What’s on my mind:
Today I stood in line an inordinately, unnaturally long time at McDonalds.
The children were climbing through tunnels like contented gerbils and I had a book to read, so I was able to wait more patiently than most.
While waiting (while reading!) my mind wandered to earlier in the afternoon where I left some of my soda bread biscuits with my hostess. She had glowed about how delicious they were, and while I was surprised at her enthusiasm, I appreciated it enough not to question it.
About this same time, still standing near the counter, I also remembered a random Dooce post I’d read where she glowed about how good food tastes now that she’s pregnant. The delicious idea of my plain bread being elevated by pregnancy magic struck me so hard I laughed out-loud (she is pregnant– I wasn’t laughing at the possibility).
An older gentleman waiting nearby looked at me questioningly and I smiled and went back to pretending to read my book, still fighting the giggles– this time brought on by imagining how this scene might have looked without the book.
Yes, I’ll admit I’m still riding high on a sleep deficit.
But here’s what I’ve gotten done:
Here’s the next steps finished:
Set in the layout they will hold for time and all eternity:
I have experimented with a number of different quilting methods and styles, but my favorite is still the Gordian knot quilts.
(If you’re wondering what happened to the dinosaurs, the project was delayed on account of bedbugs- among other things. The new fabric was in a “potentially contaminated” area and so had to be put out in the cold.)
~
For what it’s worth, I find definable, sequential projects like these very settling. I always know what to do next, and they give me a sense of accomplishment.
Something that stays done! Yay!
They are a type of paint-by-number, I suppose, but at least I get to pick my own colors.
These will all grow into the design at the top right. I set up a sort of assembly-line with all the bits and pieces across my couch:
Yes, those strips and bits take forever to cut (I got all the way through the BBC Jane Eyre and absolutely *killed* my knees, even on a gardener’s pad), but once you’re done, you’re done.
In all fairness, the cutting included pieces for three additional quilts of a different knot. If I’m still feeling like show-and-tell when I get there I’ll put them up.
So the results of this night’s work (the length of the Masterpiece Theatre Jane Eyre):
You can see what a dramatic difference color makes. And even these looks are deceptive, because the look continues to change as the knot grows and is set in its “background”.
So… woopie for me. It’s 2 a.m. and I’ll be crashing now.
My brain is so full (and my time so clogged) that I’m going to do this again. I’ve written at least four posts since the last 7-takes, but none of them were right for general consumption, so I’ll just touch some here and go on.
~ ~ 1 ~ ~
Been fighting bedbugs since last Sunday’s blitzkrieg. Three days ago I realized the hardest thing about it all (okay, one of the three hardest tings) is a basic reality I learned in Introduction to Logic 10 years ago:
You can prove something exists. You cannot prove something does not exist.
I’m feeling very good about the situation currently, but I can’t change what I’m doing because I have no way of knowing if I’ve “won” or if I’m just holding things off for the present.
I pray it’s the former.
~ ~ 2 ~ ~
I find constant housework mentally draining. “Just pick it up when you see it” only works for me if I’m chooing not to see it all.
As a project-oriented person I feel I do my best when rotating between specific, goal-focused tasks.
The necessity of daily pick-ups for the daily vacuuming makes me a little nuts and I haven’t really figured out why or what to do about it.
~ ~ 3 ~ ~
My laptop’s mouse disappeared while I was vacuuming in the other room. I really hope it surfaces soon.
~ ~ 4 ~ ~
I’ve been pulled toward my novel several times this last week, but not done any serious work. I was reviewing my characters’ playlists (I’ve mentioned these before), adding songs, and really noticed the gap in appropriateness between my children and the stuff I’m writing.
Oddly (?) enough, it entered my awareness mostly from my realizing i didn’t want my kids listening to a steady diet of these songs I’ve collected. Maybe they wouldn’t notice or care, but the stuff I collect leans toward the more emotionally intense.
It could be just my wiring, but these are rarely just background music, and when I finish one of these playlists I have a similar feeling to when I’ve sat through a movie– that breathless, half-tired rush of reentry to reality.
(And, again, if you look, the movies mean nothing– I collect these for the songs, so don’t read into what you might see.)
~ ~ 5 ~ ~
Because of all the “extra” work the dinosaurs have been put on perpetual hold. Bummer.
~ ~ 6 ~ ~
Despite telling myself a long time ago that I would focus on guitar alone, I just realized I’m at about the same level on both.
That is to say, not great, but competent enough to accompany myself on songs I’ve practiced. It’s amazing to me how much more alive and full a song sounds with an instrument.
And then it all jumps up that much again when a “real” pianist or guitarist plays that accompaniment.
~ ~ 7 ~ ~
I had a couple positive reminders yesterday of kids absorbing their parent’s enthusiasm for something.
From Jen F.’s lovely idea of lumping the littles together in their beautiful, interconnected randomness.
~ ~ 1 ~ ~
I read a book Monday, took Tuesday off, read a book Wednesday (I had a *completely* different ending mapped out for the book you sent me, Bluestocking. Couldn’t help feeling mine was just a bit more logical/realistic. If nothing else, intense.)
Jay walked in on me starting a third book Wednesday morning and was a rather efficient wet blanket to my smoldering enthusiasm. I gave up the new book and returned to a book that was already at “favorite” status with only one read.
~ ~ 2 ~ ~
While on my way home from Bermuda last week I finished Stephen King’s On Writing. I loved how right he was about being encouraged by what you read.
