Planning To Be Not Sick…

So the girlchild is sick. It’s two days until a week-long vacation, and I am surrounded by coughy, sneezy, leaves-her-used-tissues all over the house, which the dog then tries to eat, so I have to touch all of them to either throw them away or get them out of the dog’s mouth. And THEN. Then she drinks out of the milk jug, straight out of it, right in front of me, like she doesn’t even care that she’s bombarding ME with all those germs on levels that I don’t even need to consider. Her response? “Um. Sorry? We live together anyway.” She’s like the worst roommate ever. I come home and she’s already left for soccer, and all the clothes she’s worn are all over the floor, and when I come back from the gym, I find her smelly soccer socks, shoes, and shinguards sitting on the couch where I would like to sit and draw, and it reeks.

Bad roommate. Except she’s my blood. I did give her some grief yesterday when she finally came home, but she’s SIIICKKK. Sigh. I guess my plan for break is to be sick as well (pounding vitamins, washing hands as I speak). I don’t have time to be sick. I have two hikes to go on, 13,000 words to write, a quilt to get significantly started. I can’t be sick.

So there’s the drawing. I came home after delivering my quilt to the photographer and I was exhausted. So I tried to read, but fell asleep on the couch (probably I’m getting sick) and woke up to a cat lying on me. It’s a risk in this house. Happens all the time. I only had like 30 pages of my book left, so I finished it (It was good by the way…the last in Lev Grossman’s Magicians series). Then I started trying to draw, and here’s why I don’t keep track of time on the drawings. When it’s not going well, when I’m having a hard time getting it out of my head or solidifying it in there, I just stare at things…mostly at the paper, but also at the TV (Blacklist, James Spader is truly evil in this show, and yet not), or a cat. Or the white wall, annoyed by the fact that I haven’t finished doing things in here, like hanging art. So I did a lot of that. I have “four hours” into the drawing, but I’d bet that only half of that was actual pen or pencil moving on paper. And if you’re going to count the staring-at-the-paper minutes, you should also count the minutes when I’m thinking about the drawing when I don’t have a sketchbook in my lap, and that’s quite a few more hours. So yeah. Pointless measurement there. No real start and stop. Fluid.

But after I made dinner and girlchild finally showed up to eat (and sneeze and cough and moan and leave used Kleenex everywhere), I went and wrote some more story (she’s kidnapped! It happened early! I said 5 PM and then I kidnapped her early! Don’t ask. My brain does what it pleases.), and when I came back to the couch, the snotty thing had gone to bed (without even saying good night) and I was able to do a significant piece of the drawing. Because before that? I was just staring at the paper for a long time.

It is unfortunately not done. That said, I think it COULD be done with about 20 more minutes. I don’t HAVE 20 minutes before school though. And I was going to go copy it after school. SO. I could take it to school and instead of doing grades during prep, I could finish it. And then copy it after school. But I don’t like taking my sketchbook (the big one) to school. It’s just…it’s got stuff in it that the students would be shocked by, and it’s big and hard to hide, unlike the one in my bag. SO. I could just ditch out of school as soon as the bell rings, come home and finish it, and then go copy it. Probably means I’ll be putting it together at class, but I think I can do that. OR. I could stop writing this and go finish it, except mornings are not good drawing times for me. I don’t know why. My brain is primed for late night. Right now, I’m still trying to wake up. Apparently I can write half asleep but I can’t draw. Two different parts of the brain. The rambling wordy bit can vomit shit up all the time. The drawing part needs more caffeine. And wake time.

But this is where I’m at…

Like I said, not much left. Trying to keep it simple so I can actually finish it in time. Yes, the DNA hand showed up again. So did the tree. I really like the pile of people, of MEN. Yup. Standing on Da Boyz. And there’s pencil between her legs because I’m not sure about that part, but it’s there to remind me to think about it. So I guess I really need to wait until the end of the day. Yup. Plus I’m going to have to add to the top and sides a bit so I can put more leaves in. But not much.

Another thing I’m doing, which I had heard about back in September or October, is Coursera. If you haven’t heard of it, they are college classes you can take for free (no credit) or for credit (pay!) that are offered on a wide variety of subjects and from a huge number of participants. A friend (Linda!) emailed me about one she thought I would like about how plants use their “senses.” It sounded interesting, so I signed up for this class taught by a professor at Tel Aviv University, and I’m about three weeks behind starting, but since I’m not taking it for credit (unlike some of the kids in there), I don’t care. I also don’t care that I’m not acing the quizzes, because I’m listening to his lectures while I’m writing the book. And when he says something really interesting or confusing, I flip to the tab running the video and I rewatch that section, and sometimes I take notes (right now, my post-it says “auxin” and “Barbara McClintock”), but mostly I’m just listening for stuff that I could use in the book or that might make some things make more sense. I’m still boggled by this article about plants that can “hear” caterpillars eating them and respond chemically. They recorded the sounds and played them near another plant and it responded in kind. This is awesome science, and helped me write the section where the plant talks to the main character. Yeah, my science is a little out there, but I don’t think it’s as out there as I originally thought.

