Clearing the Mind

I have about 15 minutes before I have to get ready to leave…busy crazy day. When you’re a teacher, you can’t do a lot of the things normal people do on a work day. I don’t have a lunch hour where I can run errands. I don’t have a flexible start time. I can’t get an hour off in the morning to go get my blood tested or take my car in. I either take a half day or a whole day (which we never do, because it’s a rancid pain to deal with subs), so mostly you try to do stuff before or after school in some sort of crazy way before school starts or things close (yes, you, post office with your stupid hours).

Today is one of those days…I have a car issue, but the car guy is around the corner from a co-teacher, so I can catch a ride, but it makes the morning a little bit more chaotic. And the afternoon as well, honestly…

I love Mondays though, because 3 out of 4 weeks of the month, I get home relatively early and I walk the dog. We have a couple of local walks we do that are more nature than suburbia…this is going up a pretty steep slope, and Calli is being very good about the baby bunny at the top…

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OK. Really she’s trying to pull me up the slope, which is kinda useful, because it’s really steep. Anyway, it’s about 3 miles and at the end of it, I’m feeling much better, head is clear from work, and the dog is tired.

Unfortunately, it gets muddied again directly after, because I have a ton of grading to do, so I settled down to that for a while, then finally ate, and THEN I could start quilting again…I’d finished the torso the night before, so all that was left was the head for outlining.

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I had my trusty cat companion, who was going a bit bonkers at one point…

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Maybe she objected to what was on Netflix.

Amusingly, I thought I could finish the quilting last night, until I looked at the clock. Whoops.

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Well. Two and a half hours in. She’s outlined and I’ve started the background quilting, but no way was I gonna finish last night. I’m not that crazy. I do have to go to work today and deal with the car and maybe another dog and that’s a whole ‘nother long crazyass story.

And I still haven’t dealt with resizing photos at all. Too much work; not enough time. Especially right now…

Plenty on the Plate…

There was a lot of art this weekend. I haven’t even been able to process it really, there was so much of it. Four openings, and there was a fifth I meant to go to, but I was exhausted by then. Honestly, I think I need a whole day to sleep. Today would be nice, but apparently it’s a work day.

Here’s me with my two pieces at Feminism Now. I had to hold still for an interminable amount of time (apparently I can’t hold a smile that long)…

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But it gives you a good idea of the size differential between the two pieces. The smaller one will travel to Sweden next year and be in another show. It was a great opening, lots of amazing work. I’ll get through it when I have a chance and post a link to the official blogpost as soon as I can.

I did finally give the young woman some pupils, some holes in her eyes…

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And I also ironed and pinbasted her into a happy quilt sandwich…

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Ready for quilting. Then I thought about what I had coming up this week, and I do have quilt class, and I want to be efficient about what I get done at all times. Though my smart-ass answer whenever anyone asks me “How do you get so much work done” is that I don’t sleep (and this is somewhat true), the reality is that I am very practical and efficient as well. If I’m waiting for someone to show up and I have 20 minutes, I use it to iron something or cut something out. If I know I have somewhere I’ll be for two hours, and there’s a binding that could be sewn in that time, I wrangle it so that can happen. I don’t just sit at meetings…I’m almost always working. I even find it hard to sit in restaurants and wait for them to bring the food…it’s lost time.

Anyway. So I found binding fabric for that crazy orange quilt that I can’t explain…

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And I cut it and attached it so that Thursday I can sew it down.

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Then I started quilting the newest one. This is where the line comes in…the line that pops the drawing out…

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I love seeing the image become more clear as I sew the dark outline.

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I spent about an hour and did about half of the outlining. This part is so meditative, I find it hard to remember to look at the clock…let alone stand up once in a while and stretch…or go to bed. So she’s in progress. Maybe I’ll have her bound by Thursday too, although that might not be possible…I do have a ton of schoolwork to deal with as well. We’ll see.

