Podcast with The Brilliant, Creative & Curious Wendy Hale Davis

Y'all have heard me talk about Wendy many times. She's one of the Women Who Says That Horrible Word, and we've known each other for--yowza!--a dozen years now, ever since I saw her amazing work in Jason Thompson's Making Journals By Hand (Quarry, 2000). If you've got a copy, check out pages 26 & 27, for example. See? You'd send fan mail, too, wouldn't you? [Don't give up--the little podcast player is down at the bottom there--keep scrolling!]

Wendy is one of the most brilliant people I know--not only does she know stuff, but she gets interested in new stuff and finds out about it and adds it to the vast stores of stuff she knows about. She remembers stuff. You ask her a question, and hours later you get a text with information about it that you wouldn't ever have thought of. Like for instance: recently she texted me a little after 7 am to ask if it were sunny here that day (we're both sun fanatics and are happy any day it's sunny and not so happy any day it isn't), and I told her I didn't know because the sun wasn't up (plus I was still in bed drinking coffee so couldn't really see whether it was cloudy out, but I didn't tell her that because I didn't want to sound like a total slacker), and we were wondering how much later (seconds? minutes?) the sun rises here (west and north of Austin, where she lives) than it does there. Later that evening she called me to tell me all she'd discovered about the timing of sunrise and sunset from the winter solstice to the spring equinox. I love her brain.

 Her brain decorated by fabulous hats.

Anyway, so Wendy turns 60 tomorrow (Happy Birthday, again, sweetie!), and I wanted to talk to her about curiosity and creativity and getting older. So many people I know act as if life is over after 50. Oh, sure, they keep living. But they don't LIVE, you know? They don't try new things or change their basic lives or experiment or get excited about stuff. They are not, in short, curious. And curiosity about things is what fascinates me.

Her grandfather was Elmer Davis,

 and that hat was given to her by a group at his alma mater, 

which I should remember but, of course, do not.

 A wine bar in downtown Austin

 where we spent a long leisurely afternoon tasting various flights.

A sheriff's deputy working security at Whole Foods. 

We forced him to laugh. We're pretty sure

 he thought The EGE was our handler/keeper.

Somewhere in Austin, 

doing our small part to 

Keep Austin Weird. 

In a good podcast, there's a point where I can literally feel my scalp tingle and a grin spread across my face--I know I've got something that's going to inspire someone else. Listen to what Wendy says--really listen, and you're going to realize a different way of looking at what your life can be like--at any age--young, 40, 50, 60, 70, 101.

A Small Epiphany: Stuff as Burden, Stuff as "Just In Case"

At least I hope it is, in the sense of "revelation" rather than "manifestation," and I hope it sticks.

Last night I was putting stuff away (no, not in the studio--not yet) and thought of something I needed to buy. Something--I have no idea what, of course, having forgotten it almost immediately--organizational, I think. Some file or storage something, perhaps. And as soon as I thought of that--thought I should go make a note so I could pick one up the next time we're out--I thought, "Nah. I don't want something else to bring into this house." And I kind of stopped what I was doing and realized, very clearly, that I really *do not* want anything else in here, and that the reason why is because anything I buy and bring home is something for which I'm responsible and something I have to take care of. Now, I've thought of this before and have probably written about it before, but it really stuck me last night and again this morning, about how everything I have is something that's my responsibility. To pay for, sure, and to bring home, but also to take care of--find a place for (a biggie) and keep clean and in good repair. This feels overwhelming, this responsibility.

Things deserve to be used. Most things have some purpose, and many things can have multiple purposes. But no thing has as its purpose being stored somewhere and never being used for anything. Unless it's ballast, maybe, or is being used in some structural way--like you have a bunch of old tires that you've accumulated and then build some solar dwelling and use the tires as insulation. But I don't know that that would count as just being stored because now the tires have taken on a different role and are fulfilling that.

So never mind that part.

What this past week has brought home to me is that stuff is a burden. It may be lovely stuff, fabulous stuff, stuff that you like, but it still requires effort from you. Looking around this room right now, looking at all the stuff piled out here waiting to go back into the sewing studio, I'm struck by how much of it isn't being used for anything. It has a purpose--an extra-large cutting mat, for example. It's a good cutting mat, and it wasn't cheap. I've had it for years, and I've stored it, at various times, against the wall and under the daybed. But here's the deal: I've used it maybe once, long ago. I can't ever remember using it, although I'm sure I must have. But for years it hasn't served any purpose and has been shifted from one storage place to another. The problem is that I can imagine a time when I might use it: I've sometimes thought of creating my own bias tape for edging some garment I'm making. To do that, I would need a bias tape maker, which I have (somewhere) and a cutting mat and rotary cutter to cut the fabric. So I have an imagined use for the mat. But would I ever actually make my own bias tape? That seems a little anal to me--like the finished garment would be all nuclear and buttoned up and not at all funky. And the idea of measuring (which, as you know, I avoid like the plague: once an OCD brain gets into Measuring Mode, you can kiss the rest of the day goodbye) rows and rows of fabric to cut on the bias makes me shudder.

