Hey, so let’s see if I can post before school today. I don’t have much time, but I don’t have much to talk about. I’m tired. Sitting for this long is hard. I want to do jumping jacks in between classes and maybe run a mile to get my butt and back to be friends with me again. But whatever. Kids are learning something, although it might be that they’re learning how NOT to be a jerk on a collaborative assignment. Sigh. We’ll get there.
It is Friday though, and that’s a plus. A short week with the kids, although it hasn’t been a short week by any means. Next week will be the challenge…5 days on every day. I really need it to cool off some more so I can walk in the afternoons. Maybe tonight. Also I said I’d post photos of the two newest quilts, and that isn’t happening today either.
I did iron last night…I did NOT iron Wednesday night. I was too tired. Here’s last night’s paltry progress…well, I did some flying COVID virions…like they do…
And the arm of death. Or something. I’m not really sure. A bird. Little bits and pieces on the other side of the quilt. I ironed about 100 pieces, which isn’t bad for the second day of school. Hopefully I will get more done tonight…
It’s coming along, slowly but surely, which is how I get everything done during the school year. Except housecleaning…it usually gets short shrift…although I need to vacuum so I can do Pilates without being covered in dog hair. Bleck. So I’m about 200 pieces in with about 630 to go. Small progress, like I said.
I had a stitching meeting last night and finally finished the top of Folk Tails by Sue Spargo. It was the 2015 block of the month, but I didn’t start it until 2016. Four years then. Well I don’t work on it regularly…that’s probably part of it. But it was a very enjoyable quilt to make, with all the animals and details in it. I enjoy doing some embroidery after eating dinner, just a half hour or so, although for a good long while, I only worked on this at my monthly stitching meeting, which used to be in person in a Barnes & Noble bookstore coffee shop, back in the old days, when we could meet in person. Now it’s every two weeks on Zoom.
Now I just need to sandwich, pinbaste, quilt, and bind. Quilting this one is a little scary. I’m sure it will be fine. Laughing over here. Tears coming out of eyes. Well, that might be because of school, but whatever.
It’s Friday. I’m gonna teach all day and then hopefully walk my tired body around somewhere and then iron for a bit before I collapse. Tomorrow includes Pilates (my body says thanks) and a mammogram (my body won’t say thanks, but it’s for the best), and then whatever art I can fill in around that.
We are a week out from starting school with kids. First we have to contact all of them and make sure they know how to sign in to a class and get their schedules and class codes and Zoom links and internet (holy hell, my internet has been awful today)…but I need to know WHO I’m contacting before all that happens. Ought to be interesting. Meanwhile, temperatures (actual temperatures of the air) are rising and everyone is hot and why do I have to start wearing a bra again? Sigh. Ugh. So here’s something about being an online teacher. I don’t need pants. I don’t need shoes. OK, I might stand up and do something for class, but odds are, I don’t need shoes. I might need slippers when it gets cold, but not shoes. It will be a shoeless school year. I will have to wear a bra most days though. Time to get used to those things again.
Today, I made a bunch of videos about how to use certain apps and websites, and posted those, and started trying to do some other school stuff. I sat through a total waste-of-time training. Hopefully the next one is NOT a waste of time, but you know, when you have to turn your camera off so others can’t see your extreme eyeroll and because you know you have one of those faces that everyone can read…well…that does not bode well for professional learning.
Deep breaths, new school year. I see you and I will get through you, hopefully still standing…on my bare feet.
Yeah. Think some of the crazy through a little bit.
I did finish tracing the Wonder Under last night…820 pieces (or so…had some with a’s and b’s because I missed numbering them) in exactly 11 hours. Weird to be exact like that. So this is about 5 1/2 yards of Wonder Under…
Covered in little drawn pieces…so that’s probably 6 hours of cutting stuff out…
I also am still embellishing these squares and rectangles…only getting through about three a night…
It’ll get done eventually.
Here’s the fence…actually done…
And here’s the Bird Poop Caterpillar chrysalis finally…
Its horns finally showed up. Apparently they show these red horns when they feel threatened, but I never saw them. There’s about 5 more caterpillars on the tree…yes, I sacrificed lemon tree leaves for these future butterflies.
I walked yesterday. Apparently I’ve done 150 miles in my hiking boots since March 2nd…
Yes, my hiking app keeps track. Impressive, eh? Well, it could have been more.
This bird was definitely perturbed about the tree disappearing.
More rocks getting painted and left outside…
I love those.
And last night, trying to go to bed earlier (and failing)…the moon was beautiful and orange and my phone camera just couldn’t handle it.
Kitten slept right through it.
I don’t know that cats care about the color of the moon. OK, another training starts in 18 minutes. I’m not feeling good about this school year, I have to admit. Those people dissing us teachers for “not wanting to go back to work” (yes we do…we want more than anything for it all to be normal again, whatever that is)…you don’t know what our job is like…at all. I’m just watching all the experts with their advice about going back, and all the not-experts and what’s happening in schools that are already open. Masks, no masks, cohorts, no cohorts, hybrid, no hybrid, testing, no testing. It’s all very scary. I’ve actually considered in my head what might happen if I can’t go back to teaching, or if the district screws me over in some way and I lose my job. Dear Ivanka…I have done many jobs in my lifetime…I’d like to continue to use my years of teaching experience to impart my love of science to 7th graders…not start over yet again. I already have two other jobs I do that aren’t enough to support me. Deep breaths…I said that earlier. I think it’s the bra that’s causing the breathing issues…I should do something about that.
Hey. Late start. Why? We finished the fence. The front one. The second fence of the summer. You know, I thought this summer I might remodel my office/studio, but that didn’t happen. It probably would’ve cost the same as the two fence sections, but they were more of a priority this year. Maybe next year, the office will get done. I’m just glad to be done with the two fences before school starts. We can plant some stuff and get some wood chips and maybe do some irrigation lines. I hate unfinished projects. There are too many of those already here.
But it meant I’m starting the writing of this right before dinner, and I’m the cook tonight, so who knows if I’ll even finish before I need to start cooking. But I’m gonna try.
I’m still tracing Wonder Under, but I could notionally finish tonight…I think there’s only 250 pieces left to trace.
