Last night was just blurry. All the pictures are blurry. My eyes are still blurry this morning, not enough sleep. But I’m almost done dammit! With so many things! Tracing and school. Yeah. So I have 9 minutes before I have to leave for a student thing (yes, on a weekend, unpaid), but this is how I roll. If you had 9 minutes, you might stroll through Facebook or play your game online, or maybe you’d throw in a load of laundry (that would be smart, but I only do laundry on Sundays), but I sit down and START writing a post, even though I know I won’t finish, because if I get a draft on here with pictures, while I’m standing around at this student thing, I can maybe write the rest of it! No seriously. I guess I don’t have much down time.

And yes, I’m looking forward to having most of 8 weeks off (it won’t all be OFF, for sure, because school trainings are poking their ugly heads in already). It will be nice to not be panicking on a Sunday afternoon about prep for the week, it will be nice not to have to consider grading papers EVERY SINGLE NIGHT (seriously people, that’s how it rolls). I would love to come home and NOT think about my job, but that is such a rare occurrence…we really do need summer to recharge so we can go at it balls out for another 10 months. I work every Spring and Winter break. I work through Thanksgiving. I work almost every weekend during the school year. Summer is a fucking relief. I can’t afford to go anywhere, but at least I can relax for a time. I figure we have about 183 days of school (actual days, not counting weekends) and I work for at least 1-3 hours almost every night or morning during the school year, so that’s an extra 366 hours a year (or 9 weeks of 40-hour weeks…I don’t ever work a 40-hour week). Plus weekends probably average 4 hours of work…So let’s say 40 weekends times 4 hours is another 160 hours or 4 weeks there. Honestly, we work a full year of hours in less than a year and don’t get paid for those extra weeks of work. No paycheck until August! Whoo!

So yeah. Don’t begrudge me my time. Jealous? Hey. Come teach my class for a week. This week! I dare you.

So I traced last night…getting into the low 1800s.

I’m up into the head area, so only about 150 pieces left. I want it DONE.

So I can then spend 15 hours cutting them all out.

Sounds relaxing, doesn’t it? Plus reading books and drawing and sitting on the deck and long hikes and not having to deal with school!!! OK, my brain is already on vacation. I still need to finish grades and I have 46 more awards to type and print out, and there’s a field trip and the last day and I need to come up with 500 cookies. So it’s not free time yet…it’s still in overdrive.

Midnight does not do overdrive.

OK. Gotta go now…I’m a minute late.

The closer I get to the end of the school year, the louder my art brain yells about free time and summer days and being on vacation. It’s hard to focus on school stuff at all, because people around you are lazing around, leaning back, taking a break, when we have a run for another 9 days, a sprint if you will. I mean, you can do anything for 9 days, right? OK. I’m pretty sure I can come up with something that I wouldn’t be able to do for 9 days, but right now, I keep telling myself I can get through 9 more days of students and teaching sex ed and dealing with whininess and hyper behavior (oh wait, that’s kind of my household at the moment).

I did take Saturday off though. I had to deliver a quilt to Oceanside, but I got to enjoy some art there (more later) and bought some teeny tiny art, two by high-school students and one by an adult. Go ahead, you guess which is which…

Top left is the adult (female) and the other two are high-school students (both male). Interesting pieces.

Then I spent a few hours roaming Art on Adams (more pictures later) and seeing mostly mediocre art with some standouts.

Sunday was a whole shit-ton of grading and school stuff (see that’s what happens when you blow it off for a day) and I think every day from here on out will be like that unfortunately. I did make it through all the makeup work, so that’s a plus. And my aide can input grades today and tomorrow.

I finally finished (well, got to a point of ending stuff and frustration) at around 9:30 PM and headed in to trace stuff. Midnight spent most of the time trying to lie on the drawing. There’s the girlchild talking to her…

Simba is still a spaz, even with a cone on his head. Here he is trying to get me to play with his toy while I’m tracing.

Girlchild was bored, so I handed her the coloring books I ordered from Jamie Fingal…I didn’t buy them to color, but because my art group is planning on doing a coloring book and I wanted to see what hers looked like. You can find them at that link. Girlchild’s been quite happily coloring while watching TV, in between job applications and brief spurts of cooking madness.

Cleaning the kitchen is still not her forte.

I traced for over 2 hours. Girlchild had gone to bed because she was tired (I should have noted that as a clue it was getting late…because I stayed up way too late).

I’m in the 900s now…still not halfway, but getting close. It’s 9 1/2 hours so far…I keep having to adjust my time estimates. It’s somewhere around 20 hours total, I’m guessing, depending on how fast I go. Last night, I was quite fast…250 pieces in 2 hours. I completely lost track of time, which is always nice. I traced cocoons and poppies and passionflower vines, plus a hand, some pine branches, and up the arm, minus the crane. That’s where I stopped: at the crane’s foot.

OK, so I plan to do some more, hit the halfway point even, tonight. Grading may get in the way, but hopefully there will still be time. Remember my goal to have it all traced AND cut out by the time school got out? Eh. It’s looking a little more difficult…but we’ll see. It’s OK…I set the goals with the realization that I might not meet them, but sometimes I’ll beat them. It gives me something to point at.

So when the kids are here, I can’t blast music in the morning. Well. I guess I COULD, but…it would be mean. I didn’t realize I’d gotten used to being able to do that whenever I want. To their credit, they tried to organize the kitchen counters yesterday, but there’s piles for me to deal with, and I don’t have time. This makes me laugh. Because that’s why the kitchen looked like that in the first place: Time. Not enough of it. Been the story of my life. Really, no. It’s just that my priorities are different. Probably most people don’t come home and grade for a couple of hours and then trace Wonder Under for another hour or two. Or iron a few thousand pieces of fabric. Or quilt around a uterus. Boychild wanted to know why I had expired coupons. Plus they found one of my reproduction folders (I was looking for that…it has the printouts of circumcision in there…I was trying to explain that the other day). And the girlchild’s senior photos (whoops. I’m pretty sure I should have handed those out to people like last year. I suck.).

