’s all that was available…

That crazy fabric underneath them is the backing fabric I got for super-cheap a million years ago, and I used every inch of it up on the back of the Sightlines quilts, which have finally returned home.

And then I started going through my wool stash, trying to find all the leftover pieces from other projects I’ve done…because I don’t need huge pieces for the flowers in the background…these are from a Primitive Gatherings’ block-of-the-month that I finished…well, I finished all the blocks. I haven’t put them together…that’s usually my sticking point.

Then I found the pieces from the two Sue Spargo block-of-the-month leftovers…there were some good bright colors in there, including some orange I used for the fish in the water…

I don’t need big pieces. This is not hoarding. Seriously. This is using up my scraps. I don’t have a good wool stash. It’s OK. I don’t NEED a good wool stash. I’m not planning on this being a regular thing. I just really wanted something to show how much I cared about Ivy and how bad I felt about her dying so early. I realize that current readers may not have a clue who Ivy is.

Ivy came home with us in June 2006 as a puppy (yes, that is the boychild at age 10).

She was a Boxer mix…later we figured out that the mix must have been a whippet, because she was long and skinny and ran like the wind.

She was a good dog, like they all are, although she had issues with my parents’ dog at some point, so Missy couldn’t stay with us after Calli (my daughter’s dog) moved in. But she was sweet, and every time the phone rang at night, she would leap off the couch and go running down the hallway, sometimes barking like the world was ending.

She wasn’t very big, but sounded large. She was a good protector and was very loving. She had skin allergies that started up in 2011 and we tried some food and allergy tests…turns out she was allergic to everything under the sun, so we had her on allergy shots for a while, but she even developed an allergy to those. And then her vet died of a sudden heart attack…at age 44 or something. It was crazy. So it took us a while to get another vet in the practice up to speed on the whole allergy issue, and then she got really really sick really really fast. And then well again. And then sick again. And by the time we found out that she had liver cancer, she had stopped eating and drinking, and I had made the horrible decision to stop her pain and suffering. She was 6. It was May 2012. Yes, that long ago.

I don’t know why her death has been so hard on me…I’ve had multiple animals die, but always of old age…or they were old and the diseases finally got too much for them. Ivy was young, in the prime of her life, perfectly fine and hyper and running around excited one day, and vomiting everything up and barely able to stand the next day. It was about a month from the first serious illness to putting her down, and it was just hard for me. My daughter still talks about it; she’s still carrying around resentment over how she didn’t get to hold Ivy when she died. Long story…she was there when it happened, but…I know if she had said something, she could have held her, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue. One that can’t be changed now.

So I spent most of the summer sad about her death. When my first dog, Russia, died of old age, the kids were young, and it took me a couple of years to get another dog, mostly because of finances, and that was Ivy. We have Calli here half the time; she travels back and forth between me and my ex with the kids…so it’s not like I never have a dog here. And I don’t know that I’m home enough to justify a dog just for me…and there’s the cost.

But the real deal was that I felt I needed to memorialize her life. I did some drawings and one became a sort-of banner to Ivy. That’s what this is. And it’s wool mostly, with cotton accents, and I’m planning to embellish it a la Sue Spargo, because I enjoy doing that kind of work, sort of as a hobby, rather than like an art endeavor…and I want what I make for Ivy to have been enjoyable. Because it still makes me feel like crying to think about that month when she was so sick, to remember that day I couldn’t even get her to eat out of my hand, so I decided that was it. That she was suffering more than it was worth, and she wasn’t coming back. We didn’t get the biopsy results for another three or four days, but I was right. It was liver cancer all over the place.

So I’m making this for her. And for me.

I would be ironing on the ironing board, but Babygirl thinks it’s hers now. I had all the wool sort of spread out on the other side of the board.

When I got to the fleshy bits, I had a run of fabrics that I worked really hard to get back in 2012/2013.

And I currently have about half the quilt ironed down to mostly wool, ready to be cut out.

It’s a much different process than I use for most of my quilts…but I’m glad to have it started. Maybe tomorrow night I can get started on the flowers…I have Ivy, me, and the main landscape (hill, river, fish) all cut out. I just need to do about a million flowers and two banners and then there are bunnies and squirrels, because Ivy liked to chase animals. So expect to see more of this in the coming days. For Ivy. Yeah. And me.

Making Up a Journal…

Here’s the post I hope the curator never reads. It’s Monday, January 6 (yes, I started this that long ago…welcome to my life at the moment), and I am supposed to have done a journal for the Earth Stories quilt I finished back in August/September. It’s been a rough 6 months and said journal does not exist.

I started back in early January with trying to use Google Docs, because I figured I could load the photos into a document and then write the words around it while I was sitting at a soccer game. I wanted to use the iPad, but wasn’t sure if the app I wanted to use would be able to save locally without wifi; the phone was my backup plan (and yes, I do often at least start and occasionally write an entire post on my phone). However, Google Docs sucks because it won’t take photos of any size out if the camera…they have to be resized. That’s a lot of work. I did originally resize them for the blog, but I usually delete those when I archive photos into files…so now I’m doing double work…not so smart.

Why didn’t I start a journal when I started the quilt? Because that’s not how I work. I do have a sketchbook (or seven). I don’t journal each quilt’s progress there…I do have a typed private art journal that I write in every Friday (or at least once a week) and there’s obviously my blog, which documents everything except when the dog poops (which it would document if I could find a pattern to it), but I don’t really focus on each quilt in a logical way…it’s more, here’s the quilt I’m making and here’s all the other shit that’s going on, which is why when they said they wanted a journal for the Earth Stories quilt back in like February 2013, I was like…I can do that. I’ll just copy pages from my blog. And then life (shit…tsunami wave of shit) happened. And that’s probably more than EVER needs to go into the journal of making that quilt. Besides, it would be 400 pages long and no one would read it while standing in the exhibit and wondering what made Kathy Nida do what she did, or even how she did it, because I’m not sure anyone cares about why either. Or maybe they do. Who knows.

So I ignored the need for the journal for a goddamned good long time. I emailed the curator and made sure I didn’t have to deal with it right away. And then I let it percolate (ahem…actually, I completely ignored it because I couldn’t handle it).