I’m still working on the central figure…
I finished tracing her whole torso and one arm, and now need to do the other arm and her head.
I have about 4 yards of Wonder Under traced. There are some big pieces coming up, though, so they’ll take big chunks of that. Anyway. Tonight? Maybe? Done?
I also ironed all of the Grow pieces to fabric…
They need to be cut out sometime soon too.
I got all the squares and rectangles sewn down to the Folk Tails borders, and am now embellishing them…
All progress. I’ve gotten less done on the Etsy pieces…I can only do so much, right? And I’ve started working on school plans. So there’s that. Kitten approves only because I’m in here and she’s in here and she likes that I’m in the same place she is.
I also cleaned up a bunch of art stuff that needed filing so I could have more room for school stuff. I’m not done with that, but it’s a start. I need a better school setup in here. Working on a second (well, really, third) monitor and some good storage plans.
See? The cat moves out here when I’m tracing on the light table…
The light table that might be my standing desk for school. I might need another light to do that. Otherwise I’m backlit. Sigh.
This is nice.
So many memes out there. So little time. This one is for real.
Those bastards. Sometimes I have to negotiate for deck time…with dogs. Wet dogs. Wet dogs who want to go in the pool.
But then can only fetch 4 or 5 times because they’re tired and old, and then they’re wet and need to dry out.
I actually made them (dogs and man) all stay outside so I could mop floors. I wanted a clean floor to start school in here. I need to clean up too in here, besides the desk cleanup. I can’t use the green screen feature on Zoom because my computer part that handles that is too old. Which sucks. Because it means whatever is behind me, they can see. And so can their parents. So there are certain places in the house that I can’t be sometimes. Whether it’s noisy or art that might be inappropriate-for-12-year-olds or the disaster that is my fabric storage…I have to be careful sometimes.
Yesterday, the girlchild turned 23.
Apparently in a bathroom. I wasn’t there.
This is true. I need this.
OK, the fence! We needed it to look nice from both sides…
So we did slats on both sides…
I think it turned out really well.
I had to go buy 9 more boards and another box of screws in the middle of the day, after eating lunch and making pancakes to freeze for the next three weeks of school breakfasts.
Do I have a picture of the finished fence? Um no. I do not. Oh well. It’s finished. You’ll have to trust me. And now I can plant things on both sides of it. This is exciting. Notice I have more pictures of the fence than I do of the art quilt in progress. Ah yes, and here is the first Bird Poop Caterpillar turning into a chrysalis…
I’ll go check on it again tomorrow. I wonder what it feels like to like solidify all over the outside and liquefy all over the inside. What happens to the brain? Any memories left after that? Do caterpillars have brains? Or memories? I’m pretty sure I read a book about this in college. Kafka, right? Ugh.
Anyway, it’s dinner time now, for the dogs and the kittens, and then for us peoples. And then artmaking time. Tomorrow is set aside for work work work. Double ugh, but it needs doing. Then two days of train train train. Then work work work for days on end, right? Art will always be there at the end of the day. And maybe my lunch practice will include some as well. We’ll see. I’m wondering how my days will go, how they will feel, without kids in my personal space, without adults around all the time. Will there be more time-wasting? Less? Will I have to do more before or after school hours or on the weekends? Will I have tons of prep to do? I think so but I don’t know so. In two weeks, I’ll have a better idea of what this looks like. In four weeks, hopefully I’ll have it down.
This is my 3,660th post on my blog. That’s crazy. I guess I can add ‘writer’ to the list of shit I do. Although that might have already been on there, notionally. I’m writing less often than I used to. I’m not sure what changed (a pandemic…but I don’t know why it affected my writing time). As of 11 days from now, I’ll be tied to a computer from 8-3 every day, and I can see that having an effect on my ability and willingness to write a blog every day. I may shift to afternoons? Or I may go back to quick and pithy (I’m not great at pithy) every day but Sunday. I don’t know. We’ll have to see how everything rolls. School is starting earlier for me…but I don’t have to drive there most days, so it shouldn’t matter…it’s a little earlier than I would leave to drive to school. It’s a lot earlier than when we started online in the Spring. I’m thinking kids are gonna be braindead in the first few periods every day. Me too, probably. Too many school thoughts right now. That’s actually not abnormal for this time of year.
p.s. If you have kids in school and their district is saying “Teachers are much more prepared this time around. Everything is ready and they’ve been trained.”, um, yeah. No. No, we’re not. We’re not trained, we don’t have access, we don’t have everything ready, and we’re not prepared. We’ll roll, we’ll be there, we’ll have stuff, it will look good, it may even look awesome and work well, but we’ll be panicking every morning and night trying to get there. A lot of it is trying to figure out HOW to do what we used to do or something better. We don’t know what will work yet. We barely had things working before, and now it’s all changed. So be kind to us. You hate us, you love us, we save your kids, we are the worst ever. This job is so hard, y’all. Be kind. Stand up for your kid if necessary and get them what they need, but be sure you are being supportive on your end. I’ll probably have 150 students. Online. I’m scared. I’ll handle it. I have the most awesome team and co-teacher ever, so I’ll handle it. But it scares the crap out of me.
OK. So in other news, I’m still tracing Wonder Under on the newest quilt. I made it to the halfway point and beyond last night…
Of course, the kittens tried to eat one of the lungs on the drawing…
In the center of the drawing. Of course. I fixed it and now I cover the whole damn thing again with boxes in between tracing. I keep thinking they have matured and don’t do stupid kitten things any more. I would be wrong. They are not quite a year old. They still do stupid kitten things.
I also cut out all the Wonder Under for Grow…
This is the small Patreon reward for one of my patrons. I’m hoping to pick fabrics today or tomorrow for it.
I’ve mostly been working on trying to get a bunch of stuff ready for Etsy. It takes longer than you would think. I got this on a hanger…
I have a few more to do that way, both quilt tops and embroideries. And this one has its backing on…
I’m still working on the others…these are all the hooped pieces in process.
I’ll get them up on Etsy as soon as I can. I can’t decide if it’s more efficient to put them all up at once or to do a few at a time. My office companions are really no help at all…
You can see the stack with backings ready to go.