Hey, I am not a perfect parent. For one, it’s just me here. For another, there’s no manual for how to fix this and do that. I’m winging it. After spending all day with 7th graders. I can’t be amazing Supermom. I can just be me.

Speaking of uteri, I am full on into teaching human reproduction now, so my days are full of explaining spontaneous erections and semen and periods. It’s tiring, but it’s easy enough, except my voice is not trained this year…we talk less now that everything is online. So it feels like a stretch to talk almost all period. There’s some minor behaviors to deal with this week, certainly, but we should survive it. It’s almost a relief to get to this unit, because I know they will pay attention and I’ve been teaching it so long that it’s second nature. I used to have to look up the answers to a lot of their questions (because I like to be accurate), but now I just wing most of it. I looked up some data on cervical cancer yesterday. None of today’s questions require more than a basic knowledge of how stuff works. Although there were a couple of boys yesterday that wanted to know when their periods would start. Oh my. Parents? Are you telling them anything? Or are you just fucking with them? Because with those two? I’d be OK with that.

So that’s the daily grind. Grades are due in about a week in a half, so I’m trying to stay on top of it, but it’s hard. I’ll get there. The hard way.

Last night, I managed to go to the gym, finish my book for book club…in July (seriously, I think I’m a month ahead? Plus I am totally Gaiman over Pratchett…Pratchett is funny at all and sometimes really good, but not like Gaiman. Sorry if that’s blasphemy to you.), grade a pile of science journals (not all of them though, because the couch was co-opted by college kids and I was forced to work in here), and finally persuaded myself to come out and start tracing stuff. I was really tired, but I always want to get some time in.

Luckily, I was pretty efficient. Got over 100 pieces traced in about 45 minutes…that’s the channel changer on the light table…the girlchild went to bed about 5 minutes after I went in there, so I got control of the TV! This is another thing that I have to get used to…

I did the section with the giraffe and started the leaves and grapevines above it.

I didn’t do a lot of the grapes though. Look at the clock. It’s midnight. You’re tired. But you can see a whole pile of giraffe spots on the right…

I cut those out as one piece of Wonder Under and then iron that down to one fabric…it saves time. Then when I cut out the fabric, I can cut out each piece. I can’t do the same thing with the grapes in the lower left corner, though, because they overlap, so they’ll have to be a variety of colors. If I were really smart, I’d figure out a 1,2,3,4 range for those and mark them now and draw all the 1’s together, then the 2’s, etc., but I don’t usually like thinking that hard at this stage. So I’ll just have a million small grapey pieces of Wonder Under floating around.

There is no shortage of small pieces in this quilt…with the big pieces tucked behind. Most of the lower torso is now done and I’m moving up into the upper ribcage area. I think I’m in the high 500s now…yup. Checked my notes. So a third of the way through…6 hours and 16 minutes. So 19 hours? Not a bad guess. So much easier to meditate with Wonder Under at night than to do work. That damn mockingbird is still torturing me every night. I had one night last week when he wasn’t out there until almost 3 AM…and then he was further away. I could barely hear him. Last night? He’s back at it, loud as hell. I’m tired of sleeping with a pillow over my head. I tried earplugs, but they make me feel all clogged up (doesn’t help that my sinuses are being all stuffy with allergies).

Anyway. I plod on.

Ah the challenges of the end of the school year, and your college-aged kids coming home, and a puppy in the house, and all the things that need to be done. The puppy now has been neutered…although it was problematic. Poor guy had one undescended testicle…I wonder if that’s why he hadn’t been neutered yet…they were waiting or they realized it was more expensive to do? It’s done now. But he’s not a happy camper…

He does have plenty of people around to love him and help him maneuver with the cone, although all he really wants to do is lick his butt, and he’ll have to wait 2 weeks for that joy. He mostly slept last night…a very different puppy to the one we normally have.

We all went out to dinner at the Indian place…oh my golly, I forget how good that place is. I don’t go at all when the kids are gone, unfortunately (I should order takeaway)…and I usually get multiple meals out of one dinner. Yummy.

Then we came home and rallied around puppy for a while, until the kids went off to bed or room and I started tracing Wonder Under on the newest quilt…which currently is called Earth Mother 2016…I’m assuming I’ll come up with a better name eventually.

I didn’t get far in the numbers, because the whole bottom section is a giant half Earth and the pieces are pretty large.

So I traced the entire Earth part and got partway around the edge of it until I thought it was pretty late…and I knew I had multiple places to be this morning, so I needed to sleep. I didn’t have the mental energy to do a lot else last night, even though I brought home a huge pile of grading for the three-day weekend. One of the things that sucks about being a teacher is that every single three-day weekend is during school and you end up grading through at least one of the days. Sundays are already trashed by lesson planning etc on a regular weekend, so it’s nice to have one extra day, because it means I will try to treat at least one day of the weekend as a real day off…no grading, no errands, no cleaning. Just relaxing and reading and hiking and hanging out. If that works.

But I do hope to get more tracing done on this over the weekend…around the grading and the artist drop-offs and pick-ups and artist talk and all the other stuff. And right this second? I need a nap. Sad but true. Massive headache plus tired. Not a good mix. Might be worth setting the timer for 20 minutes and putting a pillow over my head. Just a quickie. Listen to the body…it’s telling you something.