Meanwhile, another hour into the disaster that was in my studio and is now in the boychild’s room. Two full trashbags have left and I’m now sorting through that red box. I’m still not entirely sure what to do with all the stuff…

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An ancient plastic needle safe (probably 1960s), full of needles. Can’t throw needles out. That’s crazy. Folding scissors. Ancient as well. Way too cool. A ton of crazy quilt fabric that I piled up by color, so I can easily pop it into the bins. Not even sure how long that’s been in the box, but the plastic bag it was in mostly fell apart when I picked it up. Obviously, there was an organizational gap in there somewhere. I have about 10 days to get it all figured out.

Meanwhile, tons of grading and teaching and all that good stuff. Plus I need to get the rest of that big drawing done. Plenty on the plate…there always is.

It Won’t Take Long…

So here’s what I know now, after last night: at 4:35 AM, the mockingbird shuts up. Totally quiet. Asleep even. Me? Not so much. That was a clusterfuck of not sleeping. OK. It’s all right. It’s Monday…always a rough day. I’m just gonna roll with it.

Grades are due Tuesday. I spent some time this weekend dealing with stuff that needed to be graded and then filling in all the the secondary grades, behavior and effort, then all the comments. Sometimes I don’t do comments for progress reports, but I want parents to know why their kid has the grade they have. And so many of them are one or two assignments from passing, but they don’t make the effort. Frustrating on my end. Maybe on theirs too. But seriously, if I’ve been telling the parents, in one case, for 4 weeks that she has two missing assignments and what they are, and those assignments still haven’t shown up, then hell, she deserves the damn F. I just don’t understand it.

So that frustration over, I considered grading some more and then slapped myself around a bit (seriously, enough is enough), and thought about what I needed to get done this week in the art arena. I have two quilts to deliver to a show on Saturday. One needs a bottom sleeve…it’s big and I made it before I automatically started putting bottom sleeves on. Then two need labels. Huh. Well, there’s a quilt under the machine that’s almost done…I should just finish it so I don’t have to switch machine foot and thread more than once. It won’t take long.

Last words of crazy people…it won’t take long.

Two hours later, I finally finished.

It took about 5 1/2 hours to quilt this. I’m not even sure why it took so long. Thread breakage maybe. It needs ink, embroidery, and a binding. I might deal with that this week. I might not. I really only needed it done so I could use the machine for the other thing. But hell, if that gets it done, then so be it.

Here’s the next two things hanging around…the one on the left needs quilting. I’m cutting out the pieces for the one on the right.

I just haven’t done anything with it since Thursday. I’ll get there.

First this beast needs a sleeve. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any more of the brown or enough of the binding fabric, which is what I used for the top sleeve, but I think the gray will do well enough.

I only really care because we’re hanging this one in the center of the gallery, so there won’t be a wall behind it. So it’s best if the back is not too chaotic. Hence the need for the second sleeve as well…it will hang much better with weight on the bottom.

So I made a second sleeve and pinned it on, and now I get to sew it on. Some quiet hours poking holes in my finger…unless I remember to put those plasticky protective pads on. That would be smart, wouldn’t it? Let’s hope I remember. Then labels for this one and the little one that goes with it…which also needs dowels. By Saturday. Plenty of time. Let’s hope I get more art done than that this week.

I also went to Artwalk this weekend…saw some good art and a lot of schlock, as always. I’ll post about some of it when I get my act together. Or sooner. Whichever makes sense.

Processing…

Some mornings…some days. I figure if I wake up in the morning and have zero motivation to do anything at all, I should listen to myself, because it’s rare that it happens. There must be a reason. I mean, obviously I don’t feel like working. I graded last night. I need to do more this weekend, but maybe not right this second. Now two hours-plus later, I got the laundry going, lots of bedding. It’s a start. And I cooked some food. Second cup of tea. Resized the photos from last night. But first I spent some time reading blogposts (yes, mine) from last April and May, so I could remind myself that it’s always like this and that’s OK. I mean, yes, it sucks, but there are only 43 days of school left and they never kill me and I always survive them, just as I will survive them this time around.