Anyway. It’s interesting enough and I’ve done two weeks of work in two nights (well, I didn’t do it WELL. I got a D on the quiz, but whatevs. I’m not taking it for reals.).

So. Progress on all levels. And two more days of school to survive. If you’ve never been in a middle school the week before an upcoming vacation, even if it’s only a week off that’s coming up, it’s like there’s a full moon. They wig out all over the place and do amazingly stupid things, because they think it’s not going to follow them after break. Which is only a week long. I’m with them, though. I want to be on vacation too. I just don’t want to be SICK on vacation. Grr. More vitamins. More handwashing.

Yes. It DOES Sound Crazy.

Well, one thing I’ve got going for me right now is that there is no shortage of projects I’m supposed to be working on. In fact, there are four due within the next 2 1/2 months. Luckily, three of them are tiny, compared to what I normally do, and even the larger one can’t be TOO large. And it’s been in my head for a couple of months, so I actually think I can get it out fairly quickly. I did know that I would have to fit it all on one page. I don’t know if you’ve noticed lately, but it’s been hard for me to fit anything on a single page. Even those drawings that are mostly on one page seem to need something added once I enlarge it…which isn’t a problem. But when I know I need to make what is for me a smaller piece because the show has a lot of people and the gallery isn’t very big, it means I have to THINK about size. I don’t usually think about size.

So before I could even deal with the drawing last night, though, I had to get my hair cut, mostly because I couldn’t get a comb through the ends. I wanted to do it in October, but financially, October was a major issue. Timewise as well, so I finally got there yesterday. It’s silly, because I guess I could have chopped it all off myself, but Rebecca does a much better job (duh. She is trained.). I have learned over the years that there are I things I CAN do (like my own quilt photography), but it’s stupid when others can do it better and I can pay them a reasonable amount to do so. My photographer also…I gladly let him do what he’s good at, so I can do more of the stuff that I’m good at. And it’s remarkably silly how nice a good haircut feels. I don’t get a lot of the good feels.

By the time I finally got home (had to pick up ex-husband because his car is in the shop again), I was tired, but I forced myself to the gym. I wrote the novel on the bike; got about 450 words written in 25 minutes (so that’s 18 words a minute), which means I’ve spent over 55 hours writing this book so far. No wonder I don’t sleep. That’s not 55 hours this month…I started in June, but it is 30 hours so far this month, which is about an hour and 3/4 each day. Wow. Really? Someone check my math. I’m not meditating at the moment by the way. I often write, though, while I’m doing something else. But still, wow. I work full time as a teacher, I exercise, I cook real food, I apparently sleep, and I write almost 2 hours a day. Plus art.

So after all that and eating dinner, I wrote…see above…over 34,000 words and a step closer to the violence. It’s 1:15 PM in the afternoon of the day when all the shit hits the fan. Some shit just hit, but we don’t really know what it means yet, and when I say “we,” yes, I’m including me, because my brain hasn’t written that part yet. It will tonight. Seriously. I rarely know where I’m going with this story until I get there. I’m hoping it all holds together, but I realized last night that I had one character bifurcating in the story (no, she really can’t be in two places at once…it’s sci fi, but not THAT sci fi.), so I’m sure editing will need to tighten up some details.

Then I ironed the new quilt for the photographer and dehaired it and prepped it…

I have to cover it so it doesn’t get more cat hair, but also because my car has dog hair in it from Calli riding in there, so I usually make a plastic bag covering. Yes, some people buy bags especially for this, but I’m not like that. Plus I spent all my money on my haircut (not really…but teenagers are really expensive). This morning I decided to roll it with the front out, because I know it will sit in the car all day, and I don’t want it to get wrinkled. I’ll drive it to him after school, he’ll take great pictures and charge me not very much at all, and I’ll happily go back and get it when he’s done. It’s like magic!

And then I’ll spend the next two weeks trying to come up with a name for it, because it needs a fucking name and the one I came up with yesterday really does reference the Adam and Eve thing, and I don’t actually want to reference that…because that’s not what it’s about. It’s interesting that there is a reference to that story, but it’s not about that story.

And then at maybe 11:30 PM, I finally sat down in the living room (it took 10 minutes to find my sketchbook, which in itself is sad) and started drawing. I have to admit that I was tired at that point, and I kept trying to Google images that would help my brain, like “woman standing with gun belt” and “arms akimbo.” Seriously. That was a thing. I finally gave up (my internet was cranky) and just started drawing.

I have to admit that I did a rough pencil sketch first of where things needed to go because they needed to fit on the page, and that’s one of my issues: fitting things on the page. And I’m not sure about either hand. But I can always redo those parts. And no, I didn’t get very far. I was tired. I actually went to bed at a reasonable hour. No, not really. But reasonable for me.

Oh yeah, and the total for the Quilt That Has No Name Yet was 101 hours and 33 minutes (yikes!). Not a small or easy beast, but a nice beast nonetheless.

Tonight? Finish the drawing, rush over to Fed Ex before they close so I can enlarge it, and come back number it, so I can start tracing at class tomorrow. Yes. It DOES sound crazy. Why do you ask?