And, seriously, I can't think of any other occasion on which I might need a cutting mat. If I did, I have several smaller ones that would work. If I really needed one this big, I could probably afford to buy one. But maybe I wouldn't want to buy one, and if I didn't have one, I wouldn't make the bias tape and so would miss the opportunity to make something fabulous that would Change My Life. Isn't that what we all think about stuff, that it might someday Change Our Lives in some undefinable way?

I'm thinking of this as I look at each thing. The Singer Heavy Duty sewing machine my mother bought for me years ago. It has been used maybe three or four times. When she bought it, we thought it was for heavy-duty sewing, like for jeans and leather. What it was, however, was for lots of use, like in a home ec. class. So it's not exactly what we thought it was, and I've never really found a use for it. My Kenmore workhorse does what I need it to do. And if it can't do it, there's the Janome. But: if those two machines died and I needed a sewing machine, I would have it. Plus my mother bought it for me, and she's gone and I didn't keep a lot of her stuff and so feel an attachment--or at least an obligation--to the stuff that I *did* keep, like this machine and Sewing Machine #4, her own olive green Elna, which I have never used since I was in high school and wasn't really allowed to use much even then.

Do you see? Stuff. Thinking about it is taxing, and I don't want that. I don't want The Burden of Stuff. I don't want to have to think about it and store it, clean it and organize it.
I want not to have to think about Stuff. I want to have what I need and have that where I can get to it easily, with no thought. What I want is for the implementation of ideas to be a seamless flow.

I can categorize my stuff this way:
~~stuff to which I have no attachment, either emotional or utilitarian. Most of this I've gotten rid of already, but it seems that more and more of what is left has begun to drift into this category.
~~stuff that's so integral to my life that I don't even think about it and can't imagine getting rid of it. Embroidery floss, fabric, beads, buttons, needles, pins, thread. Stuff like that. Clothes I love and wear constantly, like my journal skirts. Technological stuff--the iPhone, the iMac, the Flip video camera--that I use regularly.
~~everything else.

 It's the Everything Else that I'm thinking about. It sounds like nothing, but to do it well (the thinking about it) requires great effort. You look at something--some Thing that you own--and consider its value to you vs. the amount of responsibility it requires to maintain it. Is it worth the effort? What *is* its value to you? What is its intrinsic value? And extrinsic? For me, a lot of what I think about is about storage. If I keep it, where will it live? How easy will it be to get to it? What will it displace? This is important: if I can't get to something easily, I won't use it/wear it/think about it. If something takes up space but isn't important enough to me to justify that space, space that could be used for something else, then is it really valuable at all?

I can see what the problems have been in the past. One is Stuff as Security: what if I need X and can't find any more like it? So I'd better have multiples: a black pair of my favorite brown boots, a dozen pair of socks, a back-up coffee-making device. Or Stuff as A Bargain: it's such a great deal that I'd better buy it now just in case--Just In Case--I need it later. Or something is so cool and funky that I have to buy it; this is a huge problem at estate sales, which are also really bad for Stuff as Orphans: I find things that belonged to someone else that are now homeless, and I feel sorry for them (I'm not talking dolls or anthropomorphically-inclined stuff; I mean even stuff like old empty wooden spools and a sock darner and rocks and stuff) and am compelled to take them home. Or, I think, *was* compelled. I've gotten a lot better about this part already. I go to fewer estate sales just so I won't feel sorry for the stuff being sold. Yes, I fully realize this is extremely pathetic.

Another reason for all of this, I suppose, is that my family didn't have a lot of stuff when I was growing up. My parents were frugal people, sure, but the main reason was that we moved constantly through the oil-producing western states, and everything we owned had to fit in a little green trailer about 1/6th the size of this office studio I'm sitting in right now. All our clothes, all my toys (quite a lot of those), all our dishes and household stuff--it all had to be packed and moved with just days' notice. My mother didn't buy stuff because she couldn't fit it into the trailer. All her keepsakes were stored at her parents' house, and it was only after we quit moving so often that she began to acquire things. Maybe that's part of why I have stuff. But what I have to keep in mind about that part is all the things my mother managed to acquire after that, all the things I had to allow someone else to get rid of after she died. Which is kind of where this whole thing really started for me: seeing how much stuff my mother had, stuff that she had never used.

Now here I have to explain that I am not a hoarder, not by any means. I'm not compelled to keep stuff. I don't have piles of papers--the only papers I have are a bin with the back taxes stuff and two file cabinets. One of them is for writing--a paper copy of all the published stuff. I'm not sure about this--sometimes I think I'll just toss all that, but then other times I go to file something I've finished and find it satisfying to see file drawers of two decades of my work all nicely filed in chronological order so that I could, if I were so inclined, go back and re-read the very first article I ever wrote for publication. I'm not so inclined, and I can't really imagine that someday someone would want all these folders (no one I know actually reads the stuff I write, not all of it--even my mother didn't read it all, and unless I shoot someone in some spectacularly scandalous fashion, I won't be famous and these won't be worth squat), so I can see a time when I'll just ditch all that. When I began this career in 1991, you still wanted a hard copy of everything you wrote, Just In Case. And, having once lost a nearly-finished article when an early computer ate it all and died, I do print out work as I go along, Just In Case. But after it appears in print, what's the point of keeping a copy? I have no idea. Vanity, I suppose: imagining that it's all meaningful. If I got rid of all of this--including the entire printed draft of each of the books--I could free up an entire filing cabinet. But then, I think, could I actually get rid of the cabinet itself, or would I keep it Just in Case?

