Notes From the Voodoo Cafe

Photos!

2012-01-27T16:06:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-27T11:03:00.001-06:00

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

2012-01-26T12:01:00.000-06:00

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

2012-01-25T13:43:00.002-06:00

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

2012-01-24T14:10:00.001-06:00

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:

Window Week, Day 2

2012-01-24T11:24:00.000-06:00

Bleah. What with the sawdust and the smoke (one of the other guys is a smoker and stands outside the window to smoke), I'm sitting here hacking and snorffling this morning. And freezing, since they asked me to turn off the heat--they get a little warm in my world, which, of course, is 79 degrees. Of course it is! That's a civilized temperature, good for all creatures (the cats think it's cold today, too, poor traumatized animals), don't you think? Yes, you do.

The EGE, poor baby, has a cold. He got it over the weekend from--we're pretty sure--one of the barristas who was hacking and sniffling. The EGE said, "Gee, I don't want him making my drink," but he's pretty sure he did anyway. So far I haven't caught it--we do lots of fake air kissing, like socialite divas, when one of us is sick cos we both *really* hate being sick and try to limit it to just one of us. Usually it's him, alas, because he's in the schools and out in the world a lot more than I am. Colds really suck because you feel lousy but don't get a lot of sympathy--we're all trying to give him lots, but he's A Guy, after all, and keeps saying, in a really stopped-up nasal-y voice, "I'b vine. I said I'B VINE!"

So here's what it looked like at 7:30 this morning:

I love this photo--so exciting because I can see the huge difference it will make~~

And here's what it looks like now:

Now to see if I can sneak in there and get another cup of coffee. Because the sewing studio is, technically, the dining room, the kitchen is also in chaos, with the microwave sitting on the counter by the sink and the window leaning up against it, so I had to eat my breakfast--half a bran muffin; so exciting--frozen this morning. And you know what? It was pretty good--I think I'll eat them that way all the time in the summer when it's hot. (Not in the winter, though--no cold food in the winter!)

Yeah, yeah--I know it's 53 degrees and that some of y'all think that's a heat wave, but all I can say is brrrrrrrrrr~~I'm thinking of getting the electric throw (not to be confused with The Electric Slide, which, yes, I can do) and wrapping up in it. I could take it in the front part of the house with me and be mobbed by the cats. They ADORE that thing and think they each should have their very own. Or at least I should give them mine and leave it turned on "high" all day long, laundering it every day so it stays nice and fresh, maybe rubbing a little catnip on the edges, maybe putting some cushions underneath. And, oh, yeah--setting dishes of tuna within reach.

More later~~

Roku Me!

2012-01-23T19:31:00.000-06:00

I'm heaving a big, heavy sigh here. Could you hear me? I swear it changed the flow of the wind, maybe even disrupted the spin of the earth on its axis: it was a huge, huge sigh. I don't even know where to start with this particular story.

OK. So The EGE and I don't watch tv. We don't go to the movies, either. What we do is watch movies at home, mostly via Netflix (and then I buy good used DVDs of the ones we really like so that when Netflix becomes prohibitively expensive (or when they get their next harebrained idea for innovation), we can cancel and watch those). I pay almost $40 a month for 5 movies at a time and unlimited streaming. I'm not sure why, though, because we've never watched many streamed movies. I've had it for so many years I probably got some great deal that's slowly, slowly crept up in price. Anyway--the reason we don't stream much is that, to do that, we have to both sit in front of the iMac or, alternately, take the Macbook into the other room and hook it up to the larger monitor, which is a pain for shifting back and forth.

I'm just too lazy to make it work, is what it is. OK? I'm not that big a movie hound that I'm going to jump through hoops to watch them. Or go to a theater with suspicious substances on the seats and smelly babies whining in the row behind me. If I'm going to watch movies, I'm going to watch them on my own terms. So there.

So a month or so ago I got the brilliant idea that I was going to use the Netflix iPhone app and an adapter and HDMI cable to stream movies from the iPhone to the big tv. Brilliant: I had the iPhone app, and all I needed was the adapter and a cable. So off to Best Buy we go. The EGE happily goes along but has absolutely nothing to do with technology, which irritates him. He doesn't even like telephones, never mind the computer, which he believes is just an insidious way to force everyone to ~~type~~ keyboard, which he believes is a form of torture designed by evil mutants. So off we go, me complacently expecting that Matt the Apple Guy will be there and sell me stuff. He's the Apple Expert at Best Buy, and he knows Apple stuff, and every time I ask him a question, I buy something. I make the sign of protection against the evil eye before I ask him ANYTHING. He's trying to sell me an iTV, but I'm putting my fingers in my ears and going, "Nannernannernannernannernanner" as I walk rapidly out of the store to the parking lot. Probably being studied on security video.

But--horrors!--Matt is on vacation, and the young acne-ridden child who is filling in has no more knowledge of adapters than I do. AVI. VGA, DMI, RCA, HDMI, DisplayPort. We stood together, this child and I, and looked at the display rack and looked at each other, he trying to pretend he had a clue and me not even trying. I knew I needed an adapter that would allow me to connect the iPhone to a HDMI cable, so I knew *something* which turned out to be more than the boy knew, and I felt bad watching him try to maintain. You know, like drunks try to maintain so you won't notice they're drunk? He was trying to maintain so I wouldn't notice he had not Clue #1 about adapters, and I began to pity him, so I heaved a big sigh and went away.

And came back two days later, only to find Matt *still* on vacation. So I thought I'd just buy some stuff and try it out and see if it worked and, if not, bring it back. I mean, really, what did I have to lose? There's a long, long story in here, with multiple trips to Best Buy, but let's skip all that. I ordered the HDMI cable online for a fraction of the price (turns out I was right: if it's a short indoor cable, the cheapo ones are just as good--they say you can buy them at Big Lots and be just fine) and then got another adapter and brought it home--it would require plugging and unplugging stuff every time we used it, and I never even took it out of the package: I knew that was too much work for just watching movies, so I took it back.

As fate would have it, The New York Times had an article that day on your various getting-away-from-cable-tv options, and I brought that page home and read it and decided to try Roku (yes, it really is that cute). I went with the top-o-the-line (snort) Roku so The EGE could play Angry Birds, and while I was at it, I bought a new router. Next the the Airport Extreme ($179), it was supposed to be the best. And Matt put the fear of privacy invasion in me when I admitted that my Wifi network wasn't password protected and that I couldn't get in to change that.

Brought all this home, spent Friday--supposedly my Afternoon Off--setting it up. Hooked up the new router, got the password, got all the devices on the new network, everything groovy. Then I went in and set up Roku. Got it going and doing its thing, and it said it couldn't update. It was on the network, online, ready to go, but it couldn't update the software.

Skipping ahead, past the over-an-hour online support chat with someone from Roku who was not a native speaker, as evidenced from severe Mangling of The Verbs, at the end of which she wanted me to unplug and reset everything--the router, the iMac, Roku, my toaster and microwave--everything. I hung up on her and went in and starting dicking around with it, and I thought, "Huh. I wonder if instead of Error Message 101, what it really means is that the wireless signal isn't strong enough?" So I unplugged the fancy new router and re-set-up the old-unprotected-from-skyper-thieves router, and voila! It worked just perfectly.

But now I was worried about the unprotected network, and so I went in and tried to set up a password with the old router. Not only would it not let me, but it locked me out. I hardwired the laptop to get online and find a number for Linksys, and I called them and jumped through a million hoops and finally got to talk to a human (also a newcomer to English), and she listened to the problem and said she'd help and was very confident we could work it out together but first--first!--I would need to pay her $39.99 because I was out of warranty.

"All I need to know is how to get in and change the password," I told her, trying to keep the patheticness out of my voice. Also the total-pissed-off-ness. I was on the edge. I'd been on chat or on the phone all morning, dealing with people who made my hair hurt and set my former-English-teacher's teeth on edge. My Free Friday Afternoon was gone, I hadn't had a shower, I was tired and pissed and worried that I would never have internet again.

Oh, she said. If that's all I needed, then I could just pay her $29.99.

So I hung up on her, too. No, I didn't yell or cuss or anything. I just hung up and went away. And then I stomped around the house and bitched and groused about greed and planned obsolescence, and then I came out here and reset the old router, woefully unprotected but still working, and ordered an Apple Airport Extreme, with its 2200 square foot range.

While I waited for it to arrive, I've been unplugging the router in the evenings when it's being skyped. Not "skyped" as in Skyped, the online telephony system. Skyped as in taken and not paid for. I thought "to skype" was an actual verb, but apparently that's only in my head. Whatever. In fact, I did on some evenings take delight in checking to see if someone else was using my wifi and then Poof! making it disappear. Shame on me. But shame on them for not getting their own damn connection. Or at least they could do like everyone else in town and go hang out in the Starbucks parking lot to use wifi or, like the REALLY ballsy guy the other night: walk in, take the biggest table, set up his laptop and iPhone, use them for half an hour, and then get up and leave, all without speaking to anyone or buying anything. They could be like that guy.

Today the base station arrived, and I got it set up with only a few glitches when my cable modem refused to cooperate even after doing The Magic Thing. You know, where you work magic by unplugging whatever-it-is, waiting 15 seconds, and then plugging it back in. This is an amazing trick, and it works on everything from modems to computers to DVD players. I swear I think it would work on my brain if only I could find the cord. I was on the phone to Suddenlink, waiting for help, when the modem finally said, "Oh, all right, I'll play," and reset itself.

And it all worked perfectly. I got the iMac and the Macbook and my iPhone and my old iPhone-which-is-now-an-iPod all connected, and I went outside and tested the signal. The territory extends across the street to the opposite curb, to the far edge of the property of our neighbors on either side, and across the alley to the dumpster. In short, it reaches anywhere The EGE would want to go while listening to Pandora radio while working in the yard. And that's enough. Roku is happy, I'm happy. We're all happy.

Well, except the cats, who've been locked in the front of the house all day, away from the construction, and keep crying, "What's in it for *us*? Huh?" They haven't gotten much attention, and I'm going to have to pay for that.

Window Week, Day 1

2012-01-23T13:40:00.000-06:00

Here we go: sheetrock is being ripped out as I type this and, as you might imagine, this is just the teeniest bit stressful for someone like me. Walls, in my actual HOUSE and STUDIO, being REMOVED.

OMG. It makes everything seem so, so ephemeral. Walls, made to go away. Poof! If walls can go away so easily, why do we think of our homes as "shelter"? What protects us? How are we safe? It sparks a whole existential musing that serves no useful purpose.

Parts of my studio going out the soon-to-be-not-here window:

Like that. So I just try not to think about it and ignore the banging and pounding and the sounds of ripping and the fact of having two strangers in my house.

Well, one stranger and one not.

You remember my search for a contractor to do this, the half dozen guys who came to give me estimates, some who never came back and some who didn't really seem to have a clue and some who showed up with an estimate weeks after I'd given up on them? Because here's the deal: Midland's unemployment level has now dropped below 4%. There are jobs for almost anyone who wants one--people are leaving their jobs (with the city, with the school system, with just about everyone) to go work in the oil field, so there are oil field jobs and then all the other kinds of jobs that have been vacated. My vet told me Friday that the City has only two animal control officers on patrol on any given shift because all the rest have--all together now!--Gone To The Oil Field. Frakking has been very, very good to The Permian Basin, and there are pages and pages of want ads in the newspaper. What isn't there: houses for sale or rent (And no rooms to let for 50 cents, either, for those of you singing along). Contractors have jobs lined up out the wazoo, and finding someone to do ANYTHING is nearly impossible. I had almost given up, but finally my constant nagging paid off.

For months I'd periodically been telling The EGE, "Call Robert Porter." And, as usual when I nag him or tell him what to do, he kept on doing what he was doing in the first place before I said anything. See, that's what makes a happy marriage: you get to do what you want to do (in my case: nag and be reallyreallyreally bossy), but you don't have to worry about your partner's reaction because they're going to do what *they* want to do, also. In his case, that's nod or make a throat noise and keep on keeping on. It's why we get along so well. I get to be my lifelong bossy self, and it doesn't bother him a bit.

Finally, though, it worked out. We were at SeptemberFest, and one of the police officers doing security was one of The EGE's former students, and I said, "Hey! I'll bet he has Robert Porter's number! Ask him! Ask him, ask him, ask him!" (He actually did it, no throat noises or eye-rolling, although he wasn't too thrilled that he actually had to Talk on the Phone.)

Here's the story: Robert is one of The EGE's former students from long ago. He is now a retired police officer--a detective--and has his own construction business. He was doing construction on the side, but he used up all his vacation time. Since he was eligible to retire, and since construction is way more lucrative than working for the city, that's what he did. He's never advertised, working only through word of mouth. But think about it: you live in a town where contractors and fly-by-night construction guys have been flocking in for the last several years, and you're not sure you can trust anyone because crews start things and then disappear, and then here's this hometown guy who went to school here and was a detective everybody knew. Who you gonna call?

Plus, for me, there's the added bonus of his business being a locally-owned, black-owned business. There aren't a lot of those here to support, so you do what you can when you get a chance. Ellis & Sons did our central heating/ac, and they're also our plumbers. (And the sons were also former students.) These are people The EGE has known for years, people I know and around whom I'm comfortable, and that's a big deal when people are coming in and out of your house.

[I love that these guys here today all call each other "sir" and say "please" to each other. Sure beats some of the other conversations I've overheard in the past, like the young guys who did one of the bookcases and discussed women in terms that made me gnash my teeth. Yiiiiii.]

So. In the time I've been typing this, they've finished ripping out the sheetrock, discovering in the process:
~~every electrical outlet on that west wall is on a different breaker. This makes no sense, but there you go.
~~they didn't use plywood, as expected, when they built that wall in 1953. They used actual boards, which surprised everyone.
~~there was fake tile behind the baseboard. Why not remove it before adding the baseboard? Too much trouble, apparently. It's an amazing green fake tile:

~~there is absolutely no insulation in that wall. Never was, not a bit. Just boards and then sheetrock. This explains a lot, and it makes me think there's probably not a bit of insulation in our bedroom, either, since it was part of that 1953 addition. Or out here, either, which would explain why my feet are freezing right now. Sigh. Another project for which I'd better start saving up money *soon.*

OK. That's it for now. More photos later~~it's going to take all week.

Windows Week is Almost Upon Us

2012-01-22T16:34:00.000-06:00

. . .starts tomorrow. This is the week I'll get new windows in the sewing studio. Remember it? It looked like this:

Then it looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

The daybed will come out when the sun goes down and the cats are done with it for the day--they won't get their daily dose of sun this week, so we left it up so they could lounge all afternoon. And they did--The EGE was using the power drill on the wall above the bed, and Moe just kept right on snoozing. The EGE had to work around His Lounge-iness.

Stressful, indeed. Every room has parts of it--the sewing tables are in the living room, an extra table out here holds all the stuff that was on the shelves, clothes hanging on hooks are now in The Voodoo Lounge.

Yiiiii.

Now we're off to buy plastic drop cloths to tape over all the doorways to try to contain some of the dust--they'll be sanding sheetrock or something later in the week--I'm trying not to think about it, actually~~

Big Sigh

2012-01-21T14:44:00.000-06:00

Well, the re-making of the velvet duster is basically finished, but there's some issue that's bugging me a lot, and I'm trying to figure out how to resolve it. Because so much stuff has been done to the part where the ruffle joins the body (cut off the heavy lace, stitched on velvet ribbon, then this new re-making), it's gotten thick and stiff, and so the jacket hangs as if there's a wire in there. This could be cool, giving it a lot of swing and movement, but it could also be icky in a way I can't quite pin down yet. I still don't know.

OK, so here's what it looks like. Yeah, I should have some pride, I know: take better photos, try to make it look snazzy. I've been cruising on Magnolia Pearl's website (and I'm sorry, but I have to say: that music is so annoying to me that I have to mute the Mac--the least people could do is give a turn-off-the-music option, right?) this morning, and man! Talk about some styled photos. Mine are, um, the opposite of styled. I don't care about styling. Sure, I'd like to have better photos for y'all, but it's not a priority; just getting them taken so I can show what I'm doing and then *get back to doing it*--that's the priority.

And, yeah, this room's a mess. It's got a table set up to hold some of the stuff from the sewing studio (less than 48 hours until Window Week!), and I'm getting claustrophobic already.

I think part of the problem is that, since I don't have a serger, I did a couple things. I sewed the ruffle section on, and then I turned the edges of that seam down and stitched them flat, and then I zig-zagged the edge of *that*--so there's a lot of sewing there in the hope that it won't ravel. But I think I have to cut off the zig-zagged part and just hope for the best--I think that may be part of what's making it stiff. I had some moments last night when I thought I should just rip it all out and start over, but I came to my senses. I hate it when I get like this: on the one hand, I love funky and asymmetrical, raw edged and wrinkled and rough. On the other hand, I *am* my mother's daughter, and this was a woman who would think about something for days before she'd ever cut the fabric, have it all planned out in her head, measure and re-measure, pin and baste and then, when she was done, there wasn't an unfinished seam anywhere. Everything was straight and even and finished and perfect. If not? Duh. Rip it out and do it over. And again, if necessary.

Is it any wonder that she didn't teach me to sew? I learned stuff from watching her, but neither of us had the patience to try to overcome our innate differences to make it possible for her to teach me. (I drove her crazy with my love of hippie style--I was forbidden to wear the things I wanted to because they were too sloppy, too--well, too out there. Things had to be ironed, which didn't interest me. No funkiness anywhere.) I like to get an idea and jump in and make it work, with wonky seams and all. But then, when I'm done, some part of me critiques each thing I've done less-than-perfectly. My sloppy seams and lack of measuring, my uneven cutting and just generally not-perfect-ness. It's driven me crazy all my life, and I've just lately figured out why--that it's what I love vs. what I think I should be doing, all the way back to that day in high school when I first opened Native Funk & Flash and knew that this--this!--was what I loved.

Not that I was allowed to wear it. Or anything like it. But I loved it!

Alas. A gypsy-funky-loving woman who grew up in a tailored-to-a-fare-thee-well home.

No, I don't do tailoring. I never have. It's not that I've ever TRIED to sew that way; it's that I still haven't totally subdued the part of me that thinks I SHOULD.

So I'm at war with myself today. Leave it like it is and start hand-stitching, making it lie better and be smoother. Or rip it out and start over? (No. No, no, nononononononono. it makes me tense just typing that.)

Or something in between?

I think I'll go with Door #3, please, Monty! I'll be back later to give an update. I hope: unless I drive myself totally crazy over this and cut it all up with the shears.

Oh, Good Grief.

2012-01-20T11:42:00.000-06:00

I drive myself crazy. Really. I can't leave well enough alone, and once I get something in my head, it won't go away. Oh, sure--eventually I'll forget it if I ignore it long enough. But it's the "ignore it long enough" part that trips me up. I swear I have the same brain wiring as a junkie or some creepy pervert with some obsession they know they should leave alone but just can't. They start thinking about whatever-it-is, and the urge gets stronger and stronger, and the next think they know they're in the alley, shooting up Drano.

Or whatever. But we won't go there.

So I'm sitting in bed this morning, happily stitching. I've taken care of some email, sent some ideas out into the world. I worked hard yesterday and met all the week's deadlines because, theoretically, Friday afternoon is my day to play. Meaning: go to the thrift and/or consignment stores to see if there's anything there. Inspiration or cheap stuff made of silk or leather or linen or 100% wool, which are the fabrics I'm always looking for. Cos if I can get a leather skirt for $2 or a linen shirt for $1.50, I can't pass that up. I wash and dry it and put it into the bin. You know I have bins for all these, right? Silk, linen, leather (almost too full to shut--those suede skirts that were in style in the 80s just don't sell any more, and I have a ton of those) felted wool (which reminds me: there's a turquoise jacket sitting on the front porch that needs to be fulled).

Anyway, so this afternoon the vet comes to write licenses for the cats--they get a two-year vaccine but have to have tags every year. After that, I can do what I want. Not that I always do--there's always something else that needs to be done. But still: I'm sitting in bed stitching and thinking of what I might do. Go hunt for some skeins of #166, since Michael's is out and has been for ever a month. See if I can find a copy of the current magazines, since Barnes and Noble no longer has anyone to stock magazines and is several weeks behind. (The want ads in the Midland paper go on for pages, while the houses-for-rent ads number fewer than a dozen total. Don't move here. There are jobs, sure, but you'll be living in your car in the parking lot of The Dreaded Wal-Mart. Seriously. We went to dump the recycling the other night, and the parking lot looked like a trailer park. Soon they'll be setting up swing sets and barbecue grills.)