I did a little of this one…
And I also sewed most of these squares and rectangles on…
I think there are four left to go, and then they all need embellishment.
I’m in a mood today. I can feel it. I hate that feeling. But it is what it is. For now. It will hopefully change.
Every time I go get the mail or go out to water the front yard or dump stuff in the composter, the dogs chase after me and guard the door until I return…
The caterpillars are still growing.
I’m still waiting on chrysalises. Chrysali? Hmmm.
Sleepy time…
I am never alone…
And my chair is often co-opted.
This is Katie…
Katie is my parents’ dog. She’s visiting as they finish up with selling their mountain cabin. She came and then had vomitous and diarrheal events all over the place. It was fun. She’s on meds and has had fluids but still has diarrhea. I feel sorry for her, but that’s what you get for eating dead things. Dead things that aren’t cooked anyway.
And if you haven’t checked out the girlchild’s podcast…there’s armadillos and Obamas in this one.
Somehow dead things that aren’t cooked reminded me of that. It’s on the i-family of podcastery now too.
So yesterday, I had a hike planned with two co-teachers…socially distant and all that. I’ve done two pieces of this preserve…but not the West Vista loop.
So we started out…it was warm and there was a climb…
But it was outside and there were vistas and birds and plants. We did a lot of this kind of distancing…this was a shade stop going up.
I think this was the view from the bottom person, my science co-teacher…
Actually, that’s a different batch of shade. We liked shade. And interesting trees.
With brand new acorns…
These are not the oaks I have in my yard. But those oaks were there too…plus poison oak, which isn’t an oak at all…and lots of dry and dead stuff… I have Black oaks. These are live oaks? I would have to go grab my book to make sure.
Because well it is August. Black sage…
We hiked slowly but talked a lot and looked at lots of things, so that was good. Including vistas!
I’m pretty sure up there is the Clevenger Canyon hike I did with the man a few years back.
Another interesting tree.
It’s a nice hike. We had asked a random hiker man in the parking lot which direction he would go, and I think he was right. Do the big hill at the beginning, and then it’s downhill a lot and then flat a lot.
So we started at the N (Nature Center) went out to the right and up, then the loop around the top (0.9 and 0.5), then down toward Highway 79, and back to the Nature Center. The Nature Center is not open because of COVID, but is a cool spot from 12-something, so you can use the bathrooms after 12.
Next time, we’d bring sandwiches and have lunch at one of those picnic spots.
We saw turkey tracks and cows and birds…like this Harris hawk…
We think it’s a Harris hawk. Vistas and distance.
It was just under 5 miles in about 3 hours.
I enjoyed it.
We’re trying to figure out how to fit some sort of trail talk into our science curriculum…a video of us talking about rocks in the county and showing them to the kids.
Ecosystems and elements and photosynthesis. All around us. How rocks change…
And why…
And what they’re made of…
This is the hardest part…we have great ideas, but sometimes making them happen gets lost due to time constraints. If I have to be on a computer teaching a class, how do I have time to go record these videos? We’ll have to figure that out. Maybe every Wednesday, we kamikaze out of the house and school buildings as soon as school is out and meet somewhere for that week’s video.
We’re both really busy. We’ll have to find a way to make time.
We can always drag the history teacher with us. She didn’t seem to mind.
This is me trying to figure out what this used to be…
I am a curious sort.
This was another thing…electrical lines. We had ideas…
For earthquakes? Fires? Nah. Just too hard to dig a full footing in this soil…lots of little ones are easier.
I came home and we did food and I did work and some stitching and tracing. The cats are wary of Katie still…so this happened.
Three layers of calicoes. They’re all staring at Katie.
And this morning, doing school stuff…
I wish I could nap like a cat.
Well today is mostly gone. I’m hoping to get some artwork done and some more schoolwork maybe. I’ve done a bunch. There’s always more. And hopefully some decent food. I did get a pie yesterday, but I have to cook it. There’s dinner! Um. OK. Not the healthiest. I’m tired, I’m sore, and I’m cranky though. Sounds like a situation made for pie.
There’s a cat butt keeping my keyboard from being in the right place. She squeaks every time I try to shove it further toward where it’s supposed to be. Man, I’m tired. Yes, I stayed up too late. Why? Well, ostensibly I was working on art things, but also was watching the end of the second season of Hidden and wanted to see the end. Way too fucking late. Bad summer behavior.
First of all, I FINISHED THE DAMN QUILT. There was a lot of binding.
And I did all of it. And then dropped the whole quilt on the couch.
I haven’t figured out the time it took yet. But I did email my photographer for the last two quilts. Hopefully he’ll be OK with that.
So there was about a 24-hour time period in the last few days when I was going to be teaching an unknown elective for this school year, but then that went away (oh good). I suggested social-justice quilting and pole-dancing, but since my principal was too scared to actually even contact me and tell me about the elective, I also thought he wouldn’t go for either of those. No worries, all, I would have just taught art. I’ve done it before. It would be hard with the online aspect, but not undoable. Just busy as shit. But it’s OK now…that’s gone.
But because of that, I needed a hike in nature…even though it was by myself.
Sweetwater Wildlife Reserve…with its vernal pool that is quite boisterous this summer.
It was hot…
Always happy to see the flowers…
I did 3 miles…
There’s a bunny out there…
Dear School: Knock it off. Seriously, so many of my hikes are because of outside stress. Yesterday included 3 hours of an online union meeting about what is coming. So stressful. Other people can work from home, but we teachers are lazy? Ah sigh.
What else? I’ve got Patreon things I’m working on…the last embroidery…needed a different transfer color…
And also worked on the quilt pieces…Calli was helping…
The Wonder Under was traced and cut out, and I needed to iron it down…and then I cut them out.
I was doing this well after midnight.
So all three are ready to be ironed together and onto something. That’ll be this afternoon.
I also cut all the backgrounds for the Tattoo quilt and ironed down the pieces for the first block.
I’m doing hand applique. I don’t know why. But I am. And then I added the borders to Folk Tails…
There are a bunch of squares and rectangles that need to be appliqued on and then embellished. And then I’m done with this one. Done seems like a good thing.
Hey, do you do Pilates with animals? I do.
