It Just Seems That Way…

Birds are back. It was late when I started ironing. Busy day. School starts Wednesday. But the birds…the birds need to get done, whether school starts or not. I’ve started school like 13 times now. Must be my lucky year. I keep thinking I’m forgetting something major. I might be. So what? I’ll figure it out and bring it the next day. Or maybe I’ll just wing it for the first month. Science is science…make the kids figure some experimental stuff out, aim for the standards, they haven’t done science in our school a whole lot, so anything I give them will be a learning experience. I have too many ideas. Not enough time as it is.

So I focus on the birds. Because I know when they have to be done. I ironed Bird 11, another dove…

I lay out all the pieces on quilts this small…then iron them down. The drawing is under a teflon-type sheet, so I can see it as I’m ironing. I love these things. I have about 5 of them, two that are really big and three smaller ones. One of the cats tried to eat one once. Not sure why. There are teeth marks in it. Will I throw it out? Nope. Need it some days when I’m ironing something big that needs more than one sheet. Not often, but sometimes. Yes, this is how hoarders are made.

I don’t think it’s the same as the last one. I couldn’t figure out what fabrics I’d used. So I guessed. The tail looks right, but the body is much lighter. Then again, that fabric is mottled all over heck and gone, so maybe I just picked a lighter part of it. Who knows. Who cares. This one will be for sale at the Art Produce exhibit in September.

I did pick the same background though…

There’s hardly any of that fabric left now.

Then I did this one again. I really like this one…

And it exists on a quilt that will premiere at IQF Houston at the end of October. I’ll be there. Woo!

I think this one is pretty much the same…

Because I really liked it. Someone wants this one already. Bird 12. Eyeball Bird 2.

There are three more to iron, but it’s late and I have to be up earlier tomorrow than I was this morning. I was at school most of the day, and then girlchild had her wisdom teeth pulled. She did not deal well with the pain, and the doctor called around 9 PM to check on her and said they were “tough little teeth.” I don’t know what that means, but I do know her tolerance for pain is not great. So she’s iced and medicated and sleeping. She hasn’t eaten since early this morning. I made her mashed potatoes (by request) but then she didn’t want anything but water. It’s OK. They’re in the fridge for tomorrow. She’s not a happy camper. Someone needs to work on a genetic vaccine that gets rid of those wisdom teeth before they grow…like it predicts mouth size based on genetics and says, “Um, no, they will NOT fit, so let’s not even waste the resources on them.” And then they don’t grow.

Yes, this is how I can write sci fi. My brain goes to those weird places without you.

Anyway, so much of my evening was punctuated by moaning and whining and bloody gauze (which eventually she could deal with, which is good, because she only bit me twice and that was more spit and blood than I really wanted to deal with today) and ice and meds and cooking, lots of cooking. In between that, I reduced the hoard. I’ve been trying to get my room cleared of all the stuff from the living room, and part of that is finding homes for many things that used to live in there but really don’t need to live in there. So I have this closety thing in the hallway that I’m sure is supposed to be for linens and towels, but fuck that. I store art supplies, stitching stuff, computer bits and pieces, slides (from the days when that’s what we submitted to art shows), photos, and extension cords. Lots of those, for some reason. And it’s a disaster. It was organized right around the girlchild’s 2nd birthday, and I was still married then. So that tells you something about the state of those cupboards. And yes, I got a weird bug up my butt, because I knew there were photos in there, and I had a ton of photos in my room that used to live in boxes in the living room, and they needed a new home. So they should all live together, like with like.

So I started pulling things out of the cupboards…

And yes, I filled the hallway. It was un-traversable at some point. And then I filled one trash bag and another. Here’s an example of what I found in there. When I came back from the UK in 1988, I was hooked on EastEnders (yes, whatever, judge away), and when I was in my last year of college, the OC played EastEnders on PBS, so I could keep watching. Then we moved to San Diego and no such luck, so a friend of mine who lived in San Francisco would tape the show on videotapes with a VCR (oh my lord, the olden days) and send them to me. And I would watch them. I found 10 of them. In a box. Dated 1995 and 1996. Impressed? Yup. I tossed them. If I really want to watch EastEnders again, I will get the DVD. And I don’t, by the way. I really don’t.

I managed to throw out a lot of crap, because I did a lot of stitching in the past and apparently wanted to keep all the patterns of things I had already stitched and tiny bits of thread that I had knotted onto labeled index cards and carefully stored in bags with the already used patterns. Yup. Tossed them. I still have some stuff to rehome, whether at a thrift shop or in the garage (because I probably don’t need to keep my respirator from my screenprinting years in the house. Because I’m not screenprinting at the moment, and if I were, it would be in the garage, not in the house).

My SIL was so proud. Oh yeah, so going back to the early years of Kathy Quilting.

Yes. Those are hand-drawn patterns on graph paper (yes, very small) with plastic templates that have been marked to fit together.

It’s an abstract pattern made of three main blocks.

I never made these blocks. Piece 26 in the middle of that log cabin-type block is 1/4″ square. I’ve never pieced that well in my life. My art brain vomited all over my shoes when I tried. Then I learned how to applique what I really liked to draw, which at this point, was all being made into screenprints, and I’ve never looked back. But I wanted you to see some of the places I went before I got to where I’m at. Because it’s amusing, that’s why. How did you become an artist? Well, I tortured myself with the rules for a while and then I gave up and made what I wanted.

Which doesn’t explain why I’m making more birds, of course, but they serve a purpose and they will be done soon. It’s really probably just procrastination from the next step…because finishing that drawing or the floating house might kill me.

Not really. It just seems that way.

Remind me tomorrow morning why I thought it was a good idea to stay up this late?

Never Feel Bad Anymore*

So Friday night, I was going to iron more birds, but I like to watch things while ironing (it keeps the bad/sad parts of my brain occupied so they don’t make me cry) and the kids were hogging Netflix. So I decided to stitch stuff down instead, because I’ve got plenty of that to do, and I listen to music while I’m doing that, but it doesn’t do a very good job of occupying the bad/sad brain. In fact, I think it brings it out more, which is not necessarily a good thing. That said, this part of the quilting needs to get done and I’m just going to need to suck it up and stitch…and let’s be honest here, I cry while stitching. I try not to. I try to distract myself with stuff in my head, I try to pseudo-write the story I’m working on, I try a lot of fucking things that don’t fucking work at all, so maybe I should just accept that this is the crying stage. And just make sure I am well-hydrated.

I started with the mammogram quilt because it’s got fewer pieces and will take less time, and my plan was to get it done and sandwiched before the carpet guys come Wednesday, so I could quilt Wednesday if I wanted to. Not that I’ll be done with everything else, probably, but it’s good to have plans…

I got about halfway done before I got tired. It was late at night, almost midnight when I quit.

I fold it up on the machine, because otherwise I will find a cat laying upon it at the first opportune moment, and then I will have to remove all that cat hair. It will take about another hour to finish this, so hopefully I will get to that today. I’m sitting here, only sort of awake (sleep is a real bitch at the moment…can’t fall asleep, then nightmares wake me up, then can’t fall asleep again until early morning. HATE IT), trying to persuade myself to go to the gym, and the quilt brain is like, “Don’t go to the gym. Stay here. Sew. You know you want to.”

It’s true. I want to finish that one and then do all 10 birds. But I need to go to the gym as well. Grr.

So yeah, I finished ironing birds yesterday…Number 6 was a strange one…

but its shape appealed to me…

In the actual drawing, there’s a face next to it. That drawing does not exist as a quilt. Then I did number 7, which is actually on the Mammogram quilt that I’m stitching down at the moment…

I think this one has the fewest pieces…

Number 8 has the most pieces, with 61, and is also kind of the weirdest one…

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I liked the feathers though. Making these little quilts is really about my messing around with pieces of my work, which I don’t usually do, but someone liked a bird and thought they might like a small bird quilt. So I figured it was worth a try.

