slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    My coffee is sweetened with a little bit of dried stevia from the plant I grew three years ago, since I ran out of sugar and hot cocoa mix. I am not a black coffee woman, oh no.

    But I do have the blues. Both of my hands have gotten progressively worse at a time when Sandy is not supposed to lift more than five pounds (that’s NOT MUCH) and we have four cats and a litterbox. I changed to clumping litter a week ago and that has worked out well, except that it is really expensive compared to the other. It makes the box much lighter at cleaning time though. Today Sandy will have been out of the hospital for a week, so he can take on some heavier duty housework.

    This week he felt great and walked a lot despite the sometimes hot weather and what seems to be a record amount of pollen in the air. They say that heart patients often do feel much better after getting a stent or a bypass. I worry about him doing too much because even if he feels good, he still has heart damage. We had a friend about his age die just a few years ago who had a second massive attack and simply fell where he stood, so it is hard for me not to think about that. I’m going to try to let that worry go and live in the present.

    In the past couple of days the stress caught up with me and I was barely functioning at work yesterday, so I came home early and slept all afternoon and went back to bed early. I had nightmares all week and I was exhausted. I had gotten off schedule enough that I wasn’t taking my medication regularly. Physically I feel much better today, but not having the ability to make art or garden or cook without pain or numbness has taken away a major source of comfort for me, and quite frankly, I am depressed. Not nearly as much about Sandy’s situation, since that has actually relieved my mind a great deal. My depression concerns my HANDS, HANDS, HANDS, and related independence, aging worries.

    One of our electrical circuits has shorted out – the one that my little freezer and washing machine plugs into, and other wall outlets. I don’t know if running the fans tipped it over the edge or whether one of the cats sprayed the outlet next to the litterbox. There is some evidence for the latter. I shouldn’t have let Sandy talk me out of calling an electrician yesterday. Now I can’t do laundry over the weekend and I guess that I will try to make some paper since the freezer is about half full of paper pulp. I guess that it is lucky that this didn’t happen in late fall when all my freezer space was full of veggies for the winter.

    I bought some watercolor paper to make blank artist books for sale and I ordered bookboard and Stonehenge paper for one of my Art and Soul classes in May, and there will be extra. I’ll have enough to make books for the Shindig on the Square now, although I won’t have a lot of handmade paper as I had planned. I painted some papers with old credit cards last night and last weekend, just scraping the paint into the paper for the most part, and using a few handmade and vintage stamps. I hope to have a small variety of books for sale, mostly blank, with mica covers and collaged covers and upcycled book covers. That is what I am about to get started on today, as soon as we get back from the farmers market.

  • Cardoon embroidery

    The progress on this is slow, but I’m pleased with it. There is still a lot of stitching to do.

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    What are these flowers called? They are my favorite flowers and must be an old-fashioned favorite because you see them in the yards of old houses around here.

    Theo is mesmerized by the sparrow cheeping just outside the window. He just realized in the past couple of weeks that there is an real outside out there, I think, now that the windows are open and he can smell and hear it directly. We also think that he used to be an indoor/outdoor cat, because now he howls at the back door from time to time. That would also explain his habit over the winter of scratching at various closet doors and closed windows, trying to figure a way out, I guess. He won’t be allowed out of the house, though. I’m sure that he would be a major rascal. He already has the raggedy ear of one so he has been tagged.

    Sandy and I just went for a stroll around the block. He got home from the hospital mid-afternoon yesterday. The walk took ten minutes, so it was a little too long. He is supposed to walk five minutes twice a day, then add one minute each day as he builds up his strength. He is doing very well and will probably be allowed to drive and go back to work a week from Monday, pending a doctor’s evaluation on Wednesday.

    Last night, we received two reality checks:

    1. A month’s worth of medication, with insurance, was over $300. (One prescription couldn’t be filled – it could go to over $400.)

