This Is Getting Done…

Well I must be getting better. I stood up all day yesterday…well, I had one dizzy spell in one class, but they might have been the cause of that. That unit is now done; so is the assessment. I’m ready to move on. I did finally finish grading the current assessment, just in time to do the next one. (cries into her cereal) Ah school. You hurt sometimes.

I have grades due Tuesday. I’m actually pretty caught up, although not done. Never done. I probably should have done more last night, but I didn’t feel like it. Also, I had to keep my office door closed all day yesterday so the kittens couldn’t mess up the piles I had. Apparently my cat complained about that…or maybe she was just out and about more because she couldn’t hide in here. Hard to say. Either way, I wanted to get them ironed last night. So once I was done with that assignment, I went in the office…the studio…that room that’s my hideaway. And Kitten’s.

I found all the last bits of fleshy pieces and laid them out, and then started ironing out each fabric…

Most of them didn’t have a lot of pieces…

The lightest two fabrics, I didn’t think I’d have enough fabric to cut them all out…as you can see, I used a good chunk of fabric 2…

But there was some left…everything fit…although there wasn’t much left…

Fabric 1 had a little more left…

So that was a positive thing. Although I would have just found a second fabric with the same value and used both of them. That’s an interesting challenge in itself.

Here’s where I’m at right now…all the fabrics used so far plus the pile of stuff that needs to be cut out.

I’ve finished ironing all the flesh pieces down and all I have left are all the funny little bits in the body…the lungs and heart and stuff. I did iron the bones and the uterus…at which point, I was pretty tired, so I went to bed. I probably could finish tonight. Then cut them all out…then start ironing together. It’s progress.

I’m tired. I’m still recovering. I’m getting better. This is getting done.

In-Between Stages

Remember that quilt that got stolen and returned? I’m still salty about that. Makes me want to punch someone in the face. Well, that quilt got into another show, and in packing it up, I found some minor damage, proof that it went through some trauma. I have to admit to not looking very closely at it when I got it back…the stress of having sort of lost it was too much for me to process a lot of info. I pulled it out last night to prep it, and realized that when they yanked it off the wall, off the slat that was bolted to the wall, they put stress on the binding where the sleeve was attached…so a hole there needed to be resewn…

And on the other side as well…

I had to resew the bottom of the sleeve on one corner as well. Not a lot. Just a little. It would be nice to know what happened, but I guess I never will.

There was also some dirt on it, probably from being in the trash, so I had to spot clean some areas…

I think it’s OK. I’d just like the perpetrator to at least pay me back the angel money I gave to the wonderful woman who fished it out of the trash and called me. That seems fair. But life is rarely fair. I’m glad to have it back…it means it gets to go on to another show.

Back to the title of this post…the current quilt is in a real in-between stage at the moment. The plus is that I finished ironing all the Earth parts and everything around it. That means last night it was time to start ironing the fleshy bits…and there are a lot of them. I picked a run of 7 fabrics, but I don’t think I have enough of the lightest and second lightest, which could be interesting. I haven’t really dealt with that yet, because the flesh fabrics start in the 400s and go all the way to the 800s.

You can see there are some large pieces in the two lightest fabrics right there. But this isn’t even all of them. It’s the body and the head, but only one of the arms, because it was almost midnight and I still had 100 pieces to sort through and I still wouldn’t have had time to iron them all without staying up for at least another hour and a half, and that’s not a good plan when you’re still recovering from being sick. I managed school yesterday by sitting down and rolling around the room a LOT, and today will be even higher maintenance…so much so that I was dreaming about how to manage it (ugh, why do I have to DREAM about school as well as live it?), so I don’t need to overdo it at this point. I actually used the sentence, “This is your Come-to-Jesus Moment” in class yesterday. Multiple times. Yeah. I know. Apparently you don’t have to work when the teacher is gone.