ANYWAY. So I'm sitting there in bed stitching and the idea popped into my head, "I want a gypsy jacket." I have no idea where this came from--I know nothing about what a gypsy jacket would look like, and although *now* I'm completely intrigued by the idea of an entire gypsy wardrobe, I have no idea what that might include. But once that idea was in my head--"I want a gypsy jacket"--I was sunk. I sat there, and my brain took off on its own and arrived here:

Now, here's the path I think it took: gypsy jacket sounds a little like "Gypsy Johnny," and when we went to the Magnolia Pearl studio a couple years ago to interview Robin and John, they'd just launched her line of men's clothing, called Gypsy Johnny (warning: music will play!)

When we drove up and got out of the truck, John came out to meet us in the most fabulous pair of patched and appliquéd worn-to-threads Levi's. I admired them lavishly, and he said, "Yeah, she had to patch them so my testicles wouldn't fall out, and then she just kept going."

And I was like, "And who are you, exactly?" He turned out to be a very nice guy, but you know you're on alert when a guy uses the word "testicles" in the first two minutes you've known him.

NEVERMIND. Jesus. See? This is how I drive myself crazy. I have GOT to learn not to write in stream-of-consciousness meaderings. But if I wrote formally, with a thesis and all, then it would seem like, you know, Work.

So I'm sitting there stitching, remember. And I think gypsy jacket = Gypsy Johnny = Magnolia Pearl = EUREKA! I found it: the velvet duster Robin gave me when we left.

First they offered me a pair of ruffled linen bloomers, the kind Robin wears all the time (that's Robin on the right, and yes, she was wearing something like this the day we were there). I squealed in delight and thanked them profusely. John asked if I'd actually wear them. "Oh, of course! I love them!" He pressed: but would I actually *wear* them?

Um, well, I'm not really a bloomer kind of a woman. But I love them! And thank you so much!

But, no. They insisted I pick out something I would wear. And I could not resist this gorgeous rayon and, I think, silk velvet duster. Such a gorgeous color. So soft. So drape-y.

Of course, once I got it home, I had to remove all the lace. Heavy, gorgeous, drape-y lace. But I am not a lace kind of woman, so off it came. I gave it away. And it needed something else--it was too plain with the lace gone. So I stitched on a flannel heart and some embroidery stitches, and then I made some funky bias tape from some hand-dyed silk velvet ribbon from Maria Teresa Stoa. And I stitched and appliquéd and beaded and got it all perfect. It was too formal before; now it was nice and funky, like I like things. Just perfect.

I never, ever wore it. How come? Because it looks like a robe to me. That length, that popular-for-everything length--it's just astoundingly unflattering. If something is ankle length, it can pass as elegant, and if it's calf-length, it's functional. but that halfway-between length is just, frankly, dumpy. It cuts your calves in two, making them stubby, and it just doesn't flatter anyone. So many clothes are made that length, and I just hate it--it seems I spend half my sewing time cutting things off just a couple inches so they hit just below the knee (which I learned from my mother when I was a kid, for some unknown reason), is the most flattering length for almost everyone. (Never mind that I wore mini-skirts anyway.)

So I'm sitting there in bed stitching, right? And I get it into my head that I've got to cut this off and make it into a jacket. This scares the crap out of me: what if I ruin it? What if it starts unraveling? What if I can't make it do what I want it to do? What if I hate it? What if, what if, what if. . . .

And then I smack myself upside the head and go, "Well, then you won't have it to wear, and you'll have to cut it up and use it as yardage. Which means you'll have some really lovely velvet to use for something else. And guess what? You've had this hanging on the hook by the bedroom door for years, and you've Never. Worn. It. So you don't 'have it to wear' ANYWAY. Fool."

And then I smack myself again, just because.

So instead of doing any of the things I should be doing given that contractors will arrive at my house in less than 72 hours and that I should have already stowed away that sewing machine in there (the other two are already stowed, but you just never know when you're going to have to have a sewing machine at the ready, and see? It's going to come in handy!), it appears that I'm going to go in there and set up the table, get out the measuring tape and the Ginghers shears and do something rash and poorly-thought-out, just so my brain will quit going, "Come on! Come on! Let's do it! Now! Now, now, nownownownow! Let's go! Come on, come on, come on!"

My brain is not unlike a four year old in the midst of a sugar rush. Oy.

Please wish me luck. If I never come back, y'all will know why~~

Podcast with Lyric Kinard

2012-01-19T15:14:00.000-06:00

Back in December, Melanie Testa started her Rockstar Boro project, and in reading the notes from some of the participants, I ended up on Lyric Kinard's blog where she was just starting her annual Joy of Service Project, something her family does during the holidays to spread a little peace and joy in what is always a crazy busy season. We tried to set up a time to talk then, but it was, well, too crazy busy.

I apologize for the audio quality. I suspect Skype wasn't happy with the speed of my internet connection right then--sometimes it's so fabulous I can talk to someone in London with perfect clarity, and other times it's so hideous it sounds like someone here in Texas is talking from five miles under the surface of the ocean. We hung up and tried again, and I cut out the parts where you couldn't understand it at all, so I hope you'll bear with us and the quality won't be too annoying. Sorry about that.

Anyway, go to Lyric's website and blog to see her fabulous textile art. Go here to read about the Joy of Service, and go here to see her boro project--the skirt we talk about that I cannot wait to see more about. (There are more posts about it throughout December.)

And then click on the little player, below, to listen to Lyric.

Done.

2012-01-17T17:13:00.000-06:00

I am SO done. Becki Smith so very generously came and took away the rest of the stuff. There was some stuff that will surely have to be tossed--stuff that would be interesting to nobody but me--and there was some really cool stuff, too, like handmade paper and stuff. Check out what Becki does, here, and you can see that she might be able to use some of this. I hope so; that would make me even happier. Although, frankly, if she gave it all away to someone else, I'd still be pretty dang happy. I'm REALLY happy.

Here's her car, packed to the gills:

Thanks again, Becki! (And, yes, I *do* feel lighter and freer)~~XO

Another Big Purge~~Yippee!

2012-01-17T13:02:00.000-06:00

Yesterday's was so much fun that I coerced another local artist friend to come over this afternoon at 4 to take away another huge load of things I so lovingly collected but haven't even looked at in years. Many years.

art supplies of all kinds (old wooden dominos, spray dye, rusty metal boxes and bottle caps--the list just goes on and on)

fabulous paper--some handmade and given to me in trade, some hand-marbled that I bought at Texas Tech in the art supply section of the student bookstore years ago (those are the sheets on top)

lots of old, yellowed, falling-apart-and-perfect-for-collage books, such as that illustrated dictionary on top and a couple sets of way-cool encyclopedia with The BEST illustrations. I kept hanging onto them, but I'm never going to do anything with them. So off they go to a new home.

Wow. It's taken me all morning to get this from the storage building into the house and on the front porch, and now I'm filthy dusty and am going to go take a shower.

This is SOOOOO exciting!

O, Frabjous Day!

2012-01-16T17:22:00.000-06:00

Thanks to Miss Julia, I am now virtually rubber-stamp-less, and it feels fabulous.

This morning I posted a note on Facebook wishing for someone to magically show up at my house, box up all my rubber stamps, and take them away to a good home. Lots of people posted alternate suggestions, including donating the stamps to a children's home or an orphanage. [Miss Julia and I, bagging up my collection of penis stamps and another of naked people and one of nuns and popes (no, I have no idea how I ended up with any of these, frankly--various series at various times, many of them custom made and impossible to buy), had a hearty chuckle over that. Imagine, if you will, the faces of the adults in charge as the children began to stamp their hands and faces with realistic depictions of Mr. Happy, custom made and lovingly rendered by Artists Whose Names You Would Recognize. Imagine.] All great suggestions, but that's not what I wanted. I've tried it the other ways--I've given tons of these away already over the years including the boxes and boxes I paid to ship to winners of drawings--and I know myself well enough to know that the ONLY way this would work would be for someone to come take everything with no time for me to look at each stamp and remember where I got it and what I did with it (we had some fabulous round-robins back then, with Artists Whose Names You Would Recognize (I'm not being coy; I don't know if they'd want to be mentioned) and tons of wonderful mail art. (My postman commented on it when it slowed down to a trickle and then ceased; he had enjoyed the years of delivering it.)

All in the past. What prompted the wish this morning was the report from a friend over the weekend about the death last summer of someone I knew long ago in the rubber stamp world. I read a tribute to the deceased in which someone told of dozens of friends working for over a week to sort through the belongings for an estate sale, and one of the things they had to sort was a huge, huge collection of rubber stamps. Many of my own stamps were from the collection of the deceased, and I suddenly realized that if I didn't find a home for these, they would meet the same fate: sold for a dime apiece at some estate sale after I'm dead.

Imagine The Poor EGE, trying to explain to some Baptist deacon and his wife why he was selling an array of running and flying and leaping nekkid people. And the pope! Plus images of--omigod, what IS that? Quelle horreur!

Since most of these stamps are no longer available, that would be a shame. So I put out the plea, and Miss Julia said she would be by at 1:08. Unfortunately, I didn't get the message because we were on a long walk. She came by (at 1:08, of course) but missed us. But because she is my Magical Fairy, she came back at exactly 4:10 this afternoon, and by 4:50, she was gone. In the interim, we were madwomen.

Here're the first two of the five drawers we tackled (I'd already emptied several others before she arrived). These are several layers of stamps deep. I refused to look at them, just scooping them into bags as fast as I could.

Here's the backseat of her new little VW, bags on top of bags (there were at least 10 big bags full, plus a couple bags of ink pads and re-inkers in the front)

And the very cute Miss Julia (wearing, OMG, Bryn Walker! It's a wonder she got out of here still clothed) my Magical Fairy, driving away:

Yay! Thank you, Miss Julia--I feel ever-so-much lighter! Now I've got to find someone to take the assorted assemblage stuff. Rusty bottle caps, anyone?

[Note: The EGE spent the day in the kitchen packing up spare dishes so we can use half the cabinets for the cat food and chips that have until now been stored on shelving on the west wall, the wall that will be coming down in less than seven days to make space for THREE new windows. The countdown is on here at The Voodoo Cafe~~]

What I Finished This Weekend

2012-01-16T10:24:00.000-06:00

Remember this sweater I bought at the consignment store? It was about $11, I think:

Way too dull, right? Plus I had all these fibers I'd had for yearsandyearsandyears:

So I got a big blunt needle and started sewing (not knitting or crocheting) the fibers in, and I finished it yesterday. It could use a lot more--I have some fuchsia that would look fabulous--but I got tired of it and wanted to do something else, and it looks cool enough that I can live with it. Sorry about the color shift--I think the one below is truer to the actual colors. But, no: I did not dye it.

I added in sparkly purple and sparkly orange and green, and some nubbly orange and just whatever I had in colors that worked.

I think that nubbly orange yarn down in the lower left-hand corner of the photo above was a gift from Reenie Hanlin over at Material Whirled. Thanks again, Reenie! It's fabulous, and what you can't see is that it has some sparkly purple bits spun into it.

This is the back. I love the sparkly purple over the purple t-shirt fabric in the middle. I don't like the way they did that fabric--while it's a cool idea to work it in with the yarn, it's too stretchy and tight and makes it fit too snugly around the middle: if you don't stand up straight and hold in your stomach, it's going to look tacky and poochy. I hate it when clothes demand things of you, don't you? But it's OK--you have to wear this over another shirt, anyway--too open-weave for anything else unless you're 22 and wild and have fancy-schmancy underwear. I think it wanted to be a rockstar sweater. Alas, it lives in Midland, Texas, and will be worn with a journal skirt instead of spandex.

Today I'm working on another Joy Jacket--I shortened that purple one, and now I have the other three to do: I love the shorter, less dumpy-looking length, so I'm sucking it up and doing the others (I hate that kind of altering since it's just rote. I can't do it on the machine because I would hate the way it looked, so I have to do it by hand, and I have to pin it first, and I'm such a klutz with pins that if they're in *anything*, they're going to be in me, too. It's guaranteed. Lots and lots of sticking myself). But the results will be worth it~~

Then I'll get some other things ready to work on. I know it's silly, but I'm kind of frantic here: the contractors come a week from today, and they'll be replacing that window in the sewing studio (replacing the wall, pretty much), and that room will have to be empty all week. The idea that I might run out of things to stitch and not be able to get to My Stuff kind of freaks me out, never mind that all the stuff will still be in the house; it's not like it's going into storage in Anchorage or something. Still. I feel like I have to have a stack of stuff, all with little attached bags of thread and needles and beads or whatever, piled up and waiting, safely. Sheesh. I make myself soooooo tired.

XO

Why Do I Work on Weekends?

2012-01-14T14:00:00.000-06:00

I have no idea. Could it be that I like to work? As in: more than I like just about anything else? I'm afraid that's the case, but here's why: almost all of what I do is about bringing people together and giving people a chance to share what they do. So the stuff that's "work" for me is something that's going to make other people really happy, and that's fun: I like making people happy.

OK, so that's pretty pathetic, isn't it? I should have like, you know, hobbies and stuff. I should be doing something else on a gorgeous Saturday, and I will: here in a minute I'm going to get dressed (yeah: still in the pjs, although that *is* one of the New Year's Resolutions: get dressed before noon. So far, alas, I'm not doing so great at that. But that will improve the week after next when the house will be full of contractors working in the sewing studio. Gotta be dressed at the crack o' dawn that week, and I hope it's the jump-start I need). Remember I showed you this?

And told you I had to get it all cleared out. I thought I was doing great because now it looks like this:

But the contractor stopped by this week and looked kind of shocked--and a little worried--that I haven't finished. Like I have some Secret Storage Space where I'm going to put all this for three weeks. Uh, no. No, I do not. I'm not moving it out into the storage building because--duh!--then I can't get to it. Sheesh. I NEED this stuff. Really. I swear.

It has, in fact, been a week of men coming to my house and telling me I have kind of a lot of stuff. Did I ask them? No, I did not.

Anyway, so here's my desk this morning and the stuff I've been working on, with my nice organizational chart to prevent more of what happened this morning: contacting someone without remembering I'd already contacted them.

Then I added to my collection of file folders, one for each assignment, so now there are 20, all the way to July 2013. Whew. That feels really good: I like knowing what I'm going to be doing all year.

Anyway, so I got a bunch done today and thought I'd show you some of what else I've done this week. Meaning: some of what I've done besides working. "Working" is all the stuff that has deadlines. "Stitching" is the stuff that doesn't.

I showed you this coat here a couple months ago:

It had a hood, and I removed the hood and the zipper that attached it, and I used the hood lining (same as the lining of the coat itself) to make some patches.

The buttonholes had some funky stitching, but it was dull--very dull colors. So I added more in brighter versions of those colors.

Same with the buttons--more, brighter, happier thread.

A couple more patches.

Then there was this dress, which I showed you. I wore it once after I shortened the front and realized it was uneven--longer on one side in the front than the other. It might not have been noticeable to anyone else, but it was the kind of thing that would have driven me nuts. So I had to rip out, cut off, even up, and re-stitch. By hand, of course. Gah.

Then I switched out the boring buttons. Did that this morning before I started working. Now it's 2 pm, sunny, and 62 degrees. I'm heading out for a long walk. Then a shower and some sitting in the sun. Maybe with a glass of wine--who knows? It's the weekend--sometimes I break my good habits on the weekend!

That would explain the pajamas, wouldn't it, except that I already ratted myself out on that one~~

Hope you're having a fabulous Saturday~~if there's time, I'll try to come back and entertain you with my Roku Adventures. XO

Podcast with The Way-Cool Sandy Buffie, aka The Lint Lady

2012-01-12T11:44:00.005-06:00

Oh, my little chickadees, I had more fun talking to Sandy! As you'll be able to tell when you listen and hear me laughing. And laughing. And laughing. Sorry about that, but you know how it is when someone just delights you no end? That's Sandy--she's just wonderful.

I met Sandy years ago at Artfest when we shared a table in Lynn Whipple's workshop. It was a funny thing--I took the workshops just because I wanted to meet Lynn--I'm not a workshop-taker-person and had no interest in the project, so sitting next to Sandy and talking to her was way more fun than what I was supposed to be doing (Lynn was also fabulous, by the way). Sandy was in my journal skirt class, and ever since then I've wanted to talk more to her about lint. Specifically, dryer lint. And what you can do with it. Or, rather, what *she* can do with it. I can't do anything with mine--but now I know where I'm going to be sending it--and, man! I wish I'd known about this before: she welcomes donations of lint *even with cat fur included.* Who knew?

What does she do with dryer lint? She makes celebrity portraits. Scroll down and check out my favorite: Jack Sparrow.

Well, you just have to go down to that little player and listen. Here are a couple photos to show you what we're talking about--you'll find more on her website, here. You can find out more about her here--we did an artist profile over at CreateMixedMedia.com, and there are more photos there.

And here are just a few more fun facts Sandy sent me--I love these:

Fun facts about this little chickadee...

have lived in 9 states
have 3 fantastic children- twin boys (22) and 1 daughter (20)
have a MA in Speech Pathology
been married to the same amazing man for 28 years
stopped using my oven for food and started using it to bake dryer lint in 1996
had to move to another house that had a barn because the dryer lint “hobby” took over room by room
at one point I had over 200 people saving their lint for me all across the country. I no longer had to rely on commercial laundromats
have never used belly button lint
have enormous tubs of lint separated into piles: with pet hair, no pet hair, electric dryer, gas dryer,dryer sheets, and liquid fabric softener
collected my own lint for a year before I knew I would be using it for art.
did art and craft shows for 10 years-many stories about the responses!
the hardwear jewelry line started as a “chemo craft” I put together for my friend Bev. while she was battling ovarian cancer :(
I am able to use my Fathers tools that I inherited to make the hardwear. He would have loved it.
I have an amazing sister who is my best friend and constant source of creative energy.
just cowrote and illustrated a children’s book and gratitude journal-just this week sent queries to publishers
working on 2 other books with my friend Jamie. One called StudioSnacks which is a collaborative artist book with photos of their studios, art and a recipe of their favorite snacks. And the other is called The Better Scoop. It is a recipe book for healthy ice cream
I am difficult to walk with because I am always looking down and stopping to pick stuff up
I LOVE to recycle everything
I have donated over $15,000 to charities from lint sales
was contacted by the Tonight show several years ago because I did a lint head of Jay Leno. They decided not to have me on the show because I looked too “normal”! I still have the head!
I was interviewed by People magazine and had a photo shoot and everything. The article never ran because it wasn’t “Racey” enough! What did they want me to roll around nude in piles of lint? Sorry folks- I am totally covered when I work with this stuff- it is crazy dusty!

Enjoy!
(All photos courtesy of Sandy)

The New Joy Jacket. And Other Stuff.

2012-01-09T20:38:00.000-06:00

Thanks to the fabulous Kathryn, who found this blog post about the Joy Jackets, with photos and everything. Go look.

OK. See the length on that one? It bugged me. Too long and kind of dowdy or something. I just never wore these. I have four--purple, pink, acid green, and orange--and did a bunch of hand work on them and have just had them hanging on IKEA hooks in the living room. I noticed the cashier at Goodwill wearing this cool jacket, and I realized it's one just like these (undyed), and I studied her and realized what I needed to do to mine. Make them shorter and remove the hood. (It's amazing how I can get a much, much better idea of what I need to do to something if I see it on someone else. Or if I see a good photo of me wearing it. But looking in the mirror just doesn't give me a good read at all. Yet I keep relying on that. Why is that?).

The problem is that I'd done that hand work and was loathe to cut it off. I've done that before--stitched all over the hem and then realized the length was wrong and cut it off. I almost whimpered when I did it--all that stitching, gone! Gack.

So this time I cut it off and moved it up and re-stitched it. A lot of work I didn't plan on doing, but it was OK--this fabric is really easy to stitch through, so it's not like working your needle through that many layers of, oh, say, denim. Yikes.

So here's what the first one looks like now.

I cut off the hem and moved it up. The top row of stitches--the vertical ones--and the 3rd row from the top (horizontal, just like the two above it) are the new ones holding this piece in place along with the darker orange one on the bottom. The other stitching was all there already. You can go back and look again at the photos in this post if you're really interested in what I did to it.

This is a close-up (just because I could) of where I cut off the hood, below. On the left is the collar, and then there's the cut edge, then the velvet binding that's on the inside, and then--on the right--the inside of the jacket. I pulled firmly on the hood and the jacket (I had to use my foot: stood on the body, pulled on the hood, and cut as close to the seam as I could). This beat having to rip out several seams to remove the hood and then try to re-sew the velvet binding.

The hood, which I'll save for fabric. It's a nice thick cotton knit and will be fabulous for something. I don't know what yet, of course. But *something.*

I wore it all day today, and I think it's going to work. Meaning I now have to do three more. Oy.

OK. Then there's this.

To give you some idea of size: there's the needle, below. And the hoop is 6".

