Crawling the Walls*

As I’ve been watching the Kavanaugh confirmation maelstrom erupt all over the news, all I can think is why? Why would we want anyone in that position who (a) doesn’t have the back of half the population of the country (seriously not thinking of women’s rights or needs, from what I’ve seen, unless you need me to be pregnant with no rights to my uterus) or (b) where there is any hint at all of sexual impropriety (Clarence Thomas, we’re talking to you right now). I keep hearing that it’s “normal” for boys to do stupid sex things when they’re kids…or even men, as adults…and it’s not normal. It’s not OK. It’s not in their genes. It’s not caused by testosterone. As one woman said, there are plenty of people in jail who did something stupid when they were 17…they just weren’t rich enough to get out of it.

As a woman, I’ve lived through my share of sexual crap, harassment and worse, all perpetrated by men. And my goal is that my daughter never ever has to go through that. She already has…both here in the US and in Madagascar. It’s everywhere. It’s one thing to fear for yourself, walking in the dark, keys between your fingers, poised to hit 911 on your phone. It’s an entirely different thing to think about your daughter in the same situation. Give up on him. Wait until after the midterm elections. The hypocrisy in the current administration is driving me nuts. There should be no question about this. Get Kavanaugh out.

It’s actually significantly hard to watch all this. It reminds me of how little women are regarded right now in this country…and that’s sad.

So all that’s in my head.

Yesterday, we walked the dogs. At one point, the little one got it into his head that he wanted to wander off the main trail into coyote country, so the boychild let him.

He kept claiming we were on a truck trail. Uh huh. Right. Well, here, we are back on the main road. Turns out the puppy was trying out a shortcut.

He cut a 1/4 mile out of our regular walk. He said he was tired. Probably we all have ticks now too.

I graded for a long while. I have a lot to get done and not much time in which to do it. But a little at a time works.

I only ironed for 45 minutes last night, but it was enough to find and cut out all these little leaves…

Plus do the other arm (minus the hand)…and then start on the belly.

Midnight came and told me to go to bed. Wow. I miss Midnight (the cat). Still. A year later. Anyway, Midnight the TIME told me to go to bed.

I paused…I’m watching Luther…but was fascinated by this picture when I paused…

Off to bed, and there’s Katie, being a dork. Itchy nose, I think.

I helped her with that. Oh yeah, and I forgot I packed a quilt last night to ship to a show this morning. Really, I got a lot of stuff done…it just wasn’t all in the artistic-making realm. Art has to get shipped. Science has to get graded. Dogs have to be walked. Making art is sort of the ugly stepchild…it goes last, gets the smallest helping sometimes.

OK, brain…you are off this morning. Still tired. Going to go to UPS now and then school and then tutoring…and then to watch another artist explain herself tonight. And hopefully by the end of the week, I’ll see my country screw its head back on. That would be a change from the last year and a half or so.

*Dave Gross, Crawling the Walls

Needing the Art…

Well I worked a lot this weekend. I got a lot done. It never feels like enough, because there is always more, but it was a good two days. Until your SIL asks what you did all weekend, and all you can say is “graded shit.” Well. It needed to be done. The next few weeks are busy…more for my date-night companion than for me, but mine will translate into more grades (progress reports are due next week) and hopefully artmaking. I carved out time yesterday for a significant chunk of that. At some point, I’ve done enough grading and I need to do something else.

One thing we did (well, the boychild did) was replace the wireless card in my computer, trying to solve the internet problem in here.

Spiders had been in there. Weird. The plus is that when I have internet, it is now much faster. The minus is that I am still losing the internet…but only on the computer. The laptop and other devices work fine in here. Sigh. So that’s still a problem that needs solving.

I did do some work in the morning, schoolwork, but after 8 or so hours on Saturday of that, I wasn’t giving up the rest of the day. I started ironing around 4:30 PM…

This one shouldn’t take long…

I took a break to make this week’s lunches and start dinner prep. It was group cook night…make your own damn pizza. Although I did the dough prep.

So during dinner’s TV watching hour, I did more of these. I didn’t get much done last week on this.

I think I still have 7 of them left. SLOOOWWW. I remember predicting the end of July. Maybe the end of September? That’s a little less than a week away. I only work on it when we’re both home and eat together, so last week, I think that was one night? Maybe 2?