I bought the journal (a portfolio, relatively cheap from Michael’s) around January 2, and I thought I was finally ready to deal with this. Of course, it meant going through old photos, cleaning out photo files to find what I needed, and that was one of the issues before. I can’t even look at some of my old photo files right now. They’re filed by date and I then go through and cut and paste them into their relevant folder, whether it’s pictures of the animals or the kids’ soccer games, or it’s a particular quilt. It’s nice to have all the quilt pictures in one place, but this quilt spans about February or March of this year until September or so, and I don’t know if I can deal with the documentation.

I HAVE to deal with them. Shit. There’s only photos from November in the quilt file. Fuck. That means they’re all uncategorized, only in by date. That means I have to go through 8-9 months’ worth of photo files, during some of the most painful parts of my life. Wow. So. Should I take a Xanax now or later? Or should I just shoot myself? It might be quicker and less painful.

Probably better to do it in small batches (the photos…not the Xanax). I managed to get them all sorted in a few days. Then I resized all of them into one folder, so if I fucked up and deleted everything, they would be easy to find. Then I started with that damn Google Docs. I fussed with that file for about two days and finally said fuck it and imported it into Word. It wouldn’t move photos the way I wanted them to move, it wouldn’t size things easily. I couldn’t get the text to wrap right.

So you’d think years of Word expertise would make this an easy job. You’d be wrong. Something that happened in the code from Google Docs came in and warped the intelligence of anything I could have done in Word. I would move and reformat a photo just to have it completely disappear when I started typing text. The page below moved all those photos all by itself…the file doesn’t look like this, but when it prints out, this is what it does.

I don’t have a great color printer at the moment. It’s about 20 years old, maybe older, and it just sucks. So I took the file to FedEx to print it out there. It’s possible that there was something hinky that happened in that interface that randomly moved photos and words, but I wasn’t about to try to fix something I couldn’t find without carefully reading code (running out of time here), so I resorted to old-school. Yes. I reprinted the pages on my black and white printer here at home, cut out the color pictures from the other copies, and cut out the words from my printouts…

And started scrapbooking. Whatever. It’s all in these little plastic pages. No one will know…or care.

Example above. It worked fine. I didn’t write a lot because I didn’t think people would want to read a lot. I included a cover page of my inspiration for the piece and my resume in the back. I finally mailed it off earlier this week. You can see below the stupid shit that printer was doing…

“I to see”? Whatever. So it’s done. I don’t know if anyone will ever look at it, let alone read it, but there it is. When the exhibit opens, I’ll do some posts here about the quilt too, so don’t feel bad if you don’t make it to the opening.

The next journaling experience? For Celebrating Silver, they want one or two 12×12″ pages of the process or story or hell, I don’t know what. I don’t own 12×12 pages. I will have to make some paper between now and then apparently. I think I have until mid-April on that one, so obviously I should ignore the need for that to get done until…um…about April 14. I’m sure some people’s journals are really interesting and give great insight into the artistic process. I don’t think that’s the case with mine. I don’t know if I want to spend more time writing about the inspiration before I make a quilt, making the drawing, and then making the piece. I do write about it here, but I think a journal with nothing in it but a big fat QR code is probably not what they want.

Anyway. I suck at journaling the way they want. Here’s my journal. Right here. You’re reading it.

Emotional Sine Wave

I have another post I have mostly written, but I don’t feel like finishing it tonight. Maybe tomorrow morning.

Today was a numb day. I went to the gym. I managed grocery shopping (sort of a miracle these days…I forgot my reusable bags…again…the world will die because of all the plastic they gave me today). I went to one of my art group meetings (I forgot the quilt I was supposed to deliver for a new show, so I went back for that…didn’t get too far, luckily, and then I forgot the checkbook to pay my dues). Numb apparently equals forgetful.

It really does. I am so forgetful now…hence all the post-its and the calendar reminders…otherwise I’d forget my brain. Some days I don’t even know what day it is. I don’t know what month it is…I wrote a check earlier and dated it October 2013. What the hell? It’s like I’ve had some sort of stroke. My brain doesn’t like to remember stuff at the moment, so it chooses to tune out of everything. Hello, brain…feel free to join us here any time. I don’t think it’s going to get better without your involvement. Really. I know it sucks and all, but this is what we’ve got.

I finished a book, M.L. Stedman’s The Light Between Oceans…

It was a gift from my UK family. It’s her first book, about a lighthouse operator in the early 1900s in Australia. It was good; I enjoyed it, even though it was tinged with sadness.

I worked on the third bird of Month 2…

Thought I had finished it, but turns out I was supposed to sew in the moon as well…so I started that but didn’t finish. I sewed in the car on the way up and during the meeting; it was dark on the way back down. I’ll finish it at Tuesday’s soccer game and then start on Month 3’s embellishments. Very exciting stuff. The stitching itself is relaxing. I manage to stop grinding my teeth when I’m stitching mostly. The rest of the time, grind away. I have to consciously make myself stop holding my jaw like the world is ending around me.

Still too many things on the to-do list. Started my taxes because the W-2 finally showed up and I need that for the financial aid, finished the journal for Earth Stories and got it ready to ship, along with a bunch of other stuff I have to mail. Made a new to-do list. Boychild had one college interview today, so I ironed his clothes for him. He commented that men’s button-down shirts are not made for men with long hair. Never thought of that. He has another interview next weekend. I guess it’s good that he made it past the first pass…or maybe they interview everyone. Who knows. It’s all new for him, having to talk to strangers about himself, trying to sell himself, trying not to get annoyed by stupid questions…or at least not to SHOW irritation. I feel for him, but am excited by his having to deal, to manage, to grow up. He’s a good kid…man.

Came home and girlchild had made dinner, which is always nice. She hurricaned the kitchen (yes, that is a verb now) as well, but I needed to catch up on dishwashing anyway, so it was motivation to do so. All these tasks take away from artmaking time, of course. It was pretty late before I started my lesson planning for this week…well, I did most of it last year. I’m not deviating much…can’t handle that on top of everything else. I signed up for two more hikes. I need more outside time…more physical in nature time. More open space with fresh air and sweat and exertion and letting the toxic shit in my head float away into the sky while I stomp along a dirt path.