Sigh. I sigh a lot for school. Anyway. Tonight I can iron. I can finish finding all the flesh pieces, figure out what other fabrics can work for the level 1 and 2 in the flesh, and then iron them all down. All that after finishing grading yet another assignment tonight. Yeah. Yes. OK.

When I’m sorting through and finding all the actual flesh pieces, there’s all these left over for later…hearts and lungs and hair and whatever isn’t flesh.

There’s a lot of that at the moment. All that will need choosing at some point. Probably not tonight.

So I had to cover all this last night because kittens…

Would destroy this in an instant. I don’t like leaving it at this stage, but hopefully it will be OK. Hopefully I will be too. Meanwhile, I have a parent meeting this morning and a tiring day ahead. Lots of sitting? I don’t know how I will do that. But maybe I will. Based on yesterday, at some point, my body will make me whether I want to or not.

It’s Still OK (or Is It?)…

Signs of recovering delirium…the number of blog titles in a row that have the word ‘ok’ in them. The fact that I don’t know what day it is. Or the date. It’s still February, right? At one point, I duplicated a week in February for our science planning calendar. There was a good reason for it at the time, but I’m wondering if it’s still duplicated and now I will have to repeat a week in February because of that. I had to take a nap after the grocery shopping yesterday. Granted, I had already driven to Encinitas or Carlsbad or somewhere up north to pick up two quilts from a show, so I was already physically doing way more than I had in days, so the nap doesn’t seem so bad, right? Except today I have to go to school, and physically and mentally, that’s a lot more than the grocery shopping.

It’s OK. Really. I have a rolling chair. I can sit in it and maneuver all over the room. I’m sure it will be fine. I might need a nap at lunch. Also fine.

I really was better yesterday, despite the nap.

Saturday night, I finally got all these stitched down…

Now I can start doing random embroidery everywhere on it.

Really, it’s just a plan to use up all the thread in the house. Which will never happen of course. There’s just too much of it. But you can’t say I don’t have a plan.

Yesterday, I even ironed, although that was problematic at some point and I had to sit down.

Somehow in all that, I managed to record an hourlong video of who-knows-what. Don’t worry, Patreon followers…I know how to edit. I’m in the 400s at this point. Not halfway yet, because I got dizzy…and gave up…and went to bed early…but close to halfway. Progress anyway.

I finished the artist book and submitted it.

Can’t say this is my thing.

However, one of the reasons I’m in this group is because they make me do things that aren’t my thing. It’s called Ominous Nature. We’ll see if she thinks it’s too disturbing for the library. Since I have I think THREE more possible library exhibits in the future? It would be good to know what she thinks is disturbing. Sigh. Or I should just become a nature artist. Funny, I think of myself as a nature artist a lot of the time.

Oh yeah. All the fabrics I’ve used on the quilt so far. My brain is still on bouncy mode.

Wish me luck today. Wish my students luck too. And someone save me from a 2-hour staff meeting.

She’s cute, but this is after an hour of early morning rampaging, being kicked out of the bedroom, then let back in an hour later due to crying baby noises, then this is my laundry basket…

before she knocked it over. Uh huh. Evil. And yet, when asleep, adorable.

One of them was on my feet last night. Not sure which one. I can tell them apart by feel…their fur is different.

This one. This one got a water bottle sprayed in his face about four times last night for petulant barking.

Barking at coyotes is understood. It does not need to continue for 20 minutes past the coyote incursion into our sound space. He still likes me this morning apparently…

It’s questionable on my end.

OK, well seems like systems are mostly back to normal. I’ll need naps, I’m still in recovery mode, but there is progress toward normal function. Which means progress toward more art function.

For now? Progress to school. Where that rolling chair is. OK? OK. No more titles with OK.