I don’t really know whether I like this process or not…it’s quick, but it’s like Quilting Lite to me. No depth to it. I’ve always had that problem with smaller quilts.

I think that’s why I don’t make very many of them.

They’re too easy and I don’t engage in the process.

That might be why I made 10 of them…it makes it a large enough project for me to have to pay some level of attention. And I think it’s funny that one of the most complicated birds is the one that’s getting the most attention…

First owl I’ve ever done was this one on the Celebrating Silver quilt. I looked at a bunch of owl pictures to draw this…and decided there’s definitely a Harry Potter feel to it as well…

Anyway, the next step is to stitch them down, hopefully today. These will all be for sale, and some people are already in line for choosing one, but I’m not allowing any of that until they’re finished and priced, because I know that might be an issue. I do value my time and although these are small, so far the smallest ones have taken almost an hour to do (not bad, but only about halfway through, if that) and the largest ones have taken almost three hours to do. So I’m trying to be fair to myself and keep track of the time so I don’t rip myself off.

Anyway, more of that today.

On Friday, we also did a lot of moving stuff out of the living room area, prepping for the last bad day before the carpet guys come. We needed the entryway clear (which is why it would be a good time to get that quilt done and sandwiched, because that’s where I do that), so we moved all the boxes and books out of there into my bedroom mostly. Then we moved anything smallish or that would fit in my bedroom or the hallway, plus the piles of stuff we had stored in the little living room as we cleared out the dining area for painting. I am glad to announce that I could in fact have a full Hoarders house, complete with really skinny hallways full of crap.

Seriously, I get totally claustrophobic walking through this…

I could not be a serious hoarder. I would go crazy. My bedroom at the moment is like some sort of junk cave…

The cat is freaked out by it and so am I. That’s the view back down the hallway toward the more open part of the house. I will be so glad when all this is done and I can move everything back and put it away. It will be a pain in the butt, I’m sure, but I am going nuts living like this. No earthquakes please.

I hiked last night, which was nice (will post it later)…still no knee pain, so that’s good. But I didn’t get home until after 10, and then I showered and meditated (trying to be better about that), and then I had no energy for anything after that really, so I came in here and stared at the computer, and the story in my head knocked at the door. So I started to write. And I kept trying to stop, because I was tired, my neck hurt, my fingers were still going, but I mentally was done, but apparently I wasn’t, because I wrote almost 4000 words before I could stop. I seriously tried stopping in 5 different places, and my fingers would keep going. I guess that’s a good thing. I’m hoping to do some more tomorrow, because I wasn’t really trying to tell my brain how to write this thing and it went off on a tangent, which is good, because I didn’t really know where the story was going next, and now I do. Well, sort of. I have a vague idea of what’s next, but it’s turning into something scarier than I started out with. I’m at 12,000 words. Not great, but not bad. A good solid start.

Then I went to bed and read for a while with the heating pad under my tweaked neck…same place as before, dammit. Might have to call the chiropractor again for another emergency appointment. I had to read because my brain wouldn’t shut down.

For the post title, I was looking for a song I knew I had heard lately about “can’t control my brain” and this one popped up. And the video is sweet, all puppies and kittens and wild animal babies, and it’s a nice sentiment. To never feel bad anymore. Weezer: Islands in the Sun…

I think I was originally thinking of a different song, though…not the Ramones, I Wanna Be Sedated (although there is that sentiment), but there’s another one…tickling around in my brain somewhere, but these two are crowding it out. That’s probably a good thing…

Ironing Birds Very Very Flat…

It seems ironic to take something that can fly wherever it likes (well, within the atmosphere) and to make it flat and iron it onto a very flat piece of fabric. Those birds…some of them actually exist as quilt tops now! Except they’re so small, some of them could be potholders…the reviled statement about any small work…”Is that a placemat?” Maybe this is why I work so big…”Is that a bed quilt? It’s not the right size.”

So I ironed a bunch of birds yesterday, mostly because I was at Susan’s house and it was a portable thing, which most of what I have to do right now is not.

I started with birds cut out in tupperware…

Which I then ironed together with the drawing under the teflon…

And then I would try them out on a variety of backgrounds until I found the one I thought worked best…

This one seemed to need an asymmetrical background. I may change my mind later…

Most of the rest were a little more standard, wanting to sit in the middle of their square or rectangle…

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So then I had to decide, light or dark?

Bright or not?

This one looks really different on this background…I tried him on like 5 different shades of blue and this is the one that talked to me.

Here’s his twin with the eyeball…

Slightly different fabrics for him…including the background…

And one that’s not so square…

Seemed to do better with dark.

So that’s 5 done to this stage. I also cut out the other 5 yesterday afternoon and evening. It didn’t take long. I was hoping to iron the rest together tonight, and I may still get to that, but I’m not feeling well…combination of tired and hormones and cramps and crappy mental shit that goes along with a bunch of other stuff.

BLAHHHH. Exactly. That feeling.

I ironed the 5 above onto backgrounds in about 30 minutes between hanging out with Susan and friends and leaving for my monthly stitching meeting, the only place I work on this…

Girlchild’s Christmas stocking. It’s really slow. I gave up on trying to stitch the white AROUND the motifs and started stitching the damn motifs. It took a lot of counting…and then counting again, because we were talking about birds (shocking…real ones, not Kathy ones) and books and writing and movies and how I should make my own Meetup group of people who want to sit in the 2nd row at the movies and sit through the credits, and how I would still be the only one going. I must become one with my freak status. Even in the Art House Movie crowd, I am a freak. That is very sad.

In the parking lot, I documented these three (no, there are four) badly drawn penises…

Materials: dust, car window, finger

I’m debating doing a series of quilts a la Keith Haring with replicas of my students’ badly drawn penises, but then I’d have to give them credit, and that would probably lose me my job. See, I DO think these things through!

Then after that, I had to drive to North Park to pick up 4 teenaged girls at a concert, but we weren’t sure when it would be over, so I had packed my sketchbook, yes, the BIG one, because I have no fear (really, apparently I don’t) and I was just going to hang out near where the concert was, in like a coffee bar or wine bar or anything that had the word bar in it? And draw until they were ready for me. Because I told the girlchild it wasn’t safe for her to walk around down there, because of some recent assaults, but I guess I was safe because I had my sketchbook.

I had gotten the drawing to this point the night before because I was too tired to keep making art stuff, but I didn’t feel like going to sleep, so I sat in front of the computer, watching videos, and decided to be bold, rip the previous drawing out of the sketchbook…this one…

because the male figure just plain old sucked…reminded me of Draco in Harry Potter, and that’s not what I wanted. However angry I might be with particular males in the universe, my goal in this drawing is some vision of equality, of working together, of being different and yet on the same team. We can’t be the same. It’s impossible. (As I sit here dealing with menstrual cramping from hell and wondering if I can just go overmedicate myself and go to bed right now, I’m fairly sure none of the males in my life have ever felt this uncomfortable for any reason, let alone once a month, every month, for the last 35 fucking years…oh wait, I didn’t have my period while pregnant…but then I was just puking my guts out. That’s a separate hell.).

Plus the hammer bugged me. Not that there shouldn’t be a hammer in this quilt. There totally should be. Just not in his hand. She’s holding a baby. He’s holding a hammer. Not working for me.