Sigh.

I don't save stuff--no bags of string or balls of aluminum foil. I don't save ticket stubs or menus or any of that. I don't print out photos Just In Case. So no, no hoarding. No collecting--no rows of little ceramic cats (aieeeeeee!) or Bakelite jewelry or FiestaWare. No collecting. For me, it's about Stuff I Might Need, I think. And I'm thinking more and more about that and really trying to be clearer about that so that, instead of More Stuff, I can have More Space. Other people tell me they love to be surrounded by fabulous things that inspire them. I hear this a lot, and I understand how they like to look around them and see things that give them ideas. I'm not so much inspired by what's around me (although that's not always true; see below) as I am by what's in my head, and when I get an idea, I need free space so I can grab everything, lay it out, and start working. If I can't do that--if there's no room (like these past two weeks) or if I can't get to my tools (like when we're traveling) or if there's no time (when life is cluttered)--then the idea becomes exponentially less and less interesting over a relatively short period of time as other ideas take its place. If I don't pursue it right away and develop it and nourish it, it fades into nothing. I hate that--I've lost so many ideas that way. It's not about capturing them and writing them down; that doesn't help. It's doing something with them while I'm in love with them, before I fall in love with something else. For instance: I woke up in the middle of the night last week and saw this on the table by the bed:

I fell back asleep happily imagining an appliquéd and embroidered panel for the long journal skirt, kind of Peter Max-ish, with the image of my eyes from an altered photograph I took of myself years ago. I woke up the next morning thinking how cool this would be and what fun it would be to work on with the panel on stretcher bars, about the swirls and colors. But I couldn't get to any of my stuff, since it was all stacked in various rooms, and I have no idea where that image is--it's been used on an apron and a couple art quilts, and I know I have a paper copy *somewhere.*

For a couple days this was really interesting to me, and I couldn't wait to get back in the studio and start playing with the idea. Paints! Maybe foils! But as the week wore on and then the weekend and now this week, it's become less and less interesting. I have other ideas for other things I want to do, and this image doesn't make me grin any more. Maybe it will later, and I know it would have if I'd tackled it the next morning; but for now, it's nothing to me. And I hate that. It would have been fun, and I would have liked it. But now I'm thinking of a jacket I want to make out of a linen shirt I've had for a couple years, and maybe that's what I'll tackle when all this dust settles. Or maybe I'll wake up in the middle of the night tonight and have a completely brand new idea with which I instantly fall in love. I have a drawer of bits and pieces of stuff like this--stuff I started and loved but couldn't work on right away so that by the time I got to come back to it, it no longer grabbed me. Sometimes I try to work up enthusiasm for one of them, but I've moved on. They're like old lovers you once found irresistible but that now just seem ordinary and kind of pathetic in their boringness.

I'm quite thrilled to be at this place in my life because it feels really freeing to find new homes for stuff and have room to shift around the things I keep. It's wonderful to have an empty table, for example, somewhere where I can walk in and spread out a garment I want to alter without having to shift stuff and clear away clutter, just spread it out and grab the pins and scissors and start working while the idea is fresh. That is a wonderful thing; it's one of things I love best about my life, the freedom to be able to do that.

It's marvelous to me to have a closet that contains only clothes I love so that the closet isn't packed so tightly with stuff that I can't slide the hangers along the rack and see what I've got. It's wonderful to have shelves in the storage building that hold labeled bins of fabric so that I can walk in, pick a bin, find the fabric, and bring it in the house, all in less than five minutes.

It's everything that interferes with these things that I have to deal with. The remaining Stuff I Don't Love & Don't Really Need But That is Really Cool or That Might Be Useful.

That stuff. That's the stuff I don't want to put back in the sewing studio and don't want in the storage building or my closets or anywhere at all. It's determining what, exactly, that stuff *is* that's the problem. Once I figure out what category it fits into, then I can go about finding a new home for it.

Whew. Thanks for listening to me think out loud about this. It helps a lot in clarifying the core of what needs to be done. Just as I've finally gotten to the place where we use every room in our house almost every single day--meaning we spend time in each one doing something, rather than just passing through--I want to get to the place where every single thing I own has a purpose and is used regularly, whether that's every day or once every six months. But not ever, ever stored someplace Just In Case.

Just The Tiniest Bit Nuts

I'm officially Ready for This To Be Done. Below you can see what's making me nuts, along with having someone in the house with me every day so that I'm never alone except for the mornings when I'm waiting for them to arrive. It's not conducive to working or getting ideas or being inspired. It doesn't matter that I really like this guy or that he's doing excellent work. He's a joy to have around, quiet and always cheerful and just generally a really nice guy. And it's not his fault at all that it's taken longer; he did a lot of extra stuff for me. So I'm not complaining about him--not at all. In fact, I would recommend him to anyone over ANY of the people I've ever had here doing any kind of work, oh, goodness, yes. He is quite fabulous and not at *all* like The Bad Boyfriend. Remember him? The one who was EXACTLY like a Bad Boyfriend: doesn't call, doesn't show up when he says he will, leaves you to go see someone else, disappears for weeks at a time? Remember that? So it's not that at all.

