Official Title #3764

Can’t title things today. Brain offline. So my view last night of the world was this…

Yes, Glee…don’t judge. It’s light, it’s easy, and they sing. And their entire life experience is so far removed from mine that it doesn’t bother me. Everything else that was on Tivo felt really heavy and dark or light and fluffy and I decided I couldn’t handle it. And much as I’d been loving Star Trek lately, that means watching on the computer and fighting the tiny mean black cat for the chair, and my body was having an issue with being female yesterday (actually, it continues today…another symptom of the thyroid giving up the ghost), so I was in some pretty extreme pain and trying to sew. On the couch was better than in a chair that is only vaguely comfortable on a good day. It was fun. Really. And by fun, I mean, I got through it. Working on that needle-poke callus on my right middle finger now.

I spent all day yesterday (many hours) at an educational tech conference. It was long, but there was one very good workshop I went to and I think I saw the light! Or I have a bunch of new ideas about how to do something online that I have previously done on paper. But I only have three weeks to implement it, and that might not be enough. And I’m not really sure what I’m doing. See, that’s what you want in a teacher…someone who is willing to change it up by the seat of her pants. I want the kids to learn not only the content, but to stretch beyond it and be able to use it elsewhere (some of us have been teaching common core the entire time we’ve been teaching), AND I want them to be tech-proficient (beyond Facebook and video games) AND I’m willing to put my butt out there and hope it all works. So much of the admin and the petty bullshit we deal with as teachers is what chases creative teachers off. I’ve seen too many of them leave because of the shitty pay and the job uncertainty and the harassment by parents and admin (and kids sometimes, honestly). Those of us that tough it out, we are some level of crazy, yes. Luckily, I got the email address of the presenter, so if I have major issues, I know where he works (not far from here).

So that sucked up a huge part of my weekend, and today I’m at the Salk Institute (I always pronounce it SOCK…and then point to mine) to get trained on their DNA kits so I can check them out and do cool experiments with my kids. So it’s a weekend of school stuff that I didn’t get paid for, which again, underlines the crazy. This is what teachers do. If you are one of those people coming after my pay or my pension or my “vacation time” (I don’t get paid for the summer, people), then realize this is what we do. We lose an entire weekend to stuff that benefits OUR STUDENTS. And we do it for free. Because it benefits our students. I am doing what’s best for the kids. It would be nice if the politicians would do the same.

And this morning, I’m trying to persuade my body that it can go to the gym, despite its current tendency toward hemorrhaging (wow, a word I really can’t spell without help). Because I know I will feel better, but ouch. Ouch. And OUCH. Plus how do I staunch the flow long enough to actually be there? These are the fun questions perimenopause brings to you: How much black clothing do I own? How many menstrual devices can I use at once to avoid a wardrobe issue? How can I get better pain meds so I can actually stand up? Seriously, when the alarm went off this morning, I was curled up in a tiny pained ball yelling (probably a good thing the kids aren’t here) until that wave stopped. I think childbirth was easier…at least it seemed like there was a purpose to it.

If that’s all TMI, then you probably shouldn’t be reading my blog anyway.

So yeah, I’m almost done with this quilt, which feels a little weird. I really like the quilt though, so that’s good. And I’m ready, I think, to draw the next one this week, so I can spend all of Thanksgiving week cleaning house (whoo!) and starting that one plus a few smaller ones I promised to make (three. I promised three. Please slap me around a bit, because I am crazy).

I did write a little of the novel at the conference yesterday, and then I came home after dinner with friends (a slightly contentious dinner, interestingly), and I wrote some more. Today (in the story) is when the big bad shit starts to hit the fan. More people are going to die…not because it’s fun to kill people off (although it will be fun to kill ONE person off…yes, I have revenge fantasies at times), but because the deaths are going to highlight how dangerous it is for our heroine and why the Government Must Be Stopped. I’m really not a raging anti-government person, makes me sound like a cultist, but in this story, they aren’t nice or good. They’re bad people. They started out OK, but you know, lost humanity, lost perspective, blah blah blah.

I honestly don’t know if the story will be finished by the end of the month. I’m fairly certain I’ll hit 50,000 words, though. My stats from the NaNoWriMo website…

I was over 28,000 words yesterday. I’ve had a couple of lighter days, but then kicked ass on days afterwards, so the story never stops flowing from my brain. It’s more that I get too tired to write. As I’m writing, I wander off into random shit and then find myself sitting there with my eyes closed and my fingers on the keyboard. Friday night was a little like that. I should have written before I did the binding, and I kept MEANING to do that and then not doing it, and so when I wrote, it was midnight. And I woke up with a start at some point (and honestly, at that point, I gave up, short for that night, but I had a cushion from earlier in the week), and when I read it the next morning, it was a whole different kind of writing. It wasn’t Bad, but it was Different. I left it. At this point, I’m just trying to get the story out. I’ll go back and revise later. I know it needs a ton of work, if just for basic editing and continuity. Did I tell you that Book 2 (not a sequel to this one) is poking at my brain too?

Anyway. I’m a few steps closer to getting my butt out the door to the gym. Need to eat and finish the tea and then gird my loins in black and cotton absorbent things. I know exercise will help, so I am going to do it, even though I’m tired and have lots of stuff to do before I go to the science thing. Sometimes you have to do what’s right for your body or brain, even if it’s not easy. Motto of my life, I guess. I personally don’t think there’s a guarantee for easy, and I’m not even sure easy is the best thing. If we never stretch or challenge ourselves by dealing with the hard, then I think we are never as strong or amazing a human being as we could have been. That said, I could do with some easy for a while. Bring it.