    2. There was a code orange air quality alert, which means that he couldn’t go outside until after 9:00.

    But hey, I’m just a whiny liberal environmentalist who is anti-business because I want affordable health care and clean air to breathe. Very likely a lazy socialist. Of course, neither of us works hard enough because we expect others who work much harder to pay our way.

    Seriously, one fortunate aspect is that both of us are planners and pretty frugal. Sandy has a high deductible but he had a health savings account that has almost enough in it to reach the deductible. I was able to use the card for it to pay for his medication last night. And since I could tell that his health wasn’t great, I took out a secondary insurance policy for critical illness that should help out a lot. We are lucky that we make enough to get through this thing intact, but part of it is that we don’t live beyond our means and don’t live on credit for the most part, other than a mortgage and one car payment which are both paid ahead.

    It helps that we are childless and don’t have kids to worry about, although it did strike me in the middle of it that a little family support that was in town could have helped some, but I was able to handle it. I don’t know, if we had kids they would probably live far away to get away from us. I can’t imagine that either of us would have made a good parent. And we’re fine with that. That’s why we made that choice early in our lives.

    My friend and co-worker Kristina came to sit with me late on Tuesday night at the hospital. My sister and brother-in-law would have come from Chapel Hill, and I would have called her if the situation had been worse or expected to last longer, and God knows I had plenty of offers from friends and neighbors to help out. Sandy didn’t really want visitors at the hospital. He was tired and needed what snatches of prolonged sleep that he could get. The knowledge that we had emotional support and potential physical help was enough. So we are blessed in many ways, as people often find out in these situations.

    Anyway, the pollen is high but the temperature and humidity is perfect outside. I’m going to get out in the garden and plant some beans, I think, and maybe some okra under plastic bottle greenhouses. Carrots are sprouting and some volunteer tomatoes and dill. Maybe I’ll transplant these volunteers to bottle greenhouses too. I love the mystery of volunteer tomatoes. I hope to have enough lettuce to make a salad by next week. I decided to give the asparagus an extra year before harvesting since I lost a good bit of it last year.

    Update from 5 p.m.: planted Henderson bush butterbeans, less than ten Borlotti beans (hope they survive and produce a lot more: they are the last generation of the ones I brought from Italy), more Little Marvel peas and a mystery pea that I think is Dwarf Grey.

    I’m thinking about returning Squirt and Mama Kitty’s ashes to the earth beside Miss Peanut today, beneath the fig tree. I think that it is time.

    I worked on the cardoon embroidery a LOT while I was sitting in Sandy’s hospital room and will post a photo a little later. And I did get accepted to be a vendor at Shindig in the Square on May 2 in downtown Greensboro. My right hand is going numb quite often, so it is a bit iffy as to how much I’ll be able to make by then. I should have some handbound books and a small amount of handwoven items for sale, though.

  • Sandy’s heart

    Hello from beautiful Moses Cone hospital in the heart of Greensboro, North Carolina! I’m here today with my marvelous husband, who had a mild heart attack on Tuesday night. He is doing very well and hopefully he will be released tomorrow.

    We are fortunate in many ways. First, that he was home with me when it happened, so I was able to convince him and drive him to the hospital. Second, that the nearest emergency room was 5 minutes away. Third, that he only had one blocked artery that was easily unblocked with a catheter and a stent. Fourth, it was done within three hours of his first symptoms and so there was little damage to his heart. And fifth, thank God, we have very good insurance.

    The moral of this story is that if you suspect that you might possibly be having a heart attack, GO TO THE HOSPITAL or DIAL 911 immediately! Time is of the essence because the longer your heart is not getting oxygen from a restricted blood flow, the more damage you will sustain to your heart.

    It is much better to feel a little embarrassed over an anxiety attack or indigestion than to be dead because your own diagnosis was wrong.

    He’ll be out of work for 2-3 weeks and will be enrolled in a cardio rehab class three days a week.

    We’re asking that you wait to visit until he gets home. Please do not let him do cartwheels in the street or dance the mamooshka or let him volunteer to help you move! He feels fine.