Finis

Hey. Shhh. Over here. C’mere. Hey. (It’s done. The quilt. I finished it. Really. I did.)

Sigh. Started numbered the drawing September 6. That’s the first official time I take usually; sometimes I keep track of the taping, if it seems bad, but this one got taped and then drawn on the full-size, and I don’t keep track of drawing time. Finished November 17. I guess you could argue finished November 18, because it was after midnight, but I don’t consider it the next day until I’ve gone to sleep and woken up again. Completely arbitrary? Well yeah. I got a late start on the binding yesterday, because I had to meet the girlchild at the sports store to buy her soccer gear after school. I got home (completely exhausted by then) and decided (because I was braindead with exhaustion) that I should paint right away. Something about the paint drying before I started sewing and having more brain power then than later, for some quantity of “MORE”.

The real problem with the painting is that I have a ton of fabric paints, but most of them have dried up, being old, and I really should open every jar and toss anything that’s unusable. But if I had done that, I wouldn’t have been able to paint last night…so I didn’t.

I managed to mix something very close to the lighter color of the briefcase. Took me a while to get it, but I did.

I never took a picture of the bleed through, which is too bad, because it was pretty bad there. Less so in other places. (Must train self to wash with Retayne) Just trust me…there was a swath of blue across the light brown…

And now there isn’t. What a relief.

I used colored pencils and a little bit of paint on a couple other bits that had issues…

But otherwise, I left it there to dry while I moved money and calculated college costs, then cooked dinner and texted the boychild back and forth for an hour. He has snow on and off and ice and cold and rain and cold. Frozen hair (he has a lot of hair). I send him videos of his cat being a brat and he sends pictures of puppies and kittens and long dense sentences out of his essays that I then have to try to make sense of out of context.

Then I wrote a few thousand words where my main character communes with her bad plant self.

And then I sewed binding, poking holes in my fingers again. I don’t do well with thimbles. Put them on and then avoid that finger. It’s like my brain thinks there’s something wrong with the thimbled finger and tries to protect it, so it uses another finger. I debated whether I could finish last night…I had one whole short side, most of a long side, and then two sleeves.

I had one of my trusty companions.

There was another one, but she kept licking the stitching hand, so she got pushed off. I sewed for almost two hours and it was done. Please don’t ask when I went to sleep. It was entirely too late. It probably shows in my face today. But I’m done. Deep breath. I’ll have to total the hours later, because I have a parent meeting this morning. But the trimming and binding was almost 8 hours total and there was about an hour of painting and coloring. Not a small number of hours…and basically I did it in a little over 2 months. During the school year. Yup. Crazy. My hand is sore this morning from the sewing.

The next one? I only have 6 weeks. Ha! But I also have 3 weeks of vacation in that time, so I’m hoping that helps. And it needs to be smaller. So I should probably draw fewer pieces. I’m already at war in my head with this one (ironic, since it’s for a show about women and war). Drawing tonight hopefully. Also need to dehair and pack quilt for photographer…see, if you set up the photo appointment, then you HAVE to finish it. Minor issue: it has no name. I had one pop into my head just now, but I don’t know if I like it. And the boychild would argue it only deals with the traditional genders, which is true. I wasn’t having trans v cis issues, just the standard man v woman in society issues. There are two blogposts on this that I’ve been writing on and off for months. Maybe they will surface in the next week, along with my report from Houston. Maybe.

Philosophy on a Monday Morning…

There’s something about nearing the end of making a quilt that is sort of a letdown. You’ve spent all these hours, you’ve beat yourself up about not meeting this or that deadline that you arbitrarily set in your head, it’s been your life for months, and then…then it’s gone. It’s done. You’re done. It abandons you. It’s no longer the focus of your life. And if you don’t have another one, Right There, ready to take over the part of your mind that needs that level of distraction, of creativity, of something that gives you satisfaction in a world that is incredibly frustrating at the moment, then it can be depressing. And I think sometimes the brain needs to lie fallow a bit in between projects, not that I’ve let it do that in the last year, because for me, where I am, fallow means significant depression, falling into a nasty hole that I have to then drag myself back out of, and that happens even WHEN I’m creating. It’s worse when I’m not.

I have a project to start right now, though. It’s drawn in my head. It’s not on paper. I just emailed my photographer, so this current thing has to be done by Wednesday (I’m almost done with the binding, and then I will deal with the bleed). And I have quilt class on Thursday and I need something to take by then, so that means I have to draw the new one and copy it and tape it by Thursday after school. HA! Yeah. I know. But if you set crazy-ass deadlines like that, worst-case scenario you fail and you say, well, it was crazy anyway. But I’m behind where I wanted to be right now. I wanted the gender quilt done by Saturday. Now it’s Monday. That is obviously a giant fail (not). I’m doing OK. I’m a little worried about time, but I’ll figure it out.

After spending an entire weekend essentially working (second one in a row), I’m a little tense and cranky. I realize that. I don’t have a lot of outlets for that any more. I do stupid things to make myself feel better, like change the sheets on the bed to flannel (it’s getting cold), or throw out something someone gave me that I never liked but was useful, but hell, I really don’t like it and I don’t need it really, it’s just useful, and being raised to be somewhat of a hoarder is a difficult thing to break. But it’s gone now! Now if I could just get the rest of the crap under control. I read. I go to the gym. It’s not enough. It will have to do at the moment, though.