Apparently Adam and Eve…

So. I can’t show you the trimmed quilt. I can tell you some things about it though. First of all, apparently I made an Adam and Eve quilt. I guess that makes sense when you are looking at an image of gender equality and you have a society with all these images of Adam and Eve together, who really are not quite about gender equality (or ARE they…you don’t have to read the pictures with scripture supporting them), but the tree…I wasn’t thinking when I was drawing. I just like trees. But there are so many trees in the Adam and Eve paintings. I did leave the snake out! Interesting that, because I often include a snake. In fact, I just realized the snake in Love (not) probably has more symbolism than I even had thought about. This is why it’s kinda funny to watch the video my mom took at Celebrating Silver when the nice woman asks me what the skull symbolizes and I snarkily say Death, but I’m not even sure that’s the case. When I draw, there are things that have power, weight, meaning, that I plan on including for just those reasons, and then there are the things that sneak in when I’m not really thinking about it. Subconscious symbols just wandering around and plopping themselves on the paper. Because if it took both Adam and Eve to make all humanity, and that’s from the biblical times, before we understood the genetic implications of that, before we knew there were factors from Mom AND Dad that became a part of each human child, then at what time did one become more important than another in any part of the world? Why do women have to be the cookers and cleaners and the baby-minders? Why do men have to be the money-wranglers and decision-makers? Why does anyone have to be in charge? Why this perennial argument over who is REALLY in charge? I’m not really arguing about religion here, but about the images that religion has co-opted or paid for to support their doctrine (because a lot of religious paintings were paid for by the church, and you can’t piss off the boss, so you paint what you’re told unless you’re a rebel). Yes, I had to study all that stuff in school. Years and years of That’s All There Was…religious paintings. And they are fascinating in the ways they are different, but also in the ways they are the same. The Madonna, the baby Jesus, God in his sky, Adam and Eve on the ground, the tree, the animals, the snake.

So yeah, all that to tell you I made an archetypal Adam and Eve quilt. That you can’t see until January. It’s cool, though. Even the girlchild said so. I trimmed it (and ouch, I think I lost 3 inches with all that tight quilting, so don’t tell anyone, but I think it’s gonna be about 1/4 to 1/2″ too short. SHHH. I’ve never had one too small. Crazy.).

I wasn’t going to put the binding on right away. I was going to write first. But somehow, I just kept ironing, and then cutting, and somehow sewing, and then I might as well pin it…and it was done.

I asked the girlchild to help me out by wrapping the UK Xmas gifts for me…did she finish? Fuck no. This happened…

So it’s still not done. Sigh. Tonight.

I promised a photo of the skateboarding skellies…

I’m in love with this, especially the guy who is skateboarding over skelly parts.

Tonight? Sewing bindings. Very exciting. Yup. Got bug videos to watch. Seriously. I do.

Call Yourself What You Like…

So I entered this art show recently that wanted me to categorize my art as fiber, textile, or weaving. OK. Well, I know it’s not weaving, because I’m not fucking weaving anything. There’s no under over under over bam bam bam (I grew up with a weaver. That sound is embedded in my brain. Try watching TV with a weaver in the room.). That said, the fabric is woven. Technicality. Now I usually call myself a fiber artist if I’m not calling myself a quilt artist, because I use the methodology and techniques of quilting, but then people get their gramma’s quilts in their heads and what I do just makes their brains explode, so I call myself a fiber artist because it gives me some distance from gramma. But sometimes when I say that to people outside the fabric world, they think I mean the fiber you eat that cleans out your colon, and I’m like YES, THAT kind of Fiber. I make art with Metamucil. Yup. So then you say you’re a textile artist, but I’m not sure that’s a whole lot better, because what the fuck does that MEAN? So I ask my daughter, and she says, “Call yourself what you like.” Wow. I raised that child, didn’t I? So I start looking up the definition of fiber, which seems wrong, except in a holistic sense, more like thread, so if I were a basketweaver or a knotter maybe, so I look up textile, and it says something about weaving fibers, and fuck. I don’t freakin’ know which these are and then I wonder if I should even be ENTERING, but the description definitely says anything using textile materials or techniques, and before I run around the house ripping my clothes off and RENDING them into materials I can use in my next quilt, screaming, and rolling myself into a tiny urine-soaked ball in the corner of my incredibly messy studio that definitely needs cleaning, I click TEXTILE on all of them and thus define myself for the rest of my life.

Or not. Really. It’s hard to say. Probably I shouldn’t be allowed out though.

So. The good news is that I FINISHED QUILTING. Fuck me. I am relieved. And saddened. But I think the saddened is mostly unrelated hormones, so ignore it.

I had guessed 15 hours, but that was before some psychotic bitch took over my brain and made me do teeny tiny squiggles all over the background, so I clocked in at 17 1/2 hours instead. Yup. Two point five hours of squiggling. And last night, when I looked at the clock and said, Fuck yeah, I can do it and who the fuck needs sleep anyway? Well, then the thread broke and the bobbin thread ran out and the thread broke again and I just continued to bully through until it was done. And that was the 2.5 hours right there.

Back only. You wanna see the whole thing? Come to the opening in January at Visions Art Museum. Or hang out here until then. I’ll post it then. I promise. It’s kinda cool. Now I gotta draw the next one. Cuz I’m starting it! Like NOW! Because I keep saying yes to things and at some point that means I have to do the things I said yes to.

Sigh.

And in the hopes of continuing to drag my depressoid brain (thank you, thyroid, for being a stingy asshole) out of the mud and into something like a life, I went over 25,000 words on NaNoWriMo yesterday…which means I’m over 50,000 words for the whole book. Halfway done with both, really. And what was weird was that I just started writing and she fainted. And I didn’t even realize she was GOING to faint. It just happened, and then I thought, why is she fainting? And that answer came too, and it was part of the story, an additional point in the plot, foreshadowing leading up to tomorrow’s action, tomorrow not being today or Saturday, but tomorrow in the story, which is now today, because I got to today in the story. Confused? This is why I have comments telling me in the story what day it is, because Saturday lasted for about 40 pages. Sunday was not as long. There was more sleeping and less action. As there SHOULD be on a Sunday, right? Today is a Monday, and Mondays suck. So this one will suck too.