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    My right hand has feeling in it again, after a long night of waking up with it numb. If you’ve never experienced this, you might think that having a limb go to sleep while you are asleep would not disrupt your sleep, right? I mean, that seems logical. Wearing my wrist brace helps a lot but it doesn’t take long for me to start whining about wearing my brace. Cons: hot, itchy, slightly uncomfortable, quite inconvenient at certain times, and you have to repeat what is wrong with you to everybody. My problem is an old one: chronic tendinitis.

    I was able to end a pretty stressful week on Friday night by getting about as drunk as I have been in a very long time at Old Town with some M.A. students and a professor in celebration of them finishing their comprehensive exams that day. The exams did not go well – they had a blackout midway through the morning session and a lot of them lost their work and it caused a big disruption for everyone. I felt so sorry for them, and thankful that I did not have to take comps for my M.A.

    The interesting part of this was that not only did I not have a hangover, Saturday morning was the first morning in a very long time that I didn’t wake up with a headache. Other than getting up once in the middle of the night for a glass of water, there was no punishment for my fun. I thought that was very nice of God.

    I spent much of yesterday cleaning out the gazebo of the raw papermaking materials (okra stalks, artichoke blossoms, joe-pye weed stalks) I had stored over the winter, and sweeping out the leaves. I spent a good couple of hours painting pages to include in books and then worked on measuring the warp yarn and tying on the warp to my previous warp on the loom, two inches at a time. This part is what I think is hard on my hands, holding the individual threads and tying weaver’s knots. However, it is half the work of threading the reed and the heddles to do it this way. The disadvantage is that I will have to use the same threading as before, but I can get a completely different look from it.

    I used colors in this striped warp design that I saw out the studio door and window: the red Nanking cherry tree in blossom, the bare trees just beginning to leaf out, the violets, and the blue jay flying past every few minutes. The stripe design was fairly random, using the Fibonacci sequence of numbers for balance, but I balanced it further by adding a symmetrical design of larger stripes in between the randomness. I’ll post a photo if I ever get the damned thing warped so you’ll see what I mean.

    In the Fibonacci sequence, each number is the sum of the two numbers before it. 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21…

    I applied for a small table at Shindig on the Square, which looks like it will be enormous fun to be a part of even if I don’t sell anything.

    And, by the way, I did go the the Friends of the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market board meeting, and I am a member. I cannot say at this time how much help that I’m going to be, but I can at least show up to make a quorum at the meetings.

  • Back Forty update

    We were able to get some good compost cheap from our friends who bought a truckload of it. I spent late this afternoon spreading most of it and planting a few more seeds before the expected rain tomorrow night. I have to admit that I had a pretty lackadaisical attitude about these seeds since I’m looking forward to tomatoes, okra, butterbeans, and field peas, all of which will have to wait. These seeds are pretty old, and I’ll be happy with whatever I get, or nothing.

    I planted calabrese broccoli in the middle bed, with a couple of different kinds of radishes and fennel. I tossed some oakleaf lettuce seed saved from a couple of years ago in the area where the tomatoes will eventually go. Threw leek seeds behind the sugar snap peas in one of the winter beds.

    The asparagus is coming up on four of the original ten crowns. I’m just happy that I have any after the neglect they received last year.

    A squirrel has snapped off almost all the budding branches on the white Nanking cherry bush. This is a new low for the squirrels.

    Peas are sprouting, the garlic looks healthy, and I found one little lettuce volunteer from the lettuce disaster last fall. I think that the ants in that bed carried all the seed away. The winter bed nearest the maple tree has a variety pack of lettuce seeds all coming up. I will have lots of fresh salad greens soon. There is nothing better than produce picked outside your back door and placed as quickly as possible in your mouth!

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    I’m so glad that it is Saturday. This work week was so busy, and the next one will be too. Lots of stress around me, and unfortunately I’m a sponge, not a duck. I dealt with it by singing Mahna Mahna all week, confusing the hell out of most people and getting responses from others. Search for it on YouTube (I like the Muppet version with the pink cows the most) if you need silly therapy.