I went over 30,000 words on the novel (understand that I actually have over 56,000 words…but I started with a bunch written in the first place). I added an isolation tank last night. Who knew? I had to go Google them and how they worked, but the idea came to me from watching Fringe episodes. My brain is doing this, “What would you do if you needed to get this reaction?” thing, and it searches all the old databases in my head, and then I Google something like “What’s the name of that water tank that the doctor in Fringe used to use?” which is like the worst Google search ever in the world, but popped up exactly what I needed (previously known as sensory deprivation tanks). And then I was searching “epsom salts and plants,” which was another revelation. I love that the world we live in is so knowable on some levels, so searchable, even though it makes other parts of my life a pain in the ass (how easy it is for my students to contact me at all hours…the dating spreadsheets you now need to keep just to figure out if you want to date someone…the fact that you still have to pick up registered mail from the post office during their stupid hours because there’s no way to do that online).

Anyway. I’m managing things. There’s some magical thing that’s supposed to happen now where I have everything under reasonable control (ha!) and happiness just appears, like a leprechaun and his gold or a genie in a lamp. I think it’s some switch I’m supposed to pull inside my head, but I’m still looking for it. Still trying to get all the crap out from before…an analogy between my brain and my house. I don’t have the time or energy to get everything put back or dealt with from the remodeling over the summer; I can’t get my office clean all over, just 2-foot square at a time; the garage is a scary time warp that seems to breed bizarre half-broken items that I might need in the zombie apocalypse, and even if I don’t, I don’t have time to go through and figure it out right now. I’m not sure if the brain or the house comes first. Which can I get cleaned up for real? I do have time planned over break to deal with the house. If I knew how to do the brain part, I would…but I don’t. I don’t think I was built to just be content with my life. I think I was designed to ever be looking to change, adjust, make better, clean up, improve. I don’t know that I could do the art the way I do without that. Is the creative part of my brain, the part that’s always reflecting and searching and making and observing, is it why I can’t just sit back and say, OK, this is OK? This will do. Because it won’t. It’s not.

Philosophy on a Monday morning…always an issue.

Official Title #3764

Can’t title things today. Brain offline. So my view last night of the world was this…

Yes, Glee…don’t judge. It’s light, it’s easy, and they sing. And their entire life experience is so far removed from mine that it doesn’t bother me. Everything else that was on Tivo felt really heavy and dark or light and fluffy and I decided I couldn’t handle it. And much as I’d been loving Star Trek lately, that means watching on the computer and fighting the tiny mean black cat for the chair, and my body was having an issue with being female yesterday (actually, it continues today…another symptom of the thyroid giving up the ghost), so I was in some pretty extreme pain and trying to sew. On the couch was better than in a chair that is only vaguely comfortable on a good day. It was fun. Really. And by fun, I mean, I got through it. Working on that needle-poke callus on my right middle finger now.

I spent all day yesterday (many hours) at an educational tech conference. It was long, but there was one very good workshop I went to and I think I saw the light! Or I have a bunch of new ideas about how to do something online that I have previously done on paper. But I only have three weeks to implement it, and that might not be enough. And I’m not really sure what I’m doing. See, that’s what you want in a teacher…someone who is willing to change it up by the seat of her pants. I want the kids to learn not only the content, but to stretch beyond it and be able to use it elsewhere (some of us have been teaching common core the entire time we’ve been teaching), AND I want them to be tech-proficient (beyond Facebook and video games) AND I’m willing to put my butt out there and hope it all works. So much of the admin and the petty bullshit we deal with as teachers is what chases creative teachers off. I’ve seen too many of them leave because of the shitty pay and the job uncertainty and the harassment by parents and admin (and kids sometimes, honestly). Those of us that tough it out, we are some level of crazy, yes. Luckily, I got the email address of the presenter, so if I have major issues, I know where he works (not far from here).

So that sucked up a huge part of my weekend, and today I’m at the Salk Institute (I always pronounce it SOCK…and then point to mine) to get trained on their DNA kits so I can check them out and do cool experiments with my kids. So it’s a weekend of school stuff that I didn’t get paid for, which again, underlines the crazy. This is what teachers do. If you are one of those people coming after my pay or my pension or my “vacation time” (I don’t get paid for the summer, people), then realize this is what we do. We lose an entire weekend to stuff that benefits OUR STUDENTS. And we do it for free. Because it benefits our students. I am doing what’s best for the kids. It would be nice if the politicians would do the same.

And this morning, I’m trying to persuade my body that it can go to the gym, despite its current tendency toward hemorrhaging (wow, a word I really can’t spell without help). Because I know I will feel better, but ouch. Ouch. And OUCH. Plus how do I staunch the flow long enough to actually be there? These are the fun questions perimenopause brings to you: How much black clothing do I own? How many menstrual devices can I use at once to avoid a wardrobe issue? How can I get better pain meds so I can actually stand up? Seriously, when the alarm went off this morning, I was curled up in a tiny pained ball yelling (probably a good thing the kids aren’t here) until that wave stopped. I think childbirth was easier…at least it seemed like there was a purpose to it.