Two of my quilts are in a California Fibers exhibit at Soka University in Aliso Viejo through May 8…the opening is this Thursday from 5:30-7:45. The weird time is because there is a performance at the university right after that, so this takes advantage of that. I won’t be able to make it up there, unfortunately, but it apparently is a really nice show (that is only open Monday-Friday). I’m hoping to go up during Spring Break, I think. We’ll see. Earth Mother is there…

As is Untied…

Both normally hang in my house.

Then next week, I have one quilt in another California Fibers show in Ojai, California, at the Beatrice Wood Center for the Arts…Here is hanging there…

ha ha ha. Here is hanging There. That’s funny. OK, not really. It will be there through March 30. There’s word that there may be an artist’s panel with some of us on March 30. I don’t think I’ll be able to make it to that, but other artists will be there.

There are three California Fibers’ shows opening in January and February…this was a great group to join to get into shows. All three have been juried, so you still have to have good work that people want, but instead of pulling from 700 people for a show with 40 pieces, they’re pulling from a group of 30. California Fibers is a juried group and the membership call is coming up in April. If you live in Southern California, are willing to commit to 4 meetings a year in Oceanside, and work in anything that qualifies as fibers, you might consider it. Check out the website and contact the membership person.

The other art group I’m a member of is doing a 2-month exhibit in September/October about the border fence. I’m in a subcommittee (I didn’t commit to leading anything…see notes about forgetfulness above) that will be doing some sort of cross-border quilt/fabric construction. This group works completely differently than the other group…but they both are trying to be actively in exhibits and marketing themselves. It’s good, because I feel like my local SAQA group has become less active, even though we had a decent show last month that will be traveling to Georgia in March. We used to meet more down here in San Diego, and now there seem to be very few meetings down here.

If this is my life, if art is my focus, if art is the thing I have right now, then I might as well make it a regular thing. I’ve been looking at life-drawing classes as well, although then I need to balance exercise and hiking and art, because they all seem to want to happen at the same time. But if I can do it once a month, that doesn’t seem like a bad thing. I miss life drawing. Yes, I miss sitting on an uncomfortable wooden bench for hours staring at a naked person and trying to make my drawing look like what’s in front of me. Sounds crazy. It’s a different head space though…not a bad one.

Anyway, I didn’t get to start on even thinking about real artmaking until about 10:30 tonight…and then it was a decision of What Next? I could draw, I could clean off the light table and set it up for tracing the next quilt, I could stitch down the smaller quilt that’s hanging in my office. I decided to finish cutting out all the pieces for the Ivy Memorial Quilt…

They’re freezer paper, not Wonder Under…yes, new and different. The quilt is mostly wool fabrics (or will be, since it currently doesn’t exist) with cotton fabric accents, and then there will be embroidery like you see on the bird blocks I’ve been doing. It’s not something I really expect to exhibit…I just want to hang it in the house, like above a doorway, so it’s wide but not high. Ivy died in May 2012 of liver cancer at the age of 6. For some reason, it was significantly more difficult to deal with her death, probably because of her young age and it happened really quickly. I guess I don’t deal well with unexpected bad stuff. Anyway, now that all the pieces are trimmed, I could start picking wool fabrics and ironing freezer paper to them…maybe tomorrow night.

I wonder if these numb forgetful days are an aftershock to the highly emotional days. I think I’m on some sort of emotional sine wave, up and down on some regular rhythm, somehow controlled by hormones or amount of sleep or exercise or something else I don’t understand (or a combination of all of those). It’s super super low and then I hit numbness…I don’t ever really get to the high point, though. It’s just less painful than some other days. Maybe the numb days are when I get enough of some combination of sleep and exercise and interaction with humans who give a shit. It’s hard to say. I have people say to me all the time, Hey, I read your blog, and then I’m like, well then you know I’m not having any fun with all this. I don’t know what to say to that. Well, then you know I’m a giant pile of depression and awful. Well, then, I guess you know that I was crying yesterday, I’ll be crying today, and tomorrow? On the menu is crying. I guess that’s OK. You won’t have particularly high expectations of me then, will you. You’ll know I can make good art but I can’t remember anything and I’m likely to dissolve into a pile of saltwater if you bring up anything that I find troubling…like really anything. Sigh.

Who the hell is googling my age, by the way? I’m 46, people. I’ll be 47 in a couple of months. I don’t know why it’s relevant. Feel free to just ask.

OK, taking the sine wave to bed…maybe I’m still on the way up…

I Need Better Shoes…

If I’m going to hang out at art openings, I will need better shoes. I may need a personality transplant as well, one that smiles and chats at the appropriate times. I also need to be much less judgmental, both of the art and the art wannabes; the fake is strong here.

That said, I did force myself to be among the living…

and had a reasonably intelligent conversation with, of all people, another middle-school teacher who volunteers for the group that was raising money at this function. The group is 1:1 Movement, which is working on educating kids about sustainability and conservation. One of the things they do is give a plastic recyclable bag to each kid in a classroom and ask them to collect everything they would normally throw away for a whole week, and then they come back and look at what’s in the bag. The woman I talked to started saying all these things my students say about losing stuff, papers they got the day before, the pencil they brought to school…I hear you sister. They will come out to our school and talk to the kids…gonna see whether I can pull this off.

It wasn’t what I expected when I went…but I wasn’t really paying attention properly. They invited local artists to paint the recyclable bags they give the kids…

And then they auctioned them off to the highest bidder…

The money went to buy more bags for kids.

I don’t have any money to spare at the moment. So I bid on nothing. I did start to walk out (way too many people that I didn’t know), and then stopped. I bought a jar of wine (drinks came in jars, which meant I spilt), and then went and sat down in sort of the center of things, OK, not the center, but there were still lots of people around me…

And I did actually talk to about three whole people, one about my shitty camera (he had the same one and the same problem with the stupid lens covering…piece of shit!), one about the project itself (she was obviously an extrovert), and one about tamales. I know. I’m not an expert, but I did know where they were (observant tendencies).

Mostly I just sat and listened to other people do artspeak and anti-artspeak and wow, I’m old here, aren’t I? And I don’t have a lot of tolerance for people. Sigh. So I people-watched and checked out shoes and clothes and who was walking around with whom and what they looked at and didn’t look at. But I stayed for at least 45 minutes. And I’m glad I had the conversation with the other teacher, because I will look into bringing them on my campus. I think it would do my students good to think more about what they waste…it frustrates me no end. Breaking pencils so they can throw lead at other students, picking up 5 pieces of white paper instead of 1 because they think they’re entitled to do so (I buy my own paper about half the year), losing assignments they picked up the day before, never having a pencil or lead.