Sometimes We Just Have to Be OK…

I’m like warmed-up tea you left in the microwave, a little chilly with that gross skin on top. Really you should just throw it out and start over, which is how I feel about this last week. Not an option though. I spent the last two days at home, mostly in bed or on the couch. Today I have graduated, albeit briefly, to the chair in the office, which is a little too upright for how I’m feeling at the moment. The fever has abated, though, and I’m eating enough food to keep a human alive, which helps when you’re a diabetic. I’m still weak, still stuffed up, still coughing up blobs of inhuman crap…well, it comes from a human, so it must not be inhuman. Outside, it’s raining, pretty heavily at the moment. The big dog is in here with me, because in her old age, weather is frightening. She keeps looking up at me like I can stop it. Like I can stop anything, sweet girl. I can’t.

Yesterday I was well enough to grade a whole host of minor stuff and stalk my students on their computers, shutting down games and stupid Google searches for stuff that had nothing to do with what they were supposed to be working on. Monday will be a Come-to-Jesus moment for all of them. I need to go to school at some point this weekend to pick up all the crap that’s there. Or do I? I have plenty here still to grade: the assessments that require brain power, of which I’ve had none for three days. Questionable whether I have any today. The job goes on.

I am better. That is good.

Wednesday night was a SAQA meeting in this library space that looks like a cell. I guess I’d be glad to have my fabric stuff if I were in jail.

Seems like it wouldn’t be allowed. I didn’t get a ton done, but I got some…

Just cutting stuff out. Got more to iron. Maybe standing will be on the agenda later today. I wasn’t feeling well then either…it was day 2 at that point…I didn’t know how bad it would get.

That’s kinda where my body gave up on this cold thing. I thought I would be OK the next morning. In fact, I felt fine until I tried to stand up. And that’s when I realized I couldn’t go to work. Luckily a sub picked up the job and my team printed all my stuff. I’m pretty sure I was delirious when I recorded a video (no face showing!) for my students, but then I went back to bed for 6 hours.

There were a lot of animals around…

Thursday night, my fever picked up again, after being gone all day, so I preemptively called off sick for Friday, something I never do…two days off? WTF? Oh well. The body isn’t going to heal if I don’t let it.

Lots of lying around with animals ensued.

Some sleep. I read a whole book. I graded stuff. I watched some TV. I spaced out for hours.

Coughed up buckets of phlegm. Bleck. But then Friday evening, I started to feel almost human. No fever. Ate some stuff. Not a lot. Managed to unpack two quilts that were just returned to me. One of them had this on one of the hanging slats. Hmmm. No notice of that anywhere else I’d seen. Interesting.

Well at least I got that, right?

I managed to finish the last little bit of this weird thing…

I’ll get some help photographing it later today. Need someone to hold a towel or something behind it.

Fancy-ass photography methods.

Otherwise, continue to recover. Continue to grade. Hope for enough energy and presence of mind to iron some fabric. If not, read another book. We can’t always be amazing. Sometimes we just have to be OK.

Be OK…

Hmmm. It’s morning. I’m ill. I’m tired, despite more sleep than usual. I read an article about three of my former students, one sentenced yesterday for 15 years for killing the other 2 in a car accident. Geez. As teachers, we hope we only see the good news, the kids going to college and being successful, and I do see some of those. This one, it’s a shock…but maybe also not. It certainly makes me walk into some classes today with a new lens. You want them all to be OK, to realize how to be a good adult, but they don’t all do that. Sad. Very sad. We really do care about all of them, mostly, even the assholes. Although there’s some I’m glad I’ll never see again. Those are always the ones who come back and tell me they finally figured it out. I do a lot of deep breathing sometimes with a few of these kids. Today will hopefully be easy. Yesterday, they were tuned out, still asleep from their 3-day weekend, shocked when they realized I was going to make them DO something by themselves based on what I just talked about. Oh yeah baby.

Today they will be researching in groups, so some will be motivated and some won’t, as always. But I don’t have to talk all period, like I did yesterday. I might even sit down, based on how I’m feeling at the moment. It’s not a good day to be out sick. None of them ever are, but this is the intro to the assessment, so…well, hell, I have a real hard time not coming to school. I come back and they’ve done nothing and it is just frustrating. So I’ll go and hopefully the meds will kick in soon.