If that’s all TMI, then you probably shouldn’t be reading my blog anyway.

So yeah, I’m almost done with this quilt, which feels a little weird. I really like the quilt though, so that’s good. And I’m ready, I think, to draw the next one this week, so I can spend all of Thanksgiving week cleaning house (whoo!) and starting that one plus a few smaller ones I promised to make (three. I promised three. Please slap me around a bit, because I am crazy).

I did write a little of the novel at the conference yesterday, and then I came home after dinner with friends (a slightly contentious dinner, interestingly), and I wrote some more. Today (in the story) is when the big bad shit starts to hit the fan. More people are going to die…not because it’s fun to kill people off (although it will be fun to kill ONE person off…yes, I have revenge fantasies at times), but because the deaths are going to highlight how dangerous it is for our heroine and why the Government Must Be Stopped. I’m really not a raging anti-government person, makes me sound like a cultist, but in this story, they aren’t nice or good. They’re bad people. They started out OK, but you know, lost humanity, lost perspective, blah blah blah.

I honestly don’t know if the story will be finished by the end of the month. I’m fairly certain I’ll hit 50,000 words, though. My stats from the NaNoWriMo website…

I was over 28,000 words yesterday. I’ve had a couple of lighter days, but then kicked ass on days afterwards, so the story never stops flowing from my brain. It’s more that I get too tired to write. As I’m writing, I wander off into random shit and then find myself sitting there with my eyes closed and my fingers on the keyboard. Friday night was a little like that. I should have written before I did the binding, and I kept MEANING to do that and then not doing it, and so when I wrote, it was midnight. And I woke up with a start at some point (and honestly, at that point, I gave up, short for that night, but I had a cushion from earlier in the week), and when I read it the next morning, it was a whole different kind of writing. It wasn’t Bad, but it was Different. I left it. At this point, I’m just trying to get the story out. I’ll go back and revise later. I know it needs a ton of work, if just for basic editing and continuity. Did I tell you that Book 2 (not a sequel to this one) is poking at my brain too?

Anyway. I’m a few steps closer to getting my butt out the door to the gym. Need to eat and finish the tea and then gird my loins in black and cotton absorbent things. I know exercise will help, so I am going to do it, even though I’m tired and have lots of stuff to do before I go to the science thing. Sometimes you have to do what’s right for your body or brain, even if it’s not easy. Motto of my life, I guess. I personally don’t think there’s a guarantee for easy, and I’m not even sure easy is the best thing. If we never stretch or challenge ourselves by dealing with the hard, then I think we are never as strong or amazing a human being as we could have been. That said, I could do with some easy for a while. Bring it.

Apparently Adam and Eve…

So. I can’t show you the trimmed quilt. I can tell you some things about it though. First of all, apparently I made an Adam and Eve quilt. I guess that makes sense when you are looking at an image of gender equality and you have a society with all these images of Adam and Eve together, who really are not quite about gender equality (or ARE they…you don’t have to read the pictures with scripture supporting them), but the tree…I wasn’t thinking when I was drawing. I just like trees. But there are so many trees in the Adam and Eve paintings. I did leave the snake out! Interesting that, because I often include a snake. In fact, I just realized the snake in Love (not) probably has more symbolism than I even had thought about. This is why it’s kinda funny to watch the video my mom took at Celebrating Silver when the nice woman asks me what the skull symbolizes and I snarkily say Death, but I’m not even sure that’s the case. When I draw, there are things that have power, weight, meaning, that I plan on including for just those reasons, and then there are the things that sneak in when I’m not really thinking about it. Subconscious symbols just wandering around and plopping themselves on the paper. Because if it took both Adam and Eve to make all humanity, and that’s from the biblical times, before we understood the genetic implications of that, before we knew there were factors from Mom AND Dad that became a part of each human child, then at what time did one become more important than another in any part of the world? Why do women have to be the cookers and cleaners and the baby-minders? Why do men have to be the money-wranglers and decision-makers? Why does anyone have to be in charge? Why this perennial argument over who is REALLY in charge? I’m not really arguing about religion here, but about the images that religion has co-opted or paid for to support their doctrine (because a lot of religious paintings were paid for by the church, and you can’t piss off the boss, so you paint what you’re told unless you’re a rebel). Yes, I had to study all that stuff in school. Years and years of That’s All There Was…religious paintings. And they are fascinating in the ways they are different, but also in the ways they are the same. The Madonna, the baby Jesus, God in his sky, Adam and Eve on the ground, the tree, the animals, the snake.

So yeah, all that to tell you I made an archetypal Adam and Eve quilt. That you can’t see until January. It’s cool, though. Even the girlchild said so. I trimmed it (and ouch, I think I lost 3 inches with all that tight quilting, so don’t tell anyone, but I think it’s gonna be about 1/4 to 1/2″ too short. SHHH. I’ve never had one too small. Crazy.).

