slowly she turned

The first week of retirement is a wrap now. It feels very weird, but I’m doing okay. When I think too much about it I get a strange sick feeling, so I immediately switch my brain off that topic and move to something else.

On New Year’s Day I joined a couple of friends and we dipped fabrics and papers in a black walnut dye pot. Unfortunately, I’m not excited about those results, but we’ll see if I feel differently when I cut them down. I used my new tabletop paper cutter for the first time and this might be a game changer for my book art. I have always torn my papers for signatures because I like a deckled edge and I wanted all the edges to be soft, but this cut down the prep time and will leave more time for the parts I enjoy most about bookbinding. I’ll still tear when I feel that the book asked for that treatment. I’m considering framing that piece with the leaf prints.

Now it’s time to get back to these unfinished projects such as my two tapestries and the wooden cover and mica books.

It’s funny how often I wished for retirement on social media and my blog for the sole reason of being able to sleep late. When you have chronic insomnia, you tend to see everything through that lens. But this week I mostly got up at my normal time because I was pet-sitting for my neighbor, whose elderly dog, Franny, needs to go out and pee early in the morning. Franny’s companions include a cat and an African grey parrot. Djula finally started talking to me and that was fun, but I will not get any of my body parts near that beak.

My neighbor has insisted on paying me the going rate for petcare, which I very much resisted because he has taken very good care of my cats for long vacations more times than I can count for free. He says that once Franny dies, we’ll be back on even terms again. That money went to Christmas gifts for my co-workers and my vacation fund.

Anyway, other than that my focus has been on cleaning out drawers and storage space because cleaning my studio space is the only way I’m going to get any artwork done. I couldn’t find things as it was, and my worktables were covered with stuff I’d brought home from the office. This time I was determined to actually get rid of stuff and not just move one pile to another place, and I’ve made a lot of progress.

It also sent me down some rabbit holes, since I found notebooks and papers from high school and college, love letters from my mother’s boyfriend when she was in her late 70s-early 80s, and lots of photos. After flipping through my teenybopper scrapbooks with photos and articles cut out from Tiger Beat, etc., I consigned John Denver, David Essex, and Freddie Prinze to the garbage can. Sorry, guys. I hoped to find my autographs from John and Freddie, but they weren’t there so I guess they are gone forever too. I pronounced one half of a drawer to be my nostalgia storage, and put the rest of the Laurie ephemera there. We won’t discuss my mother’s hope chest at the foot of my bed.

Walking the dog and going back to the office for a birthday party and a retirement task with HR meant that I got more exercise and I’m going to try to keep that up on good weather days.

I heard back from John C. Campbell Folk School and I didn’t receive a scholarship. Considering I had two stellar recommenders, that doesn’t bode well for the future, but I’ll try again next year. Now I’m thinking about the trip to Cornwall with my sister and friends, and that is coming up a lot quicker than any of us realized, I think. Fortunately I have most of the money and the airfare points saved up for this trip, but London is very expensive, oy.

Okay, time for another cup of coffee.