And not being able to really focus on one quilt-related thing at the moment? Oh well. No deadlines breathing down my neck. That’s OK. I can afford to wander around the artistic pile a bit. I’ll get that orange quilt done, do the body one as well. No rush. And I’ll start picking fabrics this week hopefully for the other one. Meanwhile, it’s the drawing that’s calling the loudest…the furthest thing from finishing…the one I probably won’t finish until the end of summer. It’s all good.

If you don’t draw or hike or do some other thing that puts your brain in that meditative place, that space in your head where all the crap is pushed aside, I don’t know how to explain the peace you get from it…whether it’s puzzling out how to finish the arm between a cat-boob and a snake-arm…or it’s setting out on a 17-mile hike (um, that’s the boychild…I stick to 3- to 10-mile hikes personally). It clears your head like a spring breeze. Like a wave.

So yeah, a bat. It made sense last night…still does today (but drawing too small!).

Then I did the hand. I was debating bird and butterfly, and one of those will probably still fill the space above it, but the egg made the most sense last night.

That snake head is pretty.

Then I finally drew the octopus. Had to think about the suckers…not too complicated at this size. I once did one with like 150 pieces in it. Crazy.

That’s how far I am right now…head and half an upper torso. It’s slow-going.

But ultimately peaceful and calming. So I don’t mind.

And maybe today should just BE a slow day. I’ll get stuff done…just not all of it or what I thought I would do. Maybe. I realize I’m pretty hard on myself, probably too demanding. Then again, I’ve seen so many friends just stop making art completely when they started families, and I’m not that person. And it’s hard to keep on top of the job and make art regularly and still venture out of the house occasionally.

The struggle! Yeah I know. I talk about it. I fight it. I get up off the couch. And some mornings, I veg out and read a bunch of stuff and refuse to take a shower or go to the gym. The world still turns on its axis. It’s not like I get nothing done. Cut me a break. (That’s me talking to myself)

So for the drawing, there’s another arm that comes down over the belly area, there’s obviously another breast. One of the reasons I wanted to do another one was because I wanted a uterus in this one, so that’s on…then maybe lower torso dissolves into landmasses and clouds like the other one. Definitely need a volcano. I swear, I can’t remember the other one, which is good, because although I want this one to talk to that one on the phone, maybe even be sisters, I don’t want them to be clones of each other. This is the less-restricted version…the one that still has animals and plants covering her, but not because they have to…because they want to. And the important stuff is still there. Nipples dammit. And a bird or butterfly or both. Still drawing itself in my brain. Holy crap…maybe she needs a vulva. But that puts her sitting. Hmmm. Processing…

My Brain Is Like a Rampant Bunny

I have two mornings this week when I have to be at school early for meetings, which just throws me off. It makes it harder for me to fall asleep, and then my overactive workaholic brain wakes me up a full hour early to make sure I don’t sleep through the alarm (silly brain, I never sleep through alarms), and then I can’t go back to sleep. I’ve tried telling my brain how counterproductive that is, but then it blames the early wakeup call on the local birds outside my window. Also under your control, I argue…with my brain…which doesn’t ever freakin’ listen to me.

I will pay for this lack of sleep later, for sure, on the busiest day of the week. Unfortunate really, but whatever. We bully through it. We soldier on. Both good words for how I get my brain to keep going when it doesn’t want to. Years of practice with middle-schoolers? Maybe. I spent two days fighting to get them to do what I needed them to do, and then I gave them a similar assignment yesterday, and I must have broken through some wall, because they were dead silent and working. Still had to repeat instructions about 70 times for the kids that didn’t pay attention AND can’t read them (proof that I could write poetry about boogers and ear wax in my instructions, and only 5 kids would ever see it).

My brain is still like a rampant bunny, bounding through tall grass, sometimes moving uber-fast to get away from predators, and sometimes stopping to smell the daisies. I can’t get it to focus at all, but at least I have plenty of projects lying around to distract it. Although then it just gets over-interested and I can’t get it to mellow out and go to sleep.

I started with cleaning…I put all that stuff in the boychild’s room because it would force me to clean it all up before he came home. So I filled that trashbag hanging off the door and piled up some other stuff in logical piles.