I haven’t actually decided whether there is a happy ending. I think there is not. I know there is no sequel. So I think it is not. Maybe it is a hopeful ending, but maybe it is an ending where a dozen young women send me hateful contact email about how I killed off their favorite person ever. (see Divergent. She had to die guys. Oops. Spoiler.)

Because that’s how I roll. Crazy. I know.

Binding on tonight. Seriously. It has to. And then I start hand-sewing it, because this thing has to be done. Which means Sunday morning, I need to figure a way to deal with where the blue batik bled. Although it’s minor on most of it, there’s one place that’s bad. It’s OK. I have a plan. Sort of. I am trained for these maneuvers. I have the technology. (Technology just means tools, by the way. Someone told me that. Tools. I got ’em.)

Boychild is texting me about Cambodia and snow! Snow! Not here. No, he’s not in Cambodia. He’s in New York. Here we have drizzle. Well, we HAD drizzle. And my feet are cold (thyroid) and I need to switch the bed over to flannel (thyroid) and there’s a shitload of things I have to get done this weekend around the two school-related things I’m doing that are totally eating up the whole weekend anyway, so there (job that takes over life). And girlchild wanted me to drop her off at the other high school for the Magic Mountain trip at…GET THIS…4:30 AM. Really? Because I probably just went to bed. I think I’d rather have her leave her car there all day and have it stolen (because it probably would be) than do that.

At least you don’t have to listen to me complain about the quilting any more.

The Endless Quilting…

Holy crappity fuck fuck, how long is this damn quilting going to take. I think I only have this much left (holding hands out like a medium-sized fish to be caught, if I gave a shit about catching fish), but that space seems to stretch out like a hallway you’re running down in a nightmare where a monster is chasing your ass as you zigzag to avoid its damn sharply tipped claws, trying to keep your gluteus maximus whole and unscathed. I did replace the damn thread with the correct weight. Some dumbass put the wrong spools back in the wrong place. I didn’t even realize there were two weights at JoAnn’s, already my personal hellhole, but now I know. One more stupid thing I have to keep in my head. So when we were at the store, we moved all the spools in the wrong place, so some other clueless fuck wouldn’t be stymied like I was.

Here’s where I admit that I’m not finishing this thing tonight. I wanted to. I thought I could. I need another two hours I think, and I don’t have two hours tonight.

That was last night. I gave up. I was tired. It had been a very long day of meetings and racing around prepping for a sub today (I still have to go in early, because I forgot to do two things that are kinda major) and dealing with squealy kids and sheep hearts and then a union meeting and dinner out. By the end, I had a little energy left to start stuff and sorta sew, but then it all wandered off and left me sitting in a chair, barely mobile. Not even enough energy to get OUT of the chair and go to bed. Mighta been that cat paw, claws hooked, on my leg. Mighta been the rest of the room, chaotic, begging to be cleaned up, not understanding why I never get around to it.

Things always take way longer than you think they will. Unless they don’t.

All piled up at the end of the day. Defeated by a pile of fabric…

OK, not defeated really. Sort of. I can’t buy just binding apparently…

The one black and white one on the right is skateboarding skeletons. Seriously. I have a skelly issue. Wouldn’t it have been nice if I had taken a picture of it? Maybe tonight.

One of these is the binding (I went through dark blues, lighter blues, red, greens, and finally got to brown…I hope it works)…and one is for the next quilt. Maybe. It’s a good background fabric anyway. It will get used.

Not that I needed to buy more fabric really. The never-ending palette. Being a painter is probably easier…you can just mix your colors. I need to own each color.

OK, I need to go to school and I’m not really coherent anyway. I’m coping, trying to achieve something, trying to keep the head above water as chaos envelops me. Want to be more organized or something, but I’m a pantser. I’m a fairly organized pantser, but a pantser nonetheless. Wow. There are some interesting definitions of pantser…I’m the writing one…not the others. The others are just creepster.

Yes. I wrote yesterday. I’m still doing that crazy thang.

The Pattern of My Days

This? This is the dryer full of fabrics from my trip to Houston.

The trip I haven’t written about yet because I’m so buried in quilting and grading and trying to get through the days that I can’t go through the 7,000 photos I took and try to decide how to make sense of them (there’s really only about 200 photos, and since I take pictures of the signs too so I know who did each piece and why, there’s probably only 100 quilts). I did buy fabric this year. I don’t usually, unless there’s something in particular that I’m looking for, but I was in the mood to buy fabric. I haven’t been buying much at all. I only go to the quilt store when I need a background or binding, which is about every 2-3 months, and then I try to keep it reasonable. I look for stuff I use a lot of and has been an issue lately. I do always look for flesh colors, and when I get these out of the dryer and folded (god knows when that will be), I’ll show you. I didn’t want solids or almost solids…I wanted funky patterns.

I did buy some browns too, because that dirt thing keeps showing up in my quilts and it uses big pieces that are really convoluted in shape, so I need big pieces of brown. I also bought a few reds…while I was picking them out, mom walks up to me and says, “Hearts?” Yup. For hearts mostly. The average heart I draw needs 4-6 fabrics. Or more. Complicated buggers, those hearts.