So. I put the original drawing under a blank page and basically traced the female figure…

because she was mostly OK. I changed her tattoo, I added some arrows, because I had forgotten them the first time around, and I gave her lungs. Can’t breathe without fucking lungs, you know. Yes, I am venturing into the 1500+ piece range at the moment, and I need to deal with measuring this piece too, because it has to be a particular size. Then I made another pass at drawing a male…different hair, different mouth, stronger face. Better. But then what? I had an idea that I wanted a tree to be growing from them, between them, and that the tree might hold some things that would be relevant to both genders, that were maybe in the realm of male or female in the past, but could be either now, like hammers and aprons and lawnmowers and Valium. Wait. Not Valium. I also debated about what to do with their arms in the middle…I was going to put their arms across each other’s shoulders, but I wanted them joined, not necessarily leaning on each other…the arm/shoulder thing seemed awkward.

Really, if you had been watching me, there were short bursts of drawing, then long moments where I just stared at the drawing, and you couldn’t tell, but I was visualizing things (like arms over shoulders) and trying them out on the drawing in my head, rejecting some, setting some aside, deciding some might work. I still have some saved in my mental clipboard.

So when I got to the bar last night, I plopped my money down for a single glass of wine (I was driving 4 teenaged girls and it was already late) and sat down at a table in a mostly empty wine bar, pulled open my sketchbook and started to draw…and no one bugged me and it was dark (not necessarily a plus) and when I couldn’t visualize what their hands should look like (I guess it’s been that long since I’ve held a hand…telling, that is), I Googled stuff until I found a few and stared at them until it made sense to me again.

And I drew…

Yes, I stopped there. Not because I’m afraid to draw a penis in a wine bar. I’m not. It’s just that the girls had texted me that they really liked the band they were watching and we negotiated a pickup time and it was time for me to leave and go get them a half block away. (Actually, first they said they would walk to the coffee bar I was at…um…WHOOPS…not at a coffee bar) So I did.

There’s a couple things that need fixing, and it’s definitely going longer (although I don’t know how much longer…should figure that out). I didn’t work on the tree because I’d like to go taller too, and I don’t know if I have the space. So I’ll finish his body to the knees and then run a copy so I can continue the drawing down. And I will check the measurements before I do that. But I’m feeling much better about this project now, because I was able to get my head out of the shit in which it had been wallowing. Whatever my experiences in relationships have been, I do have an incredibly clear idea of what they SHOULD be…I always have…perhaps that is what gets me in trouble. I expect teamwork and cooperation and gender roles being questioned and negotiated with care for each other. I don’t have to be the cook just because I am a girl. I can mow a lawn even though I am a girl. You know, that shit. Hate that shit.

I expect both people to pay attention. I don’t really think those things are beyond most people’s ability…I just think most people treat other people badly. A good relationship requires attention and work, and if those things are diverted or ignored, then the relationship will fail.

I can believe in it even if I’ve never experienced it. Maybe that’s what this quilt is really about…a dream of equality for me personally, with the hope that my own children will get to experience something like that. It’s difficult to draw a dream…nightmares are so much easier. Reality…it’s pretty easy to draw as well. But hopes? Wishes? Dreams for something better? That’s harder to get right.

What It Takes to Iron an Owl…

Yesterday would have been my 25th wedding anniversary. I had actually gotten to a point in my life where I wasn’t reminded of the date every year post-divorce, but my parents’ anniversary is 25 years before mine, so it was the big five-oh for them this year and I forgot…or did not remember…or blanked it out…or something. So that kind of became an issue and reminded me of my own lack of anniversary. I apologized. Some part of my brain is still trying to figure out what to do about it. Apparently if I had planned ahead, I could have had the White House send them an anniversary greeting. That would have gone down well, I’m sure.

Failed marriages are not uncommon, and mine was not any more or less tragic than any other. I do wish that I had the support and relative stability of 25 years of marriage right now, between teen angst and one kid going to college (and leaving FOREVER!). But that’s not part of my life. I think, I hope, I believe it would make the daily struggle easier to deal with, but I have friends in not-so-good marriages who argue that it doesn’t. I’m not pro or con marriage…but a stable, loving relationship that provides support for the really bad days, the days where I really almost want to grab my keys and my purse and run the fuck away, just get in the car and drive and drive and drive and maybe come back in a week or two. Yeah. That. Because what really happens is that I internalize all of that, and sometimes I cry about it, but I’m really carrying it around inside me and I don’t know what to do with it. There is no one I can turn to and say, holy hell, I can’t do this, and they say, it’s OK…I’ll deal tonight. Go take a bath. Go to a book store. Just go. I’ll deal.

I figure I’ll just keep doing what I can to move this brain in the right direction and at some point I will be able to get through a day without it hurting. Like a WHOLE day. I can get through short periods of time, like on hikes or while ironing fabric down, but there’s no long-lasting effect. The chemistry in my brain is the stronger…it wins at the moment. And by then, the teen drama will have moved to a college dorm, where I’ll still get bits and pieces of it, and hopefully I won’t have to fly or drive somewhere and put all the pieces back together…hopefully, by then, she’ll have it all together and be able to deal on her own.

I’ve been watching my mood the last 4 or 5 days and realizing even more what affects it…the biological flows of receptors and hormones and all that crap, plus blood sugar wavering in response to all that. I can have brief periods of time when I can change those, with exercise or some moment of separation from the sad, maybe during a conversation or a good book or while painting a wall. And then it’s back. It’s no wonder that the book I’m trying to write is about biogenetics and human body chemistry and how to fuck with it. It’s what fills my brain. I keep having to research stuff for it though…I’ll think of something really cool, but I don’t want there to be bad science, so then I have to go Google things for the next three hours to make sure I’m writing accurate science, or at least believable science. At some point, I need to have a long conversation (or 10) with a geneticist. Or a botanist. Or both.

We finished painting the last of the walls yesterday. That should be a party in itself. We did two coats because we were painting over the plaster and the mastic. One area of the mastic actually needed three coats. So that part is done. It took a LONG time. I’m looking at my bedroom and the hallway, and anyone who thinks they can bang it out in a day, I will feed you pizza and beer while you do it. While I lie on the bed reading a book and eating bonbons (not really, because I’m allergic to chocolate). Because it gives me a giant-ass headache to even think about it (although it would be somewhat easier…just push everything into the center…as long as I don’t have to deal with carpet too…which of course, at some point, I will have to do that too). Now we can seriously concentrate on getting everything out of that space for carpet next week.

Meanwhile, a woman has art to make…Bird number 6…

I ironed the fabrics for 4 more birds…I only have the owl to go. I didn’t have the energy for it last night…it’s the most complicated one in there I think. This one isn’t…it’s the bird from the Mammogram quilt, which I hope to start stitching down today. That’s the next step in the quiltmaking process. This is Bird number 7…

I mimicked the colors on the original quilt…not quite exact fabrics, because that was too much like work.

A couple of these took 30 minutes to choose fabrics for, because they were actually semi-complicated. This one had 60 pieces in it. It doesn’t exist in a quilt yet…I’m not even sure what drawing it came from…Bird number 8…

This one is in a quilt and I looked at the picture because it’s a pretty old quilt and I didn’t remember what color I did the bird (um. Kathy. Really? It’s black.). Bird number 9 came from a quilt of my son…back when he didn’t have long hair, I think…

Here’s the drawing with the fabrics cut out…

I wrote the next paragraph before I went to the dentist and then came back and dealt with screaming and spiders and the cable company and a new modem and 9 bags of thriftshoppery and 37 pounds of clothes shipped to the cousins in Seattle and moldings that don’t match the old ones because they don’t make them any more and piles and piles of dust and going through a container of stuff to be filed from 2007 and 2008 and finding that damn title to the old car, which I was sure I didn’t have, and crying because I saw my itinerary for Alaska.

Fuck. Can’t even CLEAN without getting upset. That is just dumb. It’s lame. It’s stupid. I am not dumb, lame, or stupid. One part of my brain is. And it can just fuck the hell off.

