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.

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.

Rewrite the Kathy

I know how I should feel right now. I’ve written about it before…the joy, the relief of finishing a quilt, of making it through all the hours, the drudgery, the tasks. The deep breath, the sigh of relief. The empty space in your head waiting for another piece to rush in and fill it.

Fuck. I finished two quilts today. I’ve spent the last 6 months working on them (with other stuff in there too), and I feel…what do I feel? A slight release of pressure, of stress, because I made the deadlines…because they will be delivered to the photographer tomorrow and I did what I set out to do. I don’t feel joyous. I don’t feel happy. I acknowledge that it was hard work, that I achieved something, that I was successful, but for what?

I don’t know. I keep doing it because I want that feeling back, I want to feel that rush of good when I finish, when it’s done. I want that right now. I talked to the counselor about that magical step from where you are at the moment to where you want to be, when you are doing everything you are supposed to be doing, and you still can’t manage that step. She says it’s not magic, but she couldn’t produce a list of what to do next. She said to just keep doing, that eventually I would relocate that feeling…that I would allow myself to feel good.

Today? Today I do not feel like I will ever find that feeling. On good days, I persuade myself that if I just keep doing the right things that everything will be OK (fuck, I hate that phrase now, thanks to someone repeatedly lying and saying it over and over to me…bullshit it will be OK). Today was not a good day. It should have been. I was relatively efficient. I did all the things that were expected of me and more. I functioned fairly normally. Crying in the gym and on the walk from the gym to the tire place? Well, it happens…it’s not abnormal, but it’s probably abnormal that I still cry every day. Then again, it’s not abnormal for someone who is depressed to do that, and I have good reason to be depressed, so it’s not abnormal.

I’m not sure if I care whether I am behaving normally or not.

Sigh. Anyway, I spent 4 1/2 hours today sewing bindings on…

I finished Love (not) around 3 PM I think…and then moved on to the Celebrating Silver quilt.

I watched a lot of television today to get me through the sewing. At one point, the boychild came out and I said something about how it looked like I was just relaxing in front of the TV, sewing, and he said, no, he knew I wasn’t relaxing…I wasn’t. I was speed sewing…

Seriously…it was 4 1/2 hours of just poking holes…in fabric and my fingers.

Once they were done, I had to tape all the cat hair off of them…plus find the other one that now needs to be rephotographed for the book it will be in later this year.

It took about an hour to clean them up and iron them and roll them up in a clean sheet to take to the photographer tomorrow.

In between all this, I helped girlchild calculate her grade in biology and figure out what she has to get on the final to keep a decent grade in there, I picked up their dad from the airport returning from the UK for the second time in three weeks, I wrote a grocery list, I listened to the boychild giggling at whatever he was watching on the computer (it was The Daily Show the one time I looked, god forbid he actually study for finals), I went to the gym, and I replaced 4 tires on the kids’ car. Oh, and I graded all the makeup assignments that kids handed me yesterday. I still have to finish all the big projects from before break…they take forever to grade. I’m more than halfway through, but tomorrow is a giant clusterfuck, so who knows if I will get anything useful done then.

And all day, on and off, tears. I finished two quilts? Tears.

And it’s not just because of the holes in my middle finger (see the tip?) where the needle was bumping me all day…it’s sore right now.

What did you do today? I finished two major quilts. One took 48 hours and 39 minutes to complete, and the other one took 95 hours and 2 minutes. I wonder what normal people do with their hours, the hours I spend making art? I know they sleep more. They probably socialize more too. They might even spend more time staring at a television or mowing the lawn or cleaning house. I don’t envy them those. Why aren’t you happy about finishing them? Because the rest of it is empty. It doesn’t make the rest of it feel better. It doesn’t make me happy. I don’t have the magical pill to get to the happy. Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck refuse to grab me by the hand and skip over the bridge to happy.

Yeah, I know it’s my job to get to the happy…and I know there’s something in me that’s stopping me from getting there. I just don’t know how to fix it. In talking about meds, the counselor admits to never having taken them herself. I have. It just pushes the emotions away, like over there. She described it as numbing the emotions. How will that help me get to happy? I’m already pretty fucking numb on a regular basis. I don’t see the point.

Anyway. I have a shitload of schoolwork to deal with in the next two days, but expect me to start something new this week. I think I will tape all the smaller drawings together and then pick one or two, plus the breast cancer one. So I should be numbering and tracing this week…knock on wood. I’m scared to death of down time. I don’t want to depend on my job for any level of satisfaction or joy. I can only hope that the art will eventually be my savior. I am so tired of feeling sad and empty. I have to believe that I will not always feel this way. I have to believe in joy and love and that feeling that used to come with finishing something like this, with finishing two in one day? I can go back through my blog and read how light-hearted I used to be, and wish I could be that person, erase the last 6 months, scrub my memories (one of the TV shows I was watching today), selectively pick who I am and how I feel. Rewrite the Kathy.