I managed NaNoWriMo last night again, although I tried to write while on the phone with my SIL, and that was a clusterfuck. Apparently the writing part of my brain can’t multitask THAT well, plus it sounded like she was about to run away from home (not sure I blame her). And then I went to book club, where we all pretty much swore off Orson Scott Card for the rest of our lives, but did pick a 900-page book for February. I’ve already read December’s book and we’re skipping January due to the holidays. Most of my book club friends are much younger than me, and only one of them has children, so the poor pregnant woman who was there, we were talking about all the advice you get, and I said I had none…oh wait, yes I do…”SLEEP NOW. You will never sleep again.” Seriously. I think it’s true. We did talk a lot about how we as a society protect and treasure pregnant women, how it must be hard-wired into our brains to take care of them. And babies…them too. Mostly. Yes. I go to book club for intellectual conversation, because we don’t just talk about Oooh Babies, but we analyze society’s response to babies. And we drink and eat. You can’t go wrong with that combination.

But I was tired and headed home early to get yelled at by the girlchild, apparently, who had left dinner cooling on the counter for over an hour. Not willing to risk vomiting all night, I didn’t touch it. Sigh. Frustrating. Perfect bacteria-growing temperature.

So that’s when I wrote…actually, I started writing (again, because I had started when my SIL called) and then she needed my computer, so I went and graded for a while and then came back. I’m over 10,000 words, averaging over 2000 a day. I was only at 1200 last night and was tired, and thought I was going to quit because I didn’t feel like writing the next bit. Plus I have a bit of a cushion, but I don’t want to use it now…I’d rather be way ahead and plan for having issues later than be way behind now and assume I can catch up (that’s probably the best summary of my personality that exists anywhere…because I know life is gonna bitchslap you with some crap you don’t even know about yet and you won’t HAVE that extra time later on…seriously). Sometimes I feel (shockingly) that I am writing too much detail, but I suspect it’s better to have too much at this point and edit it out later. The whole book is almost at 35,000 words now. Good progress. The story is developing. No, I still have no idea how it will end, but I’m heading into the rising action section, maybe? I think there needs to be a kidnapping or an attack at this point, so I’m letting my brain play with those ideas as I stare out at a small sea of faces at school. Little do they know what their teacher is thinking about…

And then I quilted. Oh, I graded first, but couldn’t keep going on that for long. I had a goal of finishing one assignment last night, and I didn’t even get close. Sigh. It’s gonna bite me in the butt this weekend, but whatever. Quilting was fun…really.

Thread rebelling against me. I’m still only getting in about an hour a night, although I guess that’s better than none. I was just hoping to be oh-so efficient last night, and it didn’t work out that way. I did finish all the outlining though, and I started on the background quilting…

Which, of course, I started way too tiny and crunched up. There isn’t a ton of background on this quilt, but there are these big pieces of sky up in the tree, and they’re not all behaving nicely, so I suspect that section will make me swear and possibly even cry (OK, I don’t cry because of quilting…I get frustrated and walk away.). I didn’t get very far in the background quilting, honestly, because I was bloody tired and probably should have gone to bed an hour earlier, but I did START. And that’s what I wanted to do, so there. Nine hours in. If I can shop for binding on Sunday and put it on that night, I’ll be good (um, Kathryn, you have a soccer tournament to attend on Sunday? Damn. You’re right. Sigh.). Anyway. It’s getting there, which means I need to get my butt in gear and draw the next one. Seriously. If I type Seriously one more time, please slap me.

And there’s Ms. Bitchy, who started a fight with Kitten last night because she deigned to use the food area.

I was so tired I just watched most of it and then tried to intervene so Kitten could get away. This cat is 11 years old and out for blood most days. And then she takes over my chair and complains if I try to sit on it. Cats. Damn cats.

OK. Survive the school day. Hang out with friends. Grade stuff. Quilt. You see the pattern of my days.

The Neverending Quilting

Oh my god, I just want to be done with it…the neverending quilting. That stage when you aren’t far enough along to be close to done, dammit. You can see the end of the dark tunnel, but it’s just a speck of light in the distance, not close enough to start running towards it, because you have to conserve your energy. Sigh. Even trying to get done with the outlining would have been OK, which was interesting, because when I started quilting (late, again) last night, I thought, oh no, you’re not going to finish the outlining tonight…even though the previous night you thought it was just one more night, that part of your brain was obviously delusional and just needed to go to bed. Then I started stitching, and I got about 45 minutes in, and I’m looking at it, and my brain is at war: one part is sure I can finish and the other is telling me to give up and go to bed (that’s really what the responsible, normal adult would have done, but as I have proven over and over again, although I am responsible with many things, making art and going to sleep at a reasonable hour are not my strong points). In the end, I kept going, sure, positive, convinced I could finish.

I was so close…really, maybe another hour. But no. Sigh. Went to bed. Slept the sleep of the crazy dreamer who wanted to be DONE. Which is just stupid, because I would only be done with the OUTLINING. I still have to quilt the fucking background, and it’s proving to be a bitch, bunching up all over the place, trying to make a mess of my quilting, so I’ll be swearing at it and pulling at it and stretching it flat and wondering how all those people who quilt like 1/8″ apart do it without making a monstrous mess (this is why you are NOT one of those quilters. You think they’re ~~crazy~~ amazing for quilting that close together and they think you’re the same for cutting out a million pieces and then trying not to lose them all while ironing them together. Really, you’re all nuts.).

So I’m 8 hours in and I haven’t even finished the outlining, and I suspect I’m about halfway through, but really I don’t have a freakin’ clue. I do know that at only an hour a night, I’m not going to make my deadline. AND finish grades. AND hike on Saturday.

Oh well. And I really want to clean house; my bedroom and the studio are driving me nuts and I’m barely home long enough today to do anything. So. Yeah. Dysfunctional human much?

