slowly she turned

I’ve added a bit of flavored decaffeinated coffee to the pot so I can drink more of it this fine morning.

My biggest news is that on my 65th birthday, which I celebrated on Tuesday, I received word that I was awarded a week-long artist residency at Wildacres the second week of September! I can’t tell you how thrilled I am. It buoyed my spirits at a time when I really needed it.

Also, I was awarded a tiara from one of my very best, longest-time buds at Full Moon Oyster Bar that night, where I feasted on steamed oysters and drank two pints of Guinness. She had given this tiara to her mother, and then passed it on to me. I remember her mother with great fondness, as she fed me and put up with my junior high shenanigans in sleepovers during the 70s while we played and sang along to early Queen albums at full volume. So hail, Queen Charlotte! I love having something that you wore.

It’s been a beautiful week and I think we may have had a record high on Friday. I worked hard in the Back Forty because my neighbor helped me cut the enormous fig tree back to about eight feet tall. It had grown to about 25 feet tall, taller than the original tree from my mother’s garden where it was near a ditch and got fertilized! This one is partly on a cement slab about 18 inches down and the only fertilizer it ever got was that I buried Miss Peanut nearby when it was young. Anyway, now I am working on cutting down what big branches I can to clean up this huge pile because this sunny spot is where the raised beds are going to be. I saved a lot of the branch tips to put in the bottom of the beds.

Then I went to a winter sowing workshop at Hirsch Wellness and came home with two upcycled plastic gallon jugs with seeds planted within. Marigolds and Genovese basil, from the instructor’s saved seeds. I did this a couple of years ago with some success – my problem was more carry-through in planting the seedlings than germination. So on Friday, I excitedly prepared three more jugs with various old seeds – cosmos, a packet of lettuce mix, milkweed, and linaria. I figure what the hell, it costs me nothing to try them and if they don’t germinate, I’ll plant something else in them.

Last weekend, I planted seeds in the sunny window inside the studio, which I keep heated on cold days. There I planted a LOT – Matt’s wild cherry tomatoes, sweet banana peppers, globe artichokes, dyer’s chamomile, scarlet bee balm, butterfly blue pea, more old lettuce mix, and some mystery seeds I think I may have collected at Wildacres, probably cosmos. The chamomile, which I just planted three days ago, is already germinating. Now I’m so excited that I really have to hold myself back from buying more seeds. I don’t even have beds prepared yet, and when I do, there will only be so much room. This work will have to take place very slowly, since it is just me and I have a history of hurting myself when I push myself just a little more in the spring. I am trying to stop after an hour so that my muscles can build up again without getting strained.

On Saturday, I went to my friend Joy’s farm where she is hosting a get-together on most Saturday mornings for adults to come and work on their craft projects while she makes soup and snacks for us. I stitched on the embroidered denim dress I started the last time I was in Little Switzerland at the Mountains are Calling fiber retreat.

I left early to drive to Durham for the Triangle Weavers Guild yard sale, and oh, honeys. What self-control I had. Even now when thinking about it, I have a little trouble breathing. So much silk at wonderful prices. I resisted and only bought a bag of tiny wooden pin looms for $5, and a large cone of textured natural linen for $5, other than what I had come for, which was a Mirrix loom. It had been advertised as a Zeus (38″), which I’ve wanted for some time, but it turned out to be a Joni. I decided to get it anyway, since I doubt I’ll ever need more than 29 inch weaving width. It also came with a stand, which I already have and I have no need for, so I guess I’ll try to find a home for it. So I am excited to warp up this new Mirrix and design some larger tapestries. I will put my Shannock steel loom up for sale.

Pablocito seems to be in great shape. He was a bad boy last night, running around meowing and yawping, knocking stuff down. Last night and this morning he had the zoomies and he ate all his food last night. A few nights ago we found a dead mouse, so I guess his night-time noisy activity has to do with his job as Protector of the Realm.

I had started the week last Sunday finishing up training to score Grade 8 papers, when the work dried up. Hopefully, if it goes as they predict, I’ll have work on another project beginning in early March, but it will be 20 hours a week, which is good but also hard because I dislike the work. And hopefully it will be Grade 11, as I was told. I particularly dislike Grade 3, because I’m pissed off that these young children are being tested like this, and I don’t understand what is expected of them being “at grade level.” I didn’t have kids, and I was an advanced writer and reader in elementary school.

Reading: Just finished Daniel Mason’s “The Winter Soldier,” a gritty but romantic novel set in Austria during WWI. I love Mason’s writing. I’m also trying to finish up Dan Simmons’ fourth novel in the Cantos series, “The Rise of Endymion.” I’ll probably get there, but his novels can get very, very complex, and I have squirrelly brain right now. I think that I’ll move on to “Future Home of the Living God” by Louise Erdrich next, or another Sharon Kay Penman in the Plantagenet series, “Devil’s Brood.”

I hope to have an art post here by the end of the week. My goal is to finish this one, which I’ve named “Chaos.” I’m going to redesign that left top area a bit.