Not that you can see logical piles from here. You’ll just have to trust me. That yellow bin is empty though and can now go away. It’s circa 1985 I think…and not in great shape. It certainly held a variety of crap, most of which was just that…crap. Like samples from a flower-pounding session I did with the kids. Man those were ugly. Tossed them. And a ton of quilt patterns pulled from magazines that I will never do. That goes way back. Recycled those puppies.

This the bookshelf that has been blocked for years. I have bags of tie remnants to sell too. Back to eBay. I hang a lot of stuff off of there that probably doesn’t need to be there…quilt tops I may never finish. Blocks for quilts I’m not even working on.

Kitten had a rousing game of find the lizard on the window. Really. You can’t see it? Because the only reason I knew it was there was because she was batting at its foot…it’s hiding behind the center bit. You can just see its fingers/toes on the left side where she’s looking.

Or not. Then I quilted. I found it rather frustrating. I really just wanted to be done, but thread breakages abounded. No fun.

I got about halfway around. I still need to do the hill as well.

Then it was 11:30 and normal people would have gone to bed, but I knew my brain wasn’t ready, so I drew instead.

Cried all the way through the episode of Call the Midwife where Jenny…oh geez, don’t wanna ruin it for you. It was sad. Well and hormones. Because it probably wasn’t THAT sad. Notice that damn lizard is in my drawing. Can you see where? I don’t know what to say about that. Except that’s how I draw. Brain wanders, plops on paper.

Damn, I even graded last night and wrote an extra blogpost on here and another blogpost for someone else. Maybe that’s why my brain was in overdrive. Too much stimulation, getting stuff done. Plus I need to get some exercise in this week, but it won’t be today…dual meetings and then book club. Hopefully I’ll be able to come home and just go to bed. With my book. For next month’s book club.

By the way, I saw Deadpool over the weekend, and yeah, it was violent, but hysterically funny, except when it was being sad, but more importantly…Wade is a stitcher! He made his own costume…over and over again…and the character Blind Al, played by Uhuru from Star Trek, is my favorite.

I get a little irritated with the goody-goody attitudes of some of the superheroes, like Thor and Captain America, and it drives me nuts how much the movies blow off good female characters who aren’t wearing slinky bras to kill bad guys with, but this guy is kinda fun. And he sews. Can’t be all bad.

So Many Choices

My brain is a little garbled this morning. I’m hoping that’s not a problem. I was so bloody efficient yesterday, enlarging the drawing last night…I started with 200%, but the head was huge, so I backed it down to 150%. That looked reasonable. I didn’t have time to tape it together, but that’s OK. I’m supposed to be working on 17 other quilts before that one anyway. I made it to my stitching meeting, where mostly I read an article in New Yorker and chatted. I sewed a few stitches. I made it home with dinner…always a plus. I’m tired of eating the same thing this week. Brain freeze on the same food every day. Sometimes I don’t care at all and some days it just drives me crazy. Suppose it depends on what I’m eating…more of the quinoa chicken bowls. They’re good. Takes a ton of time to make those though. That’s the problem. Not sure I have the time this weekend.

And then too many choices. I wanted to start picking fabrics, but I was just too tired to make that happen. I thought about taping the drawing and starting to draw the rest, but that tired thing again. So I came in here and quilted…

All the outlining is done and I’m quilting orange in the background. Or red. Maybe it’s red-orange thread. See the backing fabric? Green robots? Leftovers from a baby quilt from a few years back. I count my years at this school in history teachers, because we can’t keep them more than a year, it seems. My old history teacher’s wife and my new history teacher’s wife were each having a baby, within about 2 weeks of each other. So they each got one. I never met either wife, I think. Weird, huh? Whatever. I pass on the quilty goodness.

I don’t actually make that many baby quilts. I’ve made like 6 of them. And then for a while, I made these little landscapes for wedding and Christmas presents. I’ve probably made about 20 of those. I actually have one of them back from my ex-MIL after her death. And then I’ve made about 90 art quilts. Which is crazy. Seriously crazy. Assuming I have another 30+ good quilting years left in me? I could fill the damn house. Maybe it’s better if I make fewer big quilts rather than lots of smaller quilts. Huh.