Don’t you wonder what happens in the artist’s brain to make the expression of some image (or sound or whatever) SO important that everything else seems pointless? I mean, food isn’t pointless, especially being diabetic, but I wish I had a replicator and could just ask it to make more of that avocado tomato salad this morning so I could take it to school. I have all the ingredients, but not the time (or mental energy, apparently). OK, I might find energy for that. Maybe. But I’d really rather finish sewing or do the next drawing or anything really rather than clean house. I wonder how close to hoarder status I’m approaching. That should motivate me to take the bags of clothes out of the entryway to the thrift shop today, except I don’t actually have time to do that.

Anyway. Writing is also taking up my time these days, but it’s OK. It was my November goal, and I realized at the time that it would be a stretch. I’m writing more than 2000 words a day on the novel at the moment, killing off characters with wild abandon and then going back and giving them a video entry or a first name only, because dammit, they had kids and I need their kids for genetic testing. In the book. Not in real life. I don’t have an outline for this book. I don’t know how it ends. I don’t know how it gets to the ending. I have a general feel for the shit that might happen and for the core problem of the book, but it’s writing itself. It reveals itself to me while I write…which honestly is the way I draw as well. Although I might have a drawing in my head, it doesn’t come fully apparent until pen hits paper, and I often have no idea where it will go until it’s done. I’m tapping into some part of my brain that just makes. It doesn’t really care what you think about it; hell, it barely cares what I think about it. It does take some direction, when I have some, but mostly I’m just spilling some synaptic goo out on paper or screen and trying to make sense of it afterwards.

Seriously. The book is gonna need a massive edit. But that’s OK. I hear that’s normal. Maybe tonight I’ll finish outlining, and then the light at the end of the tunnel might feel a bit closer. Sigh.

Apparently Crazy Ass

Hello very furry cat tail that is dipping into my tea. Please removeth yourself.

I’m juggling. Grading and dark coming earlier and school stuff and a dead black widow and a tire that won’t behave or maybe it’s the tire pressure monitoring system, who the fuck cares, just make the light on the dashboard with the exclamation mark go off. I served dinner at 9 PM last night (but I served it, and it was healthy and made from scratch. So there. And there are leftovers. So double there.). I only graded two periods of tests instead of all three (at least I got through two). I was determined to quilt, because goddammit, how am I going to finish the quilting by Saturday night if I don’t actually QUILT every night? So let’s ignore the fact that I was still awake at 1 AM and that my body on non-Daylight Savings time believes it should be awake an hour earlier, and honestly, so does Kitten, so there’s no point in trying to sleep longer. In fact, amusingly, my body seems to think it’s being allowed to sleep in, so although it had barely more than 5 hours of sleep, it feels better than normal, because it’s an hour later. Or earlier. Or something. I’m sure it will all even out in a few days, but for now, it’s what’s keeping me moving.

And you know what? Dumbass subs who leave no notes as to what happened at all (apparently he wrote a referral on an entire class?)? Give Up Now. Or stay out of my class. Really, there was less chaos returning to the classroom after two days gone than I thought there would be, but that was mostly because I put it all on them, made sure that all the responsibility lay squarely in their laps. Oh, you didn’t complete the work on Friday? So sad. If you don’t have it done by Tuesday, you will be unable to do the required assignment that you only get one day to do. Oh, your class doesn’t know how to plug in the Chromebooks? Y’all can write it down on PAPER…that archaic substance that frightens you so much. So sad. Other classes will be on Chromebooks today. You are not so lucky. Maybe you will learn from this. Or not.

My team is in Bitch Mode. End of the trimester mentality, but more like where we would be in March, after Trimester 2. Not sure what’s up with that. I just know it feels crappy. Teachers blame themselves when the kids don’t perform, even when they know kids are making choices to do so. It makes you feel like a failure. No one likes that.

So that’s why I need to lose myself in quilting at night. I need a place to rest after grading all those tests, a place for my head to go where I have control over the outcome…or at least more control than I have over 140 12-year-olds.

So I quilted for an hour almost…

I really like those hands. I’m 6 1/2 hours in and almost done with the outlining.

I just have the tree left, and I’ve done some of it. Then I can start quilting the background, and honestly, not very much of the background shows. Then binding and trying to figure out what to do with the bleed spots. Almost there. Still need to draw the NEXT one. No pressure. OK, lots of pressure. Crazy-ass pressure, honestly.

I’m also writing the novel again, burying myself in plant/animal hybrid genetics and escaping from the government and chemical responses and how people might die. Weird stuff. I’m doing NaNoWriMo, where you write 50,000 words in 30 days in November. I wrote on the plane on Saturday morning, I wrote in LAX’s tiny little offshoot terminal where we were stuck for four hours, I wrote on my computer, and I wrote on the iPad while sitting in a meeting (hey, it kept me awake and I was actually listening.). I’m over 6,000 words in three days, so I’m doing OK. I’m trying to stay ahead of the 1667 words/day that will definitely get me there. It’s nice to have the website tell me that at the current rate, I will finish 5 days early (unlikely in real life). It gives me a cushion for the days I can’t get much written. And the story is progressing! I wrote 7 new characters in and promptly killed them off! Good times.

Anyway. I am busy. I might need a break soon. Meanwhile, here’s the video my mom took of me at Houston explaining Awakening the Crone…there’s a Quilt Alliance video too, but they haven’t sent me the link to that yet.

Apparently I invited everyone to take me out to a bar and explain myself. You know, like you do. Yeah. Apparently crazy ass.

