wool – Kathy Nida

So I was not at school yesterday because San Diego County is on fire. Nine fires, but most of them are in North County, not down here. We can occasionally see smoke plumes. They are affecting air quality a little bit down here, but nothing like the last two big firestorms in 2003 and 2007. So they closed all the county schools for safety reasons. Stands to reason, since school staff don’t always live in the same neighborhood as their school. Anyway, it’s like a free day for those of us not dealing with evacuations and fires (hope everyone we know is OK). So what did I do? I went to bed early (for me, before midnight) and tried to sleep in. Unfortunately, I have animals and they don’t agree, so I got up and dealt with their needs, made a cup of tea, and went back to bed with a book. I often dream of being able to do that, but I’d really rather train one of the animals to bring me the tea. Working on that.

Eventually I got up and fed myself, and then I cleaned floors. Seriously, it’s been driving me nuts. I haven’t had enough time to get them done. My kids are freakin’ useless lately because of the AP tests (which finished Wednesday! Yay! Now of course they will use the excuse of end-of-school projects not to help…cough cough…bullshit!), so nothing is getting done. I didn’t get home Wednesday night until almost 9 PM because of a union meeting, soccer stuff, and car stuff, so I was exhausted yesterday anyway…that’s a typical scenario, so that’s why nothing gets cleaned. I made an effort last week to sort out all the returned quilts and get stuff cleared out of the entryway. Today, I loaded up all the thrift shop bags into the car and cleaned those floors…it looks so much better. I wish I could afford a cleaning lady (although it might stress me out more knowing I had to straighten up for her)…I just can’t keep up. Yes, I’m lame. I’m constantly picking up after the teens, though…they will do it if reminded (well, one has to scream at me first because she was going to do it anyway but then I had to remind her and that just pisses her off, even though if I never reminded her, it never would actually get done), but since they’re only here half time, it just doesn’t work well.

Anyway. I didn’t do any fabric stuff Wednesday night due to exhaustion. Then I spent all day shopping with the girlchild, because she needs clothes (so do I, but I wasn’t particularly successful). At least the stores were air-conditioned, and she used up four gift cards (one only had $1.96 on it, which I was not informed of when we went INTO the store). Now I just need to get boychild suited up for prom, because, yes, he’s going, and no, not with one other person…but with a group, but I’m still pleased he’s going…the last school dance he went to was the Halloween dance in 6th grade. He didn’t like the noise. Anyway. One more thing on my list of things to do.

It was 105 degrees here too, so running around doing lots of stuff wasn’t a reality. I had quilt class last night, so I cut out pieces in someone else’s air conditioning…

And then I came home and cut more pieces out in my non-air-conditioning.

Those are actually the trimmings. I save them to make sure I didn’t drop a piece in there, because sometimes I do. This is going to take forever, I think. Actually, Earth Stories, which is bigger and has more pieces, only took 12 hours to cut out at this stage. I’m 5 hours in. It might just be another week or so.

I’ve been getting massive drawing urges. My brain is in the mood. I need it to get in the mood of drawing a specific thing for that next show, but it’s crotchety, recalcitrant. It doesn’t want to follow instructions, as has been patently evident over the last year. I’m planning on doing a life drawing session during the summer to try to keep the brain happy. It’s worried about all that empty time, which isn’t really empty, because I have 17 million things that need doing. But there’s no overwhelming school that is eating up so much of its daily time to wander. It helps. The brain needs focus, or it ruminates too much.

So I found this in my old car…

My forest adventure pass from 2006. You need one of these to hike up in the National Forest here…it has seen better days. There’s a newer one in there now…but I didn’t have one from 2006-2014. I didn’t get to hike much during those years. When soccer starts up again, it will be difficult for a while again, but she’s only got one more year. There’s already four summer tournaments scheduled. But I won’t hike as much in the summer anyway…too hot.

My mom made this while she was traveling in Australia/New Zealand…

It’s her first wool piece, I think. Someone should tell my brother that I’m inheriting this one. (Notice the magazines…Consumer Reports, AARP with Patrick Stewart on the cover…NO! Is he OLD? And Sunset…all OUR magazines are food-, quilt-, and education-related.)