Anyway, after that, it was back to the ironing. These are all the 100s, in stacks by 10s.

I started by ironing the fruit and the fruit bowl separate and then putting them where they belong…

Then working on the legs…back hip and roots first, then back foot…

Simba was with me for a while…

Here’s the whole front leg done…

And then the heart and starting on the front arm.

The bird and nest are done, but I quit before ironing all the leaves on. It was just about midnight at that point.

And I would have had to lay out all the 300s and cut out a lot of the leaves (they’re small) before being able to iron them down. I do try to head to bed around midnight. So I ironed for 3 1/2 hours and I’m more than halfway done. I won’t get that much time tonight, but I will get some. We’ll see how well I do, but I would hope to be stitching down by Wednesday or so. I don’t have any night meetings this week until Friday, so that’s a plus. I do need to grade a lot still though…hopefully mostly at school. We’ll see.

I did not get the copyediting job, so that’s actually kind of a plus. He wasn’t the most accurate guy when it came to communication. Turns out he wasn’t just ignoring me for days…he was getting other quotes, which I don’t mind…but TELL me you received my bid and then TELL me why you aren’t answering. Geez. Professionalism. Meanwhile, I have students begging me to grade their late work (I do that once a week and I did it Sunday morning) and demanding that I change their grade because I didn’t tell them about the back page (I did) and kids losing their science folders in their backpacks (yikes!). Sigh. This job carries a significant amount of frustration, true. That’s why I love (and need) the art so much. Hell, I’d need the art no matter what I did for a living.

Head-Swallowing.

I keep drawing heads swallowing smaller heads. It’s actually even a notation in my weekly journal, constantly on the to-do list…”draw more heads smaller” is what it says. And yet I keep drawing them the same, not fitting more than one or two on the page (probably a function of page size…I should totally go full size). I’m not sure what it means. People always want me to explain my work, and when they realize that I was really tired last night and I made the mistake of having a glass of wine with dinner instead of waiting until really late, and so I almost fell asleep on the couch at 9:30 PM, like a normal person, but then I realized what was going on and got up and got my act together and did something artistic, and somehow that turned into being awake enough to draw another head-swallowing moment, well they give me that look that makes me wonder how crazy I really am. I’m sure it’s some psychological thing where I feel like my job and life are swallowing what I really want to be doing or something like that. Not so difficult to figure out.

I’m not really crazy. Just a bit. Just praying here to the internet/computer gods that I can keep the connection long enough to post this. New computer card arrives today. Let’s hope it solves the problem. Here’s the drawing, not done.

I don’t know where it’s going. I just wanted to draw. So I did. That’s a little less than an hour’s worth of pen on paper. It felt nice. I should do more of it.

It’s really only because I couldn’t get the internet to function at all, so I couldn’t grade anything. Frustrating. I need to grade stuff.

I did have quilt class last night. I finished outlining the blue flowers, sewed the rhino horns with split stitch…harder than you might think over wool…and then palestrina knots for the bird’s legs.

It never looks like much for 2 hours of work. There will be more of it at gaming tonight. I’m on the July blocks now. I think.

In between the class and the drawing, I did sort the fabrics for the next quilt, so I can start ironing this weekend. Here’s in process…

And done. Very exciting stuff.

This is not a hugely complicated quilt, so it didn’t take long. If I weren’t so tired (why am I so tired???), I would’ve started ironing it together, but that would’ve meant standing up. I didn’t do a lot of standing or walking yesterday…I was in a training, which meant my classroom went to hell in a handbasket. I love trainings. Actually, we planned for most of it, so that was good, because we needed to do that. We need to do more, of course, always more, but we’re closer than we were.

So this weekend is full of grading and hopefully ironing. And sleeping in tomorrow. I really like to sleep in. I’m such a shitty sleeper, it’s kind of ironic that I get up in the morning and I’m already thinking about when I might be able to put the pillow over my head and ignore the alarm clock.

I’m not even trying to play music right now. It would break the computer. It means I have to come up with a title with no support system. Hmmm.