I don't really want to show it because it's not my image. I traced it from a book. I know, I know--and please don't tell Roz. (Roz is my touchstone for image ownership and copyright and original material, and I think of her every time I use anyone else's anything on these skirts. This whole journal skirt is embroidered tracings of stuff that isn't mine. I won't ever sell it, but that's not the point, of course. I feel all creepy, but I love these images and wanted them on my clothes. Actually, I wanted to have this guy--an image I think comes from a woodcut and that was created by Luis San Vincente (no website, but go here) tattooed on my arm, but it doesn't look like that's ever going to happen. I waited the two years after the melanoma thing and all the check-ups, and then I thought I'd get it done. And then there were all the infections with the cartilage piercings in the ears--those still haven't healed and may, according to a nurse who had hers done, take another year and a half or so. Sigh. Anyway, a couple of doctors have told me not to get any more piercings EVER and to kind of lay off anything for a while. So no new tattoos. Hence, this embroidery. Which--let me tell you!--made me pay for stealing it. O. My. God. I have never been so anal about any stitching, and I have ripped out more of these stitches than I have put in. How is that possible? It's not, you say? I swear it is. I think I put in one stitch and then had to rip out two. I think I must have been ripping out imaginary stitches, I ripped out so many. It's taken forEVER). This is a photo I took this morning; since then, I've finished it. I'll try to get another photo here. Wait a sec~~

Now I want to add some stars and some trails--you know, that show he's riding up and down on the wind currents.

Then there's this sweater I bought at the consignment store. Or, wait: a sweater I'm *going to buy* at the consignment store. See, I had this little problem. This past spring and summer were quite hideous, what with the infections and the dog bite, mono and the broken toe and the palpitations (in case I didn't post (who remembers? Not I. Hahahahahahahaha), all the cardio tests--EKG, sonogram, Holter monitor, stress test--show my heart is just fine but sometimes beats fast. I could take beta blockers (nope) or try other drugs, but since the palpitations aren't doing any damage and have gotten better/less frequent, I'm going with Lifestyle Adjustments (less frequent wine, more dietary vigilance (remind me to write about chamomile, please), more frequent meditation--stuff like that)~~where was I?

Oh! So this summer I discovered BJ's, the consignment store, and spent quite a lot of time there, buying quite a lot of garments to re-fashion. It was therapy--it gave me something to think about besides the fact that my body was being attacked from all sides. And I got a little carried away, it seems, and am now having to re-sell a bunch of this stuff. Stuff that (I should be too embarrassed to admit this, but not moi, apparently) *does not even fit.* As in: couldn't be buttoned across the chest. How did I not realize this before I bought it? (Answer: because it was really cute and because The EGE like the army-esque snaps, which reminded him of his dad's old army uniform). Of course, that's only one example of way too many.

Anyway, so I've been taking stuff back for Trish to re-sell, and she said, OK, that's it. From now on, if I think I want something, I have to take it home and wear it around the house for a couple days. If I want it, I'm to take the tag back to her and pay for it. If not--if I recover my senses and remember I Do Not Need Another Garment Ever in My Life EVER--then I take it back and nobody gets hurt. She insists. She will not sell me anything else otherwise.

She's so cute.

So I have this.

It is so fabulously funky I couldn't resist. But she wouldn't let me buy it until I wore it.

You can see where I'm trying out my idea of adding more fiber.

I do not need it, but I cannot resist the idea of adding to it all the bits and pieces of fiber in colors I love, fiber that has been sitting in a bin in the storage building for years and years.

Isn't that ginchy? I was going to go over today and pay for it, but the s-n-o-w happened, and I didn't leave the house all day except to go out on the covered front porch and do that video down there. (I didn't even go out to the mailbox, and there's supposed to be a check in there. THAT'S how much I don't want to admit there's s-n-o-w out there). And now I feel guilty: I haven't paid for this yet. Yikes!

Oh, one more thing: I've been wanting a full denim or chambray skirt (one like one I had years ago and gave away, as my husband reminds me), but that one I had--you've seen it, from last summer--was dumpy and ugly. I found another one (another < $2 Goodwill find) and thought I'd give it a try. The waist was WAY too high, so I cut that off. And the hem wouldn't lie flat, so I sewed some tribal-looking fabric around the hem. What is this stuff called, anyway? (This is the chunk I cut off.)

Well, I knew as soon as I did it that it was a bad idea. As one of our favorite baristas said, "it was boring on stilts." Exactly.

Plus the length was really unflattering. I heaved the big sigh and cut it off (thank goodness it was sewn on by machine and not hand stitched or you might have heard me screaming all the way at your house) and turned it under and sewed it (by machine! thankyoujesus!).

I'll try to get photos of that, but I don't think it will stay up on Alex--way too big; it will slide down her skinny little hips. Maybe I should use clothespins.

OK. Whew! I think that's it. I'm going to tackle the other Joy Jackets and work on that sweater + fibers, and then I can start something bigger. I don't know what--I ordered this way-cool jacket pattern, and there's a story behind it, and I want to iron the pattern and cut it out and lay it out and see what I might want to do. But that may have to wait until after the end of the month: the contractor comes tomorrow to show me the windows and make sure they're what I want, and then in two weeks--less than, now!--he comes and installs them. Meaning: removes the wall to the studs and starts over. So nothing going on in the sewing studio for at least a week. Well, longer--we have to finish emptying it first.

Yikes.

Thanks for coming by--now it's time for yoga~~XO

What Is UP with All This *&^%$#@ Snow, People?

2012-01-09T11:54:00.001-06:00

Here's a note from weatherbug.com:
This snow will be a big deal for parts of west Texas. Midland, Texas, got hammered with 6.4 inches just before Christmas and even had a small taste of winter early in December when 2.5 inches accumulated. The additional 5 to 10 inches from this storm will bring the season`s total to about 16 inches, which would shatter the all-time snow record of 13.9 inches set in the winter of 1946-1947. In addition, the record for the most snow to ever fall in one day on January 9 is 5.9 inches. This storm could easily bypass that amount.

Some Miscellaneous Things on a Sunday Evening

2012-01-08T18:50:00.000-06:00

Happy Sunday evening--I hope your weekend was as nice as mine: easily the most relaxed weekend I've had in maybe forever. For instance: yesterday afternoon we had a glass of wine and sat outside with a fire in the chiminea and dozed off in the afternoon sun. Me! Dozing off in the sun! Whoa.

But sometimes The EGE does rub off on me. He works incredibly hard, but he also knows how to relax.

Here in a little bit we're going to go dancing--we haven't been in a long time, so we're going to brave the Winter Storm Warning and drive over to Odessa to dance. Brrrrr. Let's hope the s-n-o-w holds off until we get home. Yep: we're that sole white blob on the US weather map, the one place in the country forecast for a winter storm tomorrow: 5-7" predicted. I'm not even thinking about it.

Much.

Anyway--so here are some random things I wanted to show you.

These are some velvet shoes I got from the consignment shop. The toes were beaded, but the bows weren't--so they looked stuck on and not really integrated. (I got two pair: one bronze (these) and one coal black, so I know the bows weren't just added on). I beaded the bow with bronze beads to tie in with the bronze velvet, and then I added the larger black beads to the centers to tie in with the original beading. This was one of those just-to-see-if-I-can projects. I haven't actually worn the shoes yet. I don't plan to bead the bows on the black ones--too hard on the fingers.

Stephen Porterfield of The Cat's Meow (no website--but he sells vintage clothes to top designers including Vera Wang and to celebrities as well--Annie Lenox, Barbra Streisand) has one sale a year: 50% off the week between Christmas and New Year's Day. Last year I bought way too many coats, several of which I've since gotten rid of (felted in the wash or given away to good homes), so this year I was very careful. I bought a nubuck zip-front jacket that I couldn't resist. It's a men's jacket but fits perfectly and is a nice tunic-y length. And then I bought this necklace, which Stephen says is actually a religious piece. I couldn't resist--The EGE loves roses, so it will be something someday. Or I can just wear it.

Stephen says these were souvenirs from a beach somewhere. They're cowry shells--the side you never see. At least that's what I think they are. I think they look like spooky eyeballs and will take them apart and use them for something else.

These two like-new collars were in a bag someone gave me. This one, above, is a thick pile, just like collars I had on coats as a kid.

The fuzzier one may be real fur. I hope not. The cats haven' hit on it, so maybe it's not (they hit on rabbit fur, and I usually give fur to them to sleep on if it makes it into the house).

They've got button holes, and I think I may add buttons to something and play around with a fur collar. I don't know what yet, though.

Then there's this--sorry I didn't get a photo before I began chopping things up. The coat is my current favorite--a Bryn Walker cotton fleece coat that's made really oddly but that, surprisingly, it turns out that I adore. The embroidery was on a Lucky Brand t-shirt I bought from the consignment shop--turns out I hated the way it fit. It was made cheaply and didn't hang well. Plus it attracted cat fur like crazy (the coat, on the other hand, doesn't so much, even though it's black, too). I thought about re-selling the shirt but really liked the embroidery. So I cut it off and pinned it to the coat. I turned under all the edges and am going to blind stitch it in place. There's another piece for the front, along with a Virgo embroidery from a t-shirt I had in high school. For some reason I cut it off and saved it all these (yikes!) years, and although it's not something I would normally like, the fact that it's been around so long seems to warrant making a place for it.

Total 60s, don't you think?

I spent much of the weekend altering a jacket--one of the Joy Jackets I altered a couple years ago. I need to find that post to link to (sigh) and take some photos. I hope to do that tomorrow, but I don't know--I've got a busy couple weeks coming up before The Big Week, two weeks from now, when I GET WINDOWS!! I've tried to schedule all the podcasts and interviews before then so I don't have to try to interview someone while men are here cutting holes in my wall. Good plan, what?

So, just quickly: I'm altering those four Joy Jackets (cutting them off, removing the hoods), altering a long denim skirt (added fabric to the hem and then realized it was too long and WAY too dowdy and had to cut it off and hem it. Much gritching in the land on that one, let me tell you), doing some embroidery on the long journal skirt, altering a sweater from the thrift, and one other project, I think--but I can't remember.

And now it's time to go dancing. Hope you're doing something fun, and I'll try to get some more photos soon. XO

Doves + Food + Gravel

2012-01-05T17:39:00.001-06:00

We put out leftover bread and tortilla chips, as well as bird seed--just pretty much anything grain-based--for the birds. It may not be the healthiest thing for them--the stale cookies, perhaps--but with a drought like this and as many birds as hang around, there's no way we could feed them all the bird seed they want. We'd be putting out a huge bag every day. It would require, like, a loan. Also a station wagon to go on Seed Buying Runs.

There's water for them in a plastic box. OK, it's a cat litter box, all right? But cleaned! In fact, I don't think it was ever actually used as a cat litter box. It just holds more water but is still shallow: they like to get in and splash around. So we use this:

for the food. Actually, mostly we use the top of the water meter cover, but food falls down inside, and horrible nasty bugs (aka water bugs, aka roaches--aieeeee!) get in there and creep me out.

There were a TON of birds eating here the other day, and then there wasn't a speck of food left. But what's this?

I know it's something from the doves, but what? It looks like cat litter, but surely not. I've noticed it before where they eat, and I realized this is something I should know but don't.

So I googled "dove food gravel," and I discovered that doves have to have small bits of gravel (or large grains of sand) with their food. It's stored in their gizzards and used to grind seeds with hard shells.

Cool, huh?

I don't want to know why it's in the place they eat coz if they're throwing up gravel while they're eating, that's just way, way too nasty. So I just go "Lalalalalalala" and don't think about it.

So anyway, I found out what I was looking for, and now I know the answer. But I was thinking about how I did it--how I googled the words for what I wanted to know, went right to it, read it, and went away--nothing at all like how I used to find out stuff, where you'd get the encyclopedia and look up the shorter entry on doves, and it would lead you to the longer entry, and while you could skip to the section about food, you would usually look at the photos and then read something else and maybe get hooked into finding out about nesting behavior. Like, for instance, did you know that mourning doves are monogamous and mate for at least a nesting season? Or that both parents feed the newly-hatched young with "crop milk," which is secreted from the walls of the crop, in the throat, just in front of the breast bone? I didn't know any of that, and I could well have missed it today.

What I'm thinking is that this is a problem for us in the 21st century, when everything has become so narrow and specialized. We have no Renaissance People any more. There's so much information available about everything that no one can know it all, and it's so easy to zoom in and find out only that information you need without having to read--or even skim--everything else. You google something, and it gives you results related to your location and what's closest and what you've googled before. Everything is distilled for you before you ever even see it. Think specialty magazines and newspapers and newsletters--you get stuff tailored to you, but even then there's way, way more than you can keep up with.

I think we've lost opportunities to mosey through books, to wander through new information and follow enticing trails of ideas and random facts, to spend time finding out more about something just because we didn't know anything at all about it when we started. We've become a species of specialists, but specialists in what? Celebrity--quick: name someone from a current tv show! Someone who released an album in 2011! (No, I can't do either one. Sorry.) Popular culture--what's hip and current. Politics, maybe--at least the politics with which we agree. Gossip. Advertisements.

But who knows other stuff? Who's learning stuff they didn't know before? I mean, if you have an amazing memory, you may know a ton of stuff from when you were in school. That doesn't count. Sure, you know stuff; but you're not finding out about *new* stuff, and that's what I'm talking about here.

I want us all to learn new-to-us stuff. Random stuff. Useful stuff. Entertaining stuff. Here's a good place to start. I always buy these books--I wait and buy them used when they're cheap, so I'm while I'm behind on Learning New Stuff, I do read all the essays and am often enticed to find out more, either online or by ordering another (used, cheap) book.

Let's talk about this. Are you curious? Do you research stuff that interests you? How? And what do you do with what you find out? Does it inspire you to learn more, or do something with what you've learned? And--here's something I'd love to hear about: what's the coolest/most interesting/most amazing thing you've learned recently? Tell us about it, please! I, for one, would LOVE to hear everyone's stories~~

Thanks for coming to visit~~XO

Podcast with Deborah Boschert: "Twelve by Twelve," A Collboration

2012-01-05T12:04:00.000-06:00

I've known Deborah for years, from back when she used to live in Texas, and I was thrilled to see her last year in Houston at the International Quilt Festival. She's been involved in a collaborative project with 11 other quilters that resulted in an exhibit at the Festival as well as a book, Twelve by Twelve: The International Art Quilt Challenge. In this podcast, she talks about the collaboration and what she learned in working with eleven other people as well as her own work and her goals for 2012.

To find out more about Twelve by Twelve, visit the project's blog. You can see more of Deborah's own work on her personal blog and on her website.

Click the player to listen to the podcast or visit my podcast blog, Notes from the Voodoo Lounge, at Libsyn, my podcast host. You can also subscribe through iTunes.

Maven Me!

2012-01-04T12:47:00.000-06:00

Y'all might have noticed (Hahaha. Who but me ever looks at the tabs on blogs?) the new tab up there: Maven Me! It's my effort to make it work out so that I can be useful to people who ask for help without being resentful of the time involved. The page explains it, so you can read it there.

This isn't some big money-making plan; it didn't happen like that, like I sat down and thought, "Hmmmm. How can I make the Big Bucks?" It came about after a conversation I had with someone who told me how much I'd helped them and how much better they felt about what they were getting ready to do. I felt like a bad person because I'd been resistant to having that phone conversation--no matter how much I like someone and want to talk to them, there's never a time in the day when I think, "OK, I'm all caught up and have some extra time now. Yay!" The stuff I do is never-ending. It's fun, and I love it, and I wouldn't change it for any other job, but there's not a lot of down time. So how to work in something else I think is really important so that when someone asks me to mentor them or give some advice or something, I don't have to say, "Gee. No. I can't. Sorry"? Well, I think this just might work. This way it's a job, and you know me: work comes first. If it's my job, I'll make time for it, and I'll do my best, and I'll put a ribbon and a bow on top and hope you love it.

So there you go: Maven Me!

{Since, somehow, "Pages" don't seem to allow comments, I'm posting about it in a regular post in case anyone has questions. Feel free to ask.} XO

Clarice Taking Notes

2012-01-03T10:10:00.000-06:00

She's not quite two yet, and she's lived with us for about a year and a half. She's an intelligent cat, and she works hard to figure out How Things Work. She does this thing I call Taking Notes: whenever anyone--human or feline--does something she hasn't seen before, or hasn't seen very often, she'll sit and watch intently, trying to figure out what we're doing and what it means and what role she might have in it. I swear if she had opposable thumbs and a notebook, she'd have it almost filled by now.

This morning I've been altering a necklace. The EGE and I used to buy each other jewelry, long ago, and I've got a couple Real Necklaces. You know, with stones in them and stuff. Over the years, I've hardly worn them--I'm hard on jewelry because I put it on and leave it on for months, even in the shower, so I usually wear gold or silver bands with no stones. I recently began wearing these two necklaces again, though, because I like them and because one was the first gift he ever gave me and because, geesh, what's the point of having stuff you never wear, right? But wearing two necklaces together is problematic because they twist and tangle and are just a pain in the butt. So I figured out a way to put them together with some bits of gold chain and tiny, teeninsy gold jump rings. Not a great solution, and I may decide I hate it, but it's OK for now. It took a lot of time because the jump rings were so tiny and fragile and some stuff was soldered, and I had to cut the solder without ruining the metal.

And this process completely and totally fascinated Clarice. She got up on the table, right in front of me, and settled down, paws tucked under, watching every single movement. And started purring this quiet, gentle purr--not the happy-getting-petted one, but the intent-on-something-new one. She's such a cool little cat.

Happy New Year from Clarice~~

2012-01-01T13:30:00.000-06:00

. . .and all the rest of us over at The Voodoo Cafe. Hope you're having a wonderful day, wherever you are and whatever you're doing. I'm working on various projects; The EGE is preparing to go to his mom's, and Clarice is momentarily chilling. She was playing on the daybed with a feather, and I put the rug over her, which was really big fun. A cave! With maybe birds in there! Or mice! Who knows?! Wow!!

Then she started to doze off--one of the few times she's still. This is the deceptively calm face of a wild girl~~

Today I Hate Facebook. Is It Your Fault?

2011-12-30T13:37:00.001-06:00

Time to come clean: are you one of those people who gets all giddy at the possibilities of the reach of social media and goes crazy, creating groups and adding in dozens of your Facebook Friends? Do you spam everyone with messages about your new website/blog/product/book? Are you one of the legion of Guilty Ones?

Please say you're not, because I love you and don't want to gnash my teeth and curse you.

Yeah, I often love Facebook. I love how it lets me see what people are up to, people I know who are doing interesting stuff, people who are posting cool photos and traveling and all that. I love it for that.

But I hate it for bombarding me with crap. Ads, silly teaser status updates (where do you hang your purse when you come home? Teehee! Blush!), invitations to play games and take idiotic quizzes (that are not based on anything, you know, scientific, so you can't even pretend you're going to find out something interesting about yourself but are, instead, created by socially inept adolescents for their own odd amusement). And I hate it because it allows people to bother me with crap. They can "tag" me in a photo that has nothing to do with me, just so I'll get a notification and have to go there to untag myself and then will find an ad for some product they're trying sell by spamming me and 93 other people. Or, as happened this morning, adding me to a group without asking me first, so that even after I go in and remove myself from the group, I'm STILL GETTING EMAILS with comments others are posting.

I rant about this stuff often, and someone will invariably ask me why I care. Why don't I just go in and remove myself? It's not a big deal, they tell me.

That's not true, and here's why. I get email from a variety of people about stuff that requires my attention. In addition to all the stuff involved in having online accounts, there's a lot of work-related stuff. There are comments that need to be approved for my blog posts over at CreateMixedMedia.com, where I, you know, *work,* and there are people who are requesting to join one of the groups I moderate. Those are important: those are things I've committed to doing, and I try to do them in a timely manner so someone somewhere isn't left waiting and wondering if their request has been received. There are comments to moderate and posts to check for spam, and then there are the notes from various editors, all important. There are things like this morning's correspondence with the nice people at Libsyn, my podcast host, helping me figure out settings so podcasts will stay at iTunes rather than getting archived. Stuff like that. Plus I read every blog comment at least once, and I try to respond to as many as I can.

So, yeah, email is a tool for me. It's something I use all day every day for stuff that's way, way more important than joining a new Facebook group to look at other people's photographs or blocking some new version of Farmville or whatever obnoxious new incarnation they've thought up. Instead of being able to look at my inbox and see immediately if there's anything I need to deal with right away, keeping in mind what time it is on the east coast and what time it is on the west coast and taking into account deadlines and holiday schedules and everything else, I have to wade through notifications of stuff in which I have no interest, stuff that requires that I go over to Facebook and delete myself from things I would never, ever have though to join and--let's be honest here--to which I really, really resent being added. I hate it when people presume on my time and think I'll be flattered to be added to something, along with 6 dozen other people they've never met.