So. You’ll see my plan for the day below…and then you can laugh with me…

So today I’m going to iron down the owl and start stitching the two quilt tops down. I’m hoping to have the presence of mind to draw tonight, so I can really get focused on the next big quilt…I need to be tracing Wonder Under by next weekend, which means about a thousand things need to happen first. I think I will cut out the fabrics for these birds tomorrow at my stitching meeting. I might be able to iron a couple of them down as well…I think I only have an hour and a half between the two stitching meetings, but these babies are small. We’ll see. Maybe I will pick backgrounds before I go over to my friend’s house and I will iron them there. They are not very complicated.

Most of the birds, it took about 15-20 minutes to pick fabrics. The most complicated one took 35 minutes.

Yup. It’s 5 PM, I’m sweaty, tired, and dusty. Every Single Thing in the kitchen cupboards where the moths have been reproducing has been removed. Everything with a trace of mothiness or that has expired got tossed out. The brown widow that was living in there (hence screaming) is dead (the cable lady got to hear the screaming while she was trying to help me get my phone and internet working again…I asked her to kill the spider too, but apparently she does not have the technology for that). The cupboards are clean of moth leavings, dirt, spider guts, and oh my god are those EGGS? Of WHAT??? At which point, the girlchild gave up, left everything on the counter, and left for soccer. The only reason I am in here now, typing this fucker out, is because I’m waiting for the cupboards to dry, so I can go back in and put everything away.

Plus I’m fucking tired.

OK. Going to put things away. No more excuses.

Then maybe I will come back in here and iron a fucking owl…

Thanks for Asking…

I’m trying to get back on my planned art and remodeling schedule this week…I had a real hard time last week being motivated. It was too much, I think. But finishing the ironing on that big quilt and realizing how many hours of stitching down, quilting, and binding remain on that one and the other one, PLUS needing to do some other art things, made me realize that I have to stay focused. I’m not really ON vacation. This is my other job and I have to take advantage of the time I have to get that work done, because it will become increasingly harder to do that as the summer progresses into that crazy hell we call Fall…it really is FALL…from sanity (what little I have).

So Focus Goggles on. It’s easy to say that right now, because I’m not actually awake yet. I mean, yes, it seems like a reasonable hour for people to be waking up at almost 9, but I really can’t get to sleep before 2:30 or 3 at the moment, and I had to get up early to go to the lab and have them take my life force (aka blood). Fun stuff. Now I will freak out at regular intervals during the day when I check my results. I’m not expecting them to be good right now. Oh well.

So I had wanted to have some small quilt tops of birds ironed by this Thursday…that was my original deadline…so I started ironing Wonder Under to fabric yesterday. The plus with these is that they’re small and quick…

The minus is that they are so small that it actually takes me longer to pick the fabrics because there’s only like 5 of them and I get fussier about their going together in the way I want, because there’s nothing else to distract you from them. In a huge quilt with 80 fabrics, you wouldn’t notice if one gray was slightly off, but in something this small, I would. Maybe you still wouldn’t. Anyway, so that’s slowed me down. That said, I got 5 of them done yesterday…which isn’t bad.

I start with the drawing and the tupperware with those Wonder Under pieces in it…

Then I lay those pieces out and try to figure out what colors I’m using. I picked these as possible backgrounds, but there are more…

I’m trying to keep it simple, so I am reusing some of the fabrics in more than one bird, like the beak colors and the whites of the eyes.

This one actually really threw me with the grays for a while. I thought about finding a picture of the original quilt and trying to copy the fabrics, but I didn’t.

On this one, I actually pulled up the picture on the iPad to try to figure out what I had used in the previous quilt, but that’s because the person who likes this one liked the original bird…

Not all of these birds are in existing quilts. Some were just pulled from drawings that are in the quiltmaking queue.

On the next version of that bird, I changed it up and used different fabrics.

Eleven fabrics for this one…amazingly small number of fabrics for a Kathy quilt. Granted these are smaller than I ever work.

This one is very muted…looking for a different background for it.

So 5 down, 5 to go today, once I get my refi signed. Oh yeah, and the wall painted…

I’m just going to paint and see if the texture is irregular enough to pass with a couple of coats of paint on it. I’m not sure I care enough to spend more time on it. The wall under the window doesn’t show at all and most of the rest of the wall will be covered by bookshelf or art. Plus it will all be a lovely unifying white. I put a second coat of plastery stuff on it yesterday and then sanded it and washed it down.

We have to paint this little section too…

Not a problem with the texture here…it did much better for some reason…no mastic maybe helps.

Once all that is done and the carpet is in, I will still need to deal with putting in shelves to the right of the fireplace and finding something for a mantle. I have a decorating friend who might be able to help with that, but it’s going to have to be cheap…in fact, I’m thinking of raiding my dad’s wood supply and just throwing an old barn board up there. Not really. But I don’t want fancy; I want natural.

This is looking back at the rest of this area, which is been in chaos since school got out.

It’s getting there. Slowly. Sitting on the couch is not happening much at the moment, unless you’re willing to climb in and be crowded…which we all have done (we are nesters). We’re still eating dinner on the deck. We started moving boxes and some furniture out of this area, just so next Tuesday will not be so heinous, but it’s hot and trying to find room for stuff is challenging. Girlchild just exploded all over the place when I asked her to deal with her stuff, so that makes it so much more fun. We did get the giant box of my CDs down into the garage, and then in trying to find a shelf that it would fit on, boychild started tossing stuff (he did ask first), so we filled a trashcan with stuff and found 6 boxes of clothing that either needs to be sent to the cousins up north or to the thrift shop…so that is girlchild’s job today, to go through those boxes.

At which point, my dad asked me when I’m going to clean out the garage. Holy crap, man. I can only handle so much chaos at a time. I need to get the art stuff done. I have another quilt I haven’t started yet that needs to be significantly started before school begins. I need to DRAW that. I can’t even trace Wonder Under until the carpets are done, but I need a drawing soon. Like before next week.

Yeah. So. That. Not happening right now. But thanks for asking.

OMG Finished!

I think that’s the level of excitement I’m supposed to have for finishing the ironing part of this big quilt. That Fake It till You Make It crap. You know. Smile until it’s natural. I actually smile all the time, when things make me smile, like goofy dogs and goofy kids and even Grumpy Cat in the Honey Nut Cheerios commercial, which is significantly dumb. So my smile is working…it just doesn’t stick. I can laugh at jokes and stupid puns too…I actually had someone tell me I couldn’t be depressed because I laughed at her jokes. They were still funny. It just didn’t stick. Depression means you can’t hold on to that feeling.

So. In my head since about 1:07 AM last night, I’ve been thinking OMG I’m FINISHED! See. Not really. I tried that last night and it didn’t work and then I had distinctly troubled and fucked-up dreams all night and I totally blame the OMG. That fake-it crap.

Not really. That’s just what my brain does.

So I finished the ironing yesterday (did you get that part?). I didn’t have much left anyway, about 100 pieces or so. I kept telling myself this thing had 1800 pieces, but it was only 1700 and something (ha ha ha…now see, THAT was funny).

This is Ivy. She’s dead two years now, so that’s why she gets wings. She’s the familiar, the protector animal in this quilt. Whenever the phone rang, she would jump up from wherever she was lying and race around the house, like it was an alarm for her to protect me.

She ends up ironed in front of the giant weeping eyeball.

I got those done before we went to dinner at my parents, and then came back to the tentacles…

Those crazy-ass tentacles. These were a bit of a challenge just because the pieces were tiny. I’m a bit confused though. I knew I had lost two of the larger sucker parts, and I looked for at least 20 minutes through all my fabrics trying to find the fabric I used for that and I just couldn’t find it. This is why I usually try NOT to put everything away until the quilt is ironed down, but they were just taking up too much room.

So I adjusted things so you can’t tell that two suckers are missing…

But if I was missing two of the larger pieces, why the fuck do I have four of the smaller darker pieces left over?