Anyway. I did it. I went. It was OK.

I went to Road to California in the morning and afternoon with Julie and my mom…I will have to find time to write that post. It’s long and complicated.

The morning looked like this…

Actually, it was much prettier than that, but the camera is not being my friend.

I stitched in the car on the way up and back. I always expect to get so much done, but even with about 3 hours in the car, I only finished two of the blocks and got a bit into the third…and the first of the two I finished was really almost done.

I have done a lot of Pekinese stitch in the last few days. The bottom two are done (I could embellish them a lot more, but would never finish at that rate). The top right one will get finished in the car tomorrow (yet another drive for art-related activities).

And then when I got home, I needed to decide how to spend my evening. I needed to find something that would help my mood, rather than make it worse. I’ve had a bunch of drawings wandering my head for weeks, so I sat down and drew…

It’s not done. Yes, it’s a bit disturbing. It will get more so, once I add another page to the left. Such is my brain.

OK, tired, exhausted. Really. That is the second time I’ve drawn a gun. It is the third time I’ve drawn tsunami waves. It’s not done.

Past the Deadlines…(sort of)

I practiced meditation at school again today. In class. While teaching. Well, supervising independent work today. We do that. I also practiced a feminist rant…OK, I didn’t practice it…I just did it. Sometimes I think the kids need to see that…plus the kid saying that men were better at everything than women were kinda got my goat. It’s OK…I kinda did it as a gospel moment; I think I even hallelujahed. The girls appreciated it and some of the boys did too (although most were probably frightened). I don’t just teach science, people…

I taught. I breathed deep (actually not so deep…it’s either the allergies I technically don’t have or something pretending to be sick). I went to the emergency union meeting and took notes. I went to the girlchild’s soccer game where the asshole coach (oops, did I say that out loud) wouldn’t play her (long story…it’s finals week and she chose academics over soccer). I went to the gym and read an entire book (it was a graphic novel…they are a quick read). I prepped tomorrow night’s dinner, which now has to stretch to feed 7 instead of 3 (one of which is a hungry teenaged boy). I cleaned a bit, because apparently now there is a sleepover at my house tomorrow night (I wonder if they will mind my tracing Wonder Under on the giant-ass light table while they watch bad TV and gossip late into the night…yeah, I know. I will probably have to give up my Friday night plans).

I ate dinner super late. I picked TV that I should not be watching in the mood I’m in. As always, I don’t know what governs the moods. Is it being tired? Is it work frustration? Is it a chemical imbalance in my brain? Who the fuck knows.

At the soccer game, I almost finished this guy…

It was dark, though, and I was trying to do Pekinese stitch on top of the blue things and largely failing (I got one done), so I stopped. Some schools have crappy stadium lights.

I am definitely beyond trying to predict how many games it takes to finish any of these. I will have time in cars on Saturday and Sunday, though. I could potentially finish quite a lot. Maybe. It doesn’t really matter. They just are fun to do…the embroidery stitches are interesting. Sometimes even relaxing (minorly).

The book I finished is the graphic-novel adaptation of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children…

(real book on the left, graphic adaptation on the right)

I read the book last year and really liked it. The graphic novel was eh. The art didn’t move me. I felt like the story was chopped up by the pictures. I had a better imagination while just reading the words (there are a few photographs in the original book).

Like I said in my review on GoodReads, I need a graphic adaptation (or a movie, for that point) to ADD to the fiction, and they rarely do. Mostly they just mess with the images I had in my head.

I do have a plan for tomorrow night’s artmaking. Actually, I will need to do some more of the crossing-off the post-it-note crap. I crossed off two things today (woo hoo!). I know. It’s amazing. So maybe I can cross a few more off tomorrow. And I do have another quilt top in here that I could work on. In fact, I think there’s another QUILT in here that has been pinbasted for like 3 years. I obviously care a lot about it. So there’s no shortage of stuff to be done. It just feels better to start something new sometimes…to have that sense of excitement (pretty toned down in the current Kathy state) about new. Different. Moving on.

So I numbered the big quilt…

It’s about 350 pieces. That’s tiny. I mean, the quilt itself is good-sized…it just doesn’t have a lot of pieces.

By the way, I got my evaluation back from Road to California…shockingly, the uterus quilt did NOT win an award (I am so shocked…I’m still minorly amazed that it even got in), but the comments were interesting…they said it could use more quilting (I know KPM did not say that…), which is par for the course when you put an art quilt in a semi-traditional show (Road embraces art quilts…but there are still traditional judges), but they did say the imagery was interesting and the storytelling was effective. Nice to know. I guess. It’s been so long since a quilt of mine has been judged like that…they always say not enough quilting. Whatever.

Anyway. I’ll be up there on Saturday to see the ones that DID win awards and have enough quilting. People, if I wanted to quilt the body parts, I would, but then they wouldn’t pop out so much.

Then I thought I should probably pick one of the smaller ones too, and I had a real hard time with that, because nothing was really reaching out and grabbing me, so I just picked the smallest one, which is also breast-related (I’m on a roll), but is only about 10″ square…

It has 150 pieces or so in it. I don’t know when I’ll get back to working on these…it kind of depends on what I end up doing tomorrow night…what I feel like doing. I kinda feel like going with my mood, with whatever makes me feel better, more at peace, is totally the way to go with my art at the moment. I’ve spent the last 6 months really getting through some have-to’s as far as my art is concerned. I had what I originally thought was four pieces that had to be done by deadlines (actually 6, if I count the two small ones), and so it’s been All Deadlines, All the Time for an awfully long time… maybe I should give myself a break for a while. I’m thinking I can work on whatever I want until Spring Break (which is late this year, mid-April), and by then, I should have a drawing for the next invitational quilt that has to be done in November and another big piece for the summer…not as crazy as the Earth Stories one, but one that is impactful and strong and meaningful and will celebrate me, the artist, next summer. I feel like I’m going to need some of that Me Celebration by then. Maybe. Who knows. It will probably still be painful and emotional and full of sturm und drang, but it will be mine.