(And the reason I can't set it so I don't get email notifications about this stuff (I've opted out of notifications for tons of stuff and set my privacy settings as high as I can get them) is because I don't want my name involved with stuff I don't know about. I don't want to be listed as a member of groups I didn't join on purpose (I'm not a joiner), and I don't want weird photos of me floating around without my knowing about it, not that I can totally prevent that, but I can try to keep tabs on it. The truth is that once you have an online presence, you have to try to keep tabs on it lest you end up like one of those people who finds they've been linked to some subversive group they've never even heard of and are now having their phone conversations monitored by the government. Although some of my friends would say that's true for all of us, all the time. We won't think about that right now.)

Is this you? Are you using Facebook to annoy people? Never mind that *you* don't think it's annoying, do you really know how your Facebook Friends feel about the things you do there? And if you don't know, why don't you ask first? You know, like you would in the Real World, where you're not allowed to add people to stuff without their permission. Imagine being able to sign up your friends for life insurance or book clubs or PTA membership or political parties. All your friends wake up one morning and find out they're now members of the Tea Party and are--surprise!--hosting a rally in their den this evening. Complete with beer and those little sausages. What fun! Imagine their delight that you so thoughtfully signed them up!

Facebook, just like all other social media, can be used in countless different ways depending on who's using it and for what. Don't assume that everyone else uses it the way you do. And before anyone says, "But, Ricë, that's what you're doing right now," let me say this: No, I am not. I'm not asking people to use it the way I use it. I'm asking them not to include me in the way they use it. Don't add me to stuff. Don't spam me with messages I'll have to delete. Don't clog up the inbox with requests for me to play games and do stuff that doesn't make any sense to me.

And I'm not the only one. Not by a long shot. We--people who use Facebook in large part for work-related stuff--hate it when we have to take time out of the work day to deal with other people's impositions. We love it when they post photos of their projects or status updates with exciting news, but when we have to go in and remove ourselves from unwanted inclusions? We grumble. We "hide" people. We--gasp--unfriend people. And I don't know about others, but I report people for spam. It seems that anyone who knows me at all, even in the most tangential way online, would have a clue that including me in a new group is not a good idea. I won't be any fun, I'm not useful, I won't contribute anything. So why even bother? There are dozens of people who would LOVE to be included. Please go find them.

OK, enough gritchiness. Sorry to whinge at you, but I really want everyone to think about the things they do online. And to balance out my griping, let me tell of a happy story. Someone sent me an email yesterday. (She doesn't have a website that I know of, so I'll just call her E. Hi, E! Thank you again!) She sent me a nice note asking about my podcasts on iTunes and if there were anything I could do to make more of them available--not just the ten most recent, but all the others, in case people want to listen to one of the older ones again. Other people have asked me this before, and I've gone in and poked around and tried to find out how to do this, with no luck. This time, E's note prompted me to really tackle it. I poked around, googled (no luck here--forums are sometimes like the blind leading the blind, you know?), and finally sent a note to Libsyn. They responded right away (if you're looking for a podcast host, I'd heartily rec. them; the few times I've had to contact them, they've responded within hours, not days) and told me how to fix things, and E reports that now all is well and the podcasts are available. Yay! This makes me very happy: I fixed something and made someone happy, and now I'm happy. That's the kind of email I like to receive: it's not that I don't like it if it requires work from me. I don't mind that. I just want it to be something valuable, something that Makes Things Better.

I love hearing from actual people about things that matter. It's just that I'm really pretty sure Farmville isn't one of those.

Next time, I promise: less griping, more inspiration~~XO

What's Going on Today. And Tomorrow. And The Day After That.

2011-12-29T12:56:00.000-06:00

Oh, man. There is such a huge mess around here. I'm trying to organize--there's a story there, and I'll try to get to it soon. I know I keep saying that, but I'm kind of overwhelmed: the short story is that I'm having some construction done here in 3 1/2 weeks, and before then I have to deal with this:

What do I mean "deal with this," you ask? What I mean is: see that wall on the left, the one with the window? It's going. As in: going to be torn down to the studs and replaced. Which means? Which means everything you see in this photo, plus a TON more, has to be made gone. Vanished. Cleared out and moved away. Like I said, that's a whole nother post, and I'll get there soon, I swear.

In the meantime, as I deal with the total overwhelm of that, I've been trying to finish up smaller projects that have been hanging around.

Here's one. It's a dress I bought at the consignment shop to wear over jeans. I liked it, but it looked too much like just a regular dress worn over jeans. While I like that look despite the Fashion Caution that it "makes you look bulky," I don't like dresses that look just like dresses. They need to look more integrated or something. Whatever--I don't even know exactly what I'm after, but I knew what to do with this one, and I got it done in just one day ("a day" of stitching means some in the morning before Moe takes over my lap, some at Starbucks while we're drinking coffee, and maybe some during the movie we watch with dinner: we Netflix movies and watch one every evening. Sometimes it takes two evenings per movie. We eat dinner, our one actual meal of the day, about 10 pm. Don't even ask; the cook sets the dinner hour, and I don't complain because I don't have to cook. Well, OK, sometimes I complain. But then you know me: I complain about oxygen and gravity. Actually, it works out pretty well for the most part. So sometimes we don't watch a whole movie. If we do, I stitch while I watch after I finish eating. This wasn't the case when I was having wine with dinner; then I'd be all relaxed and would just sit and watch the movie. Without the wine? I don't relax until I get in bed. Too bad for me; great for getting things done, though!)

ANYWAY. So here's the dress before:

Ripped out the hem on the sides going to the back so I could make the transition smooth.

And here's the dress after:

Cut it short in the front and tapered toward the back, which I left as it was.

I love this look and will miss it when it's no longer in fashion. Oh, I'll still wear my stuff; it will just be a lot harder to find stuff made like this. But I'll wait a couple years, and it will magically appear in the thrift shops!

Not much done to it--I shortened the front part and hand-stitched the hem. I thought about adding stitching to a bunch of the other seams, but I think I've learned my lesson: Wear It First. I haven't actually done that yet, and who knows? I might hate it. I might never want to wear it again. In the past, I've painstakingly stitched things, adding tons of stitching, and then discovered, upon the first wearing, that I didn't much like them. Maybe they didn't fit so great, or maybe they felt dowdy, or maybe I just didn't bond with them. So this time I'll be wearing this before I do more. If I love it, I'll add more stitching and switch out those boring buttons.

Then there's this:

I got it with all those linens I bought here. It was wadded up in a box, stained and stiff, hideously ugly--I didn't even want to touch it. I brought it home and washed it, and it turned out lovely (even though the tag said to hand wash and dry flat (I tossed it in the washer and dryer--I figure it's like this: clothes in this house have to sink or swim. If they can't take the stress of laundering, they need to go live somewhere else. I'm not going to baby my clothes, and there's room for only one diva in this house (What? You think I mean me? Oh, please! I mean Lennie Lulu, of course.), it laundered beautifully and was nice and soft when it came out.))))) I love the outside seams, even though they're serged (which I find ugly). And I love the nubbliness of the linen. I love how many different textures of linen there are, from the stiff, wrinkly ones to the soft, heavy, drape-y ones to the fragile ones to the nubbly ones.

But the color was ugly, and I didn't think I could live with it, so I dyed it yesterday. Now, the thing about dyeing here lately is that I've basically run out of dye. Oh, sure: I have some dye. But it's colors I don't much use, plus a little bit of grape. Some bright green (for mixing). Fuchsia, which I don't use by itself (I use it to pump up hot pink.) All the others, I've used up. I've been using them up steadily, forcing myself to dye things whatever color I had left. I don't want to order dye until I can afford to order leggings (to dye) and a dressmaker's mannikin. And that's not cheap. I've wanted A Real Mannikin, in my size, the kind you can pin things on, forever. And Lyric's post made me salivate. See how she's got the fabric arranged on that useful mannikin? Sigh.

But I'm not going to be able to order that because, well: read the first part of this post and imagine the expense of having a wall reconstructed. Yeah. No mannikin for me this year.

So I thought maybe I could mix up some passable acid green out of avocado, lemon yellow, and bright green--the jacket had a green khaki tint, so that was the only way I could go. I thought maybe the avocado had a little fuchsia in it (the chartreuse does), and I had enough lemon to brighten it up. So I hoped. When I realized it wasn't getting there, I put in a tiny bit of fuchsia, but it's still not that zing of brightness I wanted. I think I can deal with it, though. I have some floss that will go well.

Here it is now:

I've got to put the buttons back on--I think I like them, but I'm not sure.

But today--and tomorrow, and probably all weekend--I'm going to be dealing with this.
It's the stack of projects waiting for me to get to them, and it is daunting, indeed. These are all things I love and want to work on. I think. And there's the problem: I have to go through them, one by one, decide if I love them enough to work with them and, if so, in what order. The things that are going to take forever, like the long journal skirt, and the long vest, and the duster, and, and, and--those will come later. I need to get the quicker, smaller projects done and out of the way first. I can't file them in the closet because--duh--I will forget about them. I have no memory (I can prove this: I sent a credit card payment in last week. TWICE. Two separate times, on two separate days. I saw the duplication and was all set to call the bank and complain but then thought, "I wonder if I did this. Maybe I should check before I pitch a fit. You think?" and checked, and sure enough: I did it. Then forgot I did it. And then did it again). So, yeah: no putting unfinished things in the closet.

The EGE had a good idea: he suggested I sort them and put them in order and stack them on the couch out here in the office studio. We sit on it in the summer but not so much in the winter--the floor is concrete and cool in the summer and coldcoldcold in the winter, so in the winter we sit on the couch in the living room where it's warm and toasty. Of course, in addition to his idea, I have to label them: pick out the floss and/or beads I plan to use and put them with the garment, print out a label reminding me of what I planned to do (I could probably remember (snort) if I held the garment up and looked at it, but I don't want to have to do that if I'm grabbing something quickquickquick to take with me, or before I've had coffee in the morning or whatever). Some of these could be finished in an hour or so; some will take months.

Here's what I'm talking about, right in the middle of the kitchen (I had to set up another table as a Triage Staging Area):

So that's the plan today, and I've got to get busy~~XO

The Finished Wrist Warmers

2011-12-27T18:38:00.000-06:00

Finally finished them. Here's what I started with:

Here's what they look like now:

In these photos, it actually looks like the thumb part is toward the back of the glove,

but it's not. It's larger than that and is right on the side.

What I learned: although it may *look* as if your thumb sticks straight out from the palm of your hand when it's lying flat on the table, it does not. Thumb holes need to go slightly to the front. That's why these get wonky when I wear them, and now I know. I'm ready to make another pair, and for those, I'll cut the hole for the thumbs just a little forward. Wish I'd known that in the first place, but lots of the wrist warmers I looked at before I did this had the holes on the side. Grrrrr.

Other thing I learned (and, wow! not even the hard way: I figured it out before I did it wrong) is that the tube for the thumb is not a rectangle. You have to cut one end on the slant to make it work well or one side is going to bunch up on your thumb.

Tomorrow morning when I get up I've got to triage the projects again. I'm at the weird place where I have some things I can work on but not any big projects ready to really dig into. This morning I was reduced to beading on The Endless Beading Project, which frankly depresses me--it's gone on far too long, and while it will look fabulous if I ever finish it, that "if" is looming larger and larger.

Now we're off to Starbucks~~

Walking in the Snow on Christmas Eve

2011-12-26T14:32:00.000-06:00

Whew. I finally got the little movie made. And of course as soon as I finished uploading it to YouTube, I realized I completely forgot to add still photos to it--The EGE took some amazing ones, and I was going to put those in it. I completely forgot, and, truthfully? I wouldn't have had time to do any more, anyway--after messing around with the audio and waiting for everything to upload--the videos from the camera, and then into iMovie, and then from iMovie to the external hard drive, and then to YouTube--well. It's just

Time to Move On.

So here's the video, and then scroll down for some photos.

Sorry it's a couple days late, but I spent yesterday working on the wrist warmers--I wore them and loved them and am, today, embellishing them. As soon as I get that part finished, I'll post them, too.

Click to make any of these photos much bigger.

Our house.

Down at the end of the block.

Me wearing layers and layers.

I put this on some stranger's car window. Uh-oh.

My boots!

Cool bird tracks.

This is in the window of the Haley Library (part of the museum complex), and it's so threatening and sinister it creeps me out every time I see it. I included it lest you see these photos and think it's lovely and forget that this is, after all, Midland, Texas.

All these are at the museum--we pass through the grounds every day.

Front of the museum.

Me entertaining myself in the museum driveway while The EGE takes photos.

Neighborhood house.

The EGE got a really cute one of this little girl just as--aieeeeeee!--the battery on his camera ran out. They were here from Norman, OK, and were amazed at the snow.

Our house later in the evening.

Another neighborhood house.

Isn't this just a perfect shot for "Frosty the Snowman?"

"He led them down the streets of town

Right to the traffic cop.

And he only paused a moment when

He heard him holler 'Stop!'"

Whew. Time to go for another walk~~thanks for coming by, and I hope your holiday or non-holiday or day off or however-you-think-of-it = hope it was fabulous. XO

One Keen Cat

2011-12-26T10:26:00.000-06:00

I caught Moe napping on my shoes in the sunshine (yes! Sunshine! FINALLY!) by the front door.

I turned the camera around and just shot, having no idea what I'd get.

Done with The Yoolies

2011-12-25T15:27:00.000-06:00

At least I hope so, because, honeys? I think I have Enough. More than Enough. Sure, I wear them--I'm wearing the red-and-green one (Yoolie #12) right now. But I think 15 is enough, and I have so many other stitching projects I cannot WAIT to tackle. When Zom asked if I'd shown them all, I had to go check, and it appears that, no, I have not. So here, in what I hope is near the order in which I actually made them (although, of course, I can't really remember exactly. Duh.) are The Yoolies:

One of my favorites.

Love the drape-y-ness of this one.

Another favorite, nice and heavy.

Haven't worn this one yet--it's lighter weight (70% silk)

Wearing it now with a red long-sleeved t and jeans.

Haven't worn any of these last three yet--just finished them yesterday and today.

So there they are. Right now, I think #15 is my favorite--but I haven't actually worn it yet. It's very heavy, and it's got beading on it:

I'm not sure about the neck, though--it may slip off my shoulders. These necks are problematic: I don't want them tight, as they were. I hate that. It's hard to get them over my head, and I always feel like I'm choking. On the other hand, I hate it when the neck is too big and won't stay in place. So, as my mother would say, "We'll see." Maybe having a t-shirt under it will help hold it in place.

OK--back to those wrist warmers. I'm stalling on these: I did one and hated it and had to cut off the part I stitched and then start over from scratch, so I'm all gritchy about it. Good thing I blogged it this morning (snort), or I'd toss them and go on to something else. . . .see how well I know myself? Blogging it is my stick.

Where's my carrot, though?

Challenge for Today

2011-12-25T10:24:00.000-06:00

In an effort to keep my innate Holiday Grinchiness at bay, I'm setting myself a challenge for the day. Cos, sweeties, it is so very ugly here. It snowed for over 24 hours. It's been grey and sun-less for far too many days. I do not do well in Grey & Sunless. It snowed way more than Midlanders are used to, and it's scary to even THINK of being out on the road (in the first 8 hours of just minor snowing there were 45 wrecks, so I can only imagine what it must have been like since then. We live fairly close to a fire station and so can hear the sirens over and over and over). Much of the problem is that people who don't know how to drive on wet pavement have huge trucks that were bought to demonstrate their fierce tough power and rockin' cojones, so it's a terror out there. Good thing everything closed early yesterday and will remain closed today. Maybe everyone will stay home and eat themselves into a tryptophan coma until everything melts (although that may be a myth, as you can see if you read Wikipedia's entry on Postprandial Somnolence. And don't you just know someone had fun coming up with that fabulous title?)

Anyway. The Challenge. The challenge I've chosen to accept (since it was, um, my own idea, making it hard to opt out, you know?) is to make a pair of wrist warmers/wristlets/arm warmers from the sleeves of a severely stained-despite-rigorous-laundering waffle-weave henley. Here they are:

Here's my inspiration--some that I bought on sale in various styles:

I don't know if I'll add a thumb part or just cut a slit. I did do a little altering on a Free People shirt, so I think this will work. I think I've shown it before--I got it at the consignment shop, dyed it and stitched it. The sleeves are very long and very tight, and they come down over my hands, and I thought it would be cool to have my thumbs free. So Friday night at Starbucks, as we had a really great conversation with one of The EGE's former students and his uncle and cousins who'd just come in to visit from Mexico, where the cousins had never seen snow and so were delighted with the little bit that had fallen (since then there've been several inches, and I can only imagine how thrilled those girls must be today) and the uncle, who's traveled all over the world and was just delightful (and spoke English really well, much to the astonishment of the former student/nephew, who said he didn't even know his uncle spoke English at all)--ANYWAY: I did this:

And so now I'm going to tackle these. And I'm telling you about it so I'll be forced to post progress shots, giving me a goal for the day.

Hope you're doing something fun, in whatever guise it appears to you~~XO

Trapped by The Princess

2011-12-24T16:46:00.000-06:00

One of the reasons I love The Ever-Gorgeous Earl. He sat there for an hour, waiting for her to decide she'd finally had enough lap time. (Check out his groovy cowboy pajama pants made from *vintage* fabric we found at a garage sale.)

Looking out at the snow.

Marking his hands so the other cats will know he belongs to her.

Spoiled? Just a little.

Gestures Big & Small

2011-12-24T10:45:00.000-06:00

I always liked Christmas Eve best. Better than Christmas, better than New Year's Eve, better than any of the cold winter holidays. It was the anticipation, the excitement, my dad and I vying to be the first one to say, "Christmas Eve gift!" to each other, never mind that it didn't mean anything. My parents loved Christmas. My mother did the whole thing--the decorating with elaborate handmade decorations, the endless cookie baking, the shopping (I was a very spoiled only child). My dad would use half his vacation and take a couple weeks off, totally getting into the whole thing with her.

Christmas Day itself was always a let down after the huge flurry of gift-opening. You know, the crash after too much caffeine, when things were too quiet (it was almost always just the three of us, too far away from relatives to visit them when everyone else was visiting theirs) and it was all about food--and we were three non-foodies.

Anyway, so I still like Christmas Eve, even though we no longer do gifts, and we don't cook. Today will be about stitching--it's been snowing since yesterday afternoon, and I doubt I'm going to leave the house unless I brave the neighborhood to go take a walk--I *do* have a groovy pair of rubber boots I bought on clearance last year, back when it was kind of a joke because, really, Midland is in the middle of a drought, so who needs rubber boots, and--gee--it never snows enough here to need snow-worthy boots at all. But now I'm totally prepared for anything wet and icky out there, yay, me!

But no driving: people here are really scary on the roads when it rains or snows--so many have no clue about how to drive on wet pavement, and wrecks abound.

Anyway--here's one of the things making me happy today. You remember the huge stash of linens I bought and brought home and laundered and sorted, right? Days of linen prep:

I had rather a lot of help with this endeavor.

The office studio was literally covered in stacks of vintage (aieeeeee! but true) linens.

I packed up a bunch of them and shipped them off last week, never expecting they'd arrive before Christmas--heck, I wasn't sure they'd arrive before New Year's, because the box was so heavy I told them to send it as cheaply as possible--even then it was over $30, just for super-cheap ground transport--but UPS totally rocks, and the box arrived in Brooklyn yesterday. I was amazed. Kudos to those guys in brown. Melly blogged about it here and here. Here's a photo I snagged from her post today:

[Don't worry: I enclosed a note telling her she's not expected to keep them all--to keep what she wants and can use and do whatever with the rest.]

It reminds me of two things. Once, long ago, someone who had a rubber stamp company asked me to pick what I wanted from their catalog. I loved everything and told them just to pick for me--that anything they sent would be a treat. When I opened the box, they had sent me one of each of everything. It was just amazing--I opened the box sitting in the car waiting for one of The EGE's football games to start--and I just sat there and thought, "So this is what it feels like to get everything you could imagine." To have not just enough, but more, more than you know what to do with. A surfeit. Plenty.

One year there were big teddy bears on sale for $5 at The Dreaded Wal-Mart--many, many years ago. These were largish bears, not small ones. And they were in a rainbow of colors. A friend had a young daughter, teddy-bear-aged, and we bought one of each color and packed them in a huge box and shipped them to her. It felt great. Never mind that they probably had to store or give away a bunch of them--unless she was just going to move out of her room and give it over to the rainbow of bears. Never mind that--it was just imagining that moment of her opening the box and seeing them all there, more than she could have wanted. More than she could have imagined. Just that one moment of going, "Wow. I have more than enough."

You don't often get a chance to do that, to make A Gesture, but you can find opportunities. It's not about spending a lot or money; it's about thinking what might wow someone. The biggest candy cane you can find. Letting someone play Eartha Kitt singing "Santa Baby" over and over and over and over without complaining that your ears are starting to bleed (thanks to The EGE for letting me indulge!). Making a trip to the library armed with their reading list and bringing home a stack of books they wanted and some they didn't even know about but will love, just they don't even have to get out of bed.