I wasn’t going to put the binding on right away. I was going to write first. But somehow, I just kept ironing, and then cutting, and somehow sewing, and then I might as well pin it…and it was done.

I asked the girlchild to help me out by wrapping the UK Xmas gifts for me…did she finish? Fuck no. This happened…

So it’s still not done. Sigh. Tonight.

I promised a photo of the skateboarding skellies…

I’m in love with this, especially the guy who is skateboarding over skelly parts.

Tonight? Sewing bindings. Very exciting. Yup. Got bug videos to watch. Seriously. I do.

The Endless Quilting…

Holy crappity fuck fuck, how long is this damn quilting going to take. I think I only have this much left (holding hands out like a medium-sized fish to be caught, if I gave a shit about catching fish), but that space seems to stretch out like a hallway you’re running down in a nightmare where a monster is chasing your ass as you zigzag to avoid its damn sharply tipped claws, trying to keep your gluteus maximus whole and unscathed. I did replace the damn thread with the correct weight. Some dumbass put the wrong spools back in the wrong place. I didn’t even realize there were two weights at JoAnn’s, already my personal hellhole, but now I know. One more stupid thing I have to keep in my head. So when we were at the store, we moved all the spools in the wrong place, so some other clueless fuck wouldn’t be stymied like I was.

Here’s where I admit that I’m not finishing this thing tonight. I wanted to. I thought I could. I need another two hours I think, and I don’t have two hours tonight.

That was last night. I gave up. I was tired. It had been a very long day of meetings and racing around prepping for a sub today (I still have to go in early, because I forgot to do two things that are kinda major) and dealing with squealy kids and sheep hearts and then a union meeting and dinner out. By the end, I had a little energy left to start stuff and sorta sew, but then it all wandered off and left me sitting in a chair, barely mobile. Not even enough energy to get OUT of the chair and go to bed. Mighta been that cat paw, claws hooked, on my leg. Mighta been the rest of the room, chaotic, begging to be cleaned up, not understanding why I never get around to it.

Things always take way longer than you think they will. Unless they don’t.

All piled up at the end of the day. Defeated by a pile of fabric…

OK, not defeated really. Sort of. I can’t buy just binding apparently…

The one black and white one on the right is skateboarding skeletons. Seriously. I have a skelly issue. Wouldn’t it have been nice if I had taken a picture of it? Maybe tonight.

One of these is the binding (I went through dark blues, lighter blues, red, greens, and finally got to brown…I hope it works)…and one is for the next quilt. Maybe. It’s a good background fabric anyway. It will get used.

Not that I needed to buy more fabric really. The never-ending palette. Being a painter is probably easier…you can just mix your colors. I need to own each color.

OK, I need to go to school and I’m not really coherent anyway. I’m coping, trying to achieve something, trying to keep the head above water as chaos envelops me. Want to be more organized or something, but I’m a pantser. I’m a fairly organized pantser, but a pantser nonetheless. Wow. There are some interesting definitions of pantser…I’m the writing one…not the others. The others are just creepster.

Yes. I wrote yesterday. I’m still doing that crazy thang.

Timed Frustration

I ran out of time. You’d think with a 4-day weekend, it wouldn’t be possible for me to run out of time, but when you spend 20 hours or so grading, plus a hike, plus trying to plan for the week when you have a sub one day, and all the new class changes with the new trimester…it’s not surprising. It’s just frustrating. At 11:20 last night, I was folding fabric (I did manage to buy the binding fabric yesterday, even though I couldn’t get to the point where I was putting it on, which is where I was SUPPOSED to be yesterday). I did not try to continue quilting after that for a variety of reasons…first of all, I have the wrong thread. I went out to the store to get more yesterday morning (after they drew blood from two different places, thank you very much, yes, I drank my bottle of water…that’s why I’m going to pee on your seat in a minute if you don’t get on with it.). I had the number of the color, but apparently they are now selling two different weights? And I didn’t notice? And I got the wrong one? And it’s super fine (and I don’t mean that in the 70s way), so it’s breaking all the time (rhyme that: super fine, breaking all the time…nice, eh?), plus I don’t know if I can tell the difference on the quilt or not, but FUCK.

So I was doing all these tiny little squiggles (OK, I know they could be tinier, but they’re pretty damn small and very time-consuming…my fault of course).

And really, I’m pretty close to done, being up in the tree section. But NOT done. And today is a bitch. It will be a bitch. There will be very little time in which it will not be a bitch (do not predict bitchiness. Predict Lack of Time. I predict Lack of Time, which may lead to bitchiness on my part AND the day’s part, but I cannot predict that. Maybe someone will bring me a donut and that will reduce said bitchiness. Ha! That’s not enough. I think someone has to come hand me a winning lottery ticket for said bitchiness to be truly removed.). Fucking big-ass giant sigh of frustration.

WANT TO FINISH QUILTING.

I don’t want to go to school. I want to finish this. But I’m a big girl, so I will do my job…which today involves sheep hearts. MMM MMM GOOD.

Cats are no help.