What it is is: I need my regular life back. The sad, sad truth is that I need to work. I like to work, I need to work, I'm happy when I'm working. I'm good at working. Yeah, I know that's sad. Being good at being productive isn't exactly the kind of thing they're going to mention in your obituary in happy, glowing terms. It's not the kind of thing your family says about you or that your friends claim is one of your sterling virtues. Because "being good at working" doesn't necessarily translate into "being good at making tons of money" or "being good at solving the world's problems" or "being good at starting a world-changing business." It just means you're good at getting a job done. My brain likes being productive. I'm good at that.

"Hanging around waiting for stuff" is not one of the things I'm good at. It's kind of down there with "cooking," right above "changing diapers" (which I have never, ever, ever done, not once, thankyoujesus. That's how not-good-at-it I am).

This is the office studio. Where, you know, I *work.* Snort. Now, of course, it's the holding room for half the stuff from the sewing studio next door. Parts of the cats' daybed with all its coverings and pillows, jeans my walking partner left on the front porch for me to cut up and use for something, Alex all forlorn with no project to wear~~when I sit in my desk chair, I'm surrounded by Stuff. I feel like I'm suffocating. Like right now--can you hear me wheezing? No, you can't--because the sound is muffled by ALL THIS STUFF. I could scream at the top of my lungs out here and no one would hear me. They'd go, "Did you hear a mouse? Huh. Those cats aren't doing a very good job." I could get lost out here for days and no one would find me.

~~the table in the background

 holding stuff from the sewing tables

 and the shelves that no longer exist.

 Just thinking of this is terrifying.

Where will it all go? My best answer?

 Away. It needs to Go Away.

And this, below, is the living room and the first thing I see when I come in the front door. It has the other half of the sewing studio's contents. Remember: there were three tables with three sewing machines, a day bed, a cutting table, ten shelves on the walls (full of bins of drawers), several spare folding tables and an ironing board stored against the refrigerator (that space no longer exists). It's going to take another week, once the room is finished, for me to figure out the new arrangement. That would be way fun *if I had that kind of extra time.* I arranged all my deadlines and podcasts and blog posts for CMM so that I'd have time to do this, but that's all over after today--the regular schedule starts back up, and the days I had set aside to put the room back together--from last Friday night until tonight--those are gone.

 In the foreground is the table for the Janome, currently obscured by bins of drawers that were on the shelves, most of which were removed and won't go back up, which means I have to figure out where I'm going to PUT THAT STUFF. If you look closely, you can see two red boards kind of in the background. Those are kitchen shelves, attached to the wall with brackets. They have to be painted, but I'm not sure what color--whether there'll be extra paint left over from the trim. If so, I'll sand those and paint them orange-ish. If not, I think I may paint them with acrylic paint--I don't want to buy a quart of paint just for these. On the other hand, I may need to create another shelf like them for the other end of the room, in which case I *would* need a quart of paint. Something I have to figure out once I can get everything in there and see what can be ditched and what I have to find a place for (for which. . . .).

Here, in the middle, you can see the second sewing table/desk with the Kenmore, my all-metal workhorse go-to machine. On the right: the mattress and box springs for the cats' daybed.

Almost two weeks now since I took that room apart. Ergh. The good news is that I think it's going to be finished today. He was here working until 9 pm last night, and all that's left is finishing the last bit of the siding and the trim. It's going to be fabulous once I can get in there and get it set up in a new configuration, figuring out where things go and how to use the space most efficiently while not blocking ANY of the light from those windows.

Keeping my fingers crossed~~

Some Projects

No, these aren't ones I finished this weekend. The Joy Coat I finished just before the remodeling started, and the other one, the Bryn Walker, I finished last week--I got it started before everything had to be crammed into other rooms and just carried it around with me all week. Right now I'm mending the original Journal Skirt--it's so old that it's more patches than it is original skirt, and every once in a while I have to go in and work on it some more. Since I can't get to any of my stuff (grrrrrr--going into Week 2 here), this is about all I can work on. Grumble, grumble. But it needs it, so~~

The Joy Coat--remember: I have four of these and am shortening them and removing the hoods. This is the second one I've finished:

Again, I cut off the hem and moved it up and held it in place with more hand-stitching. This fabric is easy to stitch through, so it's not a total pain--but I really do hate having to pin it in place: I stick myself over and over and pins fall out wherever I'm working. I have to check the chair cushion when we leave Starbucks lest I leave pins for someone to sit on. Yikes! Two down, two more to go.

Then this Bryn Walker jacket. I got it for 40% off on January 2nd. If I'd gone a day earlier, on New Year's Day, I could have gotten it for 50% off of that. But I didn't, and I wanted it anyway. It's a boring color, but the floss helped a lot. I love the way it feels and moves, so it was worth the 1) extra cost and 2) miles of stitching.