And I should probably give up on the Etsy site. It’s not like I’m regularly gonna make more little safe quilts for that…or even unsafe ones. And there’s no sales. So shut that down I guess. Or go look at the timing and calendar when to shut it down.

So I didn’t get much done, but I did get some. It’s all I can do some days. Some. A little. A bit. OK, I think I actually quilted for an hour and a half. It was like meditation at the end of the day, and I actually fell asleep at a reasonable time last night (mostly because I think I’m about to hit a wall of mental and physical exhaustion after this week). I’m feeling good about all of it. Finish these two quilts and start picking fabrics for the next one. Relax a bit with the art. Stop trying to make a deadline where one doesn’t exist. You have enough choices…you can handle fabric or draw or quilt…so many choices.

So many choices. Meditating with art.

Never-Ending Cups of Tea Would Be Cool if They Were Real

Stayed up way too late again, but for a reason! OK, it’s always for a reason. It’s not always a good reason. My brain is sometimes very juvenile. Anyway, so I finished quilting.

I didn’t get a lot else done yesterday honestly. It was a lost day. Oh. I did hike the dog. And there are photos! But they’re on my phone and I need to get my act in gear and do some work today, so you’ll have to wait to see them.

It took about 3 hours to do all the outline quilting, which honestly was the biggest part of this quilt.

I had to go pretty slow because the details are so freakin’ tiny…

And I was lucky to have a color of thread that worked for the background. I know some of you have incredible thread stashes, but not me, so I thought I might have to quit last night and go shopping today, but no! I had one that worked…

The total quilting time was 4 hours and 23 minutes…a baby quilt. I had a few places I had to go back and fix because I’d forgotten to stitch them down. I mark them with pins. Ironically, this pin is in the wrong place…it’s the next artery to the left. But I figured that out.

And then quilted the background, finishing around 1 AM or so. After I think.

Then I read the prospectus 17 times and measured twice as many times before I trimmed it. I really hate pieces having to be an exact size. She’s only 16 x 24″. Tiny really for me. This would be a perfectly reasonable quilt at 200-250% of this size. Anyway. Then I cut the binding but realized in the middle of the night (OK, morning, because I didn’t go to bed until morning) that I cut it too small. So I have more and will cut again today. But I really really really have to grade stuff first, as much as it might kill me. And tomorrow is actually kind of busy, so I need to get the quilt done today as well. Dad will be disappointed that I haven’t worked on the yard, but that’s because his priorities and mine are different. So I’m going to plop myself on the couch with a never-ending supply of tea and I’m going to grade until I start pulling my hair out. Then I’m going to the gym (I hope). Then I will come back and put the binding on the quilt and then grade some more…and if that doesn’t sound like a fun day to you, well, then, I agree. Finishing the quilt will be fun. The other parts suck. Well, I like the gym. And never-ending cups of tea would be cool if they were real.

I Can’t Think of a Title Because That Damn Crow Won’t Shut Up.

An empty nest during Spring Break…it sounds like bliss to those friends of mine who still have kids at home. I remember Spring Break was almost torture, because I still had tons of schoolwork, housework, and yardwork to do, but I had to entertain two kids as well. And feed them and clean up after them and all that. As they got older, sometimes they would help around the house as well, but it was still work to get through those two weeks. They were necessary to my sanity in the school year, but I didn’t feel relaxed at the end of them. Yes, I’m lucky to have two weeks off, because as any teacher knows, it takes a week just to try to recover from what you’ve been doing in the weeks before. So I get the recovery time and then a week to try to fix whatever I need to fix. Or finish grading, more like it…almost 9 hours in the last two days, but one assignment is done and input. Hopefully the next big assignment will go faster (ha!). I’ve already done some of it, the paper stuff mostly, before break started, so that was smart. But the computer stuff…my school computer is dying and is scheduled for a reboot after break, but I’m trying to bully it through some work before that happens. Otherwise I have to sit in here at this computer and I can’t have some TV show nattering on in my other ear, persuading my brain to continue working. My brain requires multiple stimulants to do just about anything. Seriously. Even art. Can’t be quiet.