So the fires are still going, although some are under control, and our local schools are going back today…which makes sense. I had to move the test for today…although I’m not sure a test on Monday is a good plan for middle-school kids who will completely forget about it over the weekend, but maybe more of them will do their study guides (ha!). I think my schedule for the next two weeks is now completely fucked, but that doesn’t really matter. In fact, none of it really matters. Any questions? They’ll learn whatever I teach them on some level. It’s not the end of the world if we don’t get through it all, because we never do.

OK, so we had one day off and it was too hot to think straight, and the plus was that I got some of the house cleaned up and all that thrift shop stuff out of here, and girlchild will leave me alone about shopping for a while, although next on her list is altering clothing, which drives me nuts, and I did a little grading and art stuff, and if I’m still feeling mopey and down, it’s because that’s what I feel most of the time. I even got more sleep than I usually would have and that’s a good thing. So I should stop pretending that this is NOT a school day (ugh, do I HAVE to go?) and remember it’s air-conditioned there and it’s only one day and then I can come home again. Not that home is a solution to the mopey and down feeling. SIGH. I need a change. I just don’t know what that change is.

My SIL really saved me from myself yesterday and last night. I think she called me about 5 times, not for long, but just to tell me one more ironic or stupid thing about life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. I know I was trying NOT to sound mopey and shit, but I was, and I don’t even know if she knew that…but just having her sarcastic loving self checking in with me kept me from sinking deep into the low. By the time she stopped calling (No, Really, she said, This is the last call), I was significantly tired so I managed to do a few more things and then went to bed early for me. And got a decent night’s sleep for probably the first time in a month. I know she doesn’t read my blog (she has three kids under the age of 12…I’m not sure she reads anything but text messages), so she’ll never see this. I’ll tell her thanks at some point.

There’s something about the vast expanse of weekend hours that I spend by myself that get me down. One part of me looks forward to quiet and getting to do something I want to do, and the other part of me wants to interact with people, but not total strangers and not in a difficult way. I don’t want to have to work hard at it, because I already do that every day during the work week. I want relaxing and social. Sort of. In small quantities. Maybe. Plus I’m significantly poor, so no cost. Yeah, I know. It’s not very realistic. Even an occasional movie would be nice…maybe when I get past the next Visa bill from hell.

Really, what I did yesterday was fill out financial aid forms. And I did a little fabric stuff. And I meditated.

I have completed 145 meditation sessions. Ironically, I’m having a hard time with the current series, the Creativity series…there’s something about the format of visualizing energy moving through that I can’t hold on to properly. I have no problems with creativity in itself, except for finding time for it and forcing myself to do OTHER stuff that is NOT creative. I am having a hard time relaxing at the moment in meditation…I can’t get my brain to release. It’s been too tied up in financial aid applications to relax…I’m still doing those, by the way. I finished the worst of it Saturday, the CSS Profile, which was way worse than the FAFSA by like 100 degrees. But some of the colleges have their own forms, so I did one of those tonight…and all of them need copies of my tax return, my paystubs, my W-2s, all need to be signed on each page and probably I need to provide a vial of my blood as well. Boychild interrupted my meditation because he had forgotten to turn in an essay online…and then I was talking to him about getting a job. He wanted to know why. Sigh. Ah. Money, dude. Plus hell…you just need to get a job and start being part of society. Feel free to find a job you’d like: politics, bookstore, I don’t know. Something. I will be doing these damn financial aid forms for another two weeks probably…so it seems fair that he should have to work this summer? I don’t know. I might have to work this summer too…who knows. I don’t know how anything is going to work out. Like him, I don’t know what job I could get just for the summer. Delivering pizza?

I also have completed 33 health coach sessions in the last year and a half. They’re stopping my coaching, which has been free so far…apparently losing all the weight means I no longer qualify for the free stuff. I’m OK with that. I think I got the best out of the sessions a while ago. I think there are one or two more. That’s it. I lost 45.5 pounds in that time period. I dropped one med. I upped two other meds and added new ones. Sigh. I’m healthier now despite the extra meds. I can’t help being anemic.

So I went to my local quilt store that carries wool fabrics and got a few more bright fabrics…well, bright-ish. That’s all that was available…

That crazy fabric underneath them is the backing fabric I got for super-cheap a million years ago, and I used every inch of it up on the back of the Sightlines quilts, which have finally returned home.