 I added two rows of stitching all the way around. I used some muted-for-me colors of orange, purple, and pink, and I got to entertain my little brain by making the two rows never match. So I alternated the three colors in the first row. Then, on the second row, I started in between two of those. So let's say I started where the first row is orange and will change to purple; on the second row I started with pink and went through the change and ended up halfway through the purple. Then I switched to orange and went through the first-row purple and into the first-row pink. So the colors on the two rows never matched. This is the kind of thing my brain latches onto. The trick is to keep from going exactly halfway--to make it look more random. I have REAL trouble doing random, as you might imagine, and so try to devise projects where I'm forced to give it a go. It is, after all, All About The Brain.

The buttonholes were loose, so it wouldn't stay buttoned. I probably won't *wear* it buttoned, but I hate it when things don't work the way they should, so I tightened up the buttonholes with more stitching. I really like the floss tails on this; they keep it from taking itself too seriously.

OK. Got to go put on some socks and try to warm up my feet. The contractor finally arrived, so now the house is freezing. OK, so it's not actually freezing--it's still over 70--but it feels icy cold to me, just knowing the door's open. Brrrrrrr. I'm such a weather weenie.

Why I Did It

Not finished yet, but close enough.

 Moe.

 Clarice.

 Lennie Lulu.

We'll have to take the bed down again tomorrow night so they can finish on Monday, but for now? Ahhhhh. . . .

Photos!

I finally got photos and came out here to show them to you and the &^%$# internet was down. But now all is well again, and here you go. Not finished--not by any means. But getting there--

 This paint color is the color out here in the office studio, and I love it and love the healthy golden glow it has when the sun comes in, so it was the perfect color for this room. It makes the rooms flow together. At first I thought I was going to have bright white so we'd have one room for taking photos and matching colors and stuff, but we never used it for that when it was white, and I hate white walls, so when he asked me what color I wanted it and I realized I had a choice, wow.

 I hadn't planned to have anything done to this wall--it's another project for another day. But Robert didn't want to have different colors in the same room and so said he was going to paint it for me, and I, needless to say, am thrilled. That hideous paneling is going to be disguised. That shape you see up there on the wall is the old original fuse box. It had been painted over several times by the time we bought the house. I like it there and haven't ever thought of having it removed. It's under layers and layers now, and I like to imagine there's something hidden inside. A note, some letters, a photo.

The black trim will be a just-slightly-darker golden-orange color.

 Robert's cousin is doing the painting, and Robert is replacing the siding--it all has to be cut to fit the new windows, like, he said, a jigsaw puzzle.

 Yiiiii~~staging area with all the tools and stuff.

 I don't even breathe on any of this stuff. They put it up every night, all neat and tidy, and it looks like this again every day.

 I'd love to know how old the boards and the felt and everything is--70 years? 80? Who knows?

Love this--our big pine in the front yard, a bit of the copper roof, and gorgeous blue sky--it's 73 today with not a cloud in sight.

People say you need a place to rest your eyes--why they have white rooms in their houses. When I want to look at something that's not orange or hot pink or whatever, this is where I look:

Now I'm getting excited--in every project, whether I'm doing it myself or having it done, there's the anticipation, and then there's the long slog of depression when everything's out of place and dusty and dirty and ugly, and I hate it and think, "OMG, what was I *thinking*? Why did I think I wanted to do this?" and then there's this stage, when you're almost there and it starts getting exciting and you can't wait to get in there and clean up and make everything shiny. I want to do that and then live with it for a couple days, really think about what I want to put back in there and what I want to leave out. It's not going to have as many shelves, so some stuff is going to have to live somewhere else. Over the weekend I'll probably go buy some more throw rugs--the sun has already ruined/discolored parts of the floor and will do even more now, so I'll get throw rugs so I won't notice the yellowed parts. They won't be fancy ones--just cotton ones that can be tossed when they're ruined by the sun. Someday, when I have the kitchen redone, I'll have some other flooring put down, but that's nowhere near the top of the list of projects for Someday. And it will be a long time before I'm ready to do this again. A project like this is something for every 2-3 years, at the most. Maybe every five years~~

Windows Week, Day 5

Well, my little chickadees, I have no photo for you today, not yet. The office is taped off, so I can't get to my camera or my computer. Theoretically, I could take the iPhone in there and get a photo, but eh. I'm keeping my fingers crossed that they paint today, but it doesn't look good--they're putting Killz on the trim right now, and it and the texture have to dry. The good news is that they mopped the floor, which brightened my mood considerably. I hadn't realized how much the dust and mud was bothering me. Duh. "Hello. My name is Ricë, and I'm anal-retentive."

Hey! Do you know how to get this: ë on your iPhone? Hold your finger over the e. A pop-up will appear w/various diacritically-marked e's. Slide your finger to the one you want and release. Voilà! See? Ñ ç ÿł ß. Cool, huh? Go play!


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPhone

Windows Week, Day 4

Oy. I debated even sitting down to write this post because it's just going to be one long drawn-out whine, but I've sort of committed myself to updating the saga every day. I have nothing new to report--it's a little after 11 am. They were to start at 10, but you know how that goes. No biggie there. I'm still cool about that. It's everything ELSE that's making me crazy this morning.