Crazy Brain…

Seriously, WordPress, why do you think this is an improved posting experience? I have to click on more things now to see what I need. I was told yesterday that I was old school…I guess so. The old WordPress posting is called “classic.” And I still draw with a PEN on PAPER. And sometimes I sew by HAND. I was supposed to draw last night. Remember my plan to draw every week? Yeah. Well. I was pretty fucking tired last night. I did manage though to sandwich and pinbaste the damn quilt together, so it’s not like I did nothing. Plus I made chocolate chip cookies from scratch for something I’m going to tonight. And my dinner was just going to be uncooked cookie dough (as it should be), but I was hungry later, so I made English muffin pizzas. I think I am turning into a college student. I just haven’t had the energy to cook anything when I’m on my own. It’s too much work. I need to solve that problem.

Anyway, so I had enough batting and I found enough of a backing fabric (which was a front fabric on another quilt, so I had a shitload of it, apparently) last night…girlchild ditched me for some Haunted Trails thing with her friends (OK, I would have ditched me too…it’s OK), so I first had to clean the entryway so I could actually find the floor. That was not a bad thing. There’s still a lot of shit in there, but it’s much better. The cleanliness issue is driving me crazy at the moment. I just don’t have time for everything that needs doing. Even my computer is slow…wasting more time I don’t have. Fucker.

So I can’t show you the whole quilt, but there’s the batting! Sandwiched on the backing! Taped to the floor!

Wow, that’s exciting. This quilt actually isn’t as huge as some of mine have been recently. It’s supposed to be 36×60″. I’m guessing it will take about 15 hours to quilt. I’m hoping to start today, but today is already turning into a clusterfuck of time suckage, so we’ll see how that goes.

Babygirl was irritated by my throwing her off the ironing board, so she decided to inhabit one of the green fabric drawers.

I really need to clean this room up. It’s a hoarder’s paradise. It’s driving me nuts. That’s the thing, though. What do I drop so I have more time to clean? Art? Grading? The gym? I could stop reading books, but then I might kill innocent bystanders. Seriously. I need time in my head.

Anyway. It’s ready for quilting. I’ve spent 70 hours and 33 minutes on this quilt so far. Minus the drawing, because I don’t ever time that. There’s too much staring-off-into-space time. Processing time. Which reminds me, I need to draw the next quilt…needs to be done by January 1. Ha ha ha ha. No seriously. It does. It’s OK…it needs to be smaller.

Pinbasting didn’t take long…

I know, Sion. You think I’m nuts for pinbasting. I’m really just very methodical about certain stages of the quiltmaking. I might change my process if I had a good reason. Or if I had time to experiment. I never have time for that. Everything’s always short of time. I never have enough. I should be grading today AND quilting. Plus the gym and the girlchild’s soccer game, and I need to pick up my library book, and because I’m at a meeting all afternoon tomorrow, I need to lesson plan and plan for being in Houston next week and I have so much grading I might fall over and I really need to clean the damn house!

Yeah. It’s deep breaths.

And you know what’s crazy? I signed up for NaNoWriMo this year. I have 28,000 words of a novel and I’m not writing right now (see comments about time above), but I WANT to write. So I’m committing to it. The thing is, I write about a thousand words a day here. It doesn’t take me long, really, and maybe I’ll cut back a bit in November to accommodate the novel. So they estimate 1667 words a day to hit 50,000, BUT…I’m on a plane (or two) on November 1, I have a 4-day weekend thanks to Veterans Day, which includes a soccer tournament and hopefully someone else driving, plus there’s a whole WEEK off for Thanksgiving. I think I can do it (the little voice in the background that is reminding me that grades are due can just shut the fuck up). A school friend gave me her NaNoWriMo T-shirt from a few years ago. And worst-case scenario? I get more written and I don’t hit 50,000. It won’t kill me. But in the 11 days I have off from school, I could do 5000 words a day (could I really? I don’t know that I could.) and be OK.

Hey, you know me. I set crazy goals. Sometimes I meet them. This quilt? Have I been meeting them? Fuck yeah. A few I had to adjust, but I’m doing OK. So I’m estimating 15 hours of quilting. Here’s the problem, though…I’m in Houston for two nights…three days gone…plus catchup when I get back. So my plan is to be done with quilting by November 9. Eeek. That’s tight. Then I need to do binding and figure out what to do with the bleeding spots. Although they’re much harder to see with all the pins…maybe the quilting will help. I’ll still have to do something, but maybe not a lot. And I set this mid-November date…and I really have a little longer. But it needs to be photographed too. And I need to start the next one.

Crazy brain. Thinking it can do all this shit. WTF.

Managed

I spent pretty much all day on a soccer field today, which explains the dehydration, the sunburn (despite multiple applications of sunscreen and the use of an umbrella), the 65 pictures of soccer playing, and my mood in the evening. Girlchild can be difficult to manage when she’s hot, tired, sweaty, etc., and all of those things happened today. I weathered most of it, but it wore me down, and by the end of the day, there wasn’t any strength left in me.

I had some moments of depressoidness today, moments when it was quiet and I wasn’t distracted enough from the inner workings of my disturbed little mind, the bit that keeps nattering on about all the things I’ve done wrong and how none of them will ever be right…you know, the standard depression fare.

I spent the hour before the first game and part of that game writing…writing this weird-ass science fiction story that just spills out of me when I turn it on, sputtering like a barely used faucet, words flowing out in big gouts of semi-literate paragraphs. I wrote about 1500 words in that hour plus. We’re out of the woods and back into the city, storywise. It’s good.

OK. I don’t actually know if it’s good. I’m just writing until I’m done, and then I’ll put the editor hat on and go back in and kick its ass. Then and only then will I read it for story. Actually, I’ll probably let other people read it then. It could really suck. Who knows.

The team lost the first game. It was very hot out there. The picture above, the girl on the other team was hooking her arm through the girlchild’s elbow, and when the girlchild swung her around as she got the ball, the other girl tried to get the ref to call a foul. He did. On her. BOOM. We then spent an hour in a chilly Panera. Much nicer, except for all the noisy people. I read. I wrote a little more. We went and bought water. I got yelled at, but not seriously.