I came home from tutoring yesterday (I sat all through tutoring, just moved from one kid to another) and laid on the couch for at least an hour, reading a graphic novel and trying to find my brain. It eventually worked. I ate a little and talked to the girlchild, but then was able to grade one class of last week’s assessment. I really didn’t want to go to bed without making art. It just sucks. So I rallied and found about 45 minutes of ironing strength.

Enough to iron the Earth together…

It’s not much, but it’s something. I needed something. Something creative.

Right now I need a brain. Some energy. Possibly someone to drive me to school. Nah. I’m good. Am I? Fuck. It’s not the flu…just some cold. I should be able to survive that. More tea. Sitting a lot. It’ll be good. A nap during lunch. Oh wait, kids are coming to take quizzes during lunch. Damn. OK. Well. Napping during prep. When we need to write an entire unit before next Wednesday. Minor issue. Yah. It’ll be fine.

Wherever It Works Best…

It was a hard day yesterday, lots of driving, lots of memories of my cousin. She was only 57 and really, honestly, the sweetest (yet still sarcastic and stubborn) of all of us. Church doesn’t do much for me (some of them are beautiful and all), but the priest did a good job despite all that, and spending time with family I hadn’t seen in years afterwards was a good thing. The drive was long, but being a holiday, it could have been much longer. I walked back in the door at home at about 3:30, and walked out 10 minutes later for MY church, the outdoors…

Although to be clear, I don’t do gods either. So really all those Mother Nature/Earth Mother quilts I do? Those are what’s in my head. She’s harsh, she’s beautiful, she’s uncontrollable, and we’re killing her. Or she’ll overcome all our stupidity and let the cockroaches rule next time. But the priest said one thing that’s true…my cousin will live on in our minds, on our lips, and in our hearts. We debated some of the other stuff said on the way home, just the wording. They’ve changed the Lord’s Prayer again and I don’t know it any more. That’s probably OK. Anyway, may we all remember Jennifer wherever it works best for us.

For me, it’s out here.

With these sweet dumbasses.

We finally found the plant that makes the dogs smell like maple syrup…

California cudweed…it’s everywhere. And now we need pancakes. I don’t actually like maple syrup. At all.

The pond is back…there’s been enough rain for it to exist…

We don’t feel like we’ve had enough rain this year…I think it was all too early. We need more.

Anyway, so then I made dinner and graded a bunch of stuff, and slowly realized the tired spacey feeling I had was actual illness. I changed out of my pajamas and drove to the pharmacy for “the real stuff,” as the guy said, because I’m not going to make it through this week without medication if that’s the case. I know I sat by someone with a cold somewhere in the last 4 days (besides my students), so apparently being exhausted and stressed out let my immune system fall short. It happens a couple of times a year, unfortunately. So I didn’t make any art last night…I went to bed two hours early to try to make up for getting up too early yesterday and to hopefully give my body some rest to overcome this thing.

Hopefully tonight I’ll rally a bit, finish the book project, maybe do something else. I’m so behind on everything. I can’t focus. I want to be ironing fabrics, so maybe, if I have the energy, I’ll work on that. And more grading. Fun stuff.

Not My Thing…

‘Tis early and there is not enough caffeine in the world. And yet I rise. Not in a good way…just…I managed to get out of bed and get showered and dressed. A challenge met.

I’m driving to Long Beach today for my cousin’s funeral thing in a church. Not a burial, not a reception, just the church part. I don’t know when the rest is happening. No one does. I’m still pretty weirded out that she’s dead, but I know this shit happens, especially as we all start getting old. I’m starting to write this in my office in San Diego, but have to leave soon to drive the parentals, so that means I’ll probably either finish it up there, sitting, waiting (churches are really not my thing), or I’ll come home and finish.