Simba loves his dinosaur…
And here he is, getting involved in Pilates…
So I realized last year that I posted a bunch of meme things about stupid shit the President said last July. So I’m hoping if I post all these now, then I will hopefully see them a year from now and life will be easier. Or different. Or less Trumpy.
Maybe I won’t even remember any of this because of the crazy stuff that will have happened since then.
That one too. And then in a year, we’ll have more data about this…
Maybe DeVos (hopefully) will be gone by then.
And this. Will we still be wearing masks in a year? I suspect so. I hope not.
Well there’s that. So I think that’s all I have for today. Oh wait! The girlchild now has a blog, Reformed Veg, where she writes about food and gives recipes. And she has a podcast with her friend Alessia about…um…well, I’m not sure what it’s about, but it’s currently on Spotify and some other platforms and will eventually make it to Podcasts on the i-devices. It’s called Rideshare. I’ll try to figure out how to share a link to a podcast here before the next blogpost. If you follow her on Insta, it’s in her profile. That might be easier. There’s the Insta…
OK. The day disappears as I get all this stuff done. And now I should do more. So there. I will also need to study more CPR before tomorrow morning’s actual test. Usually we don’t have to do a test like this, so I’m nervous I’m going to forget something. Plus it’s early in the morning because I didn’t get to pick the time. Which sucks. So I will NOT stay up until 1 AM tonight. Or later. I won’t. First I’ll eat lunch.
Ah yes. It’s late on Friday night. Well, not super late, but late enough that many of you have said goodbye to Friday (if you even know it’s Friday at all) and some are well into Saturday. Or Sunday. I can’t tell. Australia, you are crazy with the days and hours thing and it could be August by now for you all as far as I know. Plus it’s winter and that just blows my mind. In fact, I think I want to live there just for a year or so, just so I can come back and NOT think that August equals hot and February equals rain, but only a little bit, because we are Southern California in a drought for all eternity.
Why am I writing so late? Well, there was a chance on Wednesday of going to the zoo, and that didn’t happen, so today ended up being the only day available forever more that wouldn’t be a weekend, and when you’re trying to avoid people, weekends are not the way to go, so we got our butts out of bed at a reasonable hour and went to the zoo. More on that later, but it was a better social-distancing experiment than I think school will be, although there were times when I thought, oh yeah, this is JUST LIKE what school will be like, and it was mostly when I was around either people or primates. Wait. We’re primates. So it’s the damn primates. We don’t do this well. Although really, I’d rather hang with the orangutans. Not the baboons. Them’s vicious bastards. MORE LATER.
So I wrote on Wednesday last, and Wednesday night, I did some stitch down…
And I kind of got to this point where I said I would use the two meetings (both social, online) I had on Thursday to finish the stitchdown, because I had other stuff (sewing stuff) I had to finish and I needed the machine for that, and I hate switching needles and thread, so I just went for it…
It’s been hot. I have two fans I’m using in here.
And besides having to be the expert on whether or not we should open schools next month [um. If you won’t open a restaurant, why the fuck would you open a school? Because you hate teachers and want them to die? Don’t even ask me about the kids who will get sick and potentially die (none here in the age group I teach, which is great, but won’t continue if we open schools), and worse, take the disease home to family members.]. Wait, I was in the middle of a sentence. Besides having to be the expert on opening schools (no. don’t.), I just stitched.
And at 10 hours and 7 minutes…
I was done. The batting will be here tomorrow, but I had other things I had to get done, so my backing isn’t pieced yet…hopefully Sunday.
My quilt guild had a stitch along for the last 4 or 5 weeks (I can’t count. Please don’t make me.), and I needed to be done by midnight tonight. Yesterday, after finishing the stitchdown, I trimmed all the blocks…except one was too small.
Yup. That red one. I added a strip to make it work. And then I laid them all out again, and because I’d seen some other people spread them out more, I got a stupid bug up my butt and pulled 5 of the blocks out of the center bit, added more white/black, and pushed them into the border…
Because why make it easy? In fact, I have no need for an abstract quilt on the wall, so this needs to be even bigger. IDK what I will do about that, but I did piece the whole center together last night.
And then put the borders on today, after the zoo.
Looks good. All I need to do is decide how I will make it bigger, sandwich, quilt it, bind it, and then toss it on the couch for cats and dogs to sleep on it. Right? Sure. The point is that I finished it on time. The pattern is Abstract Arcs by Cotton and Bourbon. Look! I pieced something.
I’m still trying to finish all the grass on this, Folk Tails, by Sue Spargo. I found another spool of green thread and jokingly said I knew I was done with the grass when I’d run out of green thread. Um. No. So this was after Thursday’s second meeting of the day…
At this point, I think I’m done with the bottom three rows, but when I look at it like this, I see stuff that bugs me…so when I sewed these two blocks, they had the grass already on them, unlike the bits I’ve been adding. But it’s so obvious that it stops at the edge of the block that it bugs me…
So I had to go in and add more grass over the seams to make it look less like straight lines. Taking photos of this stuff helps see crazy things like that, which will drive me nuts if I don’t fix them. Then tonight during gaming, I kept going on the grass…yeah, I know there’s a cat on there, but I might be close to done with grass stitching.
I’m seeing maybe one or two places that need more. “MORE”, because if you look at her photo of it on the website, she added a gazillion more bits of grass from the pattern, and I don’t have that kind of patience. So the next step is to put the borders on. Wow. Another almost finished Sue Spargo Block of the Month. Well done.
So I also drew two more of the tattoo quilt blocks…
Again, these aren’t mine. I’m taking a paper-piecing pattern by Happy Sew Lucky and shrinking it and turning it into applique. I like the images, but I don’t like paper piecing. I also need to draw some stuff for the next Patreon rewards. Maybe that will also be tomorrow. We’ll see.
If you’ve met me more than once or twice, you know this about me.
Strangely, it does not translate to my on-video self.
OK, so the zoo. We were there for about 2 1/2 hours, and at the end, we were mostly done with people. There were more and more who were either lame as fuck about social distancing, or wouldn’t move out of the way so everyone could see the animals, or would get in our personal space, or flat out weren’t wearing a mask. That last category was pretty small, actually, which is a good thing. I feel like all school year, I will be saying, “Mask ON. Six FEET.” T-shirts to come. That said, it was outside and a walk and the baby animals are cute as hell…
The baby orangutan playing with the baby siamang.