    I don’t know if the Friends of the Market meeting happened or not. I was supposed to get an email about it and I didn’t. I’m going to assume that it didn’t happen, and be happy since I didn’t need ONE MORE THING this week. Other than Spring beginning today. I need Spring like a starving person needs food.

    I picked up my two framed oil paintings from 1910 Frame Factory, and they are beautiful. It has motivated me to frame some more of my art. Really the only thing that has stopped me has been the money, but that’s a matter of priority. If I thought I had the money to join this co-op, I have the money to get these framed. I’m going to try to frame or mat at least two pieces of work per paycheck for a few months.

    Betsy at Artmongerz was very encouraging and gave my ego a boost when I picked up my work on Wednesday. I can still change my mind but they were willing to take me into the co-op. They are definitely more interested in my weaving and embroidery than the books, although she said that they liked the books and looked at the construction of them. I explained to her that I felt that I wouldn’t have time to do tapestry or embroidery and be able to have fresh work each month AND make my books, which is my focus right now. She said that they could be flexible about that. But the fact is that if I were to do this, I need to have a body of work ready for sale, and I don’t. I jumped the gun because I got excited about the prospect of joining a co-op, something I’ve wanted to do for a very long time.

    Another reason, which I mentioned and will mention here briefly because I am so sick of the subject, is that my hands are BOTH messed up now. They go numb and stiff at night. It could be because of all the data entry I’ve done at work recently and pulling weeds and vines in the Back Forty.

    And another reason is that they seem to want bigger work, but I work small for both physical and financial reasons – I’m in love with silk. But she indicated that they were willing for me to display my small works. I just need to concentrate on doing what I do, and not what I think someone else wants. I mean, I have this in my head and I don’t even know if it is true.

    Despite all that, I am looking forward to warping up the loom today. I’ll take lots of breaks. This experience has spurred me to finish the cardoon embroidery and begin the tapestry with the carrot design from this altered photo:

    I received a book in the mail that has gotten me excited about working with pattern again: “The Handweaver’s Pattern Directory” by Anne Dixon. If you are a beginning 4-shaft weaver, you really should buy this book. I’m not a beginner, and even I am thrilled with it because of the spiral format and the color pages. I have an older book by her on color-and-weave that inspired me to make many scarves that I sold and gave for gifts in the 90s.

    Somebody somehow used my credit card number to order several things on the Internet. I found out about it when Capital One called me. I don’t think that it is fraud, because the purchases are odd and two of them have come to my address this week. The first shipment of “The Louis L’Amour Collection” showed up first, then a package from Gevalia. Another website where it was used was aarpmembership.com. This makes me think that it was not fraud, but some kind of bizarre mistake. What I don’t understand is how my home address got attached to the credit card number on sites where I have never been.

    Oh well, it’s time to get outside. A beautiful day here, with a high in the mid-70s, sunshine, peas sprouting, daffodils and cherry trees blooming. I can leave my studio door open because there are no mosquitoes right now. If my next-door neighbor doesn’t start stomping around yelling about hell and murderers and banging her back door, I might get a peaceful day in the Back Forty.

  • Retracting

    After the post on Saturday about joining an art co-op, which now I admit contained quite a bit of forced optimism, I pretty much fell in a stress hole. And you know one of my favorite Molly Ivinsisms is the First Rule of Holes: When you find yourself in one, stop digging. Instead I was trying to operate under the Power of Positive Thinking, which is all well and good when you’ve actually thought something through past the point of “I want it now!”

    For the rest of the weekend, I was anxious and miserable. I was impatient to hear from them and stared at the phone and checked my email repeatedly. I was trying to decide what to make for the gallery, in case I was accepted, instead of deciding what I wanted to do next.

    This is why I do not often sell my work. I get completely knotted up in what I think that other people want me to do, whether that is the case or not. And it SHUTS ME DOWN.

    Finally on Sunday night, I took some quiet time to deconstruct my feelings and realized that I would be miserable with either a YES, NO, or MAYBE answer.

    So I’m going to go pick up my stuff at Artmongerz and tell them that it’s not them, it’s me. It was a good idea, but not the right one for me at this time.

    I feel much better now.

    Two good things came out of this – I learned how their co-op worked, and I was motivated to get a couple of paintings framed that had been laying around for years. Now can I get motivated to hang them on the wall?

  • A few photos

    Self portrait

    Pussy willow in the rain

    Dried French hydrangea

  • So bright I gotta wear shades

    It has been a stressful week, but for the most part it has been good stress. I am psyched up and excited about the future. I haven’t had a panic attack, though, which is very encouraging since I have been super-wired and sleep-deprived because of hormones all week. In fact, I haven’t had a panic attack in, gosh, over two years, I think? Maybe my chemistry has straightened out. I have actually had dreams that are the exact opposite of my recurring anxiety dreams. In these dreams, everything’s chill, no hurry, all under control and we relax and enjoy ourselves.

    Donna emailed me and asked if I wanted to be on the board of Friends of the Greensboro Farmers’ Curb Market, and I said yes. Sounds like my first meeting will be Monday night. I don’t really know what is involved with being on the board, but it is a way for me to contribute to the local food movement here.

    Thursday I met with Betsy at Artmongerz and talked about joining their artists’ co-op. The bad news is that our discussion was very confusing for both of us at first. She was expecting big woven wall hangings, and I brought in a box of little pieces, mainly books. Then she asked me questions which I couldn’t answer to her satisfaction and I didn’t understand why she didn’t understand my answers. It must have been me, though, because Paul, the other artist there, didn’t understand me either. That really discombobulated me. Now that I’ve had some time to think about it, I realize that they didn’t know that the books WERE the art, not to be filled with my “other” art. I do plan to do that one day, especially with woodcuts, but for the most part I want to concentrate on structure and papermaking. Anyway, it is possible that they are not interested in my books, which would be a dealbreaker. I made it clear that books are my passion and my current direction. They really liked my labyrinth tapestry and the lemon embroidery, but those pieces take a lot of time to make. I plan to weave more tapestry – in fact I have a great design now waiting to be started, and three in progress. But I can’t just whip them out.

    The good news is that I can afford it, and I think that I will get along great with the artists that I’ve met so far. She really wanted me to have art to hang on the wall, and so I can frame some woodcuts, and I have a couple more woodcuts in progress now. She liked my monoprints that I made in Washington too. I really took them along to show my handmade paper, and what I could do with it. In fact, one mistake I made was that I meant to show her my intentions and my abilities, rather than what I have to sell now. It’s just that I’m moving quickly into other directions, and I have given away and sold a lot of my work and not had a chance to replenish. I’m focused on my future.

    Anyway, now I am anxiously waiting for an email or call with the verdict. If they welcome me, I will be very happy but will have to spend more time in the studio, here and there, and not let migraines or exhaustion stop me for long. I will have to put up fresh work each month, which will be very good for me. If they turn me down, I will have to remind myself very firmly that it is probably a matter of fitting in with their vision rather than my talent. I’ll probably need some hugs and confidence building. Then I’ll pick myself back up and remember that it is all probably a part of the scheme of my life. Maybe I am meant to pay my car off this year instead. Maybe selling my art will be too stressful for me and the universe is protecting me from what I don’t know.

    I wove all week long and washed and dried the fabric last night. The texture and color is fabulous! I have a towel/breadcloth, a long table runner, and a little sampler (shown below on the loom) that I think will become a book cover. Today I started measuring off another long striped warp for the Baby Wolf 4 harness loom, this time more random with stripes based on the Fibonacci sequence. If I get into the gallery, I plan to take my small 8 harness loom there, so I’ll need to design something for it.

    I took a couple of oil paintings from five years ago to a local frame shop this afternoon, and an old friend who does framing on the side will get the next job of the woodcuts and embroidery and whatever else he is willing and able to do.