Seriously, you cannot explain that away. I tried. I gave up. It was not worth it.

In the end, I found all the missing pieces (and more! seriously, I found two pieces that must belong to another quilt, because they don’t belong to this one) except one, an elbow shadow, which I recut. I almost didn’t, but its absence bugged me.

And then I ironed the tentacles down where they belong.

At that point, a smart person would have looked at the clock and gone to bed. The total ironing of all the pieces was 21 hours and 15 minutes, but I still needed to iron everything down to the background. I don’t actually know what time that was, because I am NOT smart, and I did NOT look at the clock, and I was still wide awake. So you can’t give me shit about that.

I had two fabrics for the background and I laid both of them out and put some of the big ironed-together pieces on them and picked the one I liked better, which happened to be the darker one. Honestly, the lighter one probably was the better choice, but whatever. My brain kept yelling darkER! darkER! darkER!, so I caved.

The biggest problem was that normally I would iron this on my entryway floor, but that floor is Hoarder Central at the moment. So that wasn’t happening. I mean, if I’d been patient enough to wait on the ironing until today, which also would have meant going to bed at a semi-reasonable hour, then we were planning on clearing that floor anyway as part of the pre-carpet prep work. But NOOOO. I must iron immediately. So I started on the ironing board, which was probably a mistake…I tried to get the bottom section straight…

An hour and a half later, I had laid it out (sort of) on the floor of the studio, realized I was crooked, but had already ironed major bits down and couldn’t be bothered to fix it. It will be OK.

Total ironing time: 22 hours and 45 minutes.

What have you done lately that took that much time? Here’s the top section.

No pictures of the whole thing. First of all, there’s nowhere big enough to hang or lay it out where I could photograph it all…it’s about 43″ w x 80″ h. I actually have no clue what the vertical measurement is…that was a total guess.

I’m not stitching it right away. I’m going to pick fabrics for the bird quilts and then I’m going to stitch down the Mammogram quilt, and then this one. Stitching down doesn’t take as long as ironing, though, so hopefully I’ll have a chunk of all that done this week. I did add up all the hours on this thing so far and I’m at a little over 109 hours. Wowza. It ain’t small. It ain’t simple.

Yup. This is my crazy. I do this because I have to. I don’t do it to make me happy or to change the world. I do it because I have a drive inside me that is completely out of whack (instead of the mostly out of whack that is my current existence) if I don’t do it. I know a lot of people don’t understand…they think that being able to make art should make me happy, but it doesn’t. It just decreases the unhappy. It’s like the people who think my losing weight should magically cure my diabetes. Nope. It’s deeper than that. I know what I need to be happy; I also know I can’t get there until I can get more of the unhappy to wander off. So I will laugh at your stupid jokes and smile at the dorky cat lying upside down on my pillow and think good thoughts when the bad dark cloud sinks down over my face. And at some point, my brain will respond the way it’s supposed to.

Under Construction

I’ve been trying to adjust my mood. It doesn’t help that it’s hot during the day or that I am at the most frustrating part of the renovation (although moving furniture for the carpet install might also be frustrating…we just haven’t gotten there yet) or that yesterday was the day when I am alone for the longest period of time. Strange how being alone is both good and bad. It messes with my head, but then I NEED to be alone to do some of the art stuff I’m doing. There must be a different version of alone that works better for me (you know there is. you had it once.).

So summer is turning out to be difficult, and I finally stopped avoiding that and/or trying to bully through it, and tried to do some things that would actually change it. Going on the hike was the first one, and it was fine. So I signed up for another hike next week; I might do two…kinda depends on the weather. I also signed up for a few more meetup groups that were doing things I might be interested in, like writing sci fi. I think I have to admit that the story I’m writing is more science fiction than anything else. I have 7000 words. That’s more than I had last week. If I get a chance today, I have another 3000 or so roiling around in my brain that could be vomited out onto Google Docs. Or is that INTO Google Docs. Webspace. Not real space. Typed characters. I also went to a movie with a meetup group…will write about that further on. I’m not sure that was successful for a variety of reasons, most of them probably in my head.

So I have been ironing, about 2 1/2 hours yesterday. I started with the face…

This is actually like a thought bubble that’s yelling at her and crying. It’s easier to iron the eye as a separate unit and then iron it on top of the already completed face.

Maybe that’s my brain. Or some part of my brain. It’s true that with depression and perimenopausal symptoms that often you hear things in your mind that don’t make sense, the irritation for no or very little reason, the sadness, the moodiness, and then your brain gets in your face about that as well. Demands an explanation. Honestly, I don’t know how much of that is just me and how much is some symptom of any of the things that might be affecting my mood. Even the thyroid has been screwed up lately, and because I’m not on a school schedule, I keep forgetting to take my thyroid meds (symptom of underactive thyroid? Memory issues. Seriously.), so that doesn’t help. Excuse me. I’m getting up right now to take them…late.

OK, I’m back. It won’t work as well because there’s tea in my stomach, but it’s better than not taking it at all.

There’s a wolf…I kind of think of it as a protector, her familiar maybe.

Usually I have cats as familiars in my quilts, but it seemed she needed something bigger and more wild. I’m not sure. I know there’s no cats in this one.

Bird attacking the snake that’s in her…

I actually researched the coloring of hawks to make sure I was doing this one right…the red-tail hawks who hang out in the tree outside my studio. Beak’s wrong, but whatever.

So I’m done with the 1500s…I don’t actually have much left to iron (if you ignore the fact of the octopus tentacles from hell). I could finish today. That’s good. A week later than I wanted, but still good. Deep breaths. I might actually finish it this summer. Easily could do that. With the other one (wait, panic moment). And…and…don’t let the brain think about the ‘ands’. You will lose it.

Someone commented that I should get a tall stool for ironing (and tracing probably too). I have one. It even rolls. And has padding. Came from a thrift shop or something like that. It’s old. But I can’t seem to keep my butt upon it. I just slip right off. I’m not that comfortable sitting for long. I am used to standing all day for work. Plus, here’s the available space when I’m ironing…

The pieces are to the left on the white table and there isn’t much room between it and the ironing board. I suspect the tired-of-ironing feeling is more because ironing is difficult at times, trying to get all the pieces in the right place and figure out where the missing pieces are (I found two more missing pieces yesterday). One of the biggest issues I have when I start stitching is all the sitting. And tense shoulder stuff. Which doesn’t help. So the rolling chair has become a rolling storage depository for stuff like lead for mechanical pencils and tape dispensers, which is probably not a good use of it.

I didn’t iron more yesterday because I was trying to make this wall work.

Fucking wall. I started with an online recipe for texturing and used a small roller to apply it to the patch sections. It wasn’t right. I fussed with it, sanded it a little, and tried it again with a thicker mix. Still not right.

Fucking wall. So then I rolled the whole thing…

Which is what I did on the wall next to the fireplace, rolled it twice though. This one, I’ve only done once…and there’s some issue in that the part where the window is has the original texture. Do I care? I might. I have to make that decision today. I have to sand the whole thing just to knock the peaks down and then probably put a second coat on the whole thing, and then maybe I just paint it tomorrow and assume that’s as good as it gets. Do I really care that much? There’s an entirely different texture on the dining area attached to this, as well as the wall behind the piano, which is also part of this room. It’s all white. Is the world ending because of the texture?

No. Stop freaking. Just do it. But it’s hot and I hate sanding. Really really hate it.