It Just Is…

OK, so remember that post-it from yesterday that had all the quilt stuff prioritized on it? I didn’t even write two (three?) things on it, because they were weighing on me so heavily, finishing these two quilts before Sunday, that I figured I didn’t even need to write them down. And then I got an email that has added to the priority list. It’s getting a little hairy here, but I think I have it all under control. I’m just one crazy tense mama at the moment. Seriously tense. Hate that feeling. It’s been stalking me the last two months. Won’t go, except after a hike or the gym, and even then, reluctantly. I don’t like being this person. I want to be more mellow. I don’t know how, especially with all this riding on my shoulders.

Anyway, I did manage to make it to the quilt store after school to buy binding for the Celebrating Silver quilt. It was a pain in the ass picking a color, though. I thought a gray to match her hair, but it was dead-looking. So then I tried a dark reddish brown, which worked near the base of the quilt, but was a problem higher up. So then I thought I should head for the batiks and see if I could match the brown batiks that are in the staff. Couldn’t find any that worked…nothing was dark and moody enough. So then I tried oranges and red-oranges and red-browns and reds and oranges with greens in them and then just plain old red. Even some blues. Nothing. It all sucked. I found one dark brown that was eh, so I grabbed it, feeling desperate, because here I am tossing my naked-women quilt on the ground in the store and hoping some woman with a nudity issue doesn’t come around the corner and ogle my uteri while I’m doing this. I go back to the dark browns, out of the batik section. Ugh. It all sucks. Browns are always an issue. It’s all wrong. Too many different browns in the quilt…they work together fine IN the quilt, but you can’t just pick one for the binding. Back to the grays and blacks. There we are. A dark gray. It’s not in the quilt, but it seems to ground it…not to drag too much away from the quilt itself, which is what the reds and oranges were doing. It works in some quilts, but this one is way too busy for that shock factor. Dark gray it is.

It’s such an intuitive process. I don’t think hard. I just grab and throw under the quilt and reject within seconds and move on to the next. I love that part of my brain, the part that can improvise and travel so quickly from one place to the next without a lot of introspective thought. It just does. It knows. It’s the good part of my brain.

I talked about mental illness at school today. We teach the nervous system, but it only focuses on physical problems: strokes, epilepsy, spinal-cord injuries. Why don’t we teach about mental illness? I have students who have been diagnosed bipolar, depressed, anxious. WHY THE FUCK don’t we teach this stuff? Girlchild says she got a little of it in AP biology in high school, but mostly in terms of genetic mutations. We need to teach this stuff so it’s not so confusing, so magical, so scary. I want my kids to know that this is actually somewhat normal. I heard one kid ask about bad stuff that happens to kids, can it cause XYZ? Well fuck yeah, it can! So besides the zombie unit I’m developing, I’m trying to fit mental illness into the content standards? Seriously, though…let’s teach what they really need to know.

Can you imagine? I teach depression and say, hey, your teacher suffers from this. This is why she has lost so much weight. This is why she cries in the classroom when you aren’t in there. This is what makes her the teacher who stands in front of you…it’s OK. You can get through this. Or you can’t. Do you know how many of my kids have been affected by mental illness, whether their own or their brother’s or their parent’s or whomever’s? And we don’t teach it. What the fuck is up with that? No wonder people can’t deal.

The binding fabric is washed and dried and ready for cutting. I needed to buy it today before the girlchild’s game, because the quilt store doesn’t stay open late tomorrow, and I was hoping to finish the quilting tonight so I could put the binding on tomorrow, and then do the hand-sewing on Saturday. I could have bought it Saturday, but then I would lose tomorrow night’s hours. Yes, I’m thinking that crazy at the moment. Can’t afford to lose hours.

I took the other quilt to the soccer game and sewed the rest of the binding and most of one sleeve on…nobody even asked me what I was doing. I love that. Two older ladies gave me an eye, so I’m glad they didn’t ask to see what I was working on (yeah, not flashing that vulva on the bleachers of the high-school stadium). I had it folded up so you could only see the back of the quilt. I don’t have a lot left to do, so that’s good. It was a tough game, so I didn’t sew particularly fast…unlike Tuesday’s game, which was incredibly boring (9-0 score). Tonight they played one of their big rivals, and they did freakin’ awesome until about 14 minutes into the second half, and then it fell apart…

Girlchild didn’t get to play much…this coach just confuses me. But when she did play, she was basically covering one of her good friends…it was getting dark, so my photos are crap…but you can see them here fighting over the ball. The high-school team is not a great fit for her, and the coach is not what we would like, but I guess it teaches her resilience in the face of adversity. They ended up losing 1-4, which just sucked, because they did so well for the first hour. Frustrating to watch…this is why I sew during games. It keeps me from getting as tense as the other parents, who end up yelling stupid things like, “Hit the back of the net!” Dude. Really? It just needs to go over the line. We also have one parent who is apparently a professional hog caller and practices her talent at the games. You think I’m kidding…I’m not.