Another example? Years ago, The EGE and I cooked a turkey--a whole turkey. We were not turkey eaters even when we still ate meat, but we cooked that sucker. Hours of cooking. And then we spent I-don't-know-how-long picking all the meat from the bones (bleah) and treating our many, many cats to several days of fabulous feasting for the holidays. It was a lot of work, but they thoroughly enjoyed it. Worth every messy, greasy bit.

Grand gestures, all, and so much fun. More fun for you than for them, of course, but pretty fun for them, too. Maybe you want to make a list of ideas for your own adventures--it's worth the effort, it really is. Indulge. Have fun. XO

Happy Happy

2011-12-23T15:30:00.000-06:00

One of my favorite things in the world is when I figure out how to do something I want to do but have no idea *how* to do. I did that this week, and I'm a happy camper. Plus I'm full of ideas for other things, because figuring out one thing emboldens you to try to figure out other stuff, and even if you then have some that don't work out quite so swell, you have that initial success under your belt.

I'm not talking rocket science here. I didn't find a cure for the common cold. I didn't even figure out how to make my hair stay permanently orange, so I'm a little grouchy that I had to color it this week--such a messy, smelly experience.

But never mind that. What's cool is this:

[OK, so this is backwards. I'm still having issues with how to think about getting it right.

I draw the symbol on paper. I trace it onto the back side of fusible webbing--the release paper. That flips it once, and then it gets flipped again when I iron it on. So two flips puts it back the way it was, right? But no. Sigh. For some reason, I can't think this through--it makes my brain skitter. I don't know why, as this kind of spatial thinking is easy for me. It's just this process. Which is, by the way: trace the drawing onto the release paper on the back of fusible webbing, iron that onto the wrong side of your fabric. Cut it out, then peel off the release paper and iron in place with a hot iron and a damp press cloth. Cool. You'll want to secure with stitching if it's going to be laundered.]

Another yoolie, of course. (Will I ever get tired of making these? I sure hope so, cos, man! I have so many other things I want to do, and these are taking up all my time. But, as always, I'm just the tiniest bit obsessed. (Yes, that was me snorting, that sound you just heard.))

It's a big, thick sweater. Or it WAS. Now it's a thick yoolie, and I wanted to do something else besides the hearts and X's that I've been putting on for embellishment. Whatever I put on needs to be simple--bold and graphic, without a lot of little tedious parts. These yoolies are functional, and right now I like them, but who knows whether I'll get tired of them by next year and never wear them again--they're not a Tried, Tested & True Wardrobe Staple yet, so I don't want to spend a ton of time on whatever I sew on. Plus I have no idea how this felted wool--the stuff I'm using as appliqués--will hold up through the laundry. Cos y'all know these aren't going to be delicately hand washed. Nope. Not in this house.

I don't have an arsenal of Meaningful Personal Symbols. In fact, I can't think of a lot of meaningful symbols. I'm sure other people have them--I love Jesse Reno's (go here, click on the link to his book, Contemporary Primitive Abstract Narratives, and scroll to the bottom for a key to some of the symbols he uses) --but when I tried to think of some, I draw a blank. Literally--after reading Jesse's note, I tried to come up with some of my own I could use on garments, and, well, dang. No luck.

But the other day when I was getting ready to cut out something--anything; probably another off-kilter heart--I suddenly remembered this thing I used to put under my name all the time in high school. I printed my name in lower-case letters (usually in purple ink. Duh.) and then put this underneath (my BFFHS did the same with her name but used a heart with a peace sign inside, something I think I'll probably appropriate at some point, since I'm pretty sure she long ago outgrew using that, although who knows?). I think (and of course I can't really remember) that it started out as a sort of swirl thing and then became this when the swirl alone felt incomplete--the two lines and the dots serve as a lock, securing everything in place, and I don't even want to know what that says about the 15-year-old me who came up with it. But I still like it, and that's all that matters: something besides a heart! Something not quite so cliche! O, frabjous day!

True to my nature, though, I couldn't--COULD NOT--leave well enough alone, and now I'm BEADING the damn thing. Yes, beading it. Why? Am I now sure it's going to hold up through the wash? No. Am I totally in love with it? No. Am I lacking in other, more sensible beading projects, perhaps ones that I've been working on for months, off and on? Oh, no, no, no. I am not.

But there you go. I'm beading it. I hope to be finished soon. Like, today. That would be nice. I've got a couple other yoolies to finish up, and then I want to move on. I kind of love that I get obsessed about things and make them in multiples, but I kind of hate it, too: there's so much else I want to work on, and if I'm compelled to keep making these, that means there's something else I'm NOT making. A lot of something else's. The other pile grows taller and taller. So today I'm donating back a couple henleys, and I'm going to use two others--one that's too small and one that's severely stained--to experiment with wristlets. Arm warmers. Whatever they're called.

OK. Back to beading. It's trying to snow here. I'm waiting on The EGE to return from The Dreaded Wal-Mart so we can run some errands and then go walk around the mall, which is fun these last days before everything pauses for Christmas. He always sees lots of people he knows, which is fun for him, and I get to see what people are wearing, which would be a LOT more fun for me if they'd just make more of an effort to have fun with their clothes. Yeah, yeah, I know: why should bother with their outfits just to entertain me, right? Pshaw. It would make their lives ever-so-much more fun. Truly.

Podcast with Journal Artist Ingrid Dijkers

2011-12-22T13:20:00.000-06:00

My, oh, my, Ingrid does amazing work. I love her journals:

(all images from Ingrid's website)

In the intro to the podcast, I tell the story about finally meeting Ingrid in person and finding out she wasn't at all like I thought she was going to be. So cool, and so funny when I look back at what I expected.

You'll want to see images as you're listening, so go to her website and her blog. Enjoy!

I'm Way, Way Too Easily Amused

2011-12-21T15:22:00.000-06:00

A Home for Some Goats, Please

2011-12-20T13:48:00.000-06:00

Oh, good grief. I can't believe I can't just throw these away, but I can't. I've been hanging onto them forEVER, and I don't want them. I tried to toss them this morning, but no.

It had, in fact, been a tough morning. It's The Christmas Season, and I stupidly chose this time to clean the office studio. I got to the Shelf of Memories, the shelf where I put all the stuff I've had forever and the stuff that my mother had--you know, the yellowed ivory gavel she had as an officer in Rainbow Girls, and the little wooden heart carved with her name when she was tiny, and the birth announcement they made when I was born and my childhood dog's baby teeth. That kind of stuff.

It's exhausting. I'm almost done, but now I need help. I need someone who either 1) loves goats or 2) has thing for old china figurines, no matter their state of being or 3) loves old broken stuff or 4) is just a sucker for salvaging things to give these guys a home (the daddy goat is 2" high at his horns, if that matters):

The daddy goat is missing three of his legs, bless his heart. He can stand up if he leans on the others.The momma goat is missing part of a horn. The baby goat is just fine, but it can't go on without its parents. These make me sad, for some reason, every time I see them. I want them to go somewhere where they'll make someone happy. Maybe embedded in resin in a project. Maybe in a collection of other unfortunate animals. They're about 45 years old, so they're actually doing pretty well, you know?

Anyway, if you'll give them a home, I'll wrap them up and ship them to you and love you forever. XO

The Joy of Giving

2011-12-19T11:52:00.002-06:00

Last week I did a blog post over at CreateMixedMedia.com about Lyric Kinard and her Joy in Service project. What it's about, basically, is doing something nice for someone else. Easy enough, right?

Not so fast. Turns out that doing nice stuff is way, way harder than you might think. I wanted to do something like this--deliberately being nice to people--something we think of this time of year even though we don't technically celebrate any of the various holidays. Since the only time I get out of the house many days is the evening trip to the local Starbucks, that's where I have to practice my niceness, if I'm going to do it at all.

So I was sitting there stitching, drinking my decaf soy caramel macchiato. It was busy, with people standing in line and others waiting for their coffee. They set some drinks on the bar, and a man from across the room got up and looked around and then sat back down. I thought he hadn't seen the drinks and was unfamiliar with the store and where they set them, so in my newly helpful mode, I picked up the drinks and took them over to the man and his wife. He thanked me profusely, but the woman looked puzzled.

"Did we have grandes?" she asked. "I thought we had talls." The man looked at his cup, and I explained that they'd just set these on the bar, and then I turned around and saw the woman at the counter saying, "But I have two more drinks that aren't here."

Good grief. So I had to go back and take away the drinks that I'd just delivered, apologize for the confusion, apologize to the woman who was missing her drinks and to the barista for causing confusion.

And only then did I realize that the couple to whom I'd delivered the drinks was actually a regular couple, in an odd "couple" kind of way--sitting in the back, very close together, whispering. They're about our age, maybe a little younger, very serious and intense, and we've speculated that they're meeting clandestinely once a week at someplace--this Starbucks--far away from where anyone would expect either of them to be. So of course they knew the routine and where to find their drinks. If I had a memory, I would have known that. Plus I would have known that the last thing they wanted was for someone to notice them and actually, you know, talk to them.

Ah, well. So that didn't go so well. After apologizing to everyone and proclaiming to them all that I would now just mind my own business, which they all found highly amusing, I realized I really kind of suck at this sort of thing.

Fortunately for me, I had just begun to clear out stuff here in the office studio (again), and had come across a lot of cool stuff that had never been used. Two dozen brand-new 24-count boxes of Crayola crayons, for example. (I once thought I'd use them in teaching a workshop on creativity, but that isn't going to happen.) Lots of new composition books. Cool erasers from Flax in San Francisco. Tiny colored pencils. A groovy travel watercolor set.

Stuff like that. So I began pairing the crayons with the blank books, adding a bow and a tag that read To: You, From: The Universe (changed later to Santa, since The Universe evoked puzzlement and snickering and didn't go over so well with Midlanders), and then, facing that, the explanation that everybody needs crayons and These are for you to take with you and enjoy.

And we waited until the store was fairly empty and then distributed the little packets on various tables (this has been going on for several nights--there are a couple dozen of these gifts). Then we'd do our usual thing--me stitching, The EGE reading the newspaper or playing Stupid Zombies or Angry Birds--and kind of watch surreptitiously to see how it went. The first couple of nights, when kids were there studying for finals, it was OK. They'd look at it and then look around, then pick it up and read it and put it back down, then show it to their friends and laugh and ignore it and then finally pick it up and take off the ribbon and use it--two guys used the erasers (big chunky round ones, one with a brain on it and one with a wide-mouthed kitten) on their papers.

But when they weren't there any more (school's out for the next two weeks), we noticed that adults would read the card and then push it away, leaving it carefully as if they believed someone had left it behind accidentally and would return to claim it. I understand this--lots of people meet at Starbucks for gift exchanges. People are generally too nice to pick up something and take it if they think it belongs to someone else.

One night a woman picked up a packet and asked the barista how much it was, and the barista tried to scan the bar code on the crayons and I had to go get it and take it from her and tell the woman that someone had left it there as a gift. And she took it and put it in her pocket and then went around the cafe and gathered up all the rest and put those in her pocket, too. For her kid, she said. Fine with me: my job here was to put the gifts out and then stay unattached to the outcome. Well, short of having the barista go nuts trying to figure out why the crayons weren't in the system.

I realized then I was going to have to do something else, something that would insure that there was no confusion and no hassle for the baristas. So I printed out little tags to attach to everything:

It seemed to go a little better. I don't care any more--the night before last, there was a family--or what I assume was a family: man, woman, little boy, little girl. The kids were kind of tired-ish, and they were sitting at the big table. I went over and picked up one of the packets that was a box of crayons and a thick stack of 8.5" x 11" paper and took it over and gave it to the man and told him someone had left it there as a gift. And it was so cool--it was like these people had never sat down and colored together. The dad totally got into it, talking about his favorite colors and how he liked to draw fish and animals and trading his yellow for the little girl's blue. And it was just great.

And then I thought that, with my luck, they were probably running from The Law, having robbed a bank in Idaho and making their way to Costa Rico with kids they weren't even supposed to have in some complicated custody battle. But I didn't care, because, eavesdropping (how can you not, at a Starbucks?), I heard what sounded like a family having a great time drawing and coloring together, never mind how I suck at the whole Doing Nice Things thang.

I highly recommend this if you have rather a lot of new or virtually new stuff that you know someone else would love. Some suggestions:

~~make sure you leave it somewhere where it won't be confused with merchandise for sale. You can't, for example, leave it in a toy store. People would be confused, and this time of year? Confusion is not a good thing.

~~Make sure people know it's free and they won't get yelled at for taking it. That's a biggie.

~~Don't try to get rid of your ratty broken pencils or mismatched socks. That's just lazy.

~~Be a little anal-retentive: think about things like I would. For instance: I didn't leave just a box of crayons by itself because if someone opened it with a small child and didn't have anything to draw on, what might happen? Drawing on the tables at Starbucks isn't going to make anyone happy. Don't leave packets near similar stuff that's for sale, which could lead to confusion: they can take this, so why not that, too.

~~It's more fun and means more if you stay out of it. If you go up and hand people a gift, sure, that's fun. But part of why you're doing it is so you can feel like a good person and get thanked. Better for your soul if you just give things with no need of thanks or recognition: it's good to practice letting go and non-attachment to outcome.

~~probably not a great idea to leave food, like cookies you've made. People are leery about stuff like this, always remembering the razor-blades-in-the-apples stories.

~~if you don't have anything to give away, you can print out nice notes and put them places where people will find them. My editor sent us a Christmas card with a sheet of notes like this, little things she'd printed out that you cut apart and give away or hide. "You have a wonderful smile." "You're a really nice person." "You deserve a marvelous day." Things like that.

And of course, what I realized in the process of doing this is that it's purely selfish. I'm getting people to take things I need to get rid of. I get the thrill of thinking that someone will be happy because of something I did. And I got to listen to that dad telling his kids that green was one of his favorite colors. What's not to love about that?

Lennie Lulu is Entranced with the Singing

2011-12-18T13:13:00.000-06:00

I wish I'd had the camera minutes earlier--she just stared at The Ever-Gorgeous Earl, transfixed. I'm sure she was thinking, "So this is what singing actually is. Not that horror that Ricë does. Wow." My god, this cat is cute.

More Yoolies

2011-12-16T10:45:00.000-06:00

Y'all, I'm not even trying to keep track of them any more, I'm sorry. I was giving them numbers and stuff, but I lost track in there somewhere, and there's no going back. Alas. And alack. And whatever: because of course it doesn't matter. So here you go--first we've got the one that I showed you here. it looked like this:

Now it looks like this:

The yoolie is made from an ankle-length LL Bean dress. Or maybe Land's End. I think the former--I cut the tag out when I did the stitching. Anyway, I wore it and loved the long side tails, but I didn't love the length (I wish now I'd made it shorter, since I'll wear it over something) or the lack of pockets (what were they thinking?) or the way-too-much-blackness of it.

I took photos for you, and when I looked at them on this 27" screen, I went, "Omigod. Where did *that* come from?" Because in real life? I didn't even see the cat fur. On the screen it was like the dress had been attacked by skinny worms--just long Clarice furs EVERYWHERE.

Just one more reason I don't wear much black.

Anyway--the circles and the pockets are made from t-shirts I dyed when I made this Alabama Chanin (I even used her pattern. Sort of.) skirt:

I over-dyed a bunch of thrifted t-shirts and have tons of scraps left over.

So here are the two other yoolies I did recently. I don't know--I don't celebrate Christmas, and I always feel kind of icky wearing red-and-green because, you know, I know other non-Christmas-celebrating people must get tired of being beaten about the head with all the All Christmas All the Time!! from September to January. But nevertheless, I am my mother's child, and every year I end up making some red-and-green item of apparel. I'm my own version of the old lady in the tacky holiday sweater, is what I am. But--in my own defense!--I had this red henlely, and I don't much wear red. And I had this fabulous (((vintage))) red-and-green button--I have a set of them, but the others are on a pale green sweater I thrifted years ago. Anyway. No more excuses; here it is:

Frankly, it makes me feel quite festive, in a totally retro way. I think I'll add bells to the tails.

Don't whimper, please. It's so unbecoming.

Then this morning I finished this one. It was a men's sweater, 70% silk and 30% cotton, and if I hadn't known that, I would have sworn it was polyester. So it was sort of a challenge--it's thin, and the drape is a little iffy. But it dyed up so nicely I couldn't abandon it, and I got inspired by Christmas (more with the Christmas~~aieeeeeeee!) decorations in the GiGi's Cupcake store--big green-and-pink wreaths and decorations. So I did this. And, in the process, realized I'm running out of colored felt. Years ago I fulled a lot of thrifted wool jackets and skirts, and while I was cutting them down, it seemed as if I'd have enough felt to last me the rest of my life. That is not the case. I'm totally out of fuchsia, and I'm running out of hot pink. It's time to go look for cheap wool jackets again. Fortunately, nobody else much wants them, so I don't feel guilty for taking Warm Winter Wear. Unfortunately, nobody else much wants these, so they're not easy to find. Not a lot of Wool Wearers in Midland, Texas. Nope. The ladies here go for fur when they want to be warm. BJs has a bunch of fabulous fur coats she's selling for people. I pet them and feel sad, thinking how much more fun it would be to have met the fur when it was still living on its owner. We have foxes living in our neighborhood--we see them every once in a while running across the street, and there was that one I told you about that sat on a brick wall and looked at me for long moments when I tried to send it a message about where to find food and water.

Anyway. Now I'm bumming myself out. The idea that someone would want to wear one of those guys rather than get to know them just makes me want to go lie down.

When I cut out the X's, I save the squares--I love this. They look good together, and it keeps me from wasting felt that I had to make myself. (If you've never done this, it's a very smelly process: washing wool in hot water on a long, heavy-duty cycle (for the agitation) and then drying it in a hot dryer forEVER. Pee-yooooooo. Wet dog deluxe.)

OK. I'm off to work some more in this office. I've got a couple projects going on--not sewing ones, but Life Ones--reorganizational ones. Big messy finding-where-to-put-stuff ones. There's a long-ish story, so I'll have to come back later~~

Podcast with The Amazing & Fabulous Kelly Buntin Johnson

2011-12-15T12:20:00.001-06:00

[Note: you have to scroll allllllll the way down, past all the photos, to hear the podcast. Sorry about that, but the photos are worth it, I think.]

Kelly is just amazing. You've heard me talk about her before, and she contributed to my About Creativity project here. She also contributed to my book, Living the Creative Life, and we did a profile of her and her work in Art Doll Quarterly, which is how we met (sorry, but I don't know what issue that was and can't tell from the website).

These three are photos from her blog, and I love them.

This photo makes me happy. She says it was taken on her birthday. Perfect.

Then, last year during our Big-Ass Eastern Road Trip, she and her husband, Rhett, invited us to visit their home and studios. Amazing. Just amazing. The Ever-Gorgeous Earl took a lot of photos, thank goodness, so I can go back and re-live standing in Kelly's studio: it's so overwhelmingly marvelous that there's no way you can see everything. Hence: good photos. The rest of these are The EGE's photos.

Their house.

Kelly's studio

Her garden--this was over a year ago, so I'm guessing it's bigger now.

Rhett's studio

Their pond-- love this little mown path

Rhett's sculpture

Inside Rhett's studio--you could hang out here ALL day long, I swear

Inside Kelly's studio, downstairs storage

going up the stairs

light by Rhett

some of Kelly's conservation beadwork

Some of the smaller work Kelly sells in cool shops like Doodlet's in Santa Fe, one of my favorite places to shop--so you can imagine how I squealed the first time I saw something of hers in the glass display case there.

more of Kelly's work

creepy baby dolls always creep me out, but they're cool anyway~~

I absolutely adore this bracelet. No, I did not abscond with it. I just touched it a lot~~

Walking down the street in Lawrence, Kansas. I love this photo--that's Aimee Dolich on the left, Traci Bunkers in front, Kelly next, and me over on the right.

Go visit Kelly's website here. Visit her blog here. Visit Rhett's website here--he's not only a fabulous artist, he's also a really nice guy with a great sense of humor. They're just the kind of people you want to hang out with and talk to about living a creative life.

Klout: Just One More Thing to Make You Feel Bad About Your Life

2011-12-14T10:11:00.000-06:00

Goodlordalmighty: that's just exactly what we all need, isn't it? Here it is, the Consumer Holiday Season, when we're trying to stay sane and fulfill our myriad Gift-Giving Obligations without either 1) losing our minds at The Mall or 2) going further into debt than we already are or 3) just totally losing it and throwing a left hook to the next chirpy saleswoman who tries to spray us with perfume when we walk into Dillards.

And now we're supposed to worry about our Klout scores.

I hadn't even heard of Klout until a couple weeks ago when I read several mentions in the New York Times. One was about a party/some parties where the only people invited are those with Klout Scores (omigod, I can't even believe I just typed that) over 50.

Is there anybody else out there besides me who's rolling their eyes and then stopping, mid-roll, suddenly panicked, and going, "Holy crap! It's junior high! And it's following me!"