Wow. That sounded almost hopeful and maybe even a bit I am woman, hear me roar. So much better than the godawful mood I was in earlier. It’s silly that something as mundane as numbering two drawings can be mood-altering…at least minorly. I really should just quit my job and make art full time. (ha. like that’s an option) I should probably finish crossing things off the post-it note list before I abandon all deadlines, though. Yeah. Gotta be a little bit responsible.

Finishing Parts, Not Wholes

OK, I think I really suck at writing to-do lists, because once again, I can’t actually cross something off because I only got part of it done. I got part of lots of things done today. That seems to be what I’m good at…finishing parts and not wholes? Makes sense. I usually only finish about 6 quilts a year, so I spend most of my days making parts (or wishing I could make parts), rather than finishing. I only get to finish 6 days a year, and because I finished two on one day this year, I will be spending even fewer days finishing.

So I should stop worrying about the finishing. Maybe. It’s the process, not the product.

But the product is what we see.

I finished (ha!) taping all the smaller drawings together. The smallest is about 10″ square; the larger ones are about 18×22, with a bunch in between those two.

Here’s the funny part. There are 21 of them. Because HOW LONG WILL THAT TAKE ME? Seriously, what the hell kind of drugs was I on when I thought picking 21 drawings made any fucking sense at all? I guess at least I have a choice. Or many choices. Or so many choices that I will be unable to make a choice.

Sigh.

I’m not sure any of them, including the big one, are really speaking to me at the moment. I’ll try again tomorrow night.

Before I even started taping them, I worked on the journal for Earth Stories. It’s almost done. I’ll be writing that post soon, because if it could go wrong, well hell yes, it did. I am the Queen of Adaptation. I make things work. I did that at school today too…made it work. It’s my thing at the moment. Spend less time after hours dealing with school, but more intense when I am actually there. It was intense today. I went above and beyond. Where the fuck are my stickers? I want my stickers. I should get stickers.

One of the other teachers, who I don’t think has ever graced my room, came in to tell me how he was asking his homeroom who inspired them, and he said that all the kids said mama and papa, all around the room, and then one of my dorky boys, my annoying, will-never-shut-up, could do way better than he has been boys, he said me. Sigh.

No, he’s not an orphan. And his parents are nice, supportive people. And I get in his face. So why do we keep teaching, when everyone tells us the job is awful, the hours suck, the pay is miserable, the stress levels are horrendous?

Yeah. That. And the dorky hugs. And the moment when I make them realize that they are animals. It’s so obvious to the rest of us that humans are animals…but kids need it explained, they need to be shown, they’ve never thought of themselves that way. I guess I’ve seen/felt too many people ACT like animals to ever question it. Every time I make them think or question or say OOOHHH. There we are.

Anyway. So I have 21 drawings and at least one student who likes me and I only have two things fully crossed off the lime-green post-it note from hell.

I did go to copy stuff today, and I almost recopied this other drawing that’s sort of the huge triptych from hell (apparently the phrase of the day is FROM HELL), but then I thought, no, it’s OK.

It’s really fucking not OK. Stupid copiers don’t copy correctly…they’re not accurate, so if you’re trying to tape something big together, it won’t match up. I think I might wait a month or so and give up the big bucks on this one and have it copied at the printers to size, rather than try to do it myself on 11×17″ pieces of paper that I then try to match up and tape together.

But I did copy this drawing, because it needs to continue on another page…

And I’m glad I did, because I realized how good it was, but I still need to figure out what’s on the sides. I purposely drew it on the horizontal, so I would have room at the sides. I don’t know when I think I will have time to draw, though. I will be at Road this weekend, plus a California Fibers’ meeting and an art opening, so no free time. And I’m totally exhausted tonight. Really couldn’t manage that sleep thing last night. Think I will collapse tonight, probably very soon. I exercised, but I won’t meditate…there’s no point. I will just fall asleep.

I finished reading the last in the Flamel series by Michael Scott, The Enchantress…

It made me cry. I wasn’t expecting it. I committed myself to this story for 6 books and it was compelling and interesting. There is tons of mythology and history and fantasy embedded into the series; I think the Morrigan and I need to have a drawing session. Maybe I will invite Billy the Kid…he seems like an interesting guy.

Anyway. I’m sad to have the series end, but he did good. Oh hey, there’s one where I finally finished the whole.

OK, this is seriously tired. Taking it to bed.

Lime-Green Demands

I’m up to eight post-it notes on the keyboard and the desk in front of the computer now. They are all lime green and demand my attention. I wonder if they were a different color would they feel quite so urgent? I’ll find out soon…the next color in the pad is purple, and I’m not that far away from it.

This morning at 7:40 AM, I was drawn over to the light table where all those little drawings are…I have about 10 more to tape together and I actually picked up the top page and the scissors and grabbed the tape and then NO! Bad Kathy! Bad! You have to leave for school in 20 minutes, you haven’t eaten breakfast or found your shoes or prepped your lunch, you still have about 8 kids whose grades are nonexistent (minor issue, really…grades aren’t officially due until 2 PM or so and I could probably beg an extra two hours if I needed to), and your school bag isn’t packed. You may NOT engage in art activities this morning!

But…but…I didn’t get to yesterday because of grades…

You got to sew a label on and dehair a quilt to be delivered to an exhibit. That is a privilege (crap, I can’t spell that word without looking it up). The fact that you spent probably 8 hours on grading and grades and waiting on a grading website that behaved like a recalcitrant 2-year-old is completely irrelevant. You can make art tonight. After school. And the gym. And whatever other tasks you come up with before then (there is still more grading…it’s just not going on the progress report).

I did prep a quilt for a show last night…

Mom’s picking it up tomorrow and delivering it because I don’t have time.

I had some help.

OK, no, she didn’t help me.

There’s nothing like a day (a holiday, no less) full of grading papers and inputting grades and calculating the number of Fs because you know that is all someone will care about…they won’t care about the kid who went from a 28% F to a 56% F. I care about that kid. Next time, he’ll be passing. It was painful and depressing. The only interesting part is that I watched about 7 episodes of The Black List in the last two days and I finally have figured out the plot (I don’t watch closely when I’m grading) and the James Spader character is a truly devious and wonderful person. I mean, not wonderful in like I want to hang out with him, because of the devious lying bit, but fun to watch his facial expressions and how he messes with people. But mostly it was a shitty day.