Yes, she’s lying ON the quilt while I’m quilting, and complaining as I move it. Although they do answer when I talk to them. Saw girlchild for maybe 2.1 minutes yesterday. Said maybe 10 words to me. I talked to my ex more than her. Hell, I think I talked to the ladies at the quilt shop more (they wanted to see my quilt, I warned them about the nudity, they hesitated, said something about “in the name of art”. Not sure if theirs was a positive response…whatevs. I’m not doing it for the likes of you.).

Frustration. I’m running out of time. I need to get this thing done and to the photographer and I need to start the next one. The have-tos are starting to pile up. This one is done. Essentially. I think that’s the problem. In my head, it’s done. Why isn’t it REALLY done? Damn reality check.

OK, so I’m mood-managing this week. Turns out (after lame-ass blood withdrawal yesterday) that my thyroid is yet again out of whack, and I have like ALL the symptoms. Blame my crazy moods on that stupid nonfunctioning organ in my neck. Doctor in two weeks. Then she can fix THAT, and my elbow and my toenail and maybe my life, because that’s a giant clusterfuck. Is there a prescription for that?

PROS: NaNoWriMo. I rock baby. See, I can do one thing right. I’m over 21,000 words. I wrote another 2400 yesterday…got on a roll. Started on the bike, did a little on the elliptical (harder to type on the elliptical), came home and did more while dinner was cooking, and then while I was eating, holy crap, it just spilled on out of me. And the first kidnapping has happened, which leads up to the second death (well, really, there were 8 other deaths, but that’s different…they happened before the story started). I’d really like to do one of the write-ins that are local, but I can’t fit one into my crazy schedule. All the flash write-ins are on Sundays, and I don’t have a clear Sunday ever apparently. The night ones that I could go to are all far away, like La Jolla. Ugh. Long way to drive to write. And maybe writing in public ain’t my thing (except now I’ve done it in meetings, at the gym, in an airport). So whatever. The story progresses. There might even be an ending in my head at some point. You never know.

Speaking of endings. This. It needs to end so I can go to school and make seating charts. Because I live for that moment. Yup. I do.

Forced Smile

I talked to three people yesterday. One of them was the guy who held the door open at the gym for me. I said thank you. The other two were a student and his mom, who met me at school, because he apparently hadn’t turned his journal in and I had missed it (I really thought I had caught everyone, but he’s a sneaky guy). Well, until the girlchild came home from Disneyland at 11 PM, but she was really cranky and didn’t want to talk much, just complain about whether I had the lights on or not (I do need light in order to walk down the hallway without killing myself, especially since she keeps leaving things IN the hallway for me to kill myself on). And I talked to the dog and three cats. Pretty exciting.

I graded my butt off until around noon. Then went to the gym and then to school to pick up the journal from that kid. Finished grades around 5:30 PM and started cleaning out this one section of my office that has been getting worse and worse. Basically, it was a pile of random shit that had fallen over and then been piled on again, and cats had knocked stuff over and spiders were living in there. Yes, I probably should have taken photos, but I decided to just get in there and clean it. That was good. Now I have 17 other sections of the house that need the same level of attention. It took about an hour to deal with this one section, about 2 feet square.

Giant ass sigh.

It’s a move in the right direction. Then, after procrastinating all day (yes, I clean to procrastinate), I finally started quilting again.

Tiny little squiggles. Sigh. Lots of them. My left elbow is bugging me again. I stopped lifting weights because I thought that was the problem, and it may be part of the problem, but it’s certainly not the whole problem. Tendonitis, yes, and I have a doctor’s appointment right before Thanksgiving, so I’ll bug her for more physical therapy appointments, because I used up my allotted amount for the year on my knee. My question is does the number of PT appointments per year go up as you age? Because maybe it should.

I got a couple of hours in. Not as much as I wanted, but then I thought I was further along in the grading and would have more of the day. I do have most of today.

I need to buy more thread though (did that). This is the back. And I need to get the binding fabric. And my car is having an issue that might be nothing and might be an alternator or battery. I’m trying to decide whether to be proactive and take it in or just ignore it until it’s a real issue. Really mature way to deal with life, eh?

Ugh. This week. I’m not allowed to say or think that it will suck until I have experienced it (thank you, counselor), but ugh. One day at a time. Except I can’t do that, because I have to plan. So I’m trying to plan without thinking about how the days will actually go. Difficult to do. Especially when you experience a sinking feeling just by typing out the instructions for your guest teacher. Dammit. I hate being out this much, but I don’t have a choice.

I really was writing my book on the stationary bike and the elliptical yesterday at the gym. I wrote a whopping 2800 words yesterday. I didn’t mean to; it just happened. I’m over 19,000 words at this point, and totally keeping up with the plan to finish on time.

Girlchild petting Babygirl, who was very demanding yesterday.

Oh dear. Am I the only one wondering why the parents don’t just grab their baby in their beak and fly them down from the nest? Don’t panic…there is a happy ending (I got very worried at one point)…

Barnacle goose freefall

Yup. Need to go quilt. Fighting a really down mood. Tell it to shut up. At some point, depression just gets old. Don’t think about the crap that makes you depressed. Look at clean area of floor that was not clean yesterday. Smile. Then quilt. Forced smile. Yeah, sometimes when I smile and don’t really mean it, it scares people.