So. I love going to the movies. Always have. In college, I would buy one ticket on Friday at the first matinee, student matinee price, and then I would sneak from theater to theater until I had seen like 3 or 4 movies in one day. I missed the first few minutes of some, but I didn’t care. I just loved hiding in the dark with the big picture in front of me. The last year has been mostly movie-free, not by choice. I tried in the beginning to keep going, but it made me incredibly sad being there alone and silent and I stopped. Plus it’s expensive, ticket plus parking. And I have to be picky about what I spend money on these days. College is going to kick my financial ass (which was already kicked to the ground by divorce, single-momhood, teaching not being a well-paying career, expenses for school, etc.). So I stopped going. I went to Catching Fire with the kids, but that was the last movie I saw, and that was back in November. I hate that. I hate that the one piece of my life that I absolutely loved has been so damaged by all this shit that I can’t enjoy it any more. OK. Not just one piece.

I had joined a couple of movie meetup groups, thinking that would help, I wouldn’t be there alone and there would be people to discuss the movie with afterwards. Sounds good, right? Except they usually schedule them during the week or Sunday evenings, and it just wasn’t working for me. Finally someone scheduled one for a Saturday night and it was something I would actually consider seeing, so I took a deep breath, thought about trying to change the summer mood, and signed up. Got there and introduced myself, and then realized they were all going to sit together as a group. Oh. Yeah. I hate sitting in the middle of the theater. I’m a 2nd-row person. I went on a date after the divorce with someone who told me they couldn’t continue dating me because of that. He liked the back row. That shit is never going to work. So I suggested that since we were a relatively large group, maybe some others would want to sit up front. I got one. No problem. We talked for a while before the movie, it was totally awkward, made more so by the fact that her mom wanted to sit way in the back. I’m not entirely sure why she sat with me. She said she likes being IN the movie, that feeling that being up front does for you (that is why I sit up front by the way), but it was weird. She sat still and upright for the entire movie. I fidgeted because I can’t sit still that long. I felt weird fidgeting, wondering if I was annoying her, wondering how she sat STILL for all that time.

Then afterwards, she got up during the credits and left without a word. I’m weird. I watch all the credits. When I got up, the theater was empty. Yup. I’m really weird I guess. I went out to the lobby and there were groups of people talking about the movie and I tried to join in, but I was getting texts from the girlchild about her code for the AP tests earlier (scores came out yesterday) and I knew she was expecting me to send her that soon, so I left. It was weird. And what was worse was how I felt afterwards. I love the moviegoing. I love being in the theater and experiencing another world for two hours, but the after feeling is fucking awful. I cried all the way home and into the house and found her the code and then logged in as her (like you do) because she wasn’t answering (apparently she gave up on waiting and went to a dance instead, which I am totally OK with her doing). And texted the boychild to see if he had checked his scores. I guess I’m glad I had that distraction when I got home, because the after-movie feeling was just really bad. Like crawl into bed and put the pillows over your head and sob like the world has ended bad. I have been getting better over the last few months, but this whole experience threw me back about 6 months and it sucked. I can’t live there. I can’t be like that.

So we had 7 AP tests between the two kids: they scored 3 4s and 4 5s. I texted the girlchild that she rocked (she’d been so stressed about these, thought she would be crying herself to sleep over her scores), the boychild the same. I’m proud of them. And some part of me realizes that despite the divorce years ago and all the emotional mess I’ve been this last year, that they still were able to fucking rock it academically. And as yet another person told me congratulations last night at the movies for raising a kid who’s going to Cornell, that I have smart kids, but that I had something to do with their successes…and I hope they keep having them, because I can’t do a lot about it from here on out except be the crazy mom who’s texting them at midnight about stupid stuff. The mom who stays up until 3 ironing because making art is important to her. The mom who is depressed and jokes about it and apologizes for being such a lame-ass. My house may not be clean (hell, it’s a fucking disaster at the moment), I may be a mental disaster myself, but I did OK with them.

The movies? Yeah, not so much. That part is still under construction…

Celebrating American Independence with an Iron

Yesterday, I ironed. For like 5 hours. So shockingly, I got significant portions of this beast done…because that’s what it takes, standing in front of an ironing board for 5 hours. In case you were wondering about my process. Yes, it’s mostly crazy. Trying to explain it to non-art people, they mostly just nod their heads carefully, like people do when they think you’re crazy, and then they say something about how they could NEVER do that, because they’re not creative.

OK, well, I disagree with that. You obviously don’t have the fucked-up, obsessive mind that I do, but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing at the moment. Me and my mind have not been getting along. I started by working on the ribcage. The uterus was ironed separately, to be placed properly later.

Sometimes it’s just easier to do it that way…I can’t see through fabric once it’s ironed on. And this whole central torso is pretty complicated…

There’s lungs and a heart and two hands and that uterus…I still do the whole thing while watching X Files…finally made it to Season 6.

I started ironing in the morning, then continued during the afternoon in between sanding plaster and filling holes and waiting for them to dry and washing walls and then starting all over again, although not in that order. There’s more of that happening today. Ugh. Tired of remodeling. Can’t really stop now, though. Not motivated. Until I walk into the room and realize I can’t stand the mess. It’s easier to hide in my studio/office/room at the end of the hall where all the animals congregate.

I have the same problem with ironing…if I get to a really hard bit, a complicated section, it takes will power to keep myself standing at the ironing board and working. It’s easier to walk away and come up with something else to do. You saw how many books I read earlier this week…total avoidance of ALL things, art, house, etc. Just make it all stop. I’m doing better with it right now, but that’s also because I got through the really hard bit yesterday with a whole lot of bitchy persistence.

Sometimes I don’t know where that comes from. Sometimes I know it’s genetic. Sometimes it’s just the drive in my head, the artist finally coming out of the cave where she’s been hanging out with depressoid brain. She hasn’t been around lately. She claims she was tired, that the end of the school year and boychild graduating and all the shit that came with that…she couldn’t deal. And that often happens at the end of the school year.

I’ll give her a break, as long as she doesn’t wander off again. She needs to be here. She’s got a lot of stuff to do. No excuses.

I posted these on Instagram/FB last night to see if anyone could tell what they were…

I often iron all the bits and pieces (lungs, heart, etc.) off to the side and then assemble them all into the big picture in one go, because otherwise this is overwhelming, trying to fit everything in there with limited view of the drawing below.

Here’s the heart…I cooked dinner somewhere in between the last picture and this one…or maybe I prepped it even before the last picture. I got halfway through the heart when the timer went, so I stopped and ate with the boychild, who actually stuck around at the table with me after he finished eating (oh my god, he DOES have manners) because the girlchild isn’t here and I guess he decided it would be rude or mean to leave me out there on the deck alone (we’ve been eating out there because the kitchen table is a disaster…I thought we would only have to do that once or twice. Yup. It’s been over a week. Whatever. I always underestimate home renovation time.). Then I realized we were leaving for fireworks in 20 minutes and I still needed to pack up water bags and find my hiking boots from yesterday (you’d think that would be easy), so I speedily finished ironing the heart together…

Got some crazy colors in there. My hearts are never simple. Ironic that.

I had persuaded the boychild and ex to try a new firework experience. We’ve been going to the same park for the same display for the last 16 (15?) years, with a few years off to go to Lake Arrowhead’s display. Actually, we probably started going to this one after the divorce, when Arrowhead was no longer the family destination, so maybe 12 years. Anyway, I wanted to hike up a mountain to see fireworks, multiple displays. I liked the idea of working for your 4th of July. And they crazily agreed, so at 8 PM, we were at the bottom of the back side of Cowles Mountain (Barker Way entrance). I had mapped everything out trailwise and my ex had been up one of them with the boychild before, so we weren’t completely blind and stupid. Plus we weren’t the only people doing this…which is kinda cool, if you think about it.

It’s a 1000-foot gain no matter where you start.

This is halfway up, looking back at El Cajon. It’s getting darker, but no need for flashlights yet.

The sun definitely went down.