It was somewhat tempered by, strangely, dinner out with the family, which included my ex-husband…

He felt bad about something to do with his birthday dinner…girlchild likes eclectic restaurants and was upset that he didn’t want to go to one before he went back to the UK last time, so I got invited…

A fire pit instead of a dinner table. It was actually a relatively decent evening, good food, interesting place, no one was too pissy (well, there’s the girlchild, but I think my purpose in life right now is to give her something safe to be angry at), and everyone still had their eyebrows at the end of it.

I did a crappy drawing at the table, but I’m out of practice. If I work on it some more, I might photograph it.

The good news is that I had three quilts photographed, two new ones for 2014 and one older one that needed updated photos for a book it will be in this year. Of course, I can only show details on the Celebrating Silver quilt, which will be in Houston in October this year…

It’s called Awakening the Crone, and you’ve seen its birthing over the last few months.

It’s 40″ wide and 70 1/2″ high…

Not a small beast. I’d like to say it’s a relief to have it done, and in some ways it is, because the photos are due February 1 and I’m actually early! But it’s also a letdown from the intensity of working on it and all the details…that’s hard to deal with right now. Being fully engaged in a project like that distracts you from all the crap that surrounds you otherwise. Duh.

I actually finished the other quilt first…literally, it was finished at 3:00 PM on Saturday and the Crone was finished around 10:30 PM the same day. This is Love (not).

It’s 43″ wide x 56″ high…so not too small and not too big.

It’s had a few variations on that name over the last 8 months…Is It Love? Love (not Love)…but this one stuck.

It was originally a drawing in a small sketchbook for a show that I thought an art group I am in was going to do in February, but the situation changed, and because I need so much lead time to make quilts, I was already well into finishing it when they came out with revised guidelines that were way smaller than anything I have that’s relevant.

Oh well. Some day I’ll be able to write the statement without crying. Well, I think technically, I’ll have to do that later this week, but hopefully I’ll be better off by then. OR…I’ll just cry. Whatever. Yes, those are real anatomical hearts hanging from that tree.

Tonight I forced myself to deal with the damn journal for Earth Stories…I’ll be writing about that hellish process (really, it was just hellish because I’m lame) later this week. But I rewarded myself with some art time…

I taped together another handful of smaller drawings. I’m feeling better about them now…not sure why…maybe this bunch was more interesting. A couple of them need paper taped on so I can finish the side of something or add the tips of the leaves. The one on the bottom there with the yellow post-it-note needs a half a person added on each side plus some lights and maybe a bar. I wrote all that on the note.

Anyway, the lime green post-it note with my overall to-do list only got one thing crossed off tonight, mostly because I didn’t go to a high level of detail on the list…it just says to ship the journal. I should have divided it up into steps: finish the pages, print the pages, assemble the journal, ship the journal, email the doc to the curator. Then I could have crossed off the first one (big whoop!). Actually, that is a big time-consuming whoop, so I am feeling a tad less stressed…only a tad, though.

Sad is still tracking me. It hits when I least expect it, at the gas station, in the pet store, on the way to the photographer’s. The counselor says I don’t know how to get away from it. That I’ve been sad for so long that I don’t know how not to be. Same with the depressed…like they’re somehow separate? Well, yeah. It’s my shadow. I don’t think there’s a magic trick to shaking it, despite people saying things like “well, you just have to decide to be happy.” Oh. OK. Well. Then. Happy it is. And then my brain does some Marvin the Paranoid Android move and there’s no getting there. Because I don’t believe in magic? I don’t know. I think it’s just a slow process and I will eventually realize that I’m there and it might even surprise me. I could use a surprise like that (unlike the surprise of having to change my Apple password 5 times in the last 24 hours because someone hacked into my account, but changed the credit card number and THEN charged stuff on it? Aren’t they supposed to use my card number?). Whatever.

Art this week: moving on to the next projects. Maybe it will persuade my brain to move on as well.

Making the Wrinkles…

My eyes are aging. It’s harder to see, but beyond that, the last 6 months have made my eyes LOOK older. I have all these sad wrinkles under my eyes that weren’t there before. I drew them in the Celebrating Silver quilt. I remember not having those wrinkles 6 months ago. Now they are all I see. I don’t really care about wrinkles…some people are very vain about their appearance and I’m really not. But the wrinkles disturbed me. I draw the things that disturb me. You may have noticed. I’ve had three drawings present themselves in my brain in the last three days. I took notes on the images and will maybe draw this week? What a concept. I delivered three quilts to the photographer early this afternoon…he will hopefully call tomorrow about pickup; if not, it will be Wednesday for me. I think. Maybe Tuesday? Can’t remember my schedule. But it’s a good thing.

Then I went to a meeting of one of the art groups I belong to. It took place in a dessert bar next to a gallery space where we will have a performance art/exhibit going on for two months in the fall about the border fence. Being so close to Mexico brings up ideas of crossing borders and what that looks like. I’m having issues visualizing my participation in this project, just because it’s not my normal subject matter and what I do doesn’t necessarily translate to the process they’re suggesting, but I will let me brain run with it for a while. I didn’t volunteer to be a committee leader, because I don’t have the mental energy or the time, but I will be involved somehow. Maybe I will just let someone else tell me what to do instead of having to be in charge.

A high-school friend came to dinner at my parents’ house; girlchild cooked a great meal and we had time to talk. I worked on these at the meeting and before dinner, and finally finished the first month’s squares…

It always takes longer than you think it should. I think they still need eyeball buttons, but that’s it. I did start the embellishment on the second month as well…actually, I had already done the beige background stitching on them. Anyway, there’s only one soccer game this week because the kids have finals, and I’m not even sure I am going to that game…there’s a meeting I think I have to go to…cannot be three places at once…no matter how much I try.

Grades? Well, I worked on them last night for a while and again tonight. I’m actually further ahead than I expected to be at this point, so that’s good. I also worked on the journal I need to finish for Earth Stories…it’s getting closer to done, despite Word’s attempts to mess with me via formatting and whatever crap Google Docs seems to have embedded in the original file. I know this stuff should be easier, but it’s not today.