He basically said that no matter what you read it’s good for you: either as a model to emulate/aspire to (though he repeatedly emphasized dreaming was the most we mortals can do with the really high caliber stuff), or as an encouragement that there’s stuff published that’s worse than what you’re currently producing.
~ ~ 3 ~ ~
That said, I felt encouraged by both “new” books I read this week. I felt that I am writing solidly at the level both these books were at, and it really gave me confidence to dive back in…as corny as I sometimes feel.
The what (and flaws I noticed as a writer: i.e., the biggest things I would have tried to revise):
But then it wouldn’t have been a very satisfactory romance.
~ ~ 4 ~ ~
At the dog class last night the teacher asked what tricks I was teaching Joule.
Taken aback I said we weren’t don’t anything special– she can’t jump up, and has to lay down before she gets her dinner. She *loves* to retrieve.
That’s not enough, I was informed. She needs to be able to bow or wave or something.
Get to work lady. Don’t waste a brain.
~ ~ 5 ~ ~
I have a challenge looming over me that has given me some kind of emotional flu. It’s resulted in my being less-kind than (honestly) I can ever remember being before.
Any prayers will be appreciated.
~ ~ 6 ~ ~
Have I mentioned here that one of my creative outlets (though not recently) has been making stuffed animals?
This would be of the distinctly-identifiable variety. Not the make-a-blob-and-call-it-cute type.
I started making Teddy Bears (that’s my book review on Amazon) when I was 17. Jointed and un-jointed. Big coolness points.
Creating stuffed animals is something related to noveling and giving birth. There is a moment when you see the spark of life and *other* in the thing taking shape under your hands: both of you and different from you.
Perhaps pathetic, but I am picking up the scissors again in an attempt to battle my “flu” and hope to finish designing my own pattern. It is not a bear. It combines what I learned from that book and this one about dinosaurs to mesh what I found to be the best elements of each.
I made my prototype two Mays ago and it only needs the head and tail modified. Body spot-on the first time.
Comfortably pleased with myself. Yes, I really do leave projects to sit for years at a time. Less-pleased about that, maybe, but not enough to change.
~ ~ 7 ~ ~
Fascinating place, Bermuda; everything that’s not a a bar or restaurant closes at five. And the sun goes down within the next hour. The warm dark was quite as surreal as expected.
And I *loved* the warm rain.
I was sitting in a hotel room writing while Jay was in a conference most of the day, and wrestled my way to a clean 3/4ths mark— before I had a whole flop of revision assert itself and create 5 new sections to write.
Yes, I might now be procrastinating a bit; but at least I have reasons.
Yes, these are political. And, no, I don’t like it that we don’t have another continent to run away to.
i.e., to get away from having to figure out all this junk between people and ideas.
If you’ll only read one, read the big one. I don’t really have anything to add to what Sallie says.
Now you know where I stand, if you couldn’t guess before.
In my husband’s words, Obama’s America is not a place I want to live.
Someday I would love to sit with a group of fiction-writers in a discussion on free-will vs. sovereignty.
I find being an author colors so much of my interpretation of the issue.
(And other writers don’t need me to tell them that there are certain things non-writers just don’t *get.*)
Ironically, that reality only highlights our limitations as communicators…
Why is “fixed-income” both spoken and received as “extremely-low-income”?
Weepy old lady in Incredibles: I can’t pay for this, I’m on a fixed income!
Aren’t most (or at least many) of us on “fixed incomes”? I know we are.
As a Christian I have always felt a bit embarrassed about other Christians slamming Halloween for its pagan roots.
Yes, there is good evidence to tie it to old pagan rituals involving human sacrifice or the return of the dead (to visit/haunt the living– whatever you wish to call it) rather than “once to die, and then the judgment.”
The arguments from these people primarily seem to run that Halloween should be rejected because of where it came from (many books and, I imagine, websites, go deeper into the details so I feel no need to here).
But this is a genetic fallacy, and even before I had figured out the name for it, I knew it was faulty thinking, because I’ve only once (and that was just last year) heard a Christian reject Easter for its equally traceable pagan roots.
I’ve floundered every year on how much to let my children participate.
When I had an 8-year-old foster boy, I agreed to take him to his school’s “carnival,” and was relieved when I learned it was canceled because of freezing rain.
We made a costume together for door-to-door trick or treating (to fit *over* the warm clothes– you have to do that in cool places like Alaska), but I firmly guided him away from the gross or mass-inspired (from cartoon characters to Harry Potter) costumes, because I feel those either focus on what is evil or stifle creativity.
In case anybody wonders, or needs the idea, we made a spider: matching sweatpants and shirt (that could be reused in the future) with a pair of stuffed pantyhose sewn on each side with string tying the ankles of the hose to the wrist above it.
8-year-old *loved* it: all the arms had “life” because they were connected to him.
I felt rather clever.
Anyway, what really got me last year (and assured an until-further-notice non-participation) was how an article I read in the paper melded with a section from one of my favorite books (The Perilous Gard).
The timing itself was… precise. In the morning I read the retailers’ claims that the increasing presence and gruesomeness of Halloween paraphernalia is utterly market driven: “We’re just giving them what they want!”
The same day (while I was making dinner) I listened the the section of the book that was the preparation of a human sacrifice.
It turned my stomach like it never has before, and I couldn’t imagine any more the “practice” and implications of this gross stuff to be innocent or worth perpetuating.
Here is where the genetic fallacy can have value: it should remind us what was (or should have been) left behind. We shouldn’t forget what it’s like to watch people live in fear– not knowing there was a sure defense from every terror that walked the night on the Feast of the Dead.