First off, last night. We go into the bedroom to start getting ready for bed about midnight. Now, our house is layered. If you have cats, you know why. Our cats are all perfectly litter-box-trained. No issues there. But (I'm sorry--if you're squeamish, you can skip this part. Skip the whole post, in fact. Come back later; I'll write something not cat-related then) cats throw up. You know? Sometimes it's hairballs, and sometimes it's for no apparent reason. Most of the cats are pretty good about hopping down onto the floor when they're going to puke.

Not Moe. Moe throws up wherever he is. It's extremely irritating, but I also feel sorry for him: the reason Moe is fat is because when he came in the house to live with us, he was just a kitten, and he immediately got a respiratory infection--probably incubating it from before he came indoors. He coughed all the time, and when he ate, he'd start coughing, and then he'd puke. He was such a skinny little guy, with this big head and big paws, and it was scary because he couldn't gain any weight. After a couple rounds of different antibiotics, we finally got him well, and I set about fattening him up.

Little did I know how successful this would be, alas.

Anyway, so he has a history with puking, and when he does it now (not often, but every couple weeks), he doesn't even bother to move from wherever he is.

Hence the layering. Layers of rugs on the floors, layers of dyed cotton rugs on the furniture, layers of washable bedding on the bed. We have our crispy white sheets, and then there's a dyed over sheet, and then there's the comforter, and then there's an over sheet for it (over sheets = can be whisked off and laundered quickly). Then there's another cotton comforter, twin-sized, that goes on the very top and just covers the top of the bed--it's pink and orange, and it's nice to lie under but is small enough to fit in the washing machine, unlike the king-sized one, which has to be disassembled for laundering. And, at the foot of the bed where the cats sometimes nap during the day, a piece of fuchsia fleece.

Normally we don't leave our clothes lying around, for obvious reasons and because we like our clothes and keep them put up, mostly. Except me and the ones I'm altering--I hang those up or put them somewhere theoretically away from the cats. But with the huge disarray this week, there were clothes on the bed along with the heated throw under which we've been camping out in the afternoons when the house gets really cold. And someone--I'm pretty sure it was Moe--threw up all over everything--The EGE's leather jacket, the heated throw, the fleece. A huge mess, after midnight, so there was a load of laundry to be done. And not just regular laundry, but the special laundry you have to do for those electric throws. You know: set the washer on "diva," add 2.75 tablespoons of detergent, let it agitate for 90 seconds and then let it rest and then agitate for another 90 seconds, then rinse by hand while reciting calming mantras and then let it spin with the delicacy of angels' wings. And I had to wait until it was finished so I could take it out and drape it over something to dry because heaven forbid you put it in the dryer unless you're prepared to stand right there with one hand on the dryer door and a stopwatch in the other.

OK. So we get all that done and finally go to sleep and are sleeping soundly when, at 3:25 this morning, we were both jolted awake by the biggest, hugest, scariest noise I've ever heard in my whole entire life. GRWRWRWRWRWRWRW!!!!!! We both leapt straight up out of bed and were kind of running in circles like not-awake cartoon people, trying to figure out who was using a chainsaw to hack through the house and take off the metal roof. I fully expected to see the roof being lifted off, seriously. It sounded like The End of the World.

And it's not even December yet (you know: December 2012)

 We kind of tripped over each other racing into the sewing studio and flipped on the light--we couldn't hear each other, just the GRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRWRW!!!!
and realized he air compressor had somehow mysteriously turned itself on. At 3:25 am. All by itself. The cats were locked in the front part of the house, so they weren't responsible.

Fortunately one of us knew how to turn it off. That would not be me. I was just trying to breathe and keep my heart from leaping out of my chest.

OK. So we finally get back to sleep, and all goes well this morning, and I get up and get ready to start taping off all the doors because today is the Big Mess Day of sanding the drywall. I check email, and I find an email about my YouTube channel, one of those telling you that your videos are fabulous and the sender has no idea why you don't get more hits and so you should try XYZ website because it will drive viewers to your channel and blah, blah, blah, and I click the "report as spam" link and then just happen to notice that the email is to me but also *from* me, and I'm like, "Oh, man. &^%$# hackers." So I go in and reset my google password to something even *I* can't remember--it's one of those you have to write down in a bunch of places because it has no bearing on anything in your life--it's not your cat's name or your driver's license number or the title of your first book or anything logical that you'd ever be able to remember but, instead, one of those with upper and lower case letters plus some random, not-traceable-to-you numbers. One of those. And I get that done and then think that while I'm at it, I should change my online credit card password, too. Just in case. My banking one is already so convoluted it's impossible to remember, but this one could stand tweaking. So I go in to tweak it, and there are a couple security questions, and I fail them. Both of them. And they're ones you can't forget, like, "What is your name? And how old are you?" I mean, those aren't the actual questions, but they're like that, things you aren't going to forget.