What I really love about high-school winter soccer in Southern California is that the weather runs the gamut from requiring you to wear 4 warm layers, Ugg boots, gloves, a scarf, and a blanket one week to flip-flops and short sleeves the next week…it was 85 degrees at the beginning of the game. I did put the sweatshirt and the boots on for the second half (in January, it cools down very quickly), but it was nice otherwise to not be freezing by the end of the game. We have another week of nice temperatures here in San Diego, and then it will go back to cold (which yes, means like 50 degrees when the sun goes down…you do not need to mock me).

I think I’m still having anemia issues, because I’m still freezing all the time. Or it’s the thyroid. Whatever. They’ll get tested again in April. I do take my meds.

I was hoping to eat when I got home…had the boychild put the casserole in the oven when he got home from piano (they really are having to pull their weight at the moment…and I am so glad I don’t have to do this every day, all the time), but girlchild had some secret sisters thing for soccer that she had to do. She drew the name of someone she really doesn’t like at all, but she prides herself on being a really good secret sister, no matter what, so we hit the 99-cent store (candy is cheap!), where I was oh-so-glad to score my 2014 Baby Animals calendar (OK, it’s not THAT bad) for school…because I needed a calendar and it was on my list, but it wasn’t a supreme priority, so it was WAY DOWN the list. And I get to look at baby animals all year. Plus secret sisters wasn’t as expensive as it usually is.

Finally we got home and ate and I exercised, and then, finally, got to quilting…

I was right. I needed another 2 hours.

This thing took a little over 14 hours to quilt. I can’t post full photos until the exhibit opens in late October at Houston, but I took it to school today so I could get the binding, and for the first time ever, showed one of my quilts in person to the team…I got oohs and aahs and even a couple of dangs. Dang is good. DANG. I like the sound of that.

Anyway. I’m relieved to have the quilting done. I kept saying to myself, you need to stop. You need to go to bed early. You’re tired (I was yawning…it’s been a rough week). But in the end, artist brain won that war and bullied through all the stupid-ass thread breakages and slow quilting speed and just got it the fuck done. That’s what I needed. Then I meditated and soon I will go to sleep, yes, too late, but fuck it. I needed it to be done. Tomorrow night will not be easy either…trimming and binding does take some significant time and energy, but I feel much better about where I am on the to-do list with that step done.

Maybe all I get at this point in my life is short respites. No happy. No joy. Just relief for a short amount of time, until I turn to the lime-green post-it note of TO DO and freak out about the next big thing.

Actually, I’m hoping that the next big thing isn’t a freak out. I do have a piece I have to do by next October or November, but I’m not ready to draw it yet. I think I’ll aim for Spring Break for that one…except I want to do another big one over summer again. I’ll have to think that one through. I figure I’ll be starting a new quilt, tracing stage, by next weekend…I hope. I do have some significant stuff to do before then, and Road to California is next weekend (yay Julie for wanting to drive me up there!), so that may get pushed out a bit. I wonder if I am becoming this artistic hermit…I seem to only do the art and obsessively so. Is it all I am? All I have? I don’t know. It just is at the moment. Everything else is just stupid and lame.

Hope the Dreams Make Up for the Reality

I have 6 post-it notes on my computer keyboard at the moment. Some are college-related…financial aid stuff the boychild and I need to do as soon as I can figure out my taxes for this year. One is a list of blog and Facebook posts I need to do for an art group I’m in. Another couple are related to college funds and having to move money around. And there’s one that’s a prioritized list of all the quilt-related stuff I have to do in the next week or so. My phone is regularly buzzing me to let me know where I need to be next or what I need to do on the way home or to school. I’m organized as hell, and yet, wow…I’m not. But I am. I’ve got my brain hemmed in by all these reminders to get it all done…I’m not letting it slack. I am a really highly functioning depressoid. It’s almost MORE depressing to be that highly functioning. LOOK! You CAN get it all done and on time and finished and You Still Feel Like Shit because none of it really matters deep down. I might be happier if I climbed into bed and didn’t come out.

So there we are. How do I make some of it matter again? I don’t fucking know. I go to counseling and ask her, and she doesn’t just pull out a list and hand it to me, dammit. I need a list…go through steps 1-5 and you will see that things matter again. Step 6 is optional, but will make things matter AND help you save the world, one kitten at a time. Or! Just slog through each hour, each day, and hope that you will see some light at the end of a tunnel some day in the future. Hopefully before you die. Yup. It’s the cheery hour here.