Then we sat on the field waiting for game number two. Still hot. Sleepy. Napped a bit. Read. This is where the brain started wandering. It started thinking about life a few years ago and what it was like and all the stuff I’m missing and that I’ll never have again and trip! There you are. In the damn hole. Drag yourself back out. Tell yourself to be in the fucking moment. Watch the weird seed pods floating balletically (it is TOO a word) across the soccer field, feel the (ultra) warm breeze waft across your face (and dry your eyes out). Deep breaths. Traffic on the south Interstate 5 is finally clearing up, so we might get home in a reasonable time frame. POSITIVE FUCKING THINKING BABY.

Then girlchild made a goal, which was good, because she is more likely to be in a decent mood if she is successful at something (shocker, that. Must be genetic.). The photo above is right before the goal…she actually had to kick it past the goalie and then come around with her left foot and bend it (not like Beckham) into the goal. Which she did.

I stitched during the second game. Not a lot. I really wasn’t in the mood. Sometimes it all seems very pointless.

I talked to people. I tried to be sociable. I tried to shut up the bad parts of my brain with all the wondrous seed pods and warm breeziness. SIGH. And then I got yelled at in the car on the way home. So I turned the music up and cried a bit all the way home.

And after dinner, after I heard the litany of why girlchild is so stressed, which I can’t possibly understand (seriously, she said that), I decided to do what I wanted. Yes, I’m fully aware that school starts in four days and my house is a disaster and my lesson plans are questionable. I know all of that. I also know that BALANCE is what I need and that means the only really good thing I learned last year is that even if I am so depressed I barely function, I can do my job and come home and make some sort of art every night and I will survive. So I should keep doing that part. I should not bury myself in my job, because although it can be very fulfilling, it also sucks my soul out of my body and spits it out in a sewer. Art? Not so much. It tends to be much kinder. It is a better place to be.

I’ve got 5 birds to get done by September 1. Well, two birds HAVE to be done by then…here’s the first, another one of the doves…

I pulled the original picture up on the iPad, but couldn’t figure out what fabrics I’d used, so I winged it.

Because there’s a shortage of fabric in my room? Yeah. I didn’t think so.

The dove and a new version of the diving bird will be at the Fence/Barda exhibit that I’m involved with at Art Produce Gallery in North Park (San Diego), which opens September 13.

Both will be for sale at that venue…which means I need to finish them slightly differently and not spend too much time on them, because I don’t get all the money.

I got this one cut out too, but it should already have a home…

Two more to do tomorrow. I did this one slightly differently too. Can’t always find the original fabrics. Lots of fabric in here.

Anyway, I think I fought off most of the depressoid stuff…at least, if I go to bed now, I have a good chance of leaving it here instead of bringing it to interrupt my sleep, which is what happened this morning. I could have used the extra hour of sleep, but no…my brain does not allow it. Anyway. I’m trying. Know that I’m always trying.

You’d Think…

Sometimes it’s good to let the brain wander down new streets for a while…to let it consider other ways of thinking, of making, of creating. I have one art group I’m a member of where I am often doing this meandering down avenues I wouldn’t normally frequent. Which is why tonight found me wiring two coathangers together and handstitching organza on top…

No really. I’m building a floating house of sorts and this is the picture in my head.

Or at least, this is part of the picture in my head. There’s more. Again, though, the quickie painters kick my butt. The people in my group who just spend an hour or so on a painting? I’m so jealous. Everything I do is so time-consuming. I’m over an hour in and nowhere near done. I have some time on this one though, a couple of weeks. This is for a show about the border between the US and Mexico, and we’re working with a group of female Mexican artists. My house is ephemeral. Maybe. We’ll see what it really looks like in the end. This is just the base layer. I’m handstitching it to the wire and coathangers and then there will be more layers and more handstitching and those worry dolls I ordered. Maybe some writing as well. We’ll see. I’m just glad I finally got started, so some of the image can get out of my head and into reality. The head was getting crowded. Too many ideas in there.

I also traced the five birds I need to do next…

Three are commissions and the other two are for the same exhibit as the house. They will be for sale at the exhibit or afterwards. Girlchild picked the additional two…some of that was based on size, since they need to fit into a particular shape.

Midnight was very helpful.

Not. She is known for taking bites out of drawings that are on the light table. She was also watching bad television. And reminding me that I still need to hang the TV and sort out the technology storage and put shelves up for the books. And then hang art. Because I’m not stressed out enough at the moment about getting things done.

Have I told you that I have no idea what day it is? I really don’t.

The reason I finally got going on the birds and the house was because I managed to trim the big quilt yesterday…

Aug 11 14 001 small

It’s not as straight as I’d like…the image, that is. The rectangle is in fact rectangular and not a parallelogram. Although I did consider a different shape. But in the end, I figured it was fine…

Although I would have liked the head to the left a bit…oh well. When you look at the whole thing, it’s not a problem. I see it, but most people won’t. Of course, now I’ve told you about it, so when you see the official photographs, you’ll be all judgmental, just like me.

When I bought the binding fabric, I saw some great reds for heart colors…

I actually had an idea for a quilt of a huge heart. Because I don’t have 17 quilts ahead of that one. I entered another show today and did some research for the next batch of shows, what can be in and what can’t kind-of-thing, whether it’s subject matter or size or date completed that causes the issue. I actually said out loud that if I didn’t get into one of the two big shows I’m entering, then that’s it, I’m done. No more quilts.