Or so one would think. But I fail them. Over and over. And so get locked out of my account and am given a phone number to call. Which I do. And the woman (in Florida! I love how they tell you where they are when you call) takes the info and says she'll set it up to give me new security questions tomorrow when it lets me back in. And I hang up and then think, "Wait a minute. What if my credit card company was hacked and that wasn't really an XYZ employee in sunny Florida but was instead some Evil Hacker just pretending to be a native speaker, and now she has my access info and can get into my account?" So I called the other, standard number for XYZ and explained the whole thing to some young whippersnapper in Idaho or Indiana or one of those other vowel states, and he was very helpful and assured me that my account looks just fine (and I was all like, "Well, yeah. Duh. For *now* it does, but what about an hour from now?") and then, of course, he tries to sell me a Security Protection Paranoid Old Woman Insurance Policy.

Sigh.

And then, because I changed my gmail password, it also changed it for access to this blog and my google calendar and everything else on the planet, and because it's a password that I cannot REMEMBER, not unless I were one of those people who can memorize and then recite the Constitution without missing a single word, well. Let's just say it took a while to get access to everything once again.

And then I started taping plastic over the doors and thumbtacking wet cloths over that, and I came out here to do this door and then heard Moe in the living room, trying to dig through the plastic and cloth to get in here where I am. And so I had to go through the plastic over this door, go into the kitchen, go out the kitchen door and through the carport and onto the front porch and through the living room to yell at him and then reinforce that door, the one between the kitchen and the front part of the house, by propping the ironing board--one thing they're afraid of, although not Moe so much--and other stuff so they can't reach the plastic itself. And then back out through the living room, across the porch, through the carport and into the kitchen and through the sewing studio and back out here. All made more fun by the fact that we don't wear shoes in the house. So there have to be shoes by each door so I can put them on to walk outside.

There was much grumbling in the land this morning, is what I'm saying.

I taped the plastic using the Special Expensive Blue Tape, the stuff that's supposed to be made for taping on painted walls but is PULLING THE PAINT OFF these walls out here. And they've been painted for over two years, so it's not like the paint's fresh and not cured. So now, after all this is over, I'm going to have to touch up that paint, and you know how that goes: it never matches, and it always looks shoddy. Plus it looks like more of the paint wants to peel off. The whole wall might peel!

In short, it has been A Morning. Only 10 minutes until noon--maybe this afternoon will be better. And maybe they'll show up and start sanding any time now~~

What I Learned Today

It's a little after noon, and I haven't anything to report on the Windows Week front. They said they'd be here around 8:30, then texted that it would be 10, then showed up about 11. No biggie; as I said, it's not my first rodeo. But then there were problems--the sheetrock isn't the right thickness (the receipt they gave him says it's right, but when he got it out and looked at it, they'd loaded the wrong ones), it started to rain (meaning he had to go get a tarp), he couldn't find the right-sized drill bit (I let him use mine). Stuff like that. So he's gone to get something, and I ran in the moment he left and turned the heat back up. They want the heat off; I like it at 79. We don't compromise because they're the ones doing the hard work. I've been freezing all week, and today it's 38 and raining and you can bet that when they're not here? That heat is coming back on. All I can say is: I'm ready for this to be finished and done. I need to get my life and house and studio back.

I've been trying to work, and I'm realizing even more than I already knew just how thoroughly Stuff stops me. I knew that it made it harder to have ideas and get things going when there was a lot of stuff, and now I can really see it. Because the stuff from the sewing studio is distributed into this office and the living room, I can see how much there is and what an energy drain it is. Not going through to try to find stuff, but just having it in the room.  I can't even think--it's like the Stuff absorbs all the thought rays that would ordinarily shoot out from my brain and zip around and then zip back to me so I could formulate plans and stuff, and that's not happening because the Stuff absorbs those Brain Rays, sucks them up, kills them dead. I spend the whole day feeling like I'm piddling, spinning my wheels. I HATE this, as you might imagine.

I was telling The EGE last night that having remodeling done is exactly like travel but without the scenery. You're all excited to start the adventure, and you pack your stuff and get ready, and then you're on your way and new stuff's happening and things are different and exciting, but then that first night you realize you can't find any of your stuff. Where's the damn dental floss? It's an ordeal just to get a meal because you don't have your kitchen, and you can't work because your stuff's all packed, and you're not ever quite comfortable (too hot, too cold, wearing different clothes), and soon it seems like the days are just stalled out, with you in unfamiliar places just waiting to get back to your regular life. You're tired of the noise and weird odors and constant disruptions. You're sharing a bathroom with other people (!), and you're never by yourself until late at night, when everything's unfamiliar (last night we had no electricity in our bedroom, for example) and weird.

In short, I'm ready to go home.

And you know what else? That nail gun is one scary tool. I keep remembering a scene from that movie I can't ever remember the name of (of which. . .) with Danny Glover and Mel Gibson, where The Bad Guys wreak havoc (and murder) with a nail gun. Eeeek. And now the compressor has just kicked in, and I've got that noise and the vacuum and the nail gun and two guys yelling to hear each other over the noise and omigod, I may lose my mind today.

Anyway, so I was reading about grackles to take my mind off the chaos. Chaos makes me nuts, as you might guess if you know anyone who's just the teeniest bit OCD and anal-retentive. I was never one of those adolescents who craved chaos.

I mostly craved a quiet room to myself and a good, thick book. Maybe chocolate, which I was not allowed to have but could dream about.