So it’s been too quiet here, too much alone time. Spring Break with no kids around. No one around really. It is what it is. At some point, this will be summer break as well, although not this year…at least one is coming home. Not sure about the other one. We’ll see. I’ll have to put the house on Airbnb or foster a child or puppies to get through that.

So I spend my days working through the lists of crap to do that are mostly in my head. Yesterday, the front yard, which has been a disaster since the septic field was redone, was on my list. The weeds are over 4 feet high and I’m waiting for the county to get called. My neighbor is frustrated, but he’s retired and has a gardener, neither of which are my superpowers.

Weeds. Huge ex-lawn. Deck covered in leaves. Tree overhanging.

Two plus hours later, I’ve cleared the deck, trimmed the tree, excavated weeds to the middle (mostly), and weed-whacked part of the growth.

My whacker isn’t going to make the grade though, so I went and borrowed dad’s. It’s gas-powered and I might need a shoulder harness to wield it, and if I don’t hold on tight, it might send me skyrocketing through the air into my neighbor’s yard. I’ll have to go back out again today…there are more weeds to pull and things to whack. And the real decision of what to do with the space anyway…I’d love to have the time and money to re-landscape it in a more native-plant style. But that’s not in the cards. It rained a little last night. Hopefully that will help with the weeds in the middle. They were not happy about being pulled.

This morning, I pulled 17 thorny splinters out of my hands…and that was WITH gloves on.

So after that and groceries and cooking up some weird stuff (some recipes are just lame with amounts of ingredients) and grading for fucking hours, I finally made it into the studio. Late. I pinbasted this one and the other one (which I didn’t apparently photograph).

And started quilting. Barely. It was late.

It’s the line that will pull this thing together. And I’m running out of time, so I need to put some significant hours into this today.

Oh! And good news this morning…a quilt I made for a specific show actually got into said show! A miracle. The Goddess of Never-Ending Chaos will be in Houston as part of the Turmoil SAQA exhibit.

This is kinda what it feels like when I meditate. Seriously. Even with the kids moved out. I’m glad it got in. There were 24 chosen from 220 entries…typical 10%…but it’s nice to be in there once in a while.

Lemonade Afternoon

You know that quote, “When life gives you lemons, make lemonade?” Well yesterday I had CPR/First Aid training. And it was boring. It could have been worse, but I’m easily amused by bad video. Like when the worker goes “Hi, little buddy” to the small furry animal you can’t see and gets bit. I laugh. Because my lord. Seriously. The trainer promises there will be a better set of videos in two years when we have to take this again.

The plus was that we were so quiet and asked so few questions that we got out way early. And I came home and quilted. When life gives you a free afternoon because you did CPR training so you could take your students on a field trip next month, use it to make art. I should have graded all afternoon, and to my credit, I did try to grade at the gym, but first the wifi wasn’t working and then the damn app wasn’t functioning correctly. So I gave up. And then came home and kept quilting. Because I have a deadline and my photographer is flexible, but hell, I have to get started on the next quilt too.

And grading. Sucks. Yeah. I did monitor my students on their computers all day. That was fun. We can see what tabs they have open and send them messages, like “Get off Facebook and get to work.” A couple kids just didn’t get it. I kept shutting them down and finally shut down every tab they had open as soon as they opened it. It didn’t take more than about 5 minutes of monitoring per class before they were all in the folder they were supposed to be in. Ha! Bastards. Big Teacher is watching you. My co-teacher in crime (also in CPR) was doing the same thing, so I think by the end of the day, the kids all knew they had two teachers watching everything they were doing. Sometimes being a teacher means being an evil villain character.

So I quilted for 5 hours yesterday. I know. Wow. Cool.

There’s lots of eyeballs in this quilt. Twelve to be exact. Well. There’s two on the cat, but they’re closed. And the little figures, there’s four there too. So 18 eyes. No snake on this quilt though. My imagery is shifting maybe? No Christmas lights, no bird…no bird is weird. Most of my quilts have a bird.

Anyway, I think it’s turning out well…

And at some point in the afternoon yesterday, I went and got two possible binding fabrics for it. Not sure which one is best. I was in a hurry. They’re in the dryer and when I get home from school tonight, I’m going to try to get the binding on, because I have quilt class tonight and I can do the hand-sewing there. I don’t want to lug the machine along and do the whole thing there though, so I have to quick! Come home, iron it, trim it, and bind it! No problem.

The animals were confused by my presence all afternoon…

I have five blurry-faced photos of the cat. She wouldn’t stay put. Same with the dog. Ten hours almost total quilting. Half of what I had estimated…although I knew my estimate was too high.

I feel much better about things today. I got taxes and FAFSA started, I got the quilting done, I got a quilt packed up and ready to ship. I still have a ton of stuff to get done, but it’s less looming and more manageable-looking. I will be so glad when the kids are done with college and I don’t have to deal with all the financial aid hoops any more. They are really stressful. Especially in a divorce situation. I’m really worried about how I’m going to pay for any of it next year. I don’t have any more cushions, no more college accounts to cover my portion of the fees. It’s scary.

But I’m going to try not to think about that right now. Because I’m finishing a quilt, and that’s a cool thing (although now she needs a name…aack!). And I can start thinking about the next one, which will be smallish. In fact, a difficult size for me…not super small, like 8-12″ squares really challenge me, but at least they don’t take long, but this is a size I never do…16×24 I think. Totally off for me. Remember not to do a lot of tiny pieces! Yeah. Like I listen to myself. Oh well…at least it will be a challenge.

Responsible Adult…

Adjustments made. Taxes started instead of quilting all night like I wanted. Have to be a responsible adult, dontcha know? Up early today to retrain on CPR and that heart device that I will hopefully never have to use. I had two students one year where we had to drag that thing with us on every field trip. I don’t envy my sub today…my kids are getting increasingly antsy and boisterous. We have one teacher out and the guest teacher is…eh. She’s eh. Four and a 1/2 more weeks until Spring Break. Then the math teacher will come back. I hopefully won’t kill them all in 4 1/2 weeks. Definitely in burnout. But it’s not just school. Life itself is wearing on me. Too many tasks. Want to run free in a meadow or something. But that would probably cost money I don’t have.

Really I’d be happy if I could remember to find the time to fold the towels and put them away. Plus whatever else has been living in that laundry basket for the last two months.

Quilting is so peaceful, so meditative, while I’m actually in front of the machine.

I don’t think about school or stress about people or money or college or taxes. I just quilt. Move the sandwich around and around. Listen to the music or the thing on Netflix. Don’t think too hard about it. Just draw the line, careful around the teeth and the eyes, draw around the tiny little words, thread breaks, tie it off, start up again. Bobbin runs out, fill it up. So simple. So linear. So peaceful. Don’t watch the clock. Don’t stop until you’re ready. Just go.

Sometimes I think I should just do this stuff every night and not be a grownup. But then reality kicks in. I graded. I did taxes. All very grownup. No one told me how much shit would end up on my plate though. I teach 12-year-olds. I spend all school year with kids who mostly have no idea how much work it is to be a grownup. They’re testing the boundaries of being a kid, growing up into teenagers, but not quite ready to take on the world. Last year’s failures just got lectured about not graduating. Some of them come to me and talk about their grades improving, but there they are, on the failing list. Some are just still failing, almost proud about it, beating their chests like it’s a plus.

I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the parent yesterday who said there were no consequences at home if he fails. None. No one taught her how to raise her child. He doesn’t have to be awesome. He just needs parents who give a shit about his future. Then he can too.

I think I need more walks on the beach and in the mountains. I need more hours on the elliptical. I need more time with my sketchbook. I need more time with needle and thread, fabric too. Having the kids gone gives me very little room for moods and stress. There’s nothing for them to bounce off of…they just reverberate in my own head.

Sigh. Off to learn how to save the world. Again. Damn hormones. They really fuck with you.