I got an email today asking me if one of my quilts could be used in a book…wow. Cool. But I’m also waiting on a rejection notice. Neither of those things really matters.They will happen and they will not make me happy or not happy.

I quilted for almost two hours tonight…

I think I’m up to 11 or 12 hours on this thing…and I’m not done. I’ve gone almost all the way around once, and still need to go around a second time. I wanted to finish tonight, but it didn’t happen. I also didn’t get binding today, because I opted for the gym instead. Good choice. I’m still losing weight, but it’s slowed down a lot…that’s good. I don’t want it to be a superfast thing. I want it to stay off. The first 20 pounds came off really slowly, and though it was frustrating, I still think it was much healthier than the next 25 pounds. Depression is a bitch with weight…you can’t control how it messes with your ability to eat. I can eat now…I had a 3-month time period when eating was seriously problematic. I’m better now. I’d rather be eating healthily and losing slowly than the kamikaze weight loss I was doing before. I get irritated at the people who want to know HOW I did it. I don’t think you really want to know. I just stopped eating. When I ate, I couldn’t keep it down. Vomit happened. Gaacking. Did you really want to know about that? Most of the time, I couldn’t eat. Not good. Better now.

I still haven’t solved the sleep issues though. I was never a good sleeper, and now I am an incredibly shitty sleeper. It’s not good for me, but I can’t seem to beat it. Some part of me just wants to stay up all night and finish the quilting. That’s the artist brain talking. The mom/teacher brain (the responsible part) has to talk the artist brain out of crazy shit like that. But I think I will finish quilting tomorrow, so I’m actually going to go get binding fabric before I go to the girlchild’s game…I think I have time. This is my life…it is scheduled so tight that crazy things happen like I’m cooking tonight’s dinner AND tomorrow night’s dinner at the same time, and when I finish the dishes for tonight’s dinner, I’m putting tomorrow night’s dinner into the casserole dish and into the fridge. I think that’s impressive, on one hand, but supremely sad and depressing on the other. I’m SuperWoman AND SuperDepressoid. This weekend will be like that too…getting the quilts done, plus art meetings, plus grades. There’s no down time, no time for a hike, I think…I will make it to the gym, but finding 3-5 hours for a hike doesn’t seem realistic. Too bad…something about being outside seems to help. Go outside. Exercise. Read. Talk to people. I don’t like that last part. I just cry, even now, so it’s hard to just talk about everything that’s in my head. It’s not kosher to cry all the time…to just plain old lose it.

I’m still a fucking mess. When does that stop? When do I get to be a human again? Why do I have to be like this? Why can’t I just get angry and move on?

When I’m not quilting, I pile everything up on the machine…

It keeps cats and dogs off of it…I am seriously so close to done that it is painful NOT to just sit here and finish it (it would probably be another 2 hours though). I’m a little obsessive. Will I feel relieved when it’s done? Yes. It’s due soon. I need it to be done. Will I feel happy it’s done? Wow. What does that word mean again? Maybe just successful. And even then, it’s hard to feel successful about just one tiny piece of your life…that downer part of my brain starts listing all the things I’m not successful about, and it turns into a downer fest. Not good. It’s better to just take some quiet breaths and think, OK, I did that. Moving on. Do something else. Don’t get the downer brain engaged in this…it won’t turn out well. Don’t even tell it that it should be impressed…just go on to the next thing. I don’t have anyone to celebrate with. It’s empty success.

When the kids leave for college, I think I will just fill the house with dogs. Jake has been singing to me when I get home, half-howling and body-slamming me with needy German-Shepherdness.

And then Calli feeds off of that and whines and brings me a toy. Well, earlier, one of them stole a toilet paper roll…the whole thing…not just the cardboard. So that was fun. Jake will only be here through Saturday. He’s not thrilled about being here, because we tell him the food on the table is for people, not dogs, and he thinks we are crazy for saying that. Plus I won’t let him help me cook. Or eat cats. Or sleep on my bed WHILE eating cats. He does not understand when I explain appropriate dog behavior.

Calli just wants to sit in my lap. Like all the time.

She’s not a small dog. She’s a Golden Retriever. My lap is not big enough for a Golden Retriever. Petting dogs is good therapy. Cats too. They seem to absorb some of the depressed stuff. I don’t understand people who don’t have pets, especially the ones that keep saying they want one and don’t get one. Stop saying it and just do it. There is no perfect animal or perfect set up in your home. Just go to the damn shelter and get a dog or cat and give them love and food and take care of them and pet them, and have them stare into your face and bat at you when you walk by (Babygirl) and squawk a little and need you and ignore you and pee and puke all over the carpet. Because if you can’t deal with all those things, then you aren’t a decent human being. If you overthink the process so much that you can’t even ADOPT? Then how human are you? If you just keep putting it off until the situation is perfect, then you will never have that unconditional love, that furry, bad-breathed love, that cold-nose-up-your-butt love. People with pets have empathy. I’m a big fan of empathy at the moment…of being able to engage with other people’s feelings and feel for them. I don’t deal with other people’s empathy well, but I still think it’s a better place to be than in asshole mode, where it’s all your world and no one else’s.