Saturday we tried natural dyes…

The teacher prepped all the fabrics for us…

We did paper too…and a little stitching resist…

Some dye for that, logwood?

Pulling it out of the dye…

I unwrapped somebody else’s because she grabbed mine. I knew it wasn’t mine because I didn’t recognize the leaves…

These are still wet…

Drying at home…

The paper was more impressive…

Finished grading the projects…

Kitten cleaning kitten…

Saturday night drawing while watching a band…

Here it is…

Sunday pups…

And the old lady with Nova…

Sitting in a Starbucks…going to go to church soon. Not something you hear from me often. I’m tired…art tonight?

My Eyes Are Still Tired

Gotta love Vday for the weird kid interactions. And the weird kid love. But three of the core teachers were giving a test, so that was sort of bad planning (or WAS it) on our parts. It was a hard day. I got home as quickly as I could and booked it outta there to walk the dogs. I needed it…

There’s a hawk in this picture…staring right at me…

It’s getting light later. Good stuff.

Nice side-eye Simba. The dogs had already been on one walk…but I didn’t care…new growth!

Came home, entered a show, graded an assignment, tried not to fall asleep while doing it. Cute kittens…

Did a little more drawing on the third page, glued it together, realized I’m not a paper artist…

Thought about how to attach them, decided it was bedtime…

More cats doing dorky stuff…

Currently sitting in a parking lot, waiting for it to be closer to the time I’m supposed to be at this dye workshop. Traffic north is always a crapshoot. I try to be early. Tonight is some show, but hopefully some grading and/or art before that. Maybe figure out how these book pages go together. That would be good. My eyes (and brain) are so tired…

My Brain Needed Somewhere Else to Land…

Happy V Day to all! I want to say, well, except the assholes, but maybe they need a Happy V Day and that’s why they’re assholes. Now you see how I can teach middle school, although I already know (a) I didn’t get enough sleep because I got sidetracked by making things and (b) I’m missing one SECA today. So it’ll be a challenge, but I think I can do it. It’s not like I have a choice. But here are two examples of my day job. First, it’s the only place I can think of where the words “Then don’t smell the scissors” might come out of my mouth. Followed by this…

SIGH. I only have one period left of these to sit through. And there were some very good ones that restored my faith in humanity. And learning. And schools. And children. This was not one of them. This is what happens when you copy a bunch of shit off the internet that you don’t really understand and then you try to read it and instead of figuring out how to pronounce all the words you copied, you start each word nice and loud and then you are whispering at the end because you don’t have a clue how to say it. WIScon(si…).

I will hopefully be done with these tonight, and that will just leave a bunch of smaller things to grade and a pile of makeups, which will be even bigger by next Friday. Oh. Also an assessment they’re doing today. Shit. OK. Well. Hmmm. This weekend is a clusterfuck already. I guess it will be more of one.

This is why I stayed up way too late last night. My brain needed somewhere else to land or it would never fall asleep.

I did hang out with my stitching group last night, including one member who rarely shows up and another who had moved away for 13 years and came back. THIRTEEN YEARS. Wow. And we’re still meeting. That’s cool. I think I’ve been in this group since I was pregnant with the girlchild, and she’s 22 1/2 now. So that’s a thing. I got to work on Folk Tails, my Sue Spargo Block-of-the-Month from 2015 that might never ever get done…

The cheetah is almost done…but there’s some wiggy flowers that go in the block next. Then I might sew this to the larger bit? Or do I have to finish the other two October blocks to do that? I might. It’s not a fast quilt when you only work on it one night a month and then you didn’t do even that for most of 2019. It might travel to the National Parks with me in April…or it might be too big for that. Hmmm. Hard to say. We’ll see.