All the local fireworks displays start at 9 (the big ones, anyway), so that’s what we were aiming for. There were a ton of people at the top, mostly facing west towards the bay. We decided to face east, towards what we usually see in El Cajon, plus we could see Santee, Poway, Mira Mesa, and some smaller ones as well, plus it must have been Viejas Casino (we are totally going there next year…not the casino, but somewhere nearby, because from what we could see behind the hill, theirs was freakin’ awesome).

Night pictures have their own weirdness.

And it’s honestly not the same as being right under the big booms and cascading lights…

And we wouldn’t have known that if we hadn’t tried…that’s the display we normally watch.

Getting blurry. It was a good experience though. Burned 750 calories for the day, so you can’t argue with that. We got a little lost on the way back because we are a family who is easily irritated by other people, and the groups that were stretched all the way across the trail and giggling like drunken maniacs (really, carrying your drink in one hand down a steep slope while you carry your child on your hip? Whatever.) annoyed us, so we sort of kamikazed our way down. Saw two baby scorpions on the trail (don’t think I’ve ever seen those in the wild before, at least not since I was a kid). That was cool.

And when we got back, after 10 PM, I decided to keep going on the ironing. That might have been a bit crazy, but if you’ve been here for a while, the crazy will not surprise you. I got it to here before we left…

All those bits and pieces ironed down, except for the Fallopian tube that lies over the hand on the left…it’s not attached yet because the hand goes under it…so when we got back, I did the hand and the stuff on the right shoulder/arm.

We had closed Calli up in the girlchild’s room, because she freaks out over fireworks. The ones that went off the night before, apparently she hid under the computer desk and then tried to climb into the boychild’s lap. So when we got back, there was a lot of crying and neediness, and this is where she slept for the next 4 hours…

RIGHT under my feet. A little annoying, but she was better afterwards…hard to concentrate on ironing, though, when you’re trying NOT to step on a dog.

Yes, I ironed for the next 4 hours. I was a little obsessive. I started on the face, which meant trying to find tiny little pieces in another box, because the face straddled two boxes.

I eventually found all the parts and got the whole thing together.

So now I have the whole bottom section ironed in one piece, then two side sections that sit on/in the water, then the entire torso is one piece from knees to clavicle. Then the head is separate. I’m about 17 hours in and I made it to the middle of the 1300s…it was a logical place to stop. Unfortunately, it was about 2 AM and then my brain wouldn’t shut down. It was fully in art mode, and although I was too tired to keep ironing, I couldn’t shut my brain down enough to go to sleep, so I read blogs for a while…but Ms. Needy was on my lap requiring attention.

Could have been fireworks. Who knows. I gave her what she needed and eventually made it into bed before 3. Not good for today’s brain, but it needed to happen for yesterday’s brain. I’m trying to wake up enough now to handle the gym and more ironing and painting or texturing or something. Not sure of the order. One thing at a time. Another ironing day like today, though, and I could be done. Unfortunately, I don’t think I can pull off that level of focus today. We’ll see. It’s progress anyway, significant progress.

I found a list last night (ironically while trying to shut DOWN the creative brain) of 37 creative books to read…Here. I’ve read 7 of them. I don’t really need help with the creative brain. When it misbehaves, I know why and I know how to get it back, although it might take me a while. Those aren’t artists’ blocks or anything…it really is just a matter of what I can handle. You need times of fallow to counteract the times when the brain is going like gangbusters. It’s rest, just like sleep at night (which I also suck at doing properly). So. I might read some of these. I might not.

Grabbing That Errant Eyeball

Well, first of all, I found piece 469, one of the tiny fingernails on that hand that is either reaching for or grabbing that errant eyeball.

I still have an elbow shadow, another fingernail, and a droplet of blood that are missing, but I’m hoping they’ll show up in the next 8 boxes. Holy crap. Do I really have 8 boxes left to iron? I am slow. Actually, it might be 9 boxes, but I’ve ironed bits and pieces out of the 1200, 1400, and 1500 boxes that were mixed up in the lower numbers because I missed numbering those pieces and had to go back and do it.

I haven’t ironed the damn octopus tentacles at all, because honestly, that scares me. I might need tweezers. And a magnifying glass.

Today was a much more successful day, and I was feeling pretty good about what I had achieved, and then shit from my past dropped in my lap. I’m trying to ignore it, like you would ignore an old smelly cat, but really, those are impossible to ignore, because they do that kneading thing with their claws in your lap and they’re purring and often trying to bump their head against your mouse hand and it’s just freakin’ annoying. Yes, I have personal experience with this.

I spent some time today at a friend’s house and cut out most of the Wonder Under for the 10 small bird quilts…

I finished the rest tonight. It took from 5 minutes (bird 2) to 16 minutes (bird 8) to trim the Wonder Under…about an hour and 45 minutes total today. My goal is to iron some onto fabric this weekend, but I really wanted to have the big quilt ironed together before I did that, and I don’t think I can do that as quickly as I’d like. The birds so far have taken from 22 minutes (bird 1) to 46 minutes (bird 8) to number, trace onto Wonder Under, and then cut out of the Wonder Under. Bird 8 has more pieces and is larger. The smaller birds are 1-6. Anyway. It’s progress. Progress is good. I put each bird into a tupperware or rubbermaid container (let’s hope we don’t have many leftovers in the near future) for the next step. It’s not a lot different from what I do now with 100 pieces in a bin, except this isn’t very many pieces, honestly.

The next renovation step has a lot of wait time in between the separate tasks, so hopefully I can stay focused and finish the damn quilt things…I’m starting to panic. I really feel like I’m getting nothing of substance done, and I know it’s because each thing I’m doing is so huge and time-consuming that you can’t see the finish line for all the chaos in front of it…like the living room getting done or this big quilt being finished. Even the birds…they’re small, but I’m crazy and decided to do 10 instead of 1 or 2. It’s really because I couldn’t decide…and there’s some argument that it’s more efficient this way. We’ll see if that’s true.

So yeah, I hiked tonight after…well, my last long hike was Memorial Day weekend…I never blogged about it for some reason (end of school brain death). I did a short flat hike in mid-June, with minor knee pain…but otherwise, oh yeah, there was one dog hike. That’s it. So I had been planning to do something this week and just couldn’t commit. Honestly, I was really worried my knee would act up…so I finally picked one that was strenuous but shorter than what I normally do, and in the evening, and that had at least one person I knew on it, just in case. And I packed my poles, in case the knee got really bad.

And then I hiked. And it was good. And the knee behaved, zero pain. And yes. Hallelujah. I felt good about that. So I will try to keep doing at least one night hike a week. I’ve persuaded boychild and my ex to hike tomorrow night to see fireworks (girlchild is in Anaheim and will be at Disneyland for that…scary!).

My success with the hike was enough to push me into ironing tonight…also I wasn’t as freakin’ tired as I have been the rest of this week…maybe because I went to bed at a reasonable hour last night (unlike tonight, right?). Sleep has not been good. I’m worried about upcoming stuff, lots of stuff. And worry is not good for sleep. Neither is being an old lady, but I can’t do anything about that.

So I finished up the pelvic area…some scars and cracks…

And then moved on into the ribcage above it, which is really fucking complicated (goddamned designer is just making it hard on me).

She has two hands in front of her that I haven’t ironed yet (obviously), and she’s holding her uterus (like you do). And there’s a snake that is somehow behind her and in her…so that’s the yellow/green stuff in her middle area. I’m mostly through the 900s. So halfway. Aargh. It felt like so much more, but if you think about it, there’s half the body left, including the face, which is incredibly complicated, plus a bird and an eyeball and a wolf and I don’t even know what else…and those damn tentacles. So I really shouldn’t be surprised. I’m at 12 hours and 38 minutes and I need to start spending more than an hour or two a day on this. So I should assume another 12 hours, at least. If I start now, I’ll be done before lunchtime.