I have too much empathy. It hurts.

Yes, my brain is in wander mode. And in pissy mode. And in overwhelmed mode. I’ve been overwhelmed for so many years that I don’t know how NOT to be. I dream of a happy place where I get all excited about what I’m almost finishing, and I wake up and hug a pet and make a nice lunch and the world is bright and full of cinnamon and sugar.

Yeah, I know. I should just go to bed and hope the dreams make up for the reality. The plus is I’m raking in the hugs at school…all the kids came back in needy-hug mode. I’m down with that…averaging 15 or so a day. Can’t complain. OK, dreams. Take me away. Make it all OK.

I Want to Be Henry Rollins…

I’m thinking I need to meditate twice a day at the moment…once in the morning in that hour before school starts, when my brain is in overdrive on what needs to get done, but it also mired in sadness at how it feels. The feels, they are much worse during the school day, during the quiet moments, in the prep hours, when there is no chaos around. Loud music chases them away for a bit, but it’s really hard to MAKE yourself grade stuff that you know needs to get done this week during the day so you don’t have to waste time on the weekend coming in when you feel like you want to crawl into a dark deep hole and never come out. But I seem to do best with this guided meditation, where he talks me through it…and I don’t know how to work that with the app I use. And it’s more TIME…time I don’t really have.

I don’t know. I keep thinking the mood should improve, that I should be getting better, but everything is so hard right now. Even simple things like sleeping and eating are hard.

So. Yeah. I did finally commit to being done with both quilts by Sunday at about 1 PM. That might be fucking crazy. I have most of the other one done…I’m just finishing up the binding on it. I have one more side and both sleeves to finish…yes, I’m sewing two sleeves on my quilts these days…they hang better with a bottom sleeve. So if I get really gutsy, I’ll take it to Thursday’s soccer game and work on it there. Yes, it has nudity, but I’m really good at folding them up so no one can see anything on a binding, since I’m sewing on the back anyway. YES. I handsew my bindings. I like how it looks. Plus I sew fast.

The other one, I finished the outline quilting tonight.

I only had a little of that left. I then started quilting the background…

Honestly, there isn’t much background on this quilt…it’s mostly covered with stuff. I did all of the little fussy bits in between the bodies and hair and animals, and then started out into the borders. I don’t expect it to take much longer, but probably won’t be able to get it done until Thursday. I thought about doing something fancy in the background, but the damn thing needs to get done, so that ain’t happening. Maybe on the next one.

I can get binding fabric tomorrow after the boychild’s Academic League (if I don’t go to the gym), or I can wait until Saturday. Tough call. Thursday MIGHT be an option…hard to say. I’m juggling pointy rocks like crazy. When they fall, they will stab me in the eyeball (hence need for meditation).

By the way, when you’re depressed, you probably shouldn’t read books about kids with terminal cancer…even when they’re really good. I just finished (in about 48 hours, maybe less), The Fault in Our Stars by John Green.

It’s a compelling book. Yes, it made me cry. Not shocking. I purposely finished it tonight at home, so I wouldn’t be finishing it at the gym and weeping inconsolably there. That’s not good gym etiquette.

So this was in my comments to be approved this morning…

certainly like your web site but you need to test the spelling
on quite a few of your posts. Several of them are rife with
spelling issues and I in finding it very troublesome to inform the
truth however I will definitely come again again.

I am highly amused. My spam filter didn’t catch it. Personally, I think my spam folder should kill any comment with a spelling issue in it, but that’s because I was in a mood this morning. I love that they used the word ‘rife,’ but then had a serious grammar issue in the last half of that sentence. Spammers are interesting creatures.

OK. I’m really trying to do this thing where I go to bed at a semi-reasonable hour. Tomorrow is no less busy than today was. Tomorrow is rife with busy. And my daughter informed me (and her dad on the phone) that not getting enough sleep at night will kill you. Nice. We’re dying anyway, sweetie…and not getting enough sleep is the least of my worries at the moment.