Because it is. I swear. Facebook was college--designed by college kids to appeal to college kids. Twitter was high school, where immediate gossip is the lingua franca, where The Cool Kids' Gossip is repeated ad nauseum and where the number of followers you have determines your own relative coolness.

And now there's Klout, and dang if it's not junior high. But not the fun kind of junior high experience that The EGE had. Oh, no. He liked junior high. He liked elementary school and high school and college. (Heck, he even likes subbing now that he's retired.) Junior high for him was getting to do new stuff and playing football and Little League baseball and just generally having a great time.

No. Klout is junior high as it was for the rest of us, with The Mean Girls and the acne and the constantly-changing body and the sudden rise and fall of popularity, where everything's in constant flux and you never know who your friends are and even if you have any friends, but you can tell, from day to day, who's popular and who's not. Not that that does you a whole lot of good, since tomorrow it may be someone else who's popular and handing out the invitations to the pool party. All you know for sure is this: it's not you.

That's Klout. Roughly a week after I first heard of it I got a notification that I had a score. And, oh, yeah, I had to go see. I swear, I felt just like someone had slipped me a note inviting me to a slumber party. Really. You know, one of those slumber parties where you really don't want to go because you've been to that neighborhood before, and while there's a lot of excitement all the time, it's kind of skanky in a hot-rod-on-the-front-lawn kind of way, with maybe the dads wearing pants that are a little too tight and the moms starting The Cocktail Hour right after the baby goes down for a nap.

But you know everybody else is going to be there, and you know if you don't go, they're all going to talk about you and by the end of next week, you'll be sitting by yourself in the cafeteria and won't have a ride home from band practice.

So you go. And sure enough, everybody's there. And it's exciting, and you feel like you're in the middle of something important, with everybody sharing phone numbers of cute guys and trading tips about training bras. But then you have to go pee, and when you come out of the bathroom, everybody gets quiet and looks at you, and you blush and duck back in, thinking maybe you've got a brand new zit on your nose. But no. That's not it. There are the same number of zits as there were yesterday, thankyoujesusforsmallfavors.

When you finally go back out, you discover that while you were in the bathroom, everybody else has decided Sally will be the one to ask you to call Tim because your brother is dating his sister, so you're the logical choice. Nobody else had any connections, but everyone wanted to know Tim, oh, yes, indeed. And while you're at it, doesn't your brother know Tod's brother, too? He's one hot 8th-grader, a real hunka-hunka burnin' love, and you should call him up.

Or else. The "or else" isn't stated, but you know that if you don't call up The Cute Guys and do the heavy lifting here, this will be your last slumber party, never mind that the house smells of cigarette smoke and baby spit-up and you suspect their Dachshund peed on your sleeping bag while you were out in the backyard eating a cold hot dog because the host's dad had had too many beers and forgotten to go get charcoal lighter.

Oh, yeah. You either man up and call The Studs or you'll be spending the rest of your junior high life hanging out with the parents and watching Saturday night television. But here's the deal: even if you call them, even if they remember who you are and will talk to you and even--even!--if they talk to the other girls, that sweaty, giggling mass of pubescent angst--it won't mean a thing. Your place in the hive won't be cemented. You won't be suddenly popular. All you'll be is the Girl Who Will Make the Calls. That's it. The popular girls are going to be the popular girls, and the Band Queers are always going to be themselves. All you can do is run alongside and try to keep up by spending your Saturday nights on the phone, trying to get The Cute Guys to talk to your pretend girlfriends so they'll keep inviting you to their parties.

That's the world of Klout. I got a notification from them this morning (how in the world did that happen? I have no idea. Maybe Sally gave them my number), and when I clicked on the link, the pop-up--I swear!--told me, "Oh, no! Your Klout score has dropped one point in the last week!" And then it told me people I should invite to Klout and gave me some buttons so I could tweet and post to Facebook about, um, about--well, I'm not sure. About how my Klout score dropped one point? About how I was going to invite Person X to~~and here I swear to you my fingers froze above the keyboard because I have NO IDEA what I was supposed to invite Person X to do. Be my Klout Friend? Say nice things about me? Ask other people to like me?

Invite me to her slumber party over on that side of town? All of a sudden I feel like I need braces and a Miley Cyrus t-shirt. Oh, yeah: and Clearasil.

We Are Not All Alike

2011-12-12T12:47:00.000-06:00

Here's the reason I will never be a practicing Buddhist. Well, there are other reasons, I'm sure. I've studied Buddhism and agree with many of its principles, but I won't ever say, "I'm a Buddhist." And one reason is the whole we're-all-one thing. We are not all one. We are not even close to being All One.

You hear a lot of people claim that we're all just alike, that we all want the same things and dream the same dreams. They believe that, down at our core, we are the same. OK, if you distill it down to the very essence, maybe: most of us want to live, to be free of pain, to have the things we want.

Not even that is universal, though. I don't know about y'all, but I have known people with a death wish and people who were miserable and didn't want to live. My mother, for example, who attempted suicide multiple times and told me she would have tried it again but was tired of failing. Not everyone wants things--ascetics, for example. They don't seek to acquire things the way most people do. You could claim, if you're going to nit-pick here, that not wanting things is the thing they want: they want not to want, and not having things fulfills this desire.

I'm not going there with you, though. You can go there by yourself. Good luck, and don't forget to leave a trail of crumbs so you can find your way back.

What set me off this morning was actually two things. First was something I read about how we are not overpopulated and are, in fact, in danger of having too few people as our tax base to support government programs.

I had to read this twice. I assume the commenter is living in the US and speaking of her/his experience in seeing things as both local and immediate: what applies only to this place at this time. If there aren't enough babies born here, now, there won't be enough money taken in to support the current aging population.

Such short-sightedness is astonishing. It's not about the future, where we're going to have real trouble with things like, oh, space. Arable land. Potable water. And it's not about anywhere else, where there's severe overcrowding most of us can't even imagine and not enough of anything to go around. And this person believes that all thinking people agree that we need more people, not fewer.

Then I read something else (what am I DOING here, people? Why am I online reading stuff? I have no idea) that said everyone is creative. When I read that--as I do, over and over--all I can do is think the writer is another one of those people who spends all her/his time with people who are exactly like s/he is. Now, we may all be born with the potential to be creative, but we are most decidedly not all creative. Oh, if you're going to nit-pick and say that any decision made by anyone, including whether to wear brown or taupe socks, is creative, then fine. I'm not going to argue with you about that, either, because, well, it's not worth it. I'll just go ahead and concede that, on that level, you are right: everyone is creative.

But I don't think that's what they mean. They mean something larger, and they think it's true. And it's because they don't spend time with people who are not like they are. People who have absolutely no interest in creating anything, not even a meal, and would be lost even trying to start and wouldn't want to, anyway.

We'd like to think that everyone is like us, if we kind of like ourselves and think we're doing a pretty good job of things and have a benevolent bent, but the truth is that there are herds and herds of people who are nothing like you. Nor like anyone in your circle of friends. There are, for example, millions of people who are merely existing. Have you spent time in the public schools lately? If you have children in a Nice School somewhere with a circle of charming friends, all of whom come to your house in the afternoons and build science projects involving advanced technology, I'm guessing you have no idea about the larger mass of children being "brought up" (and I use that term loosely) by parents who have no more idea of how to raise a child than they do of how to build a particle accelerator. Do not think I am talking here about one race or one class or one location. It's much, much larger than that.

Midland, as I might have mentioned a time or two, is a very wealthy place. There's oil money flowing through it like water. Oh, wait. There's no water, so that's not a good analogy. OK--there's a lot of oil money. How's that? But even here, there are people who are lost. Lots of them. We have known kids who killed their friends. Both of us have been in the classroom with a kid who stabbed his friend to death with a pocket knife. I have sat in the same room with other murderers, people who were not drooling on themselves and ranting like madmen but who seem perfectly normal if you don't know their story and the charges against them.

Or not even that--not even the cases of bad people, but what about the masses of people who go through their days on autopilot, eating, going to school or a job, coming home to watch television. Day after day after day, not thinking of any other life. Have you ever spent time eavesdropping on the conversations of people who are not like you? Who maybe didn't finish school and have no desire to go back? Who really have nothing in common with anyone you know? I have, because I am a bad person who likes to eavesdrop. The things people talk about might astound you.

What about people who want to be president? There seem to be rather a lot of those people, and I don't know about you, but being president is down there next to "being dead" on the list of things I want to be. I can't imagine a worse job. All that responsibility for so many other people's lives and welfare. I'm smart, but I'm not anywhere near smart enough to be president. Hell, I'm not smart enough to be mayor. Nor do I have any desire to be, but there are lots of people who do, people for whom power is worth almost any sacrifice. Are they like you?

Or what about the people who don't bathe, have few teeth, haven't washed their hair since last month, but who have jobs and seem to be functioning normally--what about them? Are they like you? Do they want the same things you do? Do they seem to you to be of the same species you are? Or is that just me?

What about those with power who are willing to step on anyone--lots and lots of anyones--to get more? They have a lot of power and a lot of money, but it's not enough, and they'll do just about anything to get more. Are they like you?

Or what about the people who abuse animals? Children? Each other? Are they like you? I have known kids who would hurt people just for fun. I saw things at animal control that still haunt me. Are these people fundamentally like you?

Maybe at some point we were all alike, at some moment after conception. Before hormones and maternal drug use or lack of stimulation or whatever intervened. Before childhood and adolescence and adulthood set us on this path. Perhaps on some level we are alike now--not wanting to feel "pain," whatever pain feels like to each of us (but don't forget to think of cutters, some of whom cut to blunt emotional pain, or body alteration artists, or those people who suspend themselves by hooks inserted into their muscles. Masochists. Submissives (we're talking S&M here, sorry)). Or wanting to be with those we love and wanting them to be safe, only then you have to ask: what about the people who profess love and then abandon those they claim to love? Leave their partner, their kids, their families? Swindle people who thought they were friends? Sleep with their friend's spouse? Kill their relatives? Drown their children? We want to say they're mentally ill, to distance ourselves from them. But if you say we're all alike, then what?

See? Anything you want to use to say, "We're all just alike," you can find not just a few exceptions, but many.

One little mind game they sometimes have you play here is to imagine a race of space aliens landing on Earth and trying to take over. Then, they say, you'd see that we Earthlings are all just alike and that we'd all be banding together for the same goal: to overcome the space aliens and save our home.

I'm willing to bet you there. While the majority of people might be fighting the space aliens, there would be those who were sneaking around in the background stealing the DVD players from the houses of those who'd gone off to do battle. Others would be plotting with their friends, all highly-placed, for how they'd benefit from this invasion and how they could seize more power once it was over.

There would be people doing unimaginably kind things, self-sacrificing things. There are people doing those things now, people you never hear about, people who are willing to suffer to make the world a better place, at least in their minds. Some of them we'd agree with; some of them we wouldn't.

And, on the other hand, there are people right now cultivating stuff in labs solely for the purpose of killing other human beings. They are being paid for doing that.

But this isn't about doom and dire predictions and stuff. The reason I use bad examples more than good is that bad examples elicit that, "You're right. We're not all alike. There's no way I'd kill my entire family and loot the Bank of Finland," whereas good example are more likely to make us hallucinate, as in, "Well, I'm no Mother Teresa, but we truly are a lot alike. I'm a kind and compassionate person who's willing to sacrifice to help other people. In fact, now that you mention it, I'm really a *lot* like her, just in Kansas instead of somewhere icky."

This is about--it really did start out as being about, I swear!--how simplistic it is to claim that we're all anything: good, evil, creative, kind, self-aware. We're not all anything. We are not alike, not in any real way you can claim. And if you argue that this isn't true, then what you're showing is that you don't know anyone who doesn't share your core values, your beliefs, your lifestyle and goals and dreams. If everyone you know does, then what about those you don't know?

I know it's a marketing tool, telling people we're all alike so that you can then tell them, "Hey, this is what everybody wants, so you know you want it, too!" It's at the core of social media and our hive/tribe culture. We all want to be a part of a group of people just like us. But it's misleading, and I think it's dangerous. When we believe we're all just alike, we start to believe we have nothing real to contribute, that we're all just worker drones, interchangeable and expendable. It's what the army wants you to believe, what big corporations want you to believe, what any too-big society needs you to believe. Because if you believe you're unique and that you have unique talents and capabilities and interests and desires, you're not quite so willing to fit in, to be malleable and to make yourself conform. And conformity is important, especially in an overcrowded world with two few jobs and not much room for individualism, never mind that first guy's worry about our tax base

I read another comment last week where someone said privacy was a 20th-century concept, implying that there's no room for privacy any more, that it's not important and not useful. Privacy, individualism. Are we really ready to declare them obsolete? Do we really want to live in a post-private, post-individual society?

Man, I hope not.

Big Help, Indeed

2011-12-12T09:20:00.000-06:00

I've started going through the stash, washing everything in hot water with a little bleach. Yeah, I know that's not the way to wash Vintage Linens, but the odor of smoke and the knowledge of mouse droppings--well. If some things fall apart, so be it.

I set up a table here in the office, where the washer and dryer are, and started sorting stuff as it comes out of the dryer. It's just the first of four loads, and there's already a ton. I figured I'd make one pile for Get Rid Of Now--like, you know, the dingy 50/50 blend pillowcase stamped with "Midland Memorial Hospital." That goes into the Goodwill pile. I don't even want to think about why it was in there.

Other stuff I will photograph--some is so astoundingly finely done I'll have to get a magnifying glass to figure out what they did. Shadow appliqué, maybe? I don't even know, but I've got some books. And if I can't figure it out, I'll ask y'all. Just amazing stuff.

I was showing my editor some photos of the piles this morning, and she asked what I'm going to do with it. I had to admit I have absolutely no idea. It depends on if I decide I can cut it up. If I can, the possibilities are endless. If not, then I just don't know.

Anyway, so I set up the table and started sorting in between work stuff, and Lennie Lulu said, "Why, thank you very much," and curled up and made herself at home.

I can't move her--I feel too sorry for her. She's got something going on. Tons of horrible sneezing, but no apparent infection (I'm glad for all those years working with vets). I don't know if it's a cold or allergies. One day last week she was sneezing almost constantly. Just sneeze after sneeze. I kept a close eye on her and figured I'd call her vet the next day. But the next day she sneezed hardly at all and seemed fine. And the next day she sneezed a little, but not nearly as much. Same the next day. And then yesterday she sneezed a lot more again, her fur began to look rumpled, and one eye watered a lot. So I called her vet first thing this morning. But she seems a lot better today (she hasn't lost her appetite at all through this, always a pretty good indicator of how a cat is feeling). (The vet is a mobile vet who comes to the house, but she's hard to get in touch with--you call and leave a message, and she returns the call at some point. Last time it took a week. If you tell them it's an emergency, she'll call back right away, but I don't want to be The Woman Who Cried Wolf).

This is her "You aren't even *thinking* about moving me, are you? Surely not," look. She thinks she's going to get moved off the table.

One ear hears a bird outside. She was staring me down, daring me to move her (if you move her, she jumps right back up. She's the Queen of the House and doesn't take kindly to anyone who tries to thwart her).

So that's how come Lennie hasn't been forcibly removed from the freshly laundered pile. I feel sorry for her sneezing little self. She knows that and is playing me.

It's going to be a long, long day.

Score! My Sunday Project~~

2011-12-11T15:02:00.001-06:00

Oh, sure--I've got a stitching project: I always have one of those.

[Although, I admit, I kind of scared myself once this week when I finished a piece one night and didn't start anything else and so had only the Taking-Forever-Never-Ending-Omigod beading project to go with coffee the next morning. I start a new yoolie straightaway, though, and all has been well since.]

No, today's project is something else. Here's the story: someone local emailed me this week and said they were going through a friend's estate and sorting what she'd left behind, and if I wanted to go through the fabric, I could come over Saturday. We made arrangements, and The EGE and I did just that. Now, if you've ever gotten fabric this way, you know just how difficult it is. Most people bundle their fabric in idiosyncratic ways, folding or rolling or tying it up so that it's hard to see what you've got. My mother had the most amazing method for bundling up her remnants. She'd finish sewing something and take all the scraps--everything that was larger than tiny--and fold them into the center. She'd fold in the ends so that there were no raw edges showing and then roll the whole thing up in a roll about 4" wide and wind one of the longer, thinner strips around it, tucking in the end. It made a nice, neat bundle, but there was no way you could see what you had if you were someone else--she knew what she had, because she measured and bought just what she needed and hardly ever had much left over. Of course I now bundle my own remnants this way. Alas.

Other people have other methods, but it's always hard to see what you've got. Plus, unless it's something fabulous and you're willing to take the time to do a burn test, you really don't know the content. Sometimes you can tell, but more and more, it's hard to detect polyester, that evil mimic, without burning a bit. And you don't want to go to someone's house and start setting their stuff on fire, you know?

Anyway, there was a ton of fabric, and I was going to go through it, but then I got sidetracked when they told me I could go look at some old clothes, and when I came back, I stumbled on a box of *vintage* (aieeeeeee! But, seriously, there's no other word to use here) linen and napkins (some linen, some cotton) and tiny, fragile little handkerchiefs. Many of these were still in the plastic bags that led me to believe the deceased shopped the same estate sales I often do.

OK. Cut to the chase: I had $20 cash. I hate to bargain, and I don't like playing games. So I told them I had $20 cash and asked what I could get for that. They said for $20, I could take whatever I wanted. I asked if they were sure, and they were--they were kind of overwhelmed with the sheer amount of stuff their friend had accumulated.

I may go back when they finish--I'm sure there's a bunch more fabulous stuff that I didn't get to look through, but I, too, got overwhelmed. You know how when there's so much to look at, and you start thinking about what you might be able to do with it and whether or not you want to bring it home and whether or not it would work with this, or maybe this, and before you know it, your brain has started that overheated sizzling thing? You can kind of smell the burning smell, and it's not from testing fabric--it's from your brain on overload? It was like that. My brain had already jumped ahead to what I might do with this bounty and left me back in the living room, trying to make decisions all by myself. Brainless, that's hard to do. So there was a ton I didn't look at.

We gathered up a box and two huge baskets--asking one last time if they were sure this was OK--and loaded them in The Boat and brought them home. Now, these had been stored for a long time, and there are lots of Mouse Signs in them, so to sort them this morning, out on the freezing cold porch (you knew I didn't bring anything in the house), I had on my pj's (because they'd go in the laundry as soon as I took them off) and a dust mask and a pair of disposable latex gloves.

Because, y'all, I am my mother's child, alas, and although I don't worry nearly as much as she did (she was a mom; I am not), I have internalized some of her more fervid fears, such as her belief that because I poke around in other people's old stuff, I'm going to contract Hanta virus. I can hear her warning me. Sigh. I'd like to be someone who didn't think about these things, but there you go.

[Oh, and on a related note, bird mites. Every time I pick up a feather to bring home to Clarice, I hear my mother's voice, "Bird mites."]

Anyway. So here's what I got. These big baskets alone were worth $20, although I'll have to find another home for them:

To help with seeing what size these are, that's Humphrey, the big black porch cat, in the lower right-hand corner. He is not a small guy.

Finely-stitched stuff like this, above.
This is one of the coolest (at least that I've found so far) pieces, priced at one time at $25:

I haven't opened it--or any of the other bags--because it's just too cold out there. And I don't bring them in the house until they're either laundered (if they weren't bagged) or removed from the bags. How cold is it? It snowed a week ago, and there are still big chunks of ice in the backyard from where they slid off the roof and haven't yet melted.

And then, after we left their house, we stopped by BJ's, where Trish had these wicker torsos for me:

I don't know what I'll do with them because I have absolutely. no. room. anywhere. But they were too cool to pass up--she was going to toss them if I didn't take them. So if you live nearby and need these for display and will come pick them up, let me know.

Also, if you live nearby and would like an old metal suitcase of *vintage* postcards, let me know that, too. Or a fabulous desktop--the kind where the lid lifts up. I don't have these things, but I know who does and wants to find a new home for them. Also a wedding dress. A lot of old collectible copper stuff. A bunch of studs for decorating clothing--the kind with prongs on the back. Sheesh--if y'all lived here, I would be your Tour Guide to Some Wonderful Stuff.

Wish you were here~~

Podcast with The Crafty Chica, Kathy Cano Murillo

2011-12-08T15:34:00.000-06:00

You know her best as the Crafty Chica, with a line of products with I Love to Create, several craft books, and two novels. But that's only the beginning. You can find out more about Kathy here, and you can listen to our podcast here:

Wardrobe Randomness

2011-12-08T11:17:00.000-06:00

These are just a couple of shots of stuff. The first is because people are always telling me I wear clothes that are too big and baggy. I don't always--it's just that the interesting clothes tend to be loose-fitting. Here's a totally-boring-but-not-baggy outfit:

Like I said, totally boring. Tie-dyed tee, thrifted jeans.