Yeah. I’m a slavedriver. But I know what I need to get done this summer, and I know what challenges I will face in the new school year, so trying to get stuff done AND get my head straight would be a good thing. Damn head…keeps twisting around and trying to figure shit out. It just needs to accept that other people’s shit is not its problem. Sometimes I really hate days like today when I get so close to good feelings all around, not happy, but not shit, and then one thing throws me. I need more resilience. More padding. More protection. I’m imagining this…

Yup. That, except around my brain. Plus smiling. Yeah.

I miss this…

Because she’s gone for days…Key Club convention. Her male counterpart is around…he got his new college computer (grad present from his parental units) and is thrilled to have a computer that will run more than one application at a time. I feel that pain. We have three old and decrepit computers that need updating…so that’s one down. I’m not replacing all three…mine first, because it’s the oldest and makes the most inappropriate noises, despite my earlier fixes of the year. By then, girlchild will need her own super-speedy laptop for college. So maybe that’s how I solve that problem. Just spend thousands of dollars to send them to college instead of fixing the house computers.

Here he is with his last National Piano Guild certificate…a Superior rank.

Kind of cool…I remember taking him to the first one a million years ago. He was shorter than me then and had a shaved head. Things change. I bet if I go to bed, things will change again. Like maybe I won’t feel so crappy. Look how much stuff I did today! Brain! Pay attention! Yeah. OK. Sorry. Didn’t mean to disturb you. OK, I’ll turn the light out before I go. Closing the door. Sorry. Whispering now. Good night. Sleep tight. Don’t let the…OK OK. I’m shutting up now. Geez. Brain has no sense of humor.

I Can’t Opt Out of the Tree-Killing…

Hello Internet. I have talked to very few people in the last 24 hours…in fact, I think all of them were either related to me by blood or they were providing a service for which they were paid. Hmn. That sounds bad. I went to look at carpet for the living room. I said “No Thank You” to the Kohls’ lady who wanted me to get their rewards card, and I ordered a burrito. I said yes to salsa. The guy at the gym talked to me because I can never get my card to scan. Apparently it takes special skills for that. I also talked to my mental health insurance company about the plethora of trees they are killing by sending me three pieces of paper in the mail in an envelope every time I go to counseling. I feel sorry for those who need counseling multiple times/week…I mean, first of all, because they need that much therapy but also because of the trees they are killing.

It turns out I can’t opt out of the tree-killing. I must endure it. I do not understand. It’s like the silly yellow immunization record I’m supposed to bring every time the kids go to the doctor. We lost boychild’s years ago, and I never remember girlchild’s. Why is it not all accessible on the web? Well, it sort of is, but they still want that yellow piece of folded paper in its funny plastic cover.

So the plus with going to work every day is that I often have substantive conversations with humans I’m not related to, and I don’t have to pay them to have those conversations. Instead, I spend a lot of time hiding in books or avoiding the darkly dank bits of my brain. Not fun.

When I woke up this morning and opened my blinds, this is what I saw…

Now yes, I know, it’s a nasty bit of dirt that used to be a lawn, and it will eventually be something nicer, but I’m not planting things in the summer because it’s silly in Southern California when there will be no rain for the next four or five months to plant things unless you plan to water them a lot. You can see where the trees belong though…in the place where I don’t have to stare at my neighbor’s truck. So dad found some trees, maybe, and hopefully later this week we will deal with that. Or next week. Because at least I can plant the trees and something else to block delivery guys from wondering where the fuck my front door is (because that ain’t it). And yes, that’s where they left the box. Right there. In the middle of the dirt.

The box was addressed to the boychild and had this lovely tape on it.

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Yes, this is how my life is at the moment. Tape is exciting. And uses the word pilfer. I’m betting none of my students know what pilfer means. Although I did teach them irk and vex, so I could have taught them pilfer as well. Next year. I’m also going to teach them how to make a proper British cup of tea, so they can stop asking me about my coffee (if it has milk in it, it must be coffee?). The next most common question in my class besides “Can I go to the bathroom?” which is always answered with, “Yes, I believe you know HOW, but not right now,” is “What’s THAT for?” while pointing at the eyewash. Hate that thing. I bump into it constantly, it’s in a stupid fucking location, whole room is designed by a blind dehydrated poodle, and it doesn’t matter that I demonstrate how and why to use it on like the third day of school, I will get asked about 148 times during the year (there are only 183 school days; you do the math) about what it’s for. I’m thinking of making posters for the most annoying questions so I’ll just have to point at them. Of course, one of those posters would simply say, “It’s not coffee; it’s tea.” Maybe I could have one of the Doctors saying it. David Tennant would probably do that for me. I’ll text him.

OH MY. I can actually have my tea in a David Tennant mug.

Unfortunately, the link goes to a mug with not quite as much handmade character, but here it is…and really, if I got this for school, I’d just have to explain who it was to 95% of my students.

Yes, I need to get out more. I’m going to be doing that tomorrow. Maybe. Because the girlchild started texting me at midnight about her bee sting. She stepped on a bee at the soccer tournament yesterday afternoon, and it didn’t start swelling until last night, and tonight it’s bugging her again (please don’t make me say something about how walking around on a bee sting injury at the Del Mar Fair might have made it worse, because you honestly can’t tell a 16-year-old anything like that…they will just turn it into some drama about what an awful mother you are and did you call her stupid?). I gave her some recommendations (ice, Benadryl, Motrin, cold washcloth), but she’s leaving tomorrow for Anaheim for a huge Key Club convention, so inevitably the foot will go south once she’s up there, probably in the middle of the night, so I’m expecting to have to drive to Anaheim in the middle of the night tomorrow to take her to the hospital. Seriously. Sigh.

Meanwhile, boychild and I finished painting another two walls. All that’s left is the long 22-foot wall where the mirrors are…they come down tomorrow. Worst-case scenario, we’ll have to replace drywall. Which I don’t know how to do. Minor issue. There’s the little piece of wall next to the fireplace too. It has a mastic issue. I’m hoping for carpet installation by the end of next week (I can hope, can’t I?). Then put the house back in some semblance of order, because it’s reminding me too much of an episode of Hoarders at the moment…like the season finale.

I did iron a bit today…but not until late…

These bits are fussy. And very light. I think that was on purpose. I did manage to do the hand on the right side too. Up into the pelvic bone next, then into the torso. The uterus…it’s not in the body. She’s holding it. This is a quilt about menopause and how it fucks with all your systems…including the mental crap. Really, between the hormones and the diabetic stuff, it’s amazing my mind isn’t totally crumbling. Well, maybe it is.

I read a lot today. Couldn’t deal. That’s what happens when I can’t deal. I finished this…

Locas II by Jaime Hernandez. I’ve read some of the Love and Rockets series, and couldn’t find Locas I in the library. It was OK, sometimes really good and sometimes just crazy and even unintelligible, which might just come from not living in that world. Plus I couldn’t always tell the characters apart, especially when they changed hair color. But the graphic style is really nice.

I also read Relish by Lucy Knisley, which is the next book-club selection. I really liked this, and will hand it off to the girlchild, because it’s all about being in love with food…

It’s a really nice story about how Lucy fell in love with food over the years and the influence her parents had on her food connections. There’s even a few recipes in there. Her drawing style is really nice and clean.

Anyway, I suspect there will be less time tomorrow to lose myself in words (I even wrote tonight…over 900 words of the book, plus the 1400 I’ve written here). So all those things should add up to good. My counselor often asks me if things are good, if I remember what happy or joyful feel like. I have some vague memory of it, but I always have to stop and think about it…the third book I started today, Allen Zadoff’s The Lost Mission (or I Am the Mission, depending on what you think they might title it), had this to say: “I’ll give you a hint…if you have to think about it that long, it’s not happiness.” Yeah. I’m with you on that. A lot of it is just filler. And yes, I realize that reading actual books makes me even more of a tree killer…