And then I started going through my wool stash, trying to find all the leftover pieces from other projects I’ve done…because I don’t need huge pieces for the flowers in the background…these are from a Primitive Gatherings’ block-of-the-month that I finished…well, I finished all the blocks. I haven’t put them together…that’s usually my sticking point.

Then I found the pieces from the two Sue Spargo block-of-the-month leftovers…there were some good bright colors in there, including some orange I used for the fish in the water…

I don’t need big pieces. This is not hoarding. Seriously. This is using up my scraps. I don’t have a good wool stash. It’s OK. I don’t NEED a good wool stash. I’m not planning on this being a regular thing. I just really wanted something to show how much I cared about Ivy and how bad I felt about her dying so early. I realize that current readers may not have a clue who Ivy is.

Ivy came home with us in June 2006 as a puppy (yes, that is the boychild at age 10).

She was a Boxer mix…later we figured out that the mix must have been a whippet, because she was long and skinny and ran like the wind.

She was a good dog, like they all are, although she had issues with my parents’ dog at some point, so Missy couldn’t stay with us after Calli (my daughter’s dog) moved in. But she was sweet, and every time the phone rang at night, she would leap off the couch and go running down the hallway, sometimes barking like the world was ending.

She wasn’t very big, but sounded large. She was a good protector and was very loving. She had skin allergies that started up in 2011 and we tried some food and allergy tests…turns out she was allergic to everything under the sun, so we had her on allergy shots for a while, but she even developed an allergy to those. And then her vet died of a sudden heart attack…at age 44 or something. It was crazy. So it took us a while to get another vet in the practice up to speed on the whole allergy issue, and then she got really really sick really really fast. And then well again. And then sick again. And by the time we found out that she had liver cancer, she had stopped eating and drinking, and I had made the horrible decision to stop her pain and suffering. She was 6. It was May 2012. Yes, that long ago.

I don’t know why her death has been so hard on me…I’ve had multiple animals die, but always of old age…or they were old and the diseases finally got too much for them. Ivy was young, in the prime of her life, perfectly fine and hyper and running around excited one day, and vomiting everything up and barely able to stand the next day. It was about a month from the first serious illness to putting her down, and it was just hard for me. My daughter still talks about it; she’s still carrying around resentment over how she didn’t get to hold Ivy when she died. Long story…she was there when it happened, but…I know if she had said something, she could have held her, but that’s a whole ‘nother issue. One that can’t be changed now.

So I spent most of the summer sad about her death. When my first dog, Russia, died of old age, the kids were young, and it took me a couple of years to get another dog, mostly because of finances, and that was Ivy. We have Calli here half the time; she travels back and forth between me and my ex with the kids…so it’s not like I never have a dog here. And I don’t know that I’m home enough to justify a dog just for me…and there’s the cost.

But the real deal was that I felt I needed to memorialize her life. I did some drawings and one became a sort-of banner to Ivy. That’s what this is. And it’s wool mostly, with cotton accents, and I’m planning to embellish it a la Sue Spargo, because I enjoy doing that kind of work, sort of as a hobby, rather than like an art endeavor…and I want what I make for Ivy to have been enjoyable. Because it still makes me feel like crying to think about that month when she was so sick, to remember that day I couldn’t even get her to eat out of my hand, so I decided that was it. That she was suffering more than it was worth, and she wasn’t coming back. We didn’t get the biopsy results for another three or four days, but I was right. It was liver cancer all over the place.

So I’m making this for her. And for me.

I would be ironing on the ironing board, but Babygirl thinks it’s hers now. I had all the wool sort of spread out on the other side of the board.

When I got to the fleshy bits, I had a run of fabrics that I worked really hard to get back in 2012/2013.

And I currently have about half the quilt ironed down to mostly wool, ready to be cut out.

It’s a much different process than I use for most of my quilts…but I’m glad to have it started. Maybe tomorrow night I can get started on the flowers…I have Ivy, me, and the main landscape (hill, river, fish) all cut out. I just need to do about a million flowers and two banners and then there are bunnies and squirrels, because Ivy liked to chase animals. So expect to see more of this in the coming days. For Ivy. Yeah. And me.

Tag: wool

A Strangely Free Day

For Ivy…and Me