Have I ever mentioned how much I like total silence? Espcially, like, you know: when I'm working?

So: grackles. There are tons of them in the neighborhood, and they fascinate me. They congregate in the tiptops of the trees at dusk and talk about stuff, and I would give money (if I had any, you know, left over from the remodeling and stuff) to know what they talk about. My theory is that they tell each other where they found stuff that day--water, food, nesting full of someone else's eggs (they'll eat those in a heartbeat). I think they gather at sunset and face the sun together so they can give directional signals for where that stuff is.

But I could be wrong. They could be plotting against us or telling jokes about chihuahuas or doing a little file-sharing. Who knows?

The EGE has taken a TON of photos of grackles for me, but dang if I can find them. I so, so need someone to come in and organize all these 25,000 photos for me, labeling them all and sorting them into useful categories, like Grackles Congregating and Bathing in the Rain on Wednesday, for example.

Anyway, so I was reading about grackles, and I came to this interesting thing I didn't know: they will stand around and allow ants to stream up over their legs and bodies because the acid secreted by ant stings, formic acid, may help kill parasites (nobody is sure about this, of course, since nobody has yet deciphered Grackle Code. They could be letting the ants climb aboard a Grackle Taxi for a free trip down the block in exchange for info about where to find hatchlings. But they *think* it's about parasites. You know: Bird Mites. Those things you mother warned you about every time you tried to pick up a bird feather and that you STILL think about every time. Although now you pick the feather up anyway, seeing as how you don't appear to be mite-infested and so are maybe immune. Or so you hope).

Formic. Huh. Where had I heard that before? Ah: formication, which is a paresthesia in which it feels as if insects are crawling on your skin. Now, that sounds like a hallucination, and you think only people with mental issues would be affected, but no. The reason I know about it is that I had it--looking back, I can see that it was one of the earliest symptoms of perimenopause (up to 10% of menopausal women experience it; I'm guessing it's more than that but that most women don't even know to mention it). When I'd be out here working, I'd think ants or--omg!--FLEAS were crawling on my legs. I'd check, inspecting my skin, being absolutely certain that there was something crawling up my legs. But no.

That's when I started reading up and discovered a LOT about menopause that most of us never know. Dental problems. Nosebleeds. Constipation (all related to the loss of moisture in mucous membranes). Tons of other stuff they never tell you about.

The word "formica" is Latin for ant, and I thought it sounded a lot like "hormiga," which is ant in Spanish. Sure enough, hormiga comes from formica, and now I'm all happy. Few things are more satisfying to me than figuring out how words needed up being what they are.

Then I had to know how the word "formica" fit in with all of this. (Not at all, as it turns out: formica, that plastic laminate stuff, has nothing to do with ants or formic acid but was developed as "a substitute for mica," hence for+mica = formica. How disappointing.

Now I'm off to see what I can find out about the social relationships of grackles. If I can't find anything useful, I'll just continue to make it up my own self.

The guys are back. Now the floor is wet and muddy, the shop vac's going, along with the nail gun and the saw. Yikes! I can't leave to go take a walk because it's 38 and raining. Eeeeeeeeee.

Dancing in the Studio

So we were going out dancing the other night, which is a story unto itself: one of the local (in Odessa, 20 miles west) nightclubs is usually closed on Sunday nights but opens every other Sunday for an Over-40 Dance Night, where a handful of people go to dance to supposedly old-style country music. We went for a while in the past, and then two weeks ago went back--I don't know why we quit going, and I don't know why we went back. I don't much like going to Odessa, and it's weird going dancing on a Sunday, which will always be, to me, A School Night, but our dancing opportunities are severely limited these days, so we went. And this week we went back. And I told The EGE he is never going to take me there ever again lest I hurt someone. The young DJ, some hip young dude they wrangled into playing music for The Old Folks (I actually saw his mix CD, and I swear to you it was labeled "Old Folks Music." (No, he had no apostrophe.) Yes, I gave him grief (about the label; he wouldn't have understood about the apostrophe, trust me). We bonded over tattoos, of course, and I hoped to leverage that into some actual decent music, but his idea of classic country seems to be something "from before last summer." Some of it was like 20% country and 90% rock. Yeah, I know that's 110%, and that's my point: contemporary "country" is not country. Now, having said that, I have to go ahead and admit that I don't like country. I just like dancing with my husband. But if I'm going to dance to it, I want it to be real country and not some rock-ish hybrid--because if there's any music I like less than country, it's rock. Or oh, wait: hip-hop. Heavy metal. Rap.

Well, geez. What I like is music you can dance to. ("to which one can dance"--I know). and this was not it, and at one point I actually began to whine and let my knees buckle a bit so The EGE would bring me home and feed me. I don't go so far as to lie down on the dance floor and kick my feet, but I did whine kind of a lot.

So we were going out, and since we were dressing to dance anyway and the studio was empty, I thought I'd do a little movie. The acoustics suck, and the room is still too tiny for dancing, what with that chandelier in the middle, but, hey--you should dance every chance you get, right?

Anyway--before I begin rambling for real (what with the cold and the cigarette smoke and the odor of burning pine boards (from the heat of the electric saw), I'm feeling a little wonky today), here's the video: