slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • The weather in Alaska seems to be getting cooler, but as JW pointed out, the hot air seems to be lingering around Juneau.

    I’ve packed my bag, I’m ready to go. Well, almost. I could be out of here in ten minutes, though.

    I heard vague, disturbing news that I can neither tell about, ask about, or find out any more details about on my own. So I am ready to get on a @#$%ing boat before I do something stupid. Very frustrating.

    Moo is a real hoot, by the way. Especially for a secretary in a university.

    Picked some dried bean pods off the Jacob’s Cattle and Borlotti beans. The rabbits now have moved on to them so I guess that they and the few Black Valentines will be gone by the end of the weekend.

    Paper is being pressed. I hope that it will motivate me to bind a book before I go.

    Hip update: I have hardly thought about it all day. No pain at all. And that makes me happy.

  • I’m basking in the glow that is Craven Williams AND Sarah Palin quitting their jobs and doing everyone involved a huge favor. And it is not even NEAR my birthday. So good of the universe to do this as a gift to me.

    Cat came by the house to get the key and instructions for kitty care. She is quitting her job too – going to Tucson, Arizona and living/working on a sustainable farm until she finds a job out there. How nice it must be to have the courage and confidence to move out of your place, sell most of your stuff, and hit the road. She has been house-sitting and pet-sitting around here since May and found her new gig with www.caretakers.org. Looks interesting, but I wouldn’t give up my job. And I like where I’m at, as long as I get to travel a lot.

    It is one of my favorite premises for novels: woman decides she needs a change, and surprises everyone by disappearing and doing her own thang, at least for a while. Guess that’s why I was so into Anne Tyler and Elizabeth Berg for a while.

    Hip update: MUCH BETTER! On prednisone now. The pharmacist advised me that I could take all the pills in the morning instead of spacing them out all day, and I’d be able to sleep better that way. I took the stairs several times today – I hope to get at least a little of my stamina back before the trip.

    The weather updates are helping me with what to expect. It has been 20 or more degrees hotter in Alaska that in Vancouver. I wouldn’t have guessed that. When I went to San Francisco, they were having an unusual heat wave too. It would be great if the highs settled into the 60s-70s.

  • Well, he didn’t get fired two weeks before Christmas, but this is still sweet!

    Williams retires as president of Greensboro College

    The hooting and cheering you hear is all the ex-employees of Greensboro College who were screwed over by this man in some way. Loud, isn’t it?

  • Because I’m such a weather junkie, I added Weather Underground banners for the places on our trip on the sidebar. It is 86 degrees in Skagway, Alaska right now! Can’t wait to tell the mailman, who hates the cold and can’t believe I’m going to Alaska.

    No Sarah Palin jokes, please. Unless they are really funny. Or dirty. Oh hell, bring ‘em on. I hope that Sandy and I can find a Sarah Palin cutout to take our pictures in front of. We have a photo of us and Ronald Reagan.

    Yesterday I had a huge zucchini to deal with, so I scooped out the pithy, seedy part and shredded the rest to use in zucchini bread. Actually, the shredded zucchini was sweet and tasty raw. I was surprised because it was so big. I had a few other normal sized ones that I sauted slices with onions, garlic, and basil, all grown by either my mother or myself. I’m going to call that my Eat Local Challenge dish of the week, since I have been pretty lax about cooking in general. Sandy admitted that he liked it!

    Hip update: Starting the prednisone tomorrow, because the prescription had to be clarified. Why can’t doctors write clearly? Is it like a secret society thing? Hip better, not perfect. Feels like a good day before the injection.

    Book update: Finished The Sheltering Sky, began Moo.

  • Back Forty update

    As you can see, the Back "Forty" is about 40 x 40 feet, not acres.

    In the foreground, lemon thyme, violetto artichoke, and assorted beans. The round flowers are leeks. In the middle, heirloom tomatoes, broccoli, beans, field peas, and a fig tree.

    The rabbits’ dinner table is over here. That’s my studio hiding behind the redbud tree and the red Nanking cherry bush. There are lots of flowers, parsley, tendergreens for Miss Jazz and Miss Lucy’s salads, sorrel, and Tuscan kale over here. There used to be Borlotti beans too, but…turns out rabbits love Borlotti bean leaves. The big flowering plant in the front? A parsnip planted two years ago and left alone.

    This butterbean trellis is made from old tobacco barn sticks. Tobacco used to be tied to sticks that hung in a barn to be cured. Farm children had a great time building “houses” with tobacco sticks.

    I grow everything together! Echinacea in front of flowering leeks, tomatoes, and butterbeans.

  • Let Freedom Ring

    We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.–That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, –That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.

    (In memory of Terrilynn, who posted this on her blog every July 4.)

  • The rabbits are methodically eating my bean plants, one by one, south to north. I just planted some more toscanelli beans on the other end of their projected path. Then I guess I’ll start over on the south side again. Must keep the Critter happy.

    Pruned back the white Nanking cherry bush heavily in order to make some sunny room for fall crops in that bed. Or I might replant the okra that didn’t make it earlier this year. I’ll look through my seed box tomorrow.

    I have a few butterbeans! Thank goodness the rabbits began on the other side of the Back Forty.

    This morning I pulled 9×12 sheets of recycled light blue paper from old spiral student handbooks. I kept several of these mostly intact for collaged journals and ripped out about half of the paper to make room for the extra bulk of the collaged pages. I’m nearly finished with the first one I began in May 2008, and it has been a pleasurable learning experience about glues, paints, inks, and stickiness.

    I took a nap in the chair in the gazebo without realizing it and Sandy scared the crap out of me when he woke me to go downtown to Fun Fourth. As usual, I didn’t find Fun Fourth to be all that fun. But I bought two ammonites and a crystal cluster for $3.

    We had a drink at Cafe Europa and I puttered in the garden some more and have read about half of The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles. The Keith Smith book is excellent. I am savoring the artiness of it.

    Hip update: Much better, almost no pain.

  • This was one of the prettiest days I’ve ever experienced in summer. Low humidity, high in the 80s, nice breezes.

    I slept until 9 am and spent the morning in the garden and the gazebo. I didn’t do a whole lot of work because

    Hip status: a little worse than yesterday.

    Uhn.

    I did manage to get the laundry done and the bathtub and curtains scrubbed. Sandy crawled under the house and dug holes and poured cement for the joist repairs under the bathroom, coming later this summer with the help of a friend.

    I received my cheapo grid and screen to replace the wonky expensive mould I bought and I think that it will work just fine. However, I didn’t want to aggravate my hip by standing in one spot for an hour making paper. I hope to do it tomorrow, since I feel better tonight despite

    Walking around downtown for First Friday. Sandy seldom gets a Friday night off unless we have plans to go out of town, and it just happened to be First Friday, when the galleries open late. We ate on the patio at Natty Greene’s, then strolled around South Elm. It was an extremely pleasant evening.

    Why I don’t support the Organic Trade Association, boycott Dean Foods, and eat mostly unprocessed foods. The argument that maintaining strong organic standards will result in fewer organic products is illogical if the resulting food ISN’T ORGANIC. People should be allowed to know what they are paying for.

    Via Donna Myers on Facebook:

    Federal ‘organic’ label’s integrity under fire
    Consumers who pay up to twice as much don’t always get what they expect

  • Just woke up from an after-work nap. Now I’m sitting in the gazebo with an electric fan blowing on me, enjoying the fireflies that just began their show.

    My weekend started at 4 pm today – “worked” through lunch, if you can call most of what I did today work. I did get some files cleaned out, which provided me with some colored paper to recycle into handmade paper this weekend.

    Also found some nice copies of a woodcut of a medieval weaver in the recycle bin in the copier room. I’m tellin’ ya, trashpicking pays off. I get Tyvek envelopes, packing material and cancelled stamps that way too.

    I am being lazy indeed, except for laundry, taking out the trash, and pulling a few weeds.

    Hip status: a little worse than yesterday, which was a little worse than the day before. So I’m listening.

    Sandy just informed me that he has tomorrow off. He is the only person I ever met that never knows what holidays he has off or how many sick and vacation days he gets a year. And it is not because he is not informed.

    I love my job but I treasure my time away from it. In a choice between more money and more time I will always pick time. Of course, I can because I make enough money to get by, unlike days of yore.

    My mind is more and more consumed by my upcoming cruise, which is nine days away.

    I made a collage in my journal about Terrilynn and that made me feel better. It’s nice that I can bring up all of her comments with my blogging software, but I’m sorry that I didn’t save our emails to each other.

    Now I have to figure out what to do with my dear husband for three days that won’t be too hard on my hip. We’ll probably go downtown on Saturday.

  • I don’t know if it was the steroid shot or just the fact that my inflammation was reduced for the first time in ten months but boy, was I energetic and happy last night and this morning. I still am, to a more normal degree, but I overdid it a bit so tonight I’m going to veg out with a book. This morning I was creating poetry about resurrection on my walk to work. Of course, it’s all gone now.

    I did some shopping last night, and I use any excuse to go to Ed McKay’s. Last night I bought a copy of The Decorated Page by Gwen Diehn, a book that has been on my wish list for a while (it’s the best book I’ve seen on the subject yet, I think), and a biography of Walker Evans, one of the photographers I studied about in my course. And a bunch of freebies, some to alter and some to read. Like a couple of Walter Mosley mysteries, and Moo by Jane Smiley. Score! I’d link to these, but since Amazon is not inclined to do business with me any more, y’all can search for them your own selves.

    I canceled my business license with NC a year ago since I hadn’t had any sales in a while and I kept having to pay fines for not reporting my quarterly sales of $0. I figured that if I am going to make a bunch of books for sale, and since there seems to be an Internet sales tax coming somehow for NC, I’d better get another one. It is easy as pie to do these days. You can do it online, it’s free, and some businesses will sell to you wholesale if you have one.

    I am not a businessperson. Or a money person in any way. I am an ignoramous when it comes to money. I don’t do my taxes. We get audited fairly often. I live within my means and I pay off my credit cards every month. I get by.

    I did not eat breakfast or dinner yesterday and I was not hungry last night or this morning. Maybe steroid shots are the way to go for weight loss. Kidding, of course.

    My new clothes came from Deva! I bought a pair of pants and two shirts. The fabric is naturally crinkled so they will travel well. When I took them out to try them on, they immediately attracted every cat hair in the room. I hemmed the pants in the studio with Stitch Witchery, brushed off as much hair as I could, and immediately packed them for the trip, so I hope to have at least one nice outfit without cat hair on it.

    I also have two other packages on the way that I’m excited about. One is a larger mould and deckle (of sorts) so I hope to make larger sheets of paper beginning this weekend.

    The other is another book that I’ve been wanting: Keith Smith’s Non-Adhesive Binding Volume I. I know how envious you must be, but try to rise above it, okay? You can look at it if you come to my studio and wear gloves. This series is self-published and it is supposed to be one of those things that any serious bookbinder should study. Since I don’t really have a teacher and UNCG doesn’t offer the kind of instruction that I want, I figure that I can work through the Keith Smith books.

    Okay, I’m going to go be lazy now.