The Pattern of My Days

This? This is the dryer full of fabrics from my trip to Houston.

The trip I haven’t written about yet because I’m so buried in quilting and grading and trying to get through the days that I can’t go through the 7,000 photos I took and try to decide how to make sense of them (there’s really only about 200 photos, and since I take pictures of the signs too so I know who did each piece and why, there’s probably only 100 quilts). I did buy fabric this year. I don’t usually, unless there’s something in particular that I’m looking for, but I was in the mood to buy fabric. I haven’t been buying much at all. I only go to the quilt store when I need a background or binding, which is about every 2-3 months, and then I try to keep it reasonable. I look for stuff I use a lot of and has been an issue lately. I do always look for flesh colors, and when I get these out of the dryer and folded (god knows when that will be), I’ll show you. I didn’t want solids or almost solids…I wanted funky patterns.

I did buy some browns too, because that dirt thing keeps showing up in my quilts and it uses big pieces that are really convoluted in shape, so I need big pieces of brown. I also bought a few reds…while I was picking them out, mom walks up to me and says, “Hearts?” Yup. For hearts mostly. The average heart I draw needs 4-6 fabrics. Or more. Complicated buggers, those hearts.

I managed NaNoWriMo last night again, although I tried to write while on the phone with my SIL, and that was a clusterfuck. Apparently the writing part of my brain can’t multitask THAT well, plus it sounded like she was about to run away from home (not sure I blame her). And then I went to book club, where we all pretty much swore off Orson Scott Card for the rest of our lives, but did pick a 900-page book for February. I’ve already read December’s book and we’re skipping January due to the holidays. Most of my book club friends are much younger than me, and only one of them has children, so the poor pregnant woman who was there, we were talking about all the advice you get, and I said I had none…oh wait, yes I do…”SLEEP NOW. You will never sleep again.” Seriously. I think it’s true. We did talk a lot about how we as a society protect and treasure pregnant women, how it must be hard-wired into our brains to take care of them. And babies…them too. Mostly. Yes. I go to book club for intellectual conversation, because we don’t just talk about Oooh Babies, but we analyze society’s response to babies. And we drink and eat. You can’t go wrong with that combination.

But I was tired and headed home early to get yelled at by the girlchild, apparently, who had left dinner cooling on the counter for over an hour. Not willing to risk vomiting all night, I didn’t touch it. Sigh. Frustrating. Perfect bacteria-growing temperature.

So that’s when I wrote…actually, I started writing (again, because I had started when my SIL called) and then she needed my computer, so I went and graded for a while and then came back. I’m over 10,000 words, averaging over 2000 a day. I was only at 1200 last night and was tired, and thought I was going to quit because I didn’t feel like writing the next bit. Plus I have a bit of a cushion, but I don’t want to use it now…I’d rather be way ahead and plan for having issues later than be way behind now and assume I can catch up (that’s probably the best summary of my personality that exists anywhere…because I know life is gonna bitchslap you with some crap you don’t even know about yet and you won’t HAVE that extra time later on…seriously). Sometimes I feel (shockingly) that I am writing too much detail, but I suspect it’s better to have too much at this point and edit it out later. The whole book is almost at 35,000 words now. Good progress. The story is developing. No, I still have no idea how it will end, but I’m heading into the rising action section, maybe? I think there needs to be a kidnapping or an attack at this point, so I’m letting my brain play with those ideas as I stare out at a small sea of faces at school. Little do they know what their teacher is thinking about…

And then I quilted. Oh, I graded first, but couldn’t keep going on that for long. I had a goal of finishing one assignment last night, and I didn’t even get close. Sigh. It’s gonna bite me in the butt this weekend, but whatever. Quilting was fun…really.

Thread rebelling against me. I’m still only getting in about an hour a night, although I guess that’s better than none. I was just hoping to be oh-so efficient last night, and it didn’t work out that way. I did finish all the outlining though, and I started on the background quilting…

Which, of course, I started way too tiny and crunched up. There isn’t a ton of background on this quilt, but there are these big pieces of sky up in the tree, and they’re not all behaving nicely, so I suspect that section will make me swear and possibly even cry (OK, I don’t cry because of quilting…I get frustrated and walk away.). I didn’t get very far in the background quilting, honestly, because I was bloody tired and probably should have gone to bed an hour earlier, but I did START. And that’s what I wanted to do, so there. Nine hours in. If I can shop for binding on Sunday and put it on that night, I’ll be good (um, Kathryn, you have a soccer tournament to attend on Sunday? Damn. You’re right. Sigh.). Anyway. It’s getting there, which means I need to get my butt in gear and draw the next one. Seriously. If I type Seriously one more time, please slap me.

And there’s Ms. Bitchy, who started a fight with Kitten last night because she deigned to use the food area.

I was so tired I just watched most of it and then tried to intervene so Kitten could get away. This cat is 11 years old and out for blood most days. And then she takes over my chair and complains if I try to sit on it. Cats. Damn cats.

OK. Survive the school day. Hang out with friends. Grade stuff. Quilt. You see the pattern of my days.