Then I came home and graded stuff, one more class of the projects. It was after 11 when I finished. But no way was I going to bed without something. The really lucky bit of going to my stitching meeting was my knowledgeable bookmaking friend, who gave me multiple solutions for how to connect the two pieces I’ve been working on. She was very helpful. So now I have to decide how to do it. Easy? Medium hard? Really hard? Sorta hard but kinda creative? We’ll see. I didn’t do that last night, though. More brain power than I had. Instead I meditatively stitched shit down…

Still working on just getting it all attached so I can take it off the cutting matt and do some more decorative stuff…although I guess I did a little on those leaves. Most of it is stitched down now, which is good, because something good should come of staying up too late. I just kept stitching, thinking “just one more” and then I looked at the time and went “oh shit, no more” and went to bed.

It’ll be fine. It’s Friday. It’s Valentine’s Day (makes middle-school kids crazy). It’s the day before another 3-day weekend. And we’re giving them an assessment that’s HARD. Well, unless you’ve been listening, in which case, it’s pretty damn easy. Gonna go buy a donut reward for the class that earned them, so at least one group of kids won’t totally hate me. Wait. The line at the donut store today might be hellacious. Sigh. We’ll see. I’ll do a driveby.

Most Definitely…

Sitting in meetings sucks my brain out of my head and spits it out on the floor. Especially meetings where I have to pay attention just in case important stuff is said and then someone is droning on and on about something totally irrelevant and my brain just shuts off anyway. I spend a lot of time in meetings…though not as much as I spend in the classroom. Yesterday was a frustrating day in the classroom. “Give us the answers so we can copy them.” “I’m not going to do that.” Well you can guess how that ended. It’s OK. I go back today after a night of semi-sleep (ugh) and I refigure how to make things happen and then they happen. Huge classes full of needy kids. Make it hard. And yet we still do it.

You’d think I’d come home and be done with all of it, but grades are coming up and I need to get stuff done. So I graded one assignment and input it into the gradebook, and then did another period of the longer assignment…and put it in the gradebook, and I’m seeing a light at the end of the tunnel, because I saw a few more A videos (oh hallelujah), which helps me think I didn’t totally flail (it wasn’t me!), and I’m more than halfway through the pile, so that is a good thing.

But there’s no way in hell I was going to get to sleep last night without some artmaking. I did put together my Patreon video for February first. Then I graded. Then I arted. I started at 10:30 at night. I had three to choose from, but one deadline is looming. So I decided I didn’t like one of the book ‘pages’ I’d made, the first one. It’s awkward, not well-thought-out. I could just use it, but I had a third page cut out that I hadn’t used, so I refined the first one into this…

I like it a lot more. I didn’t glue it together last night. First of all, it was late and sleep is a thing. Second of all, I’m not sure I’m done. So I’ll look at it again tonight and then decide, and then glue it together.

So the one on the right is probably a reject. Now I just need to figure out how to attach them together. And then photograph them without Game of Thrones in the background. Minor issue.

This morning is tiring already. But good news about a new show…that I can’t tell you about yet. But soon. I think.

Meanwhile…lots of furry love last night. This was while I was eating dinner and grading stuff.

They really do love each other. It’s sweet.

This one has been a barky asshole lately. Granted, it’s because of the coyote fest that’s going on every night, but sheesh.

He is probably the number 1 sleep disruptor, followed by my hot flashes and then maybe my bladder. No mockingbird at the moment…we can thank the owl for that, I think. I can sleep through the owl, who was in another backyard tree last night. I think he likes us. He? She? Don’t know. An owl box is on our list though.

These two old ladies…

Room for one human (maybe) on the couch. That is where I was sitting while I was grading. I was also playing fetch with Luna, who brought me the rattle mouse at least 10 times to throw for her. She’s a cat. Who fetches. Very cute.

OK, today I torture children by making them think again. I am pure evil. Then I meet up with friends…always a good thing, plus stitching will be involved. Then home to NOT grade another round? I think? Ugh. I think I need to do some of it today. I’ll figure it out. More art before bed though…most definitely.