Me dancing like a goober on the sidewalk.

Born shoes I love but don't wear often because they have--yikes!--heels. Plus I have a hard time finding jeans long enough--esp. since I don't buy jeans until I can get them either thrifted or on clearance. I like good jeans, but I don't like to pay a Good Jeans Price, you know? Luckily the shoes were super cheap at Nordstrom's Rack in Dallas.

OK, here's something I *did* pay full price for. Yikes. Judy Coates Perez had one of these a couple years ago at the quilt show in Houston, and I fell in love. But I did NOT want to pay that much for another bag (I have, um, let's just say I have a couple, OK?). I figured that, if I waited, I could get it on sale eventually or find it at BJ's. No luck--these bags just keep on selling, and even the ones on eBay are not cheap. So I finally just heaved the big sigh and bought one. I think waiting two years was pretty good, though, right? As if that's justification.

A while back I posted/tweeted that we were out following some quail. We went to ship a box at UPS and were driving around (it's at the edge of town) and saw some quail. A LOT of them. I tried to herd them back toward The EGE so he could get a good photo, but those little suckers are quick.

This was the best we could get:

But the light was good, so he just took photos of me:

This is an altered black knit Bryn Walker vest over a pair of fuchsia Hue corduroy leggings. On top I have a yoolie and a couple of scarves from the street in Manhattan. My favorite black Born boots (I liked the brown ones so much I hunted down a pair of these, new, on eBay).

OK. Back to work~~thanks for coming by for coffee with me! XO

That Boring Grey JWLA Coat

2011-12-07T09:54:00.000-06:00

You remember it:

It's a Johnny Was LA cotton coat with some cool embroidery but not much else going for it. It's a little scratchy--I'll bet I've checked the content tag half a dozen times thinking, "This HAS to have wool in it." But no: 100% cotton. When I posted it and said I was going to add to it, someone posted and said that they didn't think I'd be happy with my style of stitching on this coat. I had to laugh: the style of stitching I do most often--the walking stitch with the knots on the outside--is fairly recent for me. From the time I started stitching on my clothes back in 1973, the most common stitch was the split stitch, which is, when you think of it, The Perfect Anal-Retentive Stitch. I have a love/hate relationship with it--it's tedious, it's plain.

But, done patiently, it can give you a really professional-looking line of color anywhere you want it. It locks, so it stays forever, almost--I've got a pair of overalls with this stitch that I've had for over 30 years and that have been laundered over and over (not lately, but for years--I wore them a LOT), and the stitching has lasted longer than the fabric in many places. So of course I had to prove, if only to myself, that I could apply stitching to this coat that blended in perfectly with the style. I may bead the flowers--they cry out for beading--but I'm going to wear it some first and see if I like it enough to do that. All I know so far? It's not very warm. I wore it over to show Trish and Tiffany yesterday and nearly froze (it didn't get above freezing here. Brrrrrr).

Here's what it looks like now:

I needed to adjust it better before the shot above--it's not really crooked like that up at the top.

For now, it's finished. I've moved on to the yoolie that was formerly an ankle-length Land's End black knit dress. I wore it at the quilt show in Houston and realized it was way, way too boring, so I came home and started working on it--but then it got put on hold while I did the coat.

(Don't you love how in this photo Melly Testa and I

have unconsciously adopted the same position?

I love when people do that

and don't even know it.)

I'm wearing it here with a purple yoolie over it--so it's that black thing underneath. I love it because the long pieces on the sides slap against my boots when I walk, plus it's very soft and stretchy, meaning it's really comfortable. The drawback is exactly what anyone with animals would guess: it's a magnet for cat fur. Sigh. I told The EGE last night we've got to remember to get more lint roller re-fills. I don't feel prepared unless I have at least one spare on hand. Usually two. The extra-large ones.

Anyway, it doesn't look much like it did--now it just needs a ton of stitching, so that's what I'm working on now.

More soon~~XO

It Snowed! (Grrrrr.)

2011-12-06T13:49:00.000-06:00

No, I'm not excited. I don't like snow, as you know. I've *seen* snow. I've played in snow. I've been snowed in.

In short, I've been there and done that and have a really good imagination, so if I ever forget having been in it and want to experience snow, I can just think, "Really cold and wet" and have a pretty idea of what it would be like to have it in my shoes and down the back of my neck.

Nevertheless, it can be pretty. The Ever-Gorgeous Earl spent a couple hours yesterday out taking photos, so I thought I'd share some of my favorites. You can click to embiggen.

Our house, taken from the street.

Bird feeder

Love the detail on these two (above and below)

House in the neighborhood

They just recently painted this house by the museum, and I LOVE it. Other people? Not so much. I think the color is perfect.

The Museum of the Southwest, where we walk at least once a day on our route.

Back of the museum. It use to be the Turner Mansion before it was a museum.

I love this photo.

Between the museum and the planetarium.

In front of the Haley Library, next to the planetarium.

I think he went downtown for these--they look like the cars at one of the lots on Wall Street.

Our favorite creepy old house--he's got some really good shots of this one (without snow), but they must be on another flashcard. It's way out by the Interstate.

I was hoping all this stuff would be melted by now, but it's only 27 degrees at 2 pm, so it looks like we're stuck with it for another day. Nevertheless, I missed walking yesterday and so must layer up and man up and get out there.

Thanks for coming by~~more wardrobe stuff soon (I finished something--yay!) XO

Leather Case for The Bluetooth Keyboard

2011-12-05T15:08:00.000-06:00

No, I didn't plan this to tie in with my CreateMixedMedia.com post about iPhone Journaling, but when I started exporting the photos to show you and thinking about the post, I realized it's all-of-a-piece.

As you know, I have a love/hate relationship with journaling. I used to totally love it, but in the last few years, I've gotten away from it so far--so far, far away--that I can go weeks without ever touching my notebook. And I used to carry it EVERYWHERE--I never left the house without it. I'd get out of the car and go back in the house to get it, in fact. No more. Now I go days without even knowing where it is. It's a combination of things--mostly my fingers and the trouble with holding a pen and wanting to save my fingers for stitching. Mostly that. But also not wanting to have a bunch of stuff to take care of--I've started tossing old journals, trying to keep the collection down to what will fit on 1/3 of one bookcase. Partly not wanting to have something people want to look at--my notebooks have always been for me, not for public consumption. Having someone else look at them is like cracking open my skull and letting someone else look at how my brain works. Creepy!

So anyway, I'm becoming more and more reliant on the iPhone, and I think it's a good thing. It feels good. Although I have the old iPhone 4, without Siri, it still feels more and more like an assistant, like someone who's with me all the time, looking out for me and remembering all the things I never will. And then--and then!--reminding me of them. Which is like, whoa: all I have to do is make a note of something, and the iPhone will remind me half a dozen times, at set dates. I have things set up so I get email reminders starting two weeks ahead of time. FOR EVERYTHING. It allows me to relax and not have to keep checking notes and calendars to see what I might be forgetting. And since a lot of what I have to keep track of involves other people and their time, that's a concern. If someone has prepared for a podcast or interview for a certain time and I fail to show up, that's an embarrassment of the deepest sort (it's happened to me once, and I still am not sure, all these years later, what actually happened; I had it written down, but the other person swore I'd given them a different day and time).

Anyway. So I use the iPhone for more and more, and one of the things that allows me to do this is the little Bluetooth keyboard. It lets me type lots of stuff in comfort, rather than trying to use that tiny iPhone keypad. I use it with the WriteRoom app, and it's fabulous. But the keyboard is a little fragile--one of the keys starting malfunctioning, and all I can figure out is that one of the cats stood on it at some point--I keep it on the bedside table, and although I like to believe the cats stay off, I know they have lives of their own when we're not here. We go to Starbucks in the evening; they have a house party. They probably invite the squirrels in for games of Parcheesi and Twister.

You may remember that I took the ailing keyboard to the Apple store in Dallas and asked the ~~geek~~ Genius there if they could fix it, and he laughed and said those keyboards are expendable, not meant to last (he didn't use the words "planned obsolescence," thank goodness, or I would have strangled him straightaway), which would have totally pissed me off except he then told me to go to the back of the store and get a new one off the shelf and bring it to him, which I did. He took my old one, handed me the brand-new one, and told me to enjoy it.

I was WAY impressed, as you might imagine. Sometimes you hate Apple, but most of the time, you gotta love 'em.

So. With a brand-spanking-new (and, really, it's not that big a deal because, I admit, I actually had two Apple Bluetooth keyboards--another one came with the iMac, but I've got it paired with the MacBook Pro--it gets complicated, really it does) keyboard, I wanted a way to protect it AND take it with me safely. When we traveled, I'd just set it on the backseat and grab it when I needed it. But it needed more if I'm going to take it to Starbucks, and I've been so happy with the leather iPhone case I made--the one made out of an old leather jacket we found in the dumpster behind the printing company that used to save paper for me--we'd always pull around to the back to load up with all the paper we'd then distribute to various organizations that needed paper, and one time the dumpster was full of clothes. Not dirty clothes, not icky clothes, but a bunch of clothes like, oh, someone had gotten particularly pissed off at her live-in boyfriend and had loaded up all his clothes while he was at work and had driven around until she found some obscure dumpster.

Anyway: so I had all this leather, most of which I've used up. Not enough left for a keyboard case, but I did have this deer leather. And I had some really nice silk from an outfit--top and pants--I got for maybe $1 at the recent Texas Size [sic] Garage Sale to benefit Meals on Wheels.

So here goes:

Here we've got the keyboard, the silk top, the leather, and the batting. It's cotton batting, for quilts. I keep a ton of it on hand.

I love this silk--metallic gold in there with all the fabulous colors. Originally I'd planned to have tassels of various colors on the sides but gave that up when I realized it would be a constant hassle messing with them. Not fully functional.

I measured the keyboard. I hate measuring, but this is one of those things where you want to do it anyway.

I cut two layers of the batting.

Large enough to fold over and cover the keyboard entirely. I put a layer of fusible webbing between them and ironed it. You could use fabric glue--just something so they won't slide around.

I ironed fusible webbing to the back of the silk. I use waxed paper to protect the iron and/or ironing board--there's always some hang-over of the webbing since, as I might have mentioned, I HATE to measure and so just eye-ball it when I cut.

Fused it to the batting, then turned it over and mitered the corners and fused it like this.

The front, all nicely solid.

Measured the leather. I wanted to use the raw edges wherever possible, and I thought it was cool to have a little of the silk peeking out at the top.

That's a shadow on the left, not a stain. Magnetic closure like they use for purses (purse aisle at Michael's or Hobby Lobby)

Figured out where I wanted the inside and then used leather glue to adhere it. This stuff is messy, but I learned in my bookbinding days that other glue will not work with leather--when dry, it will peel right off in a lovely plastic-y sheet.

OK--here's where I quit taking photos. I ran into Some Issues when I couldn't decide how to finish it. I thought I wanted a case, sewn up on the sides, that the keyboard would just slip into and out of. So I used a leather punch and pushed a ton of holes for sewing it up with leather lace. But then, after I did all that (which involved--omigod!--more measuring!), I realized that wasn't as functional as it could have been. If I'm going to use it when I'm out, wouldn't it be better to have the keyboard more stable, rather than pulling it out and sliding it back in? What if it were adhered somehow to the case, which would unwrap for use but would still hold the keyboard? So I cut off all those measured-and-punched holes and re-thought my idea.

I have my regular wired keyboard for this iMac on a lapboard I made--The EGE cut a piece of plywood for me, and I wrapped it in batting and tie-dyed flannel. It fits in my lap, and to keep the keyboard from sliding around, I adhered it with double-stick tape (holds it in place but doesn't ruin anything). My mouse, with a top track-ball, is stuck in place the same way. So that's what I did here, using double-stick tape at the top and bottom. It may not stick as well to the silk as it does to the flannel. If not, I'll figure out some other adhesive. For now, it seems to be OK.

I used one of the conchos left over from the fringed leather skirt-let apron thing (see it here) to cover up the back of the other half of the magnetic clasp

I used some of the scraps to make a long leather strap to wrap around it horizontally, just for more security in case the tape gives way and it tried to slide out sideways. You can see where I punched a few of those holes.

And here it is, ready to go:

The Myth of "Post-Racial" America

2011-12-04T12:23:00.000-06:00

If you think we, here in the early years of the second decade of the 21st century, have transcended race and are now officially Post-Racial, here's what I want you to do. Go into your kitchen and get a tall glass. Fill it with ice and cold water and swirl it around. Listen to the ice cubes making that lovely little clinking sound. Take a cool, refreshing sip.

Ahhhhhh.

Now dump the rest of it over your head and wake up.

While there may be pockets of extreme tolerance and amicability and enough inter-racial breeding, like that in the Zachery Family, to make people feel all warm and fuzzy and hopeful, race has not gone away. It hasn't ceased being an issue, and I don't think it ever will. Even when we all have interbred enough so that we're so thoroughly mixed that racially identifying labels of any kind are about as useful as "quadroon" and "octaroon," there will still be people for whom that One Drop of Blood will matter. I can go along, blithely thinking things have really changed, and then something will hit me upside the head with such force that it takes my breath away. I'm left gasping this morning.

I'll try to make this short, so there won't be a lot of tedious details.

As y'all know, The EGE is a big fan of country dance music. Not the new-fangled kind, but the old kind--Bob Wills, Hank Williams the Daddy, Merle Haggard. Stuff like that. He made sure I could do the two-step, the waltz, the Cotton-Eyed Joe, the schottische, the polka, and the Western Swing before he ever took me on a date. Over the many years we've been dancing together, we've met some wonderful people and some real jerks. We've been welcomed at places I, on my own, would have avoided, and we have hurried away from other places, once with me holding my gun in my lap lest we were overtaken and assaulted by that crowd of people chanting The N-Word at us.

For the last couple years we've been going to dances hosted by a couple of dance groups here in Midland, most often at St. Stephen's Catholic Church, which has two huge rooms--a gym and a ballroom--that can host two dances at the same time. Sometimes we get invitations to dances, and sometimes we don't hear about them until later when someone at Starbucks will ask us where we were and why we weren't there. Last New Year's Eve I tried, with no luck, to find out if there were a dance, and where, but I couldn't. It had been suggested, long ago, that we join, and last month I tried to find out how to do that so we would know when dances were going to happen. No luck.

But we did get an email invitation to a dance last night, and we went. And we were sitting at a table talking to a friend, and I mentioned that we might as well just go ahead and join so we wouldn't miss out. And he looked at me funny and said something to the effect of, "You haven't heard, have you?" And told me the story.

After we'd gone to a couple of the dances, some of the men said something to the board about how if we were going to come, someone had to tell me not to dress "so provocatively." You've seen what I wear to dances:

The top under the sweater is a halter top (garage sale, 50 cents). Sometimes I wear just that. Sometimes I wear my Oleg Cassini beaded velvet bustier. I can't find a photo of it, but here's another one. Well, two actually--a black velvet one over a red lace one:

Yes, my arms and chest are exposed. No, there is no cleavage. Is there on other women at these dances? Oh, please. There was, our friend tells us, some mention that The Petroleum Club, where some of the dances are held, doesn't even allow spaghetti straps. I find this hard to believe, given that many ball gowns are strapless. Keep in mind that, below the top, I'm covered in layers of billowing fabric to my ankles.

Actually, though, you'll see, as you read on, that this is just a convenient red herring.

These guys said that if we were going to continue attending, someone would have to talk to me about what I wear. And, rightly, our friend and several other members called them on it, telling them it wasn't about me and the way I dressed; it was about The EGE. And instead of arguing and trying to deny that, the guy said the most amazing thing I've heard in years, something I really can't believe anyone would let come out of his mouth in a public place. He said, "Well, what if he joins and brings more of his kind?"

Let's pause for moment while that sinks in. This is Midland, Texas, one of the wealthiest places in the US, in the year 2011. The EGE has lived here his entire life and, before so many people started moving here because of the oil boom, knew most of the people in town. We are not trying to join either of the country clubs, nor do we want to join the Petroleum Club. We want to join a couple of dance clubs, the members of which are mostly retired and not even close to being The Country Club Set, whoever those people are. We don't want to come to their houses or sit on their board; all we want to do is know when the dances are so we can go and dance. We don't drink, we don't flirt, we don't eat their food. We go, we dance almost every dance, and when we're not dancing, we're sitting at a table with people who have invited us to sit with them. We do not, in short, push ourselves on anyone. And yet these old men don't want us to join because The EGE might bring more of His Kind with him.

Our friend says he asked the man, "'His kind'? You mean people who were born and raised in Midland, put themselves through college, spent their entire careers teaching Midland students in the public schools, have been married for 40 years [he was slightly off; we're not as old as he thinks we are], and has never been unfaithful to his wife? That kind?"

And then, he tells us, a bunch of people resigned their membership and quit going to the dances. Membership dropped by 50%, he said, and people have only recently started going back because he was elected president of the board for 2012 so he could change the by-laws that say one negative vote on membership will bar someone from joining. He wants to change to it a majority vote before they put our names up as prospective members.

We had no hint of any of this. Our friend couldn't believe we hadn't heard--it was a huge deal, he said.

Imagine how this feels, if you can. I was actually surprised how hurtful it was. I felt like crying, which I never do.

For one thing, no one is allowed to be rude to my husband or try to hurt him. Not my parents, when we first got married, not any of my relatives, most of whom I haven't seen since 1976. Not coaches who wanted to harass him or mall cops who were hateful to him. Nobody. The guy who said this is someone we know--or, rather, someone The EGE knows. I would love to have a conversation with him, but that should probably not happen for several months.

For another, we decided early on that we would go where we wanted to go and do what we wanted to do. You know the saying that women have to do everything twice as well to be considered equal? We knew from the beginning that people in Midland would always be watching us to see how we act. This wasn't a problem for us because we were both raised by parents with high standards for behavior, so we were never the kind of people who fought in bars or showed up drunk at The Dreaded Wal-Mart. I've always known, though, that even a heated argument in the soup aisle about whether or not the claims of "low sodium" were, in fact, legitimate was sure to make onlookers smirk knowingly. We have always been mindful of that, but it doesn't matter. People still look at us and think what they want to think, never mind how we conduct ourselves.

But here's what really irritates me. When I left college to come home and marry The EGE, my roommate said I was going to end up fat and toothless, with a bunch of kids, living in a trailer (my roommate, an accidental placement and not someone I had known beforehand, secretly lusted after black men but wouldn't be seen with them in public). I realized that her attitude wasn't all that rare: white women who marry black men are scorned for many reasons and thought to be all sorts of trash. And no matter that I'm 55 years old, with multiple college degrees and a happy 35-year marriage, that I've Made Something Of My Life--none of that matters to these people. To them, I'm a white woman married to a black man, and that defines me. They can use the way I look as an excuse for their racism because the way I look reinforces their contention that I must be trash of the lowest sort. And the truth is that it wouldn't matter if I still looked the way I looked when I was 30, with no tattoos and long brown hair and trying-to-fit-in clothes. I was trash then, and I'm trash now, and no matter what I do with my life, I'll always be trash to these people, a fair target for their bigotry.

Now, you can say that it doesn't matter and wonder why we'd want to join a group with members like these people, but here's the deal: there are a lot of really nice people there, as well, people who hug us and welcome us every time we show up. And it's the only--the ONLY--way for The EGE to get to dance. The dance clubs are full of drunk people and smoke, and the country dance clubs play New Country, which he loathes. The Stardust, which was where we went dancing for years, has closed. The few other places we could go are scary even to me--The VFW has country dances, but the only time we went there was as guests, with people we knew, and even then it was uncomfortable. While I said that we'll go wherever we want, the truth is that there are dark little enclaves where I'm not about to show up on a Saturday evening when all the good old boys have been drinking beer since mid-afternoon.

The other thing is that, no matter how I try to think of Midland as home, since it is, truly, the only home I've ever had, it often feels as foreign to me as a land where I don't speak the language. I've tried to fit in as much as I could over the 42 years I've lived here, teaching at the college and subbing in the public schools and working for the city government, but it hasn't worked. I don't think about it much, but when I do, it sometimes feels like walking among a tribe of people whose mores are unfamiliar to you. That look that passes between them might mean anything, anything at all. You never know, but you're always aware that if you stumble, they might try to eat you.

So that's life. In some parts of the world, maybe things have changed. In other parts, it *seems* things have changed, but only on the surface. We go along all happily, assuming that everyone is getting along fine and everything is fair and just and right, believing the world has progressed to the point where race--and gender, and sexual orientation--just don't matter any more.

We are wrong, and having been blind to the racism and sexism and homophobia only makes it all the more painful when it slaps you in the face.