They were adorable.
There were lots of sleeping cats…
It was a warm day.
Honestly, even mine sleep in this heat…
Except this guy…
A new dad who kept coming over to this fence to check out mom and babies…
She was, in the way of all new moms, fully into Fuck Off, You Did This to Me, and hanging with the babes.
So the baboons were yelling at each other and chasing each other around the enclosure.
Let me be clear, the ones with penises were chasing each other and everyone else was just running around either trying to figure out what was going on, or trying to avoid it. Just like in real life. So many things to feel about that. We never figured out what was really wrong…also like real life.
This baboon had the best hair.
I mean, I know they groom each other, but my hair NEVER looks that good. I was jealous.
Yes, this is a photo of a tapir peeing in the water. Not because it was peeing but because the pee was making this crystalline pattern in the water…
Which you can sort of see here, but it was much more impressive in person. Me wondering about the chemical properties of tapir pee. Really.
Secretary birds are just weird.
Some guy walked by and said they were ugly. Nah. Just fascinating.
I don’t find many animals ugly. Humans? Well, that’s another story, but it’s really the insides and not the outsides.
Lots of funny little birds to be seen.
This is hanging down bird…
And its twin…wait…it’s still a hanging bird, but this one is doing it wrong…
Or maybe it was called an upside-down bird. Can’t remember. That was its name though…the assumption that it was always upside down.
The flamingos are probably the most photographed bird at the zoo…
Because they’re bright and flashy and right up front.
Otis the hippo was born in 1976, I think.
He’s very still.
This tiger was finding food in hidden locations…
Kudos to the zoo keepers for keeping them hunting…
It was a nice morning out…well worth it. And I felt less violated by people than I do when going shopping, so that was a plus. I’d do it again.
Calli’s not sure.
I took her in the pool for a cooling-off swim…
Yes, Luna is even squishier than she was last time.
I don’t understand this.
We still have monarchs on the milkweed…
Always nice. Oh yeah, and I made blueberry cobbler to use up the berries before they went bad.
I think I like a crisp more than a cobbler, in case anyone is keeping track. There are more berries coming. I’ll make the crisp next week.
OK, it’s late and I’m tired. I’m going to do the dishes I got dirty and then go to bed. Tomorrow, I’ll finish the copyediting and go to the quilt guild zoom, and then see what else I have the energy for…maybe nothing. And that’s OK. I have been working pretty steadily all week. It’ll be nice not to be copyediting or doing school for once. But then we need to do the other fence…so that’s a different kind of work. And more art! I need to make more art. That’s what summer is for.
I’ll finish this post Saturday, but right now, Friday night (actually Saturday morning, because it’s after midnight), there are four people in four different rooms watching four different things: one music, one anime, one racial justice, and one door-is-closed-and-I’m-not-bugging-him (and if I text and ask him, he won’t answer, or he’ll just say WHY. Legit question). You can guess which person is watching which show if you want. I’ll never tell.
OK, it’s Saturday for realz now. Yesterday was weird. I did another retirement meeting…mostly making sure I’m on track (I mostly am…some changes need to happen…one of those changes is NOT somehow finding an additional $26K a year to save somewhere, despite their always recommending it). I had an online art opening webinar, which was cool and weird at the same time (next time, I will remember to have embroidery available so I’m not just staring at the screen for over an hour. I like to listen…but not stare at people’s faces for so long.). You can watch the virtual opening here for For the Love of Gaia, a show about climate change that’s being installed at the International Quilt Museum in Nebraska, available for viewing in August in person. It’s not a short video, but most of the artists talk about their work (I’m at 34:45). And then I walked. I needed to be outside for a while. That’s a pretty common issue for me. Boychild and I had transferred a chunk of the wood debris to my parents’, but the dumpster was full, so my tasks were done (well, are they ever done?), and I just wanted to walk. So I did. And about 5 minutes into the walk, I saw this on the ground…
Hmmm. There is a lot of trash on the side of the road. Some of it is masks and gloves, but other stuff that’s just dropped or falls out of the trash truck is all there too. Hard to say where this came from. Normally I pick up some of the trash, but I’m scared to touch most of it these days. I think this one qualifies.
There was someone on my side of the road at one point, so I crossed over to a side where I don’t normally walk. I always thought this was a bush like the ones we have all over our property, but it’s not…not with that thing.
The name of ours is escaping me at the moment. It’s a word I constantly lose from my brain; I’m not sure why. Probably I will remember it before I finish writing this.
In the art world, I’ve been working on this embroidery…
And I had an in-person, socially distanced social meeting today in a park, and I kept stitching on it.
There is nothing fast about this process, but it is relaxing. I need some of that. Exercise helps too, and being outside, but at the moment, I seem to feel really stressed out. So more of the not-stressful things please and thank you.
I finished ironing all the bits together last night, with the two angels complete…
They will be hanging out in the sky…
With their mask, O2 supply, and nasal probe (no, that’s not a paintbrush…). Plus a few Covid-19 virions as Enemy #1…
I need to piece the background and then iron everything down to it. I have 21 hours into the ironing so far. This is ALSO not a fast process.
On top of that, I’m working on these still…
I have the first 14 blocks done…
I need one more by tomorrow. The next batch will be the same pattern, but with the colored portions on the opposite pieces. That probably only makes sense to me. I need to piece more improv bits to do that. I thought about doing that last night, but was braindead. Ironing was easier. Improv while tired is not a good plan.
And dots…I should be done today, but I didn’t do last night’s and I want to add two more. But here is Thursday night’s dot…
I had to find more beads for it.
It looks like a Christmas wreath.
So I’m a little behind. I had a stitching meeting on Thursday, so I got more grass embroidered on this…
I started at the bottom and am only adding fly stitches. All the other greenery was already there. I’m about three rows up? I think? Although looking at this, I think the lion needs some too. Plus I found a mistake. I had sewn the tree in the bottom left on its individual block, but when it got sewn to other blocks, I added the top fluffy bit. I did not remember to stitch the sparkly shit around it, though, so that got remedied.
It’s probably a good thing I’m re-reading this quilt (aka stitching stuff all over it). It does mean it will probably never be finished.
So California has a resurgence of the virus. I feel weird leaving the house. The social distance meeting I went to today was the farthest I’d driven away from my house in over three months. And I think it was OK. Exercise still feels scary, so I’m researching a good mask for exercising. I think that would make me feel better about being in the pilates studio. There’s a fine line here though. Am I doing more than I was in the beginning? Highly possible. This week, I have two different vet appointments. The following week, another vet plus dentist. The week after? Haircut and eye appointment. I need to keep the vet appointments, but they are very good about limited contact. I can cancel hair and eye if necessary…hell, I can cancel dental as well, but it’s been a while since my last cleaning. These things are harder to do when school is in session, so I often push them into summer and breaks. We still limit our grocery runs and other errands have largely fallen by the wayside. I have some gardening to do, so I might need to run out for plants, but it’s easy to stay away from people in that situation. I saw at least three teachers from my school were hanging out at the beach together, nowhere near social distanced. Sigh. All young.
I just took another hour break in writing this, trying to get a new version of Microsoft Office to install so I can copyedit. I figure my 2013 version is a little old, so I’m hoping this will help me with some of the issues I had last time with conversions between my version and my author’s version. We’ll see. At some point, I’m probably going to need a new computer as well. I’m not there yet.
Here’s Kitten, guarding the drawing. I hung it back up to help me place everything.
The bottom is in three parts right now, with a few other bits and pieces floating around, plus those angels and virions. You can see how big it is here. Well. It’s bigger than that. A little crazy.
Speaking of crazy, this kills me. It’s just so wrong. I know it’s not the first time…
Change needs to happen. I’m doing things on my end. Vote, y’all. Don’t let this sink back down like we have school shootings. Until the next one. Don’t.
Yeah well. And masks. Wear them too. I still don’t have the patience or mindset for making masks. I probably could…I just don’t want to. This is one I ordered from Melly Testa…
A fellow artquilter. I actually ordered two styles from her, because I lost two of the ones I had here. Hopefully I will be better with these. Plus, when you purchase an individual #MellyMask through her Etsy, you are purchasing two masks, one for yourself, and one that she will give away to local essential workers. That makes me feel even better, because I can’t even manage my own masks, let alone masks for other people. They are really well made too and comfortable.
OK, it’s Saturday evening now and I will be spending some time with the man, plus doing some stitching. Tomorrow is the last day the girlchild will be here; she’s been incredibly helpful with cooking and shopping…probably saved my butt during the last three months of school. We will miss that and miss movie night with her as well. I always wish we had more time. Tomorrow, I will try to remember to take pictures of her socially distanced with her grandparents and with me before she goes. I also started copyediting today, and I want to just bang that sucker out in the next two weeks, so that’s a goal. And, as always, I have those art goals intermingled with exercise and taking care of the house. Strangely, being stuck at home has made it easier to do some of the garden and yard things I wanted to do, but there’s still a lot of cleaning and organizing in the house that I usually try to do over the summer. Plus quilt plans, yeah? Shows are coming up and I need to think about my artmaking priorities. The topics that are speaking to me now? Pandemic, still, of course; antiracism and how that would look in a quilt from a white woman; and the ever-present climate change that is just as desperate an issue as it was before. OK then. That’s not a demanding list of ideas at all.
Here come all the comments about that’s not what I’m supposed to do with the grass. Whatever. Coming to the conclusion that some days are easier for writing the blog in the current times than others. Thursdays are a clusterfuck. I resized photos and then worked and worked and had two stitching meetings but did schoolwork for the first hour plus of one of them, and the time to write never came. So next week, I will schedule more carefully…instead of every other day, there are days when this is easier and those are the days on which I will write. I used to do three days a week…I think I’ll up it to four, but it will be the same four…because I can’t deal with Thursday. This next week, Wednesday and Monday will also be messy, but whatever. So many meetings.
I’m tired this week again…still? I have been ironing until the really late hours and then falling asleep just fine, but between the early morning risings of the man for work (not his fault) and the cats afterward and that thing called daylight and noise, I can’t get sleep when I need it. Nothing new there. I should go to bed earlier, I’m sure. That’s always the case.
So. Progress on the quilt! First of all, I sorted all that Wonder Under…I need one bin for every 100 pieces, so 16 bins…
I label each one with a number, so 0 has pieces 0-99 in it. It takes about an hour to sort a quilt with this many pieces…
Luckily, no kittens were involved. Sorted!
This makes it easier for me to deal with the number of pieces in this thing. Next is the ironing to fabric. I got the fabric put away from before, then hung up the giant drawing so I can see where all the pieces go.
Then I deal with 100 pieces at a time, usually in order.
I bought a new iron. Again. Because I think the nonstick coating on the other one was not working properly. I couldn’t clean it. So hopefully this one will work.
I’ve fused stuff for years and always been able to clean them using Iron Off or just a rag…the old one just kept getting dirtier and dirtier and leaving that residue on the fabric.
This is what it looks like when I pick fabrics…I pick one section of the drawing and pull fabrics for that section, and then lay out the pieces on the fabrics…
And then iron them all down.
A half yard of fabric lasts a long time for me, because even with these relatively good-sized pieces, it’s barely using any of it. So I got some grass and dirt ironed Wednesday night…a good start, most of the background.
Thursday, I did some work during the day with my quilting Zoom.
Mostly I just work and don’t talk too much. I explain that I talk a lot for school, more than I used to maybe. Well. I guess I don’t have five classes a day, so maybe not. It just feels like a lot.
For this section, I actually had to pull pieces from the 1000 box because I have these two death arms, I guess I’ll call them, and they’re the same. Rather than try to remember 10 hours from now which fabrics I used for the first arm, I just did both of them together.
It takes about an hour per 100 pieces to iron…depending on the complexity. So for the first figure, I pulled a run of 6 fabrics, light to dark, and then I lay all the pieces out for that figure. This is the smallest figure on the quilt, so there aren’t a lot of pieces compared to the larger figure that comes next.
Then I iron them all down at once for that figure. While staring at the drawing.
It gets complicated sometimes.
This is part of why I’m up too late. I can’t stop in the middle. Between my brain losing its focus and the kittens fucking with the piles, it’s a pain. So I just iron until I’m done.
Here’s what’s done so far…and the fabrics I’ve used. Not a lot of color yet.
We’ll get there. Figure 1 isn’t completely done…just the flesh parts. She still needs a cytokine storm. And eyebrows and hair. Like you do. I’m in the 200s…but barely.
On to the embroidery…this is Tuesday night…the dot on the far right…
It was fairly simple…
Then Wednesday night, which looked fairly straightforward and then took two hours…and a ton of threads…it’s the one to the right of the sunflower near the threads.
It’s supposed to be a window box of flowers…
Then yesterday’s…I did it during my second Zoom stitching meeting of the day. Two others in the group are doing dots, although one is only doing the ones she likes. It’s the one to the right of the cactus…
It was pretty easy.
So I think today is Dot number 40. Still less than halfway.
When I finished the dot, I went back to the million pieces of grass on Folk Tails.
I’m just going to add grass all over the place until I run out of the two grass thread colors. Maybe. I might buy more. Hard to say. Sewing grass is pretty relaxing.
I might do it forever.
Other things that have been happening, mostly animal related. We had a plank challenge for PE, but Calli really wanted to lie in front of the computer.
I thought about moving her, but then didn’t.
Kitten just sleeps wherever I am.
That’s a lot of cat hair on that chair. This is better than when she tries to whack me with her tail because she wants to sit on the keyboard and mouse while I’m using them. She was playing with Luna for a bit.
Although the heat has slowed the kittens down during the day.
Well that doesn’t look friendly.
We did some hanging out by the pool on Wednesday, which was supposed to be the hottest day.
We put the big girl in the water…
The dog. Not the girlchild. It’s her favorite place to be. She’s kind of a pain about it. I graded while I watched her. Please throw the pinecone.
She likes to fetch them out of the water and then chew them to bits. Hence all the crap you can see on the concrete.
Nova stealing the dog bed from Calli.
Calli always lets the cats win. They have sharp bits.
Even when they’re asleep.
Seriously, she just follows me everywhere and sleeps there. Even on the browns.
Well. It’s already Friday afternoon. I’m so glad it’s Friday, y’all. I need a break from checking all these programs for scores and emailing kids and their parents to get them to show up and do shit. It’s exhausting. Hopefully we’ll go for a walk later…it’s cooler today than it has been. I’m also hoping to do some more ironing and get some schoolwork ready for next week, so I can ignore it tomorrow. I need to water everything and I don’t remember what else. I have office hours in 24 minutes, so I need to pee, get more tea, find my bra and put it back on (sigh), and consider the article I read this morning that said school districts may have to put all the older teachers who are immunocompromised in jobs that keep them away from kids. Ah shit. OK. Well. I have no idea where they’ll draw that line, so I’m going to take my old, diabetic self out of that mindset and into one of getting shit done today. Plus maybe just sitting on the deck for a while with my book. I worked hard this week. As always. I should relax a bit.
Trying to buy stuff online that I normally buy in a store. On the one hand, I’m grateful I can even do that; on the other hand, it’s not always the right thing or easy to find or possible to get it relatively quickly, whereas if I went to the store, I’d have it, but I’d also have COVID-19 if I did that all the time, and then we’d overrun the hospitals and it would suck for everyone. So I try to think about “do I really need it?” and “can this be put off for a while?” and sometimes that helps, and sometimes it’s just annoying. Much like all of this. We’re grateful we’re not sick and/or dying and that we can be at home and still have money coming in (not looking at the future with that right now, because my salary is paid by taxes and those will be an issue in the future with so many losing their jobs), so we can buy things and decide not to buy things. Each time we venture out for buying (usually food…groceries obviously, and then the occasional take-out to keep restaurants going), we are amazed by what people are not doing…not wearing masks, not keeping their distance…and it makes us wonder what people think about all this. And when people are protesting “their rights” about the virus, when it isn’t just their rights…it’s our rights as well. I guess that hasn’t changed at all…just the focus has…their right to go out vs my right to determine the state of my female body.
It is the state of the world right now…crazy. With an attempt at control. I’m managing small bits of control. I think I have a plan for teaching…for Monday. I’m not sure it will last after Monday, but maybe I have a plan for the week? Who knows.
Friday was just a bit of chaos. I did manage to finish drawing the big one…
The key really was waiting until the baby kittens (who are 7 months old now) are both asleep. Well. They aren’t always asleep at the same times or for the same amount of time, just like real live human children, so to finish the last bit of this…
I had to lock Luna in the bedroom for a bit. Because she wanted to play. With the paper. In a destructive manner.
In doing so, I was able to finish fairly quickly. Well. It took over 13 hours to draw this. I do know a lot of that time was staring off into space, but that’s the thinking part of the drawing and it has to happen. An awful lot of it happens while I’m doing other things (like sleeping), but also when the paper is there in front of me.
For some reason, I thought this was in the 50″-square range. Oh no. It’s way bigger than that.
71″ square. All right then. So then comes the numbering. Also needs to be done when kittens are napping. I did some Friday night…then it was too late and I was tired, so I finished Saturday morning…1541 pieces.
Well. That’s equivalent to last year’s big piece. I’m good with that.
I need something with a large focus right now. So the next step is to trace all the Wonder Under, another task that kittens are highly interested in. Luckily they napped for a good long time yesterday, long enough for me to trace most of the background land…
So that’s a lot of big pieces. I’m expecting to be tracing this all week, hopefully with kittens asleep at useful intervals. Since I’m starting school tomorrow, I don’t have as much flexibility with my time as I used to. So it will be a bit more difficult.
Here are the sweet babies awake and alert.
They have been in high-destruction mode lately. I had to cover this so Nova would stop tearing bits off the top of it…
Here it is before the destruction, with all three cats hanging out in my maker space.
OK, it’s true that large portions of the house are my maker space, and there are many things the cats would like to play with in all of those spaces. I do my best to keep them out of stuff. And then they want to be all cute and cuddly and lovey.
Sigh. Evil beasts. “Oh. You’re on the computer? I’M on the computer too.”