Brain depressed. Will read about some person’s sketchbook before I go to sleep…Danny Gregory’s An Illustrated Life…

If I read about other people’s artful existences, it might make me feel better about my own. Which reminds me, this…

Henry Rollins is so serious. I wonder if he ever smiles. I love this story of his…I wish I could have been in my favorite band when I was younger. I’m a visual artist, and that’s definitely where my talent lies, but I’d really like to be either a book author or a rock star. Or Henry. Yup. That’s it. I want to be Henry Rollins…

That’s All You Can Do…

Hey. So I went back to school today. It’s school. It’s the same old. It’s depressing, honestly. Seeing the people I work with, adults and kids, not depressing. The workload, the constant pile of crap, that’s depressing. The feeling you get when you realize you will be carrying this load for another 3 months before Spring Break, and then there will be more after that, and then you will have Summer Break, and then it will start all over again? That’s heavy. It’s not what I want. I want to teach kids and be their science inspiration, but I don’t want all the paperwork and the stress and the constant heavy negative crap that comes with teaching. But there’s no escaping that at the moment. There’s nothing I can do that’s different right now…I have kids going into college and I need reliable income and health insurance, and I need to focus on getting my kids a good start in life so hopefully they can do it way better than I did…hopefully they can have some semblance of happy and stable and not worry all the time about money and the septic tank and how dinner will get on the table…because that was a giant-ass disaster tonight, although it eventually came together.

I was on this hike the other day and another single/divorced mom was talking about her older teens not doing laundry, and I just laughed. I trained my kids on dishes and laundry at about age 6. I was divorced and was teaching by then, and I needed them to help. I’m totally honest with them about what needs to get done and what I can handle, because one’s an adult and the other is approaching that, and they need to see that life isn’t always easy…that you have to bust your butt sometimes to get through…and that it might hurt and be hard, but you can get through. Because I think some kids never see that part and when it gets hard? They run away, they hide, and people get hurt when they can’t deal. Each year, the helping part from my kids gets bigger, and tonight it culminated in one kid on the phone with me analyzing the 1/2″ vents cut in a cooking bag while I was running tutorial at school, then another kid coming home early because she didn’t hear me say I would leave the gym early to deal with step 2 (or 3?) of dinner. Meanwhile, the first kid had read the post-it note instructions I had left for the second kid, but hadn’t panicked enough to text me yet. We are a working unit. They are adults in many ways, trying to help their mom survive work and art and life in general. They know I’m having a hard time and they try to make it easier. On the one hand, I feel incredibly bad that they have to do that…on the other, I know they will be more competent adults because of it.

God damn. I’m going to miss them when they’re gone. I’m not going to miss the fussing about getting Christmas thank-yous and college apps done, or the refusal to take the trash out until I’ve thrown things and yelled at them…I’m going to miss their care for me, their careful consideration of their broken mom and how they can help and still be the pissy teenagers they’re supposed to be. I did good with them. They will be good adults. They will know how to survive adversity and hopefully get past it. They will bitch at me about the text I sent, and then ask for a hug in the next text (yes, I text my kids while I’m in the same house…). I hope they will be happier than I am. I hope someday to be happy too, but more importantly, I hope they are happy.

I am 8 1/2 hours in to the quilting of the Celebrating Silver quilt. Technically the photos are due February 1 (I think), but I’m trying to get it done by Saturday night, so I can get it and the other quilt photographed next week. I emailed the photographer to set up a time, so now I HAVE to finish. Way to put pressure on myself. I’m juggling some other deadlines as well…I have a quilt that has to be delivered to VAM next week and it’s missing a label; my parents are doing that delivery, because I have no way of getting there within their time constraints (it takes a village). That show opens February 15, I think. I found out today that one of my older quilts, Here, will be going to Ojai to the Beatrice Wood Arts Center for an exhibit opening February 9.

It needs to be delivered a week from Sunday, but that’s to a regular meeting I would go to anyway, so that’s not a supreme hardship. I just have to FIND the damn thing. I love this quilt…it’s been in a ton of shows and has traveled all over the place. A friend was diagnosed with breast cancer and I drew this…she is still cancer-free, knock on wood. That’s 13 pieces out on exhibit and 3 in process, about to be sent on exhibit. I should be proud of all that. I should be able to take a deep breath and have that achievement fill me up with joy and success.

Those are Sion’s thorns…

Yeah, well, we know how depression deals with all those feelings. That said, meditation is focusing on this visualization technique and I am rocking that. There’s something about my ability to see quilts fully colored in my head that translates to this ability to visualize myself filling with warm light, the warm light of creative thought. It’s a good place to be…in meditation. I cry still, but it’s tempered by this calm feeling of being filled by some artistic thing…some creative thing. So many people are lacking that…lacking an ability to create, to make, to draw, to paint, to take what’s in their head and make it INTO something. I have that. I’ve had it for as long as I can remember. I have that and I am so glad that I do, because it pulls me up out of the muck. I’m still depressed, but I’m not crawling into bed and not getting out. I’m not refusing to shower. I’m not crawling into a hole and never coming out. I’m not suicidal. I could be. This experience has been bad enough, has dragged me low enough that I often think I just don’t want to be awake…I don’t want to exist, please don’t make me get up and get dressed and deal with the world. I just can’t. But the art is there, banging on my skull, saying FUCK YOU. GET UP AND MAKE ART. So I do. And I know that’s the way out of this crap…and I will eventually GET out. But I also know what it looks like to want to give up and not deal with anything. That even doing the laundry or grading papers or saying hi to someone in the morning is sometimes the hardest thing in the world for me. Sometimes I wonder how I get up, how I get in the car and drive to work, how I manage to do anything at all. Simple. Art brain. It’s saving my life. It’s making me deal. It’s taking on all the pain and crap and shit and it’s pulling me along, whether I like it or not. And when the days are really bad, really low, it puts the pen in my hand, it makes me sit down at the sewing machine, it pulls fabric out of a drawer, and it makes me be…exist…survive.