A Quick Morning Project

2011-12-03T12:07:00.000-06:00

Sometimes it's fun to just do something, you know? Just start it and finish it. I did one of those, and I'll show it soon (I hope; by saying that, I hope I remember to Just Do It); but this is something else. It's also quick, but it's more of a make-over, not really making anything new. It's out of my comfort zone--I am not a sew-er. I am not a seamstress or tailor. I embellish things. And while I *do* make things, I don't make them The Right Way. I sort of know how it should be done, but it's never important enough to me to take the time to take something completely apart and start over. Remaking things doesn't have the same appeal for me as making something from scratch or embellishing something that's already finished. I have no idea why. I like one end or the other but not the in-between.

OK. But sometimes I have to try, you know? There was this jacket at BJ's. Bolero, brown cotton velvet, some embroidery and a little bit of beading with sequins. But there was something seriously wrong with it--I suspect that someone had washed it and the jacket shrank but the polyester (ick) lining did not. So the lining in the sleeves had all bunched up and made the sleeves too small, and not even Tiffany (who works there and is roughly my size but not as broad in the shoulders) could wear it. So yesterday they gave it to me to bring home for Alex--it had been hanging around the shop all fall.

But I couldn't let it rest: the jacket was potentially too cute for someone not to wear it. At first I was going to remove the lining from the sleeves, but since they had probably shrunk enough that they would never work, I just removed them and their separate lining and then sewed the lining to the jacket at the armholes.

Sorry, but I didn't even think about taking a photo of the Before. Sorry! I keep saying I'm going to get better at that, but when I'm working on something, the last thing I think about is stopping to take photos. I'm always wondering if it's going to work out, and taking photos of something that may or may not be a disaster seems like a distraction and probably a waste of time.

While it's cute, it's not me; I think Tiffany will like it (she's 25) rather a lot. so I'll take it to her this afternoon. It kind of bothers me--I know what I should have done: removed the lining, resewn it to make it fit, replaced it and sewn it in place. I did not do that. I took small tucks where I needed to make it fit. I should have taken the lining apart in the body, as well, and taken it up so it doesn't sag. I did not do that. I hate that kind of stuff and avoid it whenever I can. While I can do things by hand, I have real issues with sewing machines, never mind that I have four and have been using one of them for 35 years. I always approach them as if they're large, unfamiliar dogs who may be having a bad day. Sometimes we get along fine, and sometimes I just back away.

Why I Don't Sell What I Make

2011-12-02T10:07:00.001-06:00

In the past I have--I have sold many things. Jewelry, hand bound books, art dolls, assemblage, collage, stamped cards, clothes, art quilts. As I've mentioned before, one year I made $10,000 selling the stuff I made. That seems amazing to me today--it's been a lot of years.

But I don't even try any more. My Etsy shop has been empty (if it still even exists) for years now. People are always--always--telling me I should sell the clothes I alter. "People would pay for that!" they tell me, and I just smile.

Yes, indeed. People would pay for it. Just recently, when I posted this jacket,

someone contacted me and said they'd like to buy it. I pretty much knew where this would go, having been there before, but I asked them, just out of curiosity, to make an offer. They suggested $25. I said no, I wouldn't sell it for that amount, but if they'd send a SASE, I'd put it in the mail to them as a gift. They did. I did. I hope they received it--I haven't heard, and it's been a couple weeks, so it may have gone astray, which would be sad.

[The good news is that just the other day--Monday--I boxed up a carton of things I'd altered and was hanging onto but realized I probably am not going to wear, given the bulging state of all the closets, and sent them to Nan Spring, a fabulous photographer in San Antonio. They've arrived safely, and Nan says she'll have photos to post on Facebook soon. You may remember the last time I did this and Nan shared the photos. This is why I send things to her: they fit her, she wears them, she enjoys them, I get to see how they look on someone else. She came to the book signing we did in San Antonio last month and had on one of the dresses I dyed and stitched, and it was SO much fun to see her in it.

She looked fabulous (she's wearing a pair of tights that exactly matches the darker fuchsia in this dress), and seeing her + the dress was like seeing two friends I hadn't seen in a while. In fact, it was so cool of her to wear it that I gave her a jacket I bought at Quilt Festival last year and embroidered--I hadn't know I was going to do that, but I was compelled to hand it to her. She's just one of those people who make you feel great about sending something their way, you know? Even if it might not be the coolest thing she's ever seen, she has so much fun with styling it that you have fun, too.]

Anyway: so why would I rather give something away then sell it for $25? Let's look at it.

I bought the jacket for a couple of dollars. Let's say $3. I brought it home and washed it and dyed it. Let's say the dye and salt and soda ash cost $2. I switched out the buttons--that was probably about $4, given the ridiculous cost of even plain plastic buttons. Let's say I spent $1 on the floss. That's $10.

Let's say that all this took me three hours. It probably took longer than that, of course, but let's say it took three. That comes out to $5 an hour for altering the jacket. I don't know about y'all, but I'm not willing to do something--even something I love--for $5 an hour. Oh, sure--if I were starving and had to have the money to buy food, I'd do it. But you know what? I'd rather do something else for $5 an hour, something physical. Shoveling out kennels, for instance. Nasty, dirty, disgusting work, but hard physical work for which you don't expect to make much money. I've done it, and I could do it again (think tall rubber boots, gloves, a mask). What I'm not willing to do is something I've been doing since 1973 and, if I say so myself, do fairly well, for far less than minimum wage.

If I sell something, I have to copy the check and make sure it's included for taxes. I have to pay Etsy fees and shipping. I have to have boxes and tissue on hand, and I have to keep track of stuff. I have to take it to the post office or UPS. By that time, that $5 an hour I made has dwindled down to nothing.

I understand that people aren't willing to pay for the time I--we!--put into things we make by hand. You know that. You've heard people say, over and over, in that dismissive tone, "I could do that." Well, yes. Yes, indeed: they *could* do that. The question is, though: would they? Are they really going to spend hours and hours learning to do what you do? Mastering the techniques and then still loving it enough to sit down and do it?

You know the answer to that one. They're not. They're not willing to do it, but because they can imagine themselves doing it, they don't value it nearly as much as if it were something they couldn't do. Brain surgery. Tax law. Architecture.

Or some art, like gem cutting or glass blowing, that they have no idea how to do and that, therefore, seems mysterious and valuable.

I have sold some artwear for quite a bit of money. A couple hundred dollars, say. Does that sound good? The truth is that didn't even begin to cover the amount of time I spent working on them.

Here's the thing: you have to value the things you do. This is why I'm always harping about work, about buckling down and learning to do things well, about practicing and learning and expanding your skills. You do it, and you do it well, and you value it. If you want to give it away as a gift, that's your business. But if you sell what you do for pennies, what are you saying? Remember how I say, periodically, that people treat you the way you teach them to treat you? Well, people value your work the way you teach them to value your work. If you don't value what you do, they won't, either. If you're willing to sell it for way less than it's worth, then that's what it actually *is* worth. You're the one who put that price on it.

So while I used to think it would be marvelous to make a living selling what I make, I realized that would never happen. I don't make high-end artwear. I don't have A Name that makes people want to spend lots of money on what I make, and the stuff I make is quirky enough that only maybe a handful of people would wear it. And that's OK. I don't make it to sell it; I make it for me, to wear it. And if I don't wear it? I give it away. There are wonderful people out there who give marvelous homes to the things I pass along. They wear them and have fun with them, and that makes me happy.

That's why I don't sell what I make. I make it for me and for the joy of making something. I have way, way too much. But I'd rather give it away than undervalue what I do by selling it for less than what my time is worth. Packing up a box of stuff I've altered and sending it to a friend and then waiting to see photos? Now that's fun~~almost as much fun as wearing it myself, which, as you know, I love to do.

Thanks, Nan! XO

Podcast with Robert Dancik: Talking about Amulets & Talismans

2011-12-01T14:02:00.002-06:00

You know how I love wearable art, right? Fabulous clothing and jewelry that you can actually *wear,* rather than just put in a book or hang on the wall. But what I've realized in thinking about this stuff for years and years and years is that it's not just wearable art that I love; it's meaningful wearable art. It needs to have some special meaning for the wearer. It's about amulets and talismans, and that just happens to be the title of Robert Dancik's book: Amulets and Talismans (North Light Books, 2009)

When I talked to him for the profile in Belle Armoire Jewelry last summer, I asked him about these, but I knew I wanted to ask more. So we finally scheduled some time, and here's our conversation:

Happy Birthday, Mark Twain~~

2011-11-30T08:49:00.002-06:00

I'm not a huge fan of the literature, having taken a graduate seminar in Twain & Melville and having rather more testosterone-intensive, water-logged reading in one semester than I'd ever anticipated, but I think I would have liked to sit down on the porch and visit with Twain. Here is what I think is perhaps the most useful thing he said. I offer it to you to go along with yesterday's post about being older:

"Twenty years from now
you will be more disappointed
by the things that you didn't do

than by the ones you did do.

So throw off the bowlines.

Sail away from the safe harbor.

Catch the trade winds in your sails.

Explore. Dream. Discover."

Today's Project. I Hope.

2011-11-29T14:54:00.001-06:00

Eeesh. I bought this a while back. $15 at an antique store. I saw it, saw that it needed Some Serious Rehab, and walked away.

And, of course--you know this!--couldn't get it out of my head. Old. Soft. Leather. Tooled! Perfect!

What is perfect, you ask? Well, The Perfect Bag is leather (I'm sorry, I want to shun leather, I really do. It's my weakness, and I admit it). It's old and broken in but sturdy. It's maybe a little stained but clean. Soft. It has pockets that make sense: I need an interior zipper pocket for my wallet (I carry a men's bi-fold and have for as long as I can remember--if I get a chance to do something exciting, like go ride a horse (it's happened) or something physical, I can put the wallet in the back pocket of my Levi's, and it will stay, snug and secure. Otherwise, it needs a zippered pocket), an exterior pocket for the iPhone in its large-ish fringed leather case (the one I made here), and at least one other pocket for business cards and Stuff. (This one has three sections, each separate from the others.) Not too big--I've got big bags, and I try to carry them only when I really need them. Carrying huge bags crammed full of stuff is not the path to Good Back & Neck Health, let me tell you. But not too small--if the bag is too small to hold the stuff you need, then it's just An Accessory, like a big bow stuck on the back of your head. Eh.

So I went back for it, thinking it was $45 and not knowing whether it was worth it, never mind that I'd fallen in love. Turns out it was $15. What can I say? But then, once I had it home, I couldn't figure out how to mend the inside. The lining that separates the outside pocket from the inside pocket has pulled loose. To repair it The Right Way, I'd have to rip out the seam in the leather, iron the lining, insert it between the two pieces of leather, and re-stitch the seam.

I don't think that's going to happen, but I don't know what's going to happen instead. What I've got to do is figure out a way to mend it. I can't turn the bag inside out--the cardboard bottom panel would be ruined. It's too small to get my hands in there to stitch. I hate glueing fabric--it's so tacky. Like safety-pinning your underwear. So I've got everything out on the table--leather scraps, the bag, needles, various kinds of adhesive. I'm going to figure out SOMETHING today; I just hope it's something I can live with.

Wish me luck, please~~

Being a Baby Boomer Doesn't Mean You're Dead Yet

2011-11-29T11:35:00.001-06:00

What do you think of when you think of someone who's "middle-aged"? Technically, I'm past middle age--I really don't think I'm going to live to be 110. Nor do I want to--everyone I know, plus all my teeth and functioning joints, would be gone.

Two interesting things in the last 24 hours made me think about this this morning when I should really be doing other things. One was this, a page posted on the blog of someone who tweeted me about museum experiences, which is what made this so serendipitous. Let's see if I can condense the story [bwa-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha]:

Our walking route goes through the grounds of the Museum of the Southwest, the old Turner Mansion (where, back in the 1960s, there was a scandalous murder. The wife was killed, and a black man was convicted of the murder. Some people believe the husband did it and the black man was just the convenient target. Duh: Midland, Texas. 1960s. Anyway, I love a mystery--just about any kind of mystery except the ones that plague me, like: what in the world happened to the charcoal henley I prepared for making a yoolie, cutting it and picking the floss and putting it in a bag and pinning it to the collar? I had it all ready to go, and it vanished. I have no idea where it is or what could have happened to it, and that's the kind of mystery I most certainly do NOT like.

Most other kinds, though? Love them).

OK, I'm already not doing so well with the whole "condensing" thing, am I?

Anyway, so we walk through the grounds. The museum is closed on Monday, but people work there, and the director of the children's museum has given us a standing invitation to stop in on any Monday to check out the current exhibit--she knows I'm not a kid person and am not going to come in on a day when there are actual kids visiting. So yesterday we went in to check out the current exhibit, on masks. It was interesting, and--even better--they made use of QR codes: you can scan various codes for more information, short videos, slide shows. I loved it, and we got to talking about QR codes and then podcasts.

More about that in a minute.

When I got home, I tweeted about this--about the museum doing a good job using QR codes in a creative and useful way. And that's when I got the tweet. It had a link, and I don't follow tweeted links unless they make sense in the context--from someone I know about something I would expect them to tweet. You know the drill. But for some reason I checked out her profile and went to her website, and I found this, about how she set up a business helping middle-aged people with their problems with technology. This is a good thing--and a brilliant idea--but it bothers me that it's necessary. And the "Baby Boomers" in the title make me shriek a little.

Back to the conversation at the museum. Another woman was there, and she was talking about how she's getting ready to start doing podcasts for the museum. Both women are in their late 20s/early 30s. The one we know says she's not into technology at all; the other admitted that it's a little scary--she wants to do podcasts but doesn't really know how to put it all together. I explained the process--what she'll need, what some of the options are--and gave her my email so she can ask questions.

This isn't the first time this has happened, that someone way younger than I am has asked about podcasting or making iMovies or setting up a website or an Etsy shop. What I'm coming to believe, more and more, is that it's not about age and technology, but about interests. My nieces and nephews (20s, early 30s) are all on Facebook. Most of them have smart phones that they carry in their hands constantly. My editors and people with whom I work are mostly about the same age. They know Facebook and Twitter, Etsy and Pinterest and Linkedin. They know all that stuff.

But most of the people I know know nothing about how to set up an automatic backup of their hard drive or create and distribute a podcast or create a QR code or make and share a movie with music. They don't know about Dropbox for file sharing or about creating pages on their blog. I believe it's not that Young People are amazingly technology-savvy; it's that they're very socially oriented. They use social media constantly, and they know how to use technology for that. But many of them don't use their actual computers/laptops/iPads for much else beyond that and sharing photos and videos and maybe doing some light word processing. This isn't a bad thing; it's knowing what you want to know and focusing on that.

Sure, there are more 19-year-old computer geeks writing code and creating apps and hacking into bank accounts than there are 60 year olds doing the same thing, but there *are* 60 year olds doing it. It's not about age; it's about interest: knowing what interests you and focusing on that and learning what you need to know to be able to do it.

(And here I have to insert that I *do* know at least one kid who's a total computer geek, who takes apart and rebuilds his computers and can do amazing stuff that I can't even understand. But it's OK that I don't understand--the math-and-science part isn't the part I want to know more about; I know whom to call if suddenly a huge wad of wires and bolts and 2 x 4s and PVP pipe falls out onto the desk.)

I've ranted before about how irritating it is to me to hear women (it's almost always women; men may feel the same way, but they keep it to themselves. Except my husband, who has no problem telling you how little he likes technology and how happy he is to leave it to me, which is just one more reason we get along so well) my age say they can't do this and they can't do that and (the straw that breaks me every time) they have to wait to send me something/do something/show something until their son (it's always their son and never their daughter) has time to do it for them. This makes me crazy. While I have no problem with someone who, like my husband, has no interest in computers or what's online and is happy to admit it, I have a real problem with someone who wants and needs to use the technology but has decided, for some reason, that they're too old to do so and that Someone Young has to do it for them. I kind of fell for this, too, when I wanted to start doing podcasts. I foolishly assumed that every Young Person with a computer knew this stuff, and I knew a bunch of Young People with computers, so I'd have a bunch of information and a bunch of options, right?

Not a single one of them knew anything about it at all. Most of them didn't even know what podcasts were.

But that's understandable, once I started thinking about it: you know about what interests you, and they weren't interested. Makes sense. What doesn't make sense is assuming that if something *does* interest you, you can't learn about it because you're too old.

How is that possible? Oh, sure, if you've got some kind of brain malfunction, then it would make sense. But otherwise? No, age isn't an excuse. You learn what you want to learn. If you decide this--whatever it is--is something that would be fun or useful or lucrative or entertaining or whatever--you learn it.

Back to the museum: one of the (remember: young) women said it was all just overwhelming--Etsy and Pinterest and Twitter and all the rest--and I told her that's because people think they have to know it all and do it all and master it all, and that's just not true. You can't use all of it--there's not enough time. There're not enough hours in the day to keep up with everything. You have to figure out what you want to do and focus on that.

Focus, focus, focus. That's the key.

Same with technology. You don't need to know everything about your computer. This iMac does tons and tons of stuff that I don't know about. I have never used Automator or made a slide show or a DVD. I know nothing about creating spread sheets or PowerPoint presentations (on the Mac, that would be KeyNote). But here's the deal: I don't need to know that stuff. Someday I might need to know it, and then I can find out about it. Until then, though, there's no reason for spending time learning it and having that information cluttering up my brain until I forget it. And forget it I would because 1) I have no reason to use it and reinforce the neural pathways of the stuff I learned and 2) I forget everything. (Except, it seems, every moment of my mother's last day in the hospital, which plays for me like a movie at totally random times.)

Anyway. There are two problems here, and they dovetail. One is that people my age seem to think they're too old to learn new stuff, and the other is that many people of all ages believe there's so much stuff to learn, they'll never be able to learn it all.

They dovetail at curiosity. If you're curious about something--if you want to learn how something works, want to master it, want to find out what you can do--that's over half the battle. A huge portion of the rest is figuring out what you don't need. You don't need to learn everything all at once. You learn the basics, and you learn the stuff that interests you, and the rest can wait. I will probably never need to make a DVD, never mind that there's an application for doing that--iDVD--right here, and that all the manuals devote chapters to this. I haven't opened the program, and I haven't read the chapters. But if the day comes (which I doubt it will--few people share movies on DVDs any more), I can open it up, read the chapters, figure it out.

I have never had a lesson in anything having to do with computers. I didn't know anyone who used a computer until I was in graduate school, and there was only one person who had one, a total geek girl. I had a graduate degree and was in my 30s before I ever touched a computer--heck, I didn't learn how to ~~type~~ keyboard until I was in college. I got my first dedicated word processor forever ago. It was used, and it was huge, and it weighed a ton. The disks were big platter-sized (well, almost) things, and the "manual" was some poorly-Xeroxed sheets hastily stapled together, and I bumbled along and figured out what I needed to know to do a bunch of writing on that thing--it served me well. I never tried to learn to do much on it--I knew it was just a temporary thing. The next computer I had was also used, and again with the photocopied "user's manual," and again with the bumbling. When I finally got my first brand-new PC, the first thing I did was go buy manuals--the "for Dummies" ones and the 1000+-page ones and everything in between. And I read them all and spent a ton of time trying things out. By the time I switched to a Mac, I'd learned what I needed to know, which was this: you don't need to know everything. You need to know only what you need to know; you can learn the other stuff when you need to know it.

Life isn't like school. You're not required to learn stuff in a certain order. You don't have to master everything in a course before you can move on. In life, you can learn just the basics and then add to those when you need to. And the key is: as long as you're curious and willing to stretch yourself, it's never too late to learn new stuff.

[Whoa. I was sitting here typing and started getting a headache. I never have headaches, so this was pretty odd. And it got odder and odder until I reached up to my head and discovered the reading glasses I'd pushed up there are not my regular, familiar ones but a much smaller, tighter pair I'd grabbed from one of the 10,549 locations where these are stashed throughout the house. I took them off my head, and the headache immediately went away. I think there's a lesson in there.]

I have so many problems with women my age and the things they believe about what they can do, what they can't do, what they should do. About technology and clothes, about physical activity and interests. People I know are selling their houses and moving to another town to "be near our grandkids," which makes me wonder how they can have so little that interests them that they can give it all up to move hundreds of miles away to be someone's baby sitter. Sure, they want to spend time with their family, but giving up everything--the house, the neighborhood, the friends, the activities--is the life you've created of that little interest to you that you're willing to give it all up just because You're Getting Old?

Oy.

I hate hearing "I can't do that," "I can't wear that," "I can't learn that." If you think that--at any age--then of COURSE it's true. Tell yourself you can't do something, and it's a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Do me a favor. If you're Middle-Aged, male or female, and you're mired in the "I can't do that" slough of despond, sit yourself down for a good talk. If you're in decent health, there's no reason you can't do the things you want to do. Change your diet, get more exercise, walk away from the television, get some books. Make lists. Keep a journal. Make a chart. Make plans. Above all, be curious. The longer I live, the more I realize that the people I want to know and talk to are the people who are curious about things. Wide-ranging things, random things, serial things, obsessive things. Just curious.

I think that's another blog post, though.

OK. I'm done. Thanks for sticking it out all the way through~~XO