Just One More Peaceful Day*

I haven’t had time to draw in a while. I used to draw a lot more. I’d like to draw more. One I think I do draw is cover pages for science. I also draw when I have a specific piece or exhibit in mind. In science, every unit has a cover page that’s about the upcoming topic. It gives the kids a chance to sort of check out the subject matter, google a bunch of stuff about whatever we’re studying, and start to use some vocabulary words. For me, it’s a chance to draw and color for a good portion of the day. I even sit at their tables with them and color (I usually pick the most disruptive table, so there is a purpose to my madness). Yesterday was such a day…the beginning of Unit 2. I also got a bunch of grading done, so I don’t feel bad about taking a break to hang out and draw.

So the next unit is earth science…

I illustrated some of the vocab words…and then I got to color.

It just took 5 tries to get that picture to load. Internet, wifi, computer, whatever it really is, I’m about to scream. So many struggles. I know, it’s not the end of the world. It’s just frustrating.

When I got home from school, after hanging out at Michael’s and trying to find things that would fit in a graduated cylinder (don’t ask…it’s the life of a science teacher)…we took all three dogs out for a long tiring walk.

At no point in time did my legs get excited about this walk. I was excited. I was breathing in the air…looking at the landscape, taking in the outdoor existence. All good. But my legs were like lumps of wood that I dragged along on the trip. Also, the puppy was like that. Uphill was torture for him. Apparently he spent 4 hours racing around in the morning and he was tired.

So we made him more tired. All of them really, because then Calli basically collapsed at my feet for the next 4 hours. Right there. Not moving. So I cut stuff out for about 4 hours too.

I just refused to do any schoolwork. Looking back on it, that was lame. But I did it. It’s done. It is what it is. Moving on.

At several points, I almost quit cutting because it’s not the most exciting thing in the world to do and sometimes those pieces are a pain in the butt to cut out. All the little tiny flesh pieces, for example, kind of drive me nuts. Yes, I know I drew them, but that doesn’t mean I like cutting them out. Not every part of the process is fun and games.

Anyway, I got down to this…

And I’m looking at the clock, knowing I would have to be up a bit early this morning, and I’m thinking, ah, what the heck. Just finish tomorrow. Except I already know I have a meeting and probably really will have to grade something and I really should just do it. Well, you know me. I did just do it.

Here’s the whole quilt, ready to be ironed together. That’s about 8 hours of cutting…

It doesn’t look like much. I don’t know if I’ll be able to start tonight…maybe a little bit? I have a meeting and I need to grade some stuff. It does feel like the grading never ends. In fact, I’m going to do some now. Before work. I think. And then hopefully I can get this ironed together by early next week. That’s the plan anyway.

*Staind, It’s Been Awhile

Confusing What Is Real*

I’m sitting here staring at the white screen of the computer. I do that a lot. I sit down and realize I have no idea why I’m there…or it’s morning and my brain is still nonfunctional and I know I write the blog because it clears my brain and keeps me motivated and moving forward on art, but I don’t know where to start. I need the sentence starters I give my students. And it’s only Wednesday, but I’m looking forward to sleeping in on Saturday. That’s a little pitiful.

So the quilt I’m working on (very slowly) now does not have to be done until late October, early November, but there was something else I wanted to make with the same deadline. I don’t think I’m going to make that one. I think I’ll skip it. I have another one with a deadline a month later that I think is the better choice. I like both ideas, both themes, I even already did a pre-drawing for the earlier one, but I just don’t think I can pull it off. Grading is sucking up a lot of my time, as is trying to be healthy and all that good exercise stuff. I actually like to exercise, but work gets in the way…all the works…school, art, and copyediting. Balance. I never get there.

I did make it to the gym last night, though, and I finished my book (finally…it’s due at the library on Saturday, so that’s a good thing), but then also graded assignments while on the elliptical. Kinda crazy, but it was an easy assignment to grade anyway.

I’m not quite done…but I got a good chunk of it done while ellipticizing. Or however you verb that. I do actually really like going to the gym. I just have to find the time to do it. This is one of the ways I can pull it off. Two things at once.

Meanwhile, I do have a lot of art wandering the world at the moment. Pam Rubert posted this picture of my quilt Untied with a design/illustration class touring the eXtreme Fiber Art exhibit. Very cool!

And I’m still waiting on all those shows I entered back in August and early September. Three have notified…two acceptances and one rejection. Not bad odds so far, but the harder ones are coming up…five more to go. I don’t expect acceptances on any of the five, but it would be nice. If not, then I enter more shows.

Meanwhile, here’s the piece that’s in progress. I’m slowly cutting things out. I’d like to say I’ll be done by the weekend…but that’s only an hour I got in last night…

I’m maybe halfway done? It’s hard to tell. That was after tutoring, going to the gym, cooking dinner, and cooking lunches for the next three days. Not the best food plan for this week. But it’s done. I didn’t start cutting until 11 PM or so. Really late. And I’m feeling it this morning. All of it. Ugh. Moving. Sucks.

Katie is the only dog here this morning. The other two went to my ex’s with the boychild. She wouldn’t go out to pee last night…she’s scared of the dark, especially when she’s by herself. I went out with her, with the flashlight, and told her to pee, and she’d run to the nearest dirt and then run back to the back door. Once she pretend-squatted for like 4 seconds…and then came in and peed on her bed.

Sigh. So at midnight, I ran laundry. You dork. She gets lots of pets but is especially neurotic.

Today I shop for small plastic animals that fit in a graduated cylinder, I teach a cover page (yay drawing!) about the Earth, I hopefully walk the dogs, I don’t have to cook dinner (double yay!), and I get to cut stuff out. I might have to grade stuff as well. Who are we kidding? I have to grade stuff. But balance. I think it might be impossible to achieve balance with this job. The school one. Maybe the other two as well.

*Linkin Park, Crawling

It Ain’t Going Nowhere*

My internet here in this office, with this computer, is getting worse and worse. I had 85 videos to watch yesterday, short ones, but 85 nonetheless. So I’m sitting here with video after video freezing, frustrated as hell, but then the internet or my computer figures its shit out and its go go go. So I got them done and all…there’s a wireless card on its way here that may help…or I may give up and wire this room…because the wireless sucks. Hopefully it’s fixable. All that was after picking up my sewing machine, where the guy who fixes it actually noticed one of the inconsistent issues I was having and fixed it (he thinks), plus playing dodgeball at school as a team-building exercise. I don’t like dodgeball. I didn’t like it when I was a kid; I like it even less now. I don’t have the reflexes or good eyesight to catch, I don’t have the upper body strength to throw, and I’m not that kind of competitive, the kind where you have to bean someone to win. We came in 2nd place, which was kind of a surprise. And here’s the thing. There were a few staff members out there who are new, who I don’t know at all. So if I’d been paired with them at a staff meeting, I would have been open-minded about meeting them and getting to know them. But the one who hit me hard? Well, now I just think he’s an asshole. So I’m not sure the team-building worked.

Whatever. I’m too cynical some days. Moving on.

After grading all those videos, I made a good dinner, one I will make again, although once again, the recipes are totally clueless about how long stuff takes to cook…30 minutes, my ass. But relatively easy, once the time adjusts (to an hour, fuckwads, an hour). After that, I revised the copyediting bid…apparently he totally miscalculated the word count…so instead of a nice sum of money, it’s an OK sum of money. Less time? Less money. Pros and cons. I’m a little relieved on the time commitment, but then it almost doesn’t feel worth it. So conflicted!

Then I cut stuff out for a while…

Which apparently I was also doing LAST year on September 17 at night. Weird how that works. Pile of trash on the left, cut-out pieces in the middle, lots still to be cut out on the right. That’s like 2 hours of cutting. It looks like nothing. More of that tonight. Although grading too? Ugh.

Kind of pitiful.

Plus I have these guys following me everywhere.

At one point this morning, after one person left for work and the other person wasn’t out of their room yet, I had all five animals in here…

Two cats are not in this picture…one is on the chair behind me, and one is hiding behind the monitor. There’s no being alone in this house.

Which is probably OK.

*Alison Moyet, Invisible

Mysteries of Our Disguise Revolve*

We each have our method for dealing with stress…mine was hiking for 5 1/2 miles on Saturday evening. I was going to be waiting around for the social stuff to happen anyway. I had worked all day, either on school or art. I need more exercise. I wanted to see how far I could get…I could have gone farther, but in the end, it was good that I turned around when I did…the timing was better.

I do this hike all the time with the dogs…we go about a mile and a half out and then come back.

Scarily, that is a coyote, completely ignoring my presence, about 20 feet from the path. Where I usually walk the dogs.

Boychild says only one adult fatality from coyotes. Thanks kid. Appreciate it.

OK, well then. I was hiking late afternoon, trying to beat the heat…it was warm.

Here’s the weird bridge that’s not really a bridge.

It’s California. There’s always cactus.

It took like 20 minutes for my incredibly slow computer internet to load these photos. But here are the birds that I haven’t looked up yet (heron? egret?) that I saw at the turnaround point…the point where I realized I’d been out for an hour and needed to turn back if I was going to get any dinner.

The birds were totally worth it.

It was a nice hike. Yes, I always worry about hiking alone. I told two people where I was going. I told one of them to call the police if I wasn’t back by 7.

It was an awesome hike. Didn’t affect my blood sugar at all, unfortunately. My body is confused.

Before all that, I did do some ironing. I left this chaotic pile of fabrics…

With only these pieces left to iron on Saturday (it didn’t happen)…

And the to-be-cut pile like this…

Oh yeah, so I painted this birdhouse about a million years ago when one of the big fires was trashing San Diego County…it has flames and a dead tree. Boychild finally nailed it to a tree.

Hey! Remember these? Never going to get done at this rate. I have 10 left. I got 2 done last night. Sad, really.

And then after grading a good chunk of the day (I think I worked for about 10 hours this weekend on school stuff), I finally went in and finished ironing the fabric for this quilt.

There’s about 8 1/2 hours of ironing in here, plus 93 colors. I like lots of fabrics, apparently.

And here’s the pile that now needs to be cut out. I finished the new season of Call the Midwife, plus at least two YA movies that made me cry. Hell, Call the Midwife made me cry. I think I cried on the hike too. Obviously some shit in my head that needs to get out somehow.

So then I headed out to the living room, the couch, with dogs, to cut out pieces…I didn’t get very far, but it’s a start. Happy that…

Tried to pick something to watch that wouldn’t make me cry. I don’t really do comedy. So killing it is! Watching The Sinner…don’t tell me it will make me cry. I don’t wanna know.

More tonight. By then, I’ll know if I’m copyediting 102 hours over the next 5 weeks or not. Stress!

*Portishead, Sour Times

All That Pressure Got You Down*

It’s one of those Saturdays where the to-do list looms large on the biggest post-it note you can find, but all I want to do is finish ironing fabric for the new quilt and maybe read my book. Yeah. Well. Welcome to adulthood. First on the list is trying to use up all the food my parents left here before absconding to Spain and Portugal for a million days. Luckily, the boychild is here and he has some of those Depression-era genes in him that allow one to use up ALL the foods in one or two meals. Except he doesn’t like lettuce, I think. So I’m in charge of eating lettuce. MMMM. Lettuce. Perhaps my compost pile needs some help.

What is on said to-do list? Well, grading, of course, and tending to money issues and the compost pile and making sure art paperwork is done or ready or shipped or something. Prepping for school for the next few weeks…I have a kid who will be gone for over a week and will miss every measurement lab we do, but still needs independent work and won’t have internet. And I don’t have a textbook. So there’s that. Fun stuff for a weekend. I’m on Day 3 of uncomfortable headaches that eventually go away. Ugh. Oh yeah, I also need to go shopping for small plastic animals that will fit in a graduated cylinder, but I forgot to bring the damn thing home, so I’ll have to go GET it, and then go shopping. I also think the Golden Retriever might be showing signs of diabetes, so I should set an appointment for her. Ugh. Meanwhile, where my diabetes numbers were looking good last week, this week they have sucked and besides being totally stressed out and exhausted, I’m not sure what was different. Damn pancreas. Behave, you bastard.

My goal is to kick a lot of the to-do list hard this morning and then find time to iron later today. And maybe even go for a walk. Although I won’t have any dogs. That might be better? I don’t know.

My office floor last night…only two…the other one is outside the door. I was grading before this. I made it through one small period and half of my most challenging period…it’s big and full of kids who are not great at English yet, so their writing is difficult to grade. Trying to be fair and helpful but realizing they can’t figure out a run-on sentence yet (I’m reteaching that on Monday…)…it just makes it hard to grade. I’ll finish today.

One cat hiding behind the monitor. I was doing work stuff on here. I think. And ordering stuff. Very important stuff, like the salmon oil for the old lady dog’s food, those things for my tooth flosser, and some sort of card for my computer that might help with the fucking slow internet. I still need to contact Tivo, but their call center is in the Philippines, and there’s a typhoon. Might be hard to get through. I know if I were in the Philippines and there were evacuations, the last thing I would wanna do is talk to some entitled white chick in California about why her Tivo won’t connect.

I did eventually iron stuff. I was happy to iron stuff. It makes me feel less stressed to iron stuff. Picking colors pushes all the other stressful stuff out of my head. Ahhhh…look at all the pretty fabrics.

OK, it actually looks pretty chaotic now because I didn’t organize by color. My brain likes rainbow order. I can’t explain it.

A box full of pieces! I’m getting closer to done. I probably have about 100 pieces left to iron. I could easily kick that out today. That’s the plan too.

Get it done.

So the boychild was hacking things again. There’s a plan to get the overgrown jungle under control.

OMG. It’s a fence I haven’t seen in years. I’m not really sure what will happen to all this space once he’s done hacking at it. It might just be easier to find the little dog out there. I do feel sorry for the bunnies though. It’s gonna get scary for them.

Finally I managed to get a photo of all three dogs in one space. Not moving. This is harder than you might think. They know how to sit, but they are stubborn assholes and won’t listen.

We haven’t tried walking all three yet. I used to do it by myself. It’s doable. Pain in the butt, but doable.

OK, so grading and small-plastic-animal purchases and cleaning up and compost pile and hopefully ironing and who knows what else, but maybe Netflix could stop recommending YA movies that make me cry because I remember being that awkward and having so little confidence back then and it’s so much easier now to exist. Although I could do without the bills and taxes and the horrendous number of meetings I had to add to my schedule the other day (30. I had to add 30 meetings to my schedule.). Yeah. And I need a walk. A long one. With headphones. Maybe dogs.

*Chic, Le Freak

Should Have Been Easier by Three*

Some Fridays are a surprise. I get to the end of the week and I’m not even mentally there yet. I still have energy and brain power. The weeks with back-to-school night in them? Yeah no. Friday is a blessing, but also it’s a good thing I will be sitting for most of the day (I’m demonstrating how to make a webpage), because I’m sorta dead on my feet right now. Too many meetings, too much jocularity with parents, not enough rest apparently, my body is sort of screaming that at the top of its lungs. OK OK. I hear you. You can sleep in tomorrow. I promise. Sunday too. I’ll be nice to you. Seriously, there’s enough sick people around that I need to promise the body something or it will succumb to some cold or sinusy thing that I really don’t want. I do have a sore throat, but that often happens after back-to-school night. Too much talking.

I came home to the boychild’s plant deconstruction. I haven’t had time to get my jungle under control for years, but this seems to be the year. We got some trees trimmed that were out of control (there’s more to come on that front, once I have a little more cash put away for the college costs), then went after the bougainvillea profusion, and now he’s on a roll with crazy-ass bushes…the trees have been dead since they did the septic field. We think we’re going to put a fence in here, just to block delivery-happy UPS guys who can’t figure out where my front door is.

And that hole goes into a part of the backyard that hasn’t been seen by anyone but dogs and bunnies for about 5 years, maybe longer.

Found? A dead tree, a statue of a cherub or something, a mop head…the normal stuff. Impressive work.

Meanwhile, I got home from back-to-school night after 6:30 PM. I spent over an hour on the phone with the cable company fixing modem issues, but unable to fix Tivo issues. We’re going to replace a cable and see if that helps, but if it doesn’t, then I have to go to war with Tivo, which apparently is not a good thing. Then I made the most simple dinner I could…read my book a bit…realized this piece needs to be in Houston by next Friday and I wasn’t likely to be LESS tired Friday night, so I got my butt moving, found the quilt, ironed it, labeled it, dehaired it, rolled it, packed it, and shipped it.

That was done around 10:30 PM. It was really hard to motivate myself to do it, but I’m glad I got it out of the way. It’s ready to go out this morning, so it’s out of my hair…unlike the 7 tons of grading I need to do. It’s only 80 videos, another 90 essays, this week’s warmups, two weeks of homework (the TA can do one of them, maybe both), and I don’t remember what else. Crawling under the desk with my computer now.

There are lots of animals here at the moment. They’re tolerating each other. This is how Kitten looks when Katie is here. It’s very judgy.

Yes, that’s a skelly hand. Why do you ask? I am a science teacher.

Boychild is trying to pet all three dogs at once. I’m trying to get them all in one photo and not blurry. I suck at my job. He does OK.

Satchemo is still not sure about Katie. It’s Day 1. Things will chill out.

Meanwhile, my friend Ann, who moved far away long ago, happened to be near Walla Walla, WA, where The Nature of a Stitch is going on until December, and where my Disrupted is right now! So there they both are!

They both look awesome, and I’m so pleased that she sent photos. It looks like a great show. I wish I could see it…

The next show I’ll be at with my work is Things That Matter opening in Chandler, AZ, in November. Oh wait, that might not be true. I’ll probably be at the opening of Futurecraft at the Boehm Gallery, Palomar College, here in San Marcos, CA. That’s in October…I’ll be at the October 13th opening. I should put that on my calendar before I forget. Yeah.

OK, survival day. Followed by a decent night’s sleep. Next week will be so much easier than this one. Seriously. And tonight, I’ll be ironing again. That will be good.

*Bush, Glycerine

The Day Is in My Sight*

Good morning head. You appear to be achey this morning. I don’t know why. I mean, sure, you’re not getting enough sleep, and obvi, you’re tired, you want a nap and it’s 7 AM, so apparently you slept, so maybe the weather is seesawing around, because that’s usually what causes the head to ache so, but maybe it was the quiet chaos of yesterday (was it quiet? was it?) pounding through whatever you were dreaming last night, but wow. No need to be so bangy. Seriously. I don’t have the brain power today for pounding headache plus middle school plus back-to-school night.

Oh yeah, I did have a union meeting yesterday, which starts a host of complicated things I have to do today on top of my regular job…it’s OK, though, because I’m stuck at school until 6 PM, and I have an hour and a half before I have to deal with parents, so hopefully I can bang some union duties out in that time…in time with the banging of my head. Or pass them on to some other rep who didn’t show up to the meeting last night.

I didn’t go to book club. I haven’t finished the book. I was exhausted when I got home. Didn’t happen. No friendly gathering. Oh well…because we got Katie! Katie is my parents’ dog and her full name is Katie Girl, but no one calls her that but my parents, maybe only my mom, because that’s too many words for a dog, too many syllables. Katie is much skinnier now because she is on a green bean and carrot diet, which luckily she enjoys. Well, she enjoys all foods, so there’s that. She’s also constantly rolling over on her back, either for pets, or because she’s the most submissive animal in the house…or both. Calli steadfastly ignores her until she gets pets, and then Calli gets jealous and wants attention.

ON HER BACK…

That face will be here until November, so get used to it. Her fur will also be here until November. Someone should vacuum now so we have a baseline. (Headache is minorly responding to meds and tea…but not well enough. There might be an invisible vise on my skull…I just can’t tell.)

Anyway, after a long meeting and dealing with Katie’s arrival with all her shit and the instructions that came along with all that, and dinner and then the Tivo is acting up so there was that and I was grading essays (short ones, thank god) for a while until I couldn’t stand it, well, I didn’t get into my office until well after 10 PM. There’s really not that many pieces in this quilt, but I need to have the mental energy to pick things. And that is currently problematic.

My brain just got stuck on that word. It said it, and then some part of it argued for pragmatic instead, but no, that wasn’t right, but sure enough, some other part said it louder, PRAGMATIC, and then my brain (which isn’t very awake and is struggling with the poundiness of headache) LOST the word problematic and all that was left was pragmatic. So my fingers stopped typing for about 30 seconds until I could find it again and yell it back at that part of the brain that is always trying to interject with inappropriate words. More so as I age, dammit. At some point, there’ll be a damn coup up in there and I won’t get any of the words right. It’s coming. Definitely problematic, you asshole.

Anyway, I ironed for less than an hour, and honestly, I spent most of that time staring at the drawing, trying to color it in using the same brain that just lost a word for 30 seconds. At the end of the day too. So it was slow and mostly painful. But I added some colors of the rainbow for her hair, and that was good.

I didn’t get much done though. I wanted more. I hope for tonight, but I also know I need to put a label on a quilt, and I won’t even get home until after 6, and no one but me is cooking dinner for me. Which might be simpler. Who knows? Maybe I’ll read my book (and fall asleep on the couch because nothing survives back-to-school night). But I’m still hoping to be done ironing by the weekend. It could happen. I just need to be way more awake than I have been.

Katie will be waiting for me when I get home. There’s that.

*Violent Femmes, Add It Up