I don’t know what made that happen in my brain, but I’m grateful that it did.

One eye stitched…one eye not.

It sounds so lame to write all that out. I read a blog once about how to decide you want to be alive. I want to know how the book I’m reading ends. I want to know what quilt I will make next. I want to know if that kid I’m teaching will graduate from high school. I want to see what my own children will become. I want to see my grandchildren. I want to see the next dog I will have. I want to see the next sunset…sunrise…mountain top. That’s how you get through. That’s how you survive. That’s how you bully through depression and get to the other side. I’m not saying it’s easy and I’m not saying it works for everyone. It’s just working for me. I’m still depressed. I’m still really really sad and hurt and not happy. But…that will not be forever, even on the days when I can’t quite convince myself that it feels like forever and I see no light at the end of the tunnel, hey. I’m in these shows and I’m making art and my kids are trying to cook dinner and manage the recycling bins. So there.

Broken? Yup. Totally. Permanent? Nope. Will be cracked forever, but will figure it all out. The crone? She is there, she is in me. I’m not her yet. I’m not there yet.

Sigh. Rough day. Babygirl is quite happy with my folded-up batting pile…

When I decide that the cat hair is too much, I do have piles of smaller batting pieces. I’m thinking she is so ecstatic about the batting that I should just make her some batting piles throughout the house. Because when part of your life is focused on how to make the life of a bitchy, old-lady cat a good thing…how do you make her last years enjoyable and make her feel loved? Well, really, that’s all you can do in this world…

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.

At the End…

My mood is low. It probably isn’t particularly helpful to be reading a huge long book about World War II in London during the Blitz. I keep reading up on depression and tactics for getting the hell out of it. I know I’m doing everything I’m supposed to, mostly, except it’s funny…they recommend getting more sleep and eating right, but admit that two of the significant symptoms of depression are the inability to sleep well (either it’s too much or interrupted or too little) and digestive issues (eating too much or too little, or just differently). So I should fight the symptoms by pretending they aren’t there? And it’s depressing in itself to realize that you are doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, but it doesn’t seem to be helping. Am I doing it wrong? Probably.

I just keep doing. It will hopefully eventually work. I’ll wake up one morning with fairy dust sprinkled everywhere and the world will be sparkling and new and everything will be pretty and happy and full of butterflies and nice smells.

Sigh. I’d settle for waking up and not thinking, “Oh God. Another day to get through.”

My ex guilt-tripped me today for not having sent out the kids’ school and soccer photos to his mom before she died. Little does he know that I already felt bad about that, that I had started a letter to her about 5 times and couldn’t manage to write anything about my life and the kids’ lives in the last 6 months. I didn’t know what to write. I didn’t send a Christmas letter this year either. Same deal. How to summarize months of depression and grief? You can’t…not without sounding really fake or whiny or pitiful or pathetic…and maybe I am all of those things, but I didn’t want to put it down on paper (says the woman who blogs about it every night…I can’t say that it makes sense). So I procrastinated. It’s not the only thing I’ve procrastinated about over the last 6 months. Things that are hard…I just can’t summon the energy or motivation to deal with them. I’m trying very hard to stay on track with the financial aid stuff for college, because I have to. Same with school, although I’ve let some things slide with that…nothing crucial. I’m a perfectionist when it comes to work, so it’s hard for me to let anything go, but I talk to myself about what really matters all the time. Just do what really matters. Let the rest go.

So I told my ex, I’ve been suffering from depression (I’m sure he knows this already) and couldn’t deal with it and many other things in the last 6 months, and I already had a mental conversation with his mom about this in my head and she was OK, she understood. I don’t know if she would have understood or not, but I can’t fix not sending the photos. It’s done. I’m carrying enough guilt at the moment. I don’t need more. And he could have sent them himself. I never seem to attach myself to the people who will DO. They just expect me to DO. And if I don’t, if I can’t, because my brain is messing with its serotonin and dopamine levels and not working properly, then they complain about it or they don’t complain about it, they just feel bad that I’m not DOING and that sucks too. So give me a break. I’m doing the best that I can. And then I handed him all of his photos. I usually put the kid’s name, grade, and date on all the photos, but I didn’t. That’s why I hadn’t finished packing them all up. It was too much like hard work to write all that. Sigh.