Tomorrow, I will finish grades (which might take hours honestly), label the quilt that needs to be delivered this week, find and pack up the quilt that needs to be delivered next week, possibly pack up the quilts that need to be shipped and maybe even ship them…can’t ship the notebook with them anyway. Might as well get them out of here. There’s other paperwork I need to get through as well, and then financial aid stuff really does have to get done.

But I don’t want to go from art every day to no art at all. I know how bad that feels and I don’t want to let my mood get any worse…it was bloody awful this morning and it was just stupid stuff that set me off, got me crying in the grocery store and not just a little bit, and then I couldn’t get it under control, and there’s only so long you can stare at the Brussels sprouts with your head down so your hair blocks any view of your eyes, trying to get the tears to stop coming. I don’t get it. It’s like automatic sprinklers. Maybe it’s some sort of mental let down from finishing the quilts, from the stress of trying to get them done. Maybe it’s because the Brussels sprouts were in such bad shape. Who knows.

So I could have kept grading for another hour tonight, but I made myself stop and I started taping the smaller drawings together again…

I have 10 taped together and another 10 or so to do. Yes, that’s a lot. They’re small. It’s kind of crazy, actually, but I wasn’t capable of deciding what to do next when I copied them. I just went through about 3 or 4 of the smaller sketchbooks I’ve used over the last 4 years or so and marked the ones I liked or that I thought were good candidates. The problem is that the smaller drawings seem less serious to me, less about something, less issue-driven. Most of them happened while waiting for a movie to start or sitting in a coffee house or waiting for dinner. They didn’t have a specific purpose, no image came to mind beforehand, they are literally brain vomit. And sometimes it’s related to where I was or what I was doing before or after, but mostly they’re just random. So how do I pick one? I feel like it needs to have meaning. I don’t know why I feel that way. It seems like my life is such a crazy mess that at least my art has to mean something, to have a purpose, to have a message. And I don’t know if any of these small drawings has a good enough message. Plus they’re kind of painful to look at, because they are reminders of a life I don’t have any more. So that kind of sucks.

Sigh. I wanted to do a smaller one (or two) before starting the next big one, but maybe I just need to suck it up and go big again.

I think I’ll tape up the rest of them and then make a decision…probably not until tomorrow night or Tuesday even. I really do need to get grades done first. Damn job. Gets in the way of the art. I should do something about that (like win the lottery and become financially independent so I don’t have to go to work any more? Yeah, like that).

OK. I am really tired. Sleep. Hopefully sleep. Maybe it’s that lack of sleep thing that’s making the wrinkles…

Stay Gold, Ponyboy…Stay Gold

I have 12 posts in draft mode at the moment. Two of them I will never write, one because I don’t care any more and one because I care too much. Some of it is because I get an idea about something I’m working on (like that stupid journal that I have to do, which some people might really enjoy, but is giving me mental ulcers at the moment), but I’m not done with the thing or I’m not ready to write it yet…it has to develop itself more. Some need more photos or research before I can write them, and extra time is kind of short at the moment. I do write fast, and sometimes I just save up half-written posts for nights when my brain isn’t working, although that doesn’t happen often. More often than not, I get a phrase or feeling or idea midday and I write a quick draft or outline or even just a list of words or a phrase on a draft post, and hopefully that turns into that night’s post. When my brain is really in a mental slump (can you say DEPRESSION, kids? Say it WITH me! I know you CAN!), I sometimes preload a bunch of posts with pictures that I can use for nights when I can’t even pull my brain out of the gumbo…I have at least one or two of those in the wings at the moment as well. Then I get a wild hair and try to clean out the repository of drafts and post a bunch of stuff. Writing is like meds for me…it clears out all that muck that doesn’t need to be in my brain all the time. Drawing does too. Writing and drawing are therapy…I need more of the latter. I probably write enough at this point…I may even write too much.

Today was a lost day. School starts tomorrow and I’ve been trying to ignore it all day. Couldn’t ignore it completely, but I haven’t done a couple of things I always WOULD have done by now on the Sunday before we go back. Oh well. The New Kathy says Fuck That. School will start up again whether I’m totally freaking out about it or not. My biggest worry is actually being able to fall asleep at a reasonable hour, unlike last night’s sleep calamity. Was that sleep? Who knows. Does it count when you start it that late? Sure…it counted somewhere in the world, like celebrating New Year’s in 12 different time zones. I celebrated bedtime the same way…except I woke up in between each one. Dammit.

I did a lot of pre-cooking today, trying to get ready to survive the week. I’ve got multiple casseroles and crockpot items going, because the ex is going back to the UK for his mum’s funeral and I have all kid duty, all the time, and I’m really trying to be better prepared this time, especially since my head will be in a stress spin due to school and quilt deadlines and financial aid deadlines and who knows what else. I haven’t scheduled any hikes for the next two weeks because I don’t think I’ll have time. I did schedule the gym and tried to make sense of all the food stuff, because it’s so complicated…boychild will have to put this thing in the oven at that time and because the oven temperature thing is totally fucked, you have to permanently leave a thermometer in there and monitor the temperature until it’s right (can’t afford to fix that right now), and then girlchild can pop the other thing in there, and odds are I’ll be home somewhere in between all that, but the timing doesn’t work for me to do any of it. Luckily, boychild is motivated to do well by the potential arrival of food he can eat.

I went to the gym, and instead of crying at Hip Abduction, I cried at…crap, I can’t remember the name of the machine…actually, the whole gym thing was rather painful today because the muscles I used on the hike yesterday had apparently never been used in the entire 46+ years of their existence and today they had to tell me about it (which was part of why I WENT to the gym in the first place, because I could tell last night that it was going to be bad…it was going to be walking-like-an-old-lady bad). But I did read an entire book there…more about that in a later post, since it’s an official review. Yes, I was actually ASKED to review a book…probably not because it’s me, but because I put something in my profile that matched their key words for reviewers, like “reads a lot, no really, a LOT.”