They are sweet, adorable, and monstrous.
In a year’s time, we will miss all the kitten shenanigans. Well, Luna I think has shenanigan as a middle name, so maybe not, and Nova eats paper and plastic now and will probably never stop.
The stitching continues with the snowflake dot.
Easy. Nice to have an easy one. Some are really time consuming.
Like Saturday night’s dot…
The one to the right of the blue thread ball. It looks simple, but it took a lot of time.
I also finished all the official bits on this, and now am just adding lots and lots of grass.
Everywhere. I’ll be here for days. Or until I run out of thread. Whichever comes first.
I’ve been trying to fill the greenery trash cans every week. It’s Spring, so there’s lot that needs cleaning up and trimming and weeding. My partner in yard work has been missing though. I did see some of these…
Which is nice…
I still think someone eats them before they become chrysalises. Sadly.
And the lime from a friend that we planted is growing and flowering…
The boychild did make it out to help me make a decision about a bush we had that the tree guys pushed down by accident. It wasn’t growing in the right direction, so we trimmed it way way way back and we’ll see if it will come back. It has the weirdest seed pods…
So bright! We don’t know what it is though…here’s the leaves and the pods before they dry out.
I have a trashcan and a half full right now…another half to go before tomorrow.
Yesterday brought a long walk…
Same walk as always…
This is where the construction on the path was…they spread a bunch of dirt out and there were just a few footprints…
I think maybe they didn’t want us on there, but whatever.
That’s Cowles Mountain in the distance. Not allowed to go there.
But I can go here…mustard…
And there’s the fam.
We passed each other going opposite ways…
See, it IS Spring…and there are hawks…
OK, there are always hawks…
They left Calli behind because she was limping again. Old lady.
She was very upset at being left behind.
OK. The plan: groceries and tracing Wonder Under and not panicking about school tomorrow. All good. It’s Sunday. I say that to remind myself. I don’t care if you don’t want to know what day it is. I need to.
Hey. It’s apparently the last Friday of Spring Break. What does it feel like? A regular morning. I’m a little tired because I was awakened by a cat banging on the window blinds because there was a bunny out there, followed by one of those tree shredder things that sound like the branches are screaming when they go in. I’d be really irritated if it were a real Last Friday of Spring Break, like the last day before I had to go back to the stressful classroom and getting up at godawful (for us night owls) times. But in reality, most mornings at the moment, I get to sleep to a decent hour…it’s just a matter of how late I go to sleep the night before, which I do have control over. I’m not getting 8 hours a night, even now, with no real constraints.
I start school Monday. It might actually be easier to have that started and deal with it. I get the most anxious when I don’t have a plan or routine and I don’t know what things will be like. And I’m pretty chill at the moment, for whatever reason. I still don’t have a real great routine, but I’m doing things, making plans/lists, and trying to give myself what I need. When I look at my teaching team, some people are like me and not able to even look at the stuff, let alone figure out how to do any of it. And then some are banging out slide decks and check-in forms, and I’m impressed and thankful that they’ve done that. My brain just isn’t there. Maybe it will get there, but I don’t know when.
So Wednesday, I worked at school again, and remembered to grab a white board, pens, and a notebook. Sometime next week, I’ll grab some lab materials, or actually DO a lab at school and record it. I guess it’s a demo, not a lab, but whatever. It’s way more interesting than the dumbassery the district provided. Then I came back and spent some time on a friendly Zoom with other quilters. I worked on the drawing…
But Nova wanted to be involved…
This is right before that fang went into my toe.
“But I’m so sweet…”. Yes, you usually are, unless you want pets.
When that call ended, we walked the dogs…the old lady seems to have conquered her limp…the dog, not me.
I didn’t take a lot of pictures on that walk.
We did a lot of movie watching that night, so I did some stitching. I did order some dot-specific threads for this project, so I could stop raiding all the block-of-the-month packages. I needed brighter threads too.
I do wish I’d gotten a better royal blue. Turquoise is nice, but…maybe later. So I did the bee dot…
Which was fun…
Kitten was in my space, as always…
I’m really trying to finish the Folk Tails top…so the monkey got embellished…
Girlchild made these awesome conchas…
I’ve been keeping my eyes open for these guys to come back.
I found about three of them. We never got any chrysalises last year…I suspect something is eating them.
Yesterday was a school Zoom and a bunch of work related to it. But afterwards, I sat on the deck with these two watching me.
And I finished my drawing…
I also have my first mosquito bite.
My next Earth Daughter, COVID-19. I couldn’t work on the big drawing because the couch was occupied. Maybe today.
Then we finished the third season of True Detective while I stitched the flower down at the bottom.
A closeup, right side up…
And more work on Folk Tails…I did the hut embellishment and the flowers by the road from a previous month. I needed to sew everything together before I could do that.
The last bit of flowers is down at the bottom. I spent about 30 minutes trying to find instructions for those flowers, and I can’t locate them, even after searching emails from 2015 (it was probably answered in the email group we had back then, but it’s closed now, 5 years later). I can look at the drawing and color picture and figure it out, though, so I’ll get it done. Then I get to add all the grassy bits tonight during gaming. And then put the borders on. Wow! Finishing!
This is last night’s cat convention. They were all considering coming to bed with us.
We have a lot of calicoes here.
OK. It’s Friday. Remember? I want to finish the drawing and do some exercise and write the parent email and make sure everything is done for Monday. I should start with a shower. I’ve been up for a few hours, but I still don’t feel awake. Next week will be interesting with an advisory class every day and office hours four days a week. I’m hoping to take that down to two or three a week…we’ll see. I’m trying not to think about going back to ‘normal’ with no testing. I need information to feel safe. I can’t imagine being in a classroom right now without testing being part of the decision-making process. I understand the financial issues people are having, but when you say ‘only 2-3% fatalities,’ you have to consider that those are real people with families and loved ones, and 2-3% is an awful lot of those. Plus with opening schools, the majority of those fatalities will be teachers or adult staff. We already don’t have enough substitutes. How will that work? Sigh. Whatever. Can’t think about that. Gotta go do the things that help my brain process. That’s art. And exercise. And stitching.
Kathy Nida 