I still feel bad.

I got up eventually this morning. I actually got one kid up early (the other one got herself up) and then went back to sleep, because I went to sleep way too late last night. Then I took a cat to the vet…Midnight has some infection and the antibiotic pill I was supposed to be giving her, well she was being evil and spitting it out after we thought she had swallowed it, so she’s not getting better as fast as we’d like. Hopefully the shot they gave her today will help, because otherwise there might be something else going on.

Saw this sign near the vet…

Made me think of Game of Thrones.

When I got home, I started going through my stash of batting, looking for something big enough for this quilt. Sigh. NOTHING. I have lots of weird-sized offcuts, but nothing long enough or wide enough. Damn. I should have figured this out earlier this week. Now I have to waste possible quilting time going shopping for batting. I did find one piece of batting big enough actually…

But I have no idea what it is. I usually use Warm and Natural, but this was something with a scrim in it and loose layers on top…

Not sure why I have it. There is a smallish rectangle cut out of it, but I have no idea what I used it for. Sad but true. I was too paranoid to use something that I wasn’t sure of the results on, so I went and bought more, came home and washed and dried it, and ironed the top and backing while I was waiting…

I have two drawers of pieces big enough for backings and backgrounds, but most of them are old sale pieces that weren’t wide enough. I used a batik for the background, so they run wider than the normal print fabrics by about 4 inches…so I needed a batik for the back as well. I could have used the purple I originally purchased for the front, but I think it will work really well for another quilt, so I saved it…why waste it on a background? I’ve had this batik (off the sale rack) for a very very long time. It’s about time it got used.

And because I had even more time, I started cleaning up the office, putting away all the fabric from this last quilt and straightening up all the mess. There was a lot of mess. There’s still more mess, but it’s better.

By the time I got back from picking the girlchild up from school, the batting was dry and I laid the whole mess out on the entryway floor and pinbasted it. Apparently I only took one very blurry picture of this process, probably because I only had 45 minutes before girlchild would stomp through the entryway with muddy soccer cleats, and I wanted the quilt off the floor by then.

Anyway. I did all that and managed to start quilting between dropping her off amid her many complaints of the car shortage in the house (boychild has piano lessons…I offered to let her have my car and ask her dad or grandpa to take me, but apparently she recognized my plan for the guilt trip I really didn’t mean it to be and let me keep my car). She really likes being able to drive herself places.

I didn’t get far on the quilting. I didn’t have much time before her game.

I took lots of crappy blurry pictures during the game until I realized I was on some crappy blurry setting (why do cameras have settings like that?)…

and then it got too dark to photograph anything (they won 3-1), so I sewed instead.

I finished two more bird feet and about a million pink bullion knots. OK. Not a million…

Not even close. I am still revising my finishing plan for these. Going with the uber-positive, hopeful mood I’ve been in all week (cough cough), I have decided that it will take me a decade to finish three birds, and if I am any faster than that, I am an amazing stitching dynamo and should be worshiped from afar for my masterful stitching skills.

At least I know I can achieve that.

I came home, went to the gym, read about 300 pages of depressing wartime novel (sigh…for book club…even the time travel is boring, because IT’S NOT EVEN HAPPENING), ate dinner, and then quilted for a while.

I’m done with flames and smoke and am up in the rocks…

Tomorrow looks ugly, but hopefully I’ll get a few hours in. That’s my goal anyway, but I need to deal with school stuff too. Yuck. Not ready. Never ready.

I did get the postcards for the new California Fibers show, which will open on January 13 at Soka University in Aliso Viejo, California (Orange County, for those who don’t recognize the name).

I have two pieces in the show…it’s a wide variety of fiber work, from baskets to weaving to quilting to lace netting and dying and lots of cool work. Unfortunately, it’s only open Monday-Friday, so I probably won’t be able to go up until Spring Break…luckily, it’s open through May 8, so that is an option. The opening is Thursday, January 30, from 5:30-7:45, for those who live in the area. This is one of three California Fibers’ shows in the next two months. I have one piece in the show that will open at the Visions Art Museum next month, and we haven’t heard the jury results on the third show yet, which will be in Ojai, California. Anyway, it means lots of getting work ready for exhibit, but also having to finish and ship for two other major exhibits, so if I’m a little stressed out and feeling overwhelmed, that would be why. At least I have a good excuse.

Anyway, sad day. Whatever. Move on to the next one. At the end of it, I’ll have some quilts done. That’s better than most depressoids do…at least I can do that. Make art. At the end of it…reminds me, we are at the end of Winter Break as well. And I’m almost at the end of two quilts. And hopefully boychild finished the last college app tonight because it was due today…we’re at the end of that (but that signifies the beginning of a lot of scary and expensive future shit).