Yeah right. I know. Not gonna happen. But it is discouraging to have rejection after rejection for months on end, especially when you know the stuff you’re making is bang, in your face, detailed and amazing. You wonder where it belongs. You wonder if you will ever find a place where your life’s work belongs. It doesn’t have to be in a tribe of likes or anything…just to belong. I realize it has to fit into the shows I enter. Maybe that is the core problem, the fitting-in.

I got the binding sewn on last night, super late.

I used a lighter background fabric for once, so you can see the outlining.

I got everything pinned down and started stitching it down last night. Had a hard time going to sleep. Brain was racing around like a crazy car…

So I stitched for a while. There aren’t enough waking hours in the day to get everything done. I’d rather be awake and making art than sleeping. That’s probably not healthy, but it is where I’m at at the moment. At at.

This, by the way, made me inordinately sad.

To realize how much pain he must have been in. He was so great in Mrs. Doubtfire, and also in Dead Poet’s Society…in everything. At some point, I guess, it no longer matters that you haven’t read all the books or seen all the movies. I joke about not killing myself because my Netflix queue is too long or I don’t know if Arya will survive George R. R. Martin. I can’t possibly die not knowing that. I am not the suicidal type, at core, so that helps, but have experienced the depths seriously enough to feel an electric shock when I hear of someone who seemed like he had it all together and thought this was a solution. Look at that face. I’m very sad. My whole household was sad. Well, except for the cats, and that’s because they are just clueless assholes.

(I just had to get up and go look for Babygirl, because I realized I hadn’t seen her in a while…she’s an old lady and sleeps a lot. I found her in the dining area, deeply asleep on the floor.)

By the way, the girlchild’s friend who gave her the Frozen soundtrack? I hate you. You bitch. But it was amusing to walk past her bedroom as she was packing for their trip to Arrowhead and hear the music blasting and seeing the boychild (who spent 2+ hours with me today negotiating shipping boxes to New York, ordering textbooks from multiple sites, trying to figure out his mailing address, and trying to open a bank account, and finally walked out and handed me his phone, saying he wasn’t going to watch it for a phone call) sitting on her floor untangling all of her bracelets and necklaces, and when I asked him why, he said the knots offended him. He leaves in 10 days. Sad. I think he might miss us. I know we will miss him. Greatly. He tells me he won’t answer his phone if he doesn’t recognize the number. I suggested he might have to get over that in the next few weeks. Damn. Sending your oldest off to college, knowing they will only barely come back, that this is the line between childhood and adulthood, that now it’s his life and not his life as my child. That is just so difficult. More so knowing that he provides me with a level of sanity that I otherwise don’t have. I’m rewriting my life as I sit here. I don’t know what it will look like any more than he knows what his looks like.

I finally managed to break through the writer’s block that was stifling me the last 10 days on the science fiction novel I am apparently writing. Yes, it still surprises me that I am doing this, but I am definitely doing it, and already have a core outline for book 2, which is not related…or is it? Hard to say. I was stymied by the science at one point and kept thinking myself into this hole of wanting GOOD science, but not having a strong enough background to write it well. So I wrote a paragraph that was extremely vague and then, because I’m using Google Docs, wrote a comment telling myself to add a bunch of good science here, once I have a chance to chase down a source of said information (I think I need to pick someone’s brain, a plant geneticist or something like that), and even wrote “blah blah blah” at the end of one sentence, and then actually typed, “Add good science here.” And then? Then I could jumpstart the story again (although now I need a gun consultant, dammit), and it wrote another 1000 words all by itself without my even trying very hard. I think that’s the goal. Get the core story out and then go back and fix all the shit I don’t really know yet. Like people’s names…although the three core players in this section all have names. I still have a main character named Dr. Blank, though. Not good.

Anyway. Unfortunately, the rest of my week is full of school stuff, mostly professional development. I’m taking the iPad so I can work on the book if it’s boring (it usually is), and hopefully I’ll get the binding on that big quilt done this week so I can call the photographer, plus get the birds in gear and make a bloody floating house. The kids are gone for a few days to Arrowhead with their dad and grandpa. I get to house Jake, the amazingly large and overly friendly German Shepherd who belongs to my ex but really loves me more…plus clean up vast amounts of cat puke and negotiate a houseful of silence…which honestly might be a joy after three days of teacher talk. I shoved a hike in there too, because why the fuck not? And the weekend is full of soccer, or maybe it’s full of drawing boobies on the soccer field (the breasticle kind instead of the blue-footed kind). Whatever. Three to five soccer games in two days in the OC? There are many things wrong with that picture, but in the end? It doesn’t really matter. I will do this or that and make this or that and get into this or that show and whatever. School starts in a week and I am not ready, but then again, when am I ever? It’s a job and I do it relatively well, despite the mental crap I carry around.

I had to apologize to the kids about 14 times tonight. I tried a new meal (we do a lot of that over the summer, because there is more time than during the school year), and the recipe said 20 minutes prep time and 40 minutes cook time. What a joke! I think it took me 90 minutes to prep, and no, I wasn’t being particularly lame…there was just a lot of cutting and chopping. Girlchild says some recipes don’t count that as prep time (fuckwads!), so who knows. She is willing to look for shortcuts for me. So we didn’t have dinner until 9 PM, and I said, well, at least you’ll look back at these years and laugh, because your mom was so lame at the basics, like cooking and cleaning (because I was entering an art show!), but the thing that sucks is that the recipe was really GOOD (both kids went back for seconds), so I will probably have to make it again. At least I have leftovers for the next two days of lunch, right? Unless some kid bogarts it for breakfast. Seriously. I started cooking at 6:15. I’m not totally lame…just mostly lame.

OK, I really should have gone to bed two hours ago, but the brain is not complying. Fucked up, for sure, because that’s two nights running with very little sleep. You’d think I would have figured that one out by now.