I did actually quilt today, although not until nighttime, because grades and dinner at parentals and gym and cooking and kid stuff. Yeah. I wanted to do 2-3 hours and I did 1 1/2. Better than nothing. What was interesting was that when I started, I noticed a problem…

There are many problems, but this was kind of a big one. In the center, where that weird line in the fabric is? That’s a wear mark of some sort, and the fabric was trying to tear in three places. Crap.You can see the three holes here…

It’s OK. I’m a quick thinker. I thought about just patching something on top of it, but instead I made another crack and put it on top…

You can’t even tell. Plus it’s all fused AND quilted. I quilted the breasts and heart and lungs and the left arm and the entire staff…

I’ve been quilting this pretty slowly. There’s a lot of detail and I don’t want to mess it up. I’m trying to be a NEAT quilter. Crazy that.

There’s the heart and the lungs…

I can never decide what color to make the lungs. I know what color they are in real life, but that doesn’t work to set them off from the heart and the flesh, and the heart has to be red, and I’ve only recently added the yellow layer of fat on the heart, so usually the lungs are blue and there are fish in them, but this time, they were green with pink flowers. WHY? Why the fuck not?

I still need to do the right arm and the face and the cat and the owl…not a small amount of work…lots of fussy details. Then I can start on the background. I think that’s why I just reserved the upcoming weekend for finishing my stuff…for one thing, I have the kids all day Saturday, and for another, grades are due next week anyway, so if I’m not working on quilt stuff, then I’m doing grades. I also want to keep working on the cleaning I’ve been doing around the house, slowly but surely, and maybe buy those roses I was thinking about. Money’s super tight, though…the septic tank needs to be pumped and that ain’t cheap. I also got the next quilt drawing ready to go…I had to go copy some filler parts that I missed the first time around, and I got those taped down on Friday night. When this one is done, I will either start the next big one or a smaller one…I have about three of those taped up, but none of them is screaming to be done yet.

I’ve been really missing my regular drawing time…I had managed to integrate it really well into my life on a fairly regular basis, and the change in my life screwed that over. I haven’t been able to revise my practices to allow for it…I could draw at soccer games, but there are too many people hanging around for me to feel comfortable with it (I used to draw at indoor soccer and it caused some strange issues)…so maybe I will have to schedule one night a week for that. I don’t usually find that to work for me, because I do need to be in the mood for it, but maybe if I go back to the smaller drawings for a while, there will be less pressure to make something AMAZING on the first try. Maybe Friday nights need to be drawing nights from here on out…except those are notoriously low-energy nights. Sigh. Sometimes I think too hard about everything, and then I feel bad about the hermit existence as well, because I know it’s not a good existence, but I have so little time for myself as it is, and to spend it trying to be happily sociable in situations that I don’t really want to be in just seems stupid. I do miss art openings, though…not sure what’s up with that, but maybe with the holidays over, there will be more of those.

Anyway. Fuck you, sad. Fuck you, tense and stressed-out. You’re downers. Go mess with somebody else’s head. For this week, I need to be SuperMom and Teacher Lady (I don’t aspire to be SuperTeacher). Oh yeah, and I need to be The Finisher for the art stuff. It would be nice if my brain would get with the program and remember all the stuff it needs to remember this week as well, but barring that, can I please just remember to put it on my calendar so my technology will remind me? I would settle for that. And the first thing I’m going to remember to do is drop that little sketchbook back into my work bag, just in case my brain tries to explode at school. I’m sure there are meds for that, but drawing seems the safer option.

So that was it, Winter Break. Three weeks, survived. It was eh. I can’t even enjoy vacations any more. That just sucks. I’m not sure what reminded me of this, but…this…

Message to the brain? Who knows.

Dear Self

Dear Self: thank you for ever so briefly getting your act together in December and copying everything for the next two units of school. I went in to school today and it was all there, ready, planned. Seriously. Like I had a brain at some point. It’s nice to know that someone is looking out for me sometimes. Am I done with the grading? Heck no. But I can teach for the next 6 weeks with very little planning. And honestly? I needed that. So it’s nice to know that my brain CAN kick in and behave at times.

So yeah, I went in to school this morning and learned a little bit about the silly tablet we’re supposed to be using and then signed up for computers for some of the upcoming assignments (because we won’t have access at all for some portion of the Spring, due to Common Core assessments), and I sort of dealt with my classroom and organizing and putting stuff where it belonged, and then I went home, because there’s a plumbing issue, and it should have been something small, but it’s not…it’s not difficult, but it’s expensive, because expensive is something I need at the moment. If we’re eating something besides ramen at the end of the month, it might be a miracle. Who knows what will die or need to be fixed next…I’m ducking at this point.

I did quilt for a little while…

Not as long as I wanted, but some. I always want the stressful things to stay away and leave my brain in peace, but they don’t. They keep me from getting the art stuff done, tying my brain up in knots. I finished the whole dirt area, the little black and white bird, and about half of the Mother. My goal is to get a ton of it done tomorrow afternoon and evening. We’ll see if that flies.

I’m about 3 hours in…I think. I had my stitching meeting this evening with friends and my kids…I worked on the binding for the Love (not Love) quilt. It’s STILL not done. I’m slow.

Julie brought a cool coloring book of flowers and leaves and birds…

There were lots of owls. I’m developing a fascination with owls lately…

It makes me want to draw…I really miss drawing. I used to draw more. Now I don’t find the time as easily. It’s a place thing, I think. When I was waiting, I would draw. Now I am waiting less. Plus I am incredibly overstressed about deadlines at the moment, and so I find myself either rushing around dealing with those or completely immobilized by too much. So I do very little or I read a lot or I clean a lot. That might be beneficial to the house, but it’s not beneficial to my brain. My brain needs to do a better job of clearing all that stress out.

Julie also gave us bird ornaments for our Christmas trees…but my ornaments are all put away in the garage until next December, so I will hang it on something else for a while and see if it notices that Christmas is over.

I think it will be quite happy being a Spring bird for a while.

Anyway. I’m going to bed early. I’m tired. I have an early hike in the morning. I want to read for a bit, even though it is still World War II, because the time travel has returned and the book is back to being interesting. And I want to have enough mental energy tomorrow to finish quilting, or at least get a lot of it done. I can worry about school and money and getting all the other crap done some other day. Saturdays should be for good stuff…not work and stress and sad. Yes sad. It’s there. It’s always there…lurking about and stalking me. Asshole.

Dear Self: Get rid of that sad guy. He’s a jerk.