slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Again, I stayed up way too late and got up early to feed the little monsters, then went back to bed and slept way too long. My dreams were vivid and not necessarily good, but I still wanted to remain within them rather than join reality today. I was brutally honest on a Facebook post yesterday: “I am a bitter, angry person.”

    However, last night I was up because I was caught up in reading “The Last Days of Dogtown” by Anita Diamant. It is a thin volume and I had been warned off by the words “not as good as The Red Tent” but I am enjoying it immensely.

    Orbitz finally responded to my third follow-up email in which I said that if I didn’t get a response by Nov. 30, the original date of my flight credit’s expiration, I would go higher and go to social media. I hate having to threaten to go to social media, even when I do it nicely, but it seems to be effective. They granted me the same credit that they had in August, with the same conditions, but I have to book before Dec. 31 now.

    I immediately went into some kind of frantic angry brain-fogged research and decided that the airfares were now too high for the credit to be worth flying on Aer Lingus again. I filled out a customer service survey that I now regret. Somebody, please, help me get control of my brain back.

    Because when I calmed down and thought about it, I looked at my Southwest account and found a lot of miles had been refunded from that trip. Which reminded me that on the original trip, I used those miles to fly to Boston, and booked Aer Lingus through Orbitz from Boston-Dublin-Boston. Well, that is an entirely different scenario. Flights are much, much cheaper to Ireland from Boston. So the current plan is to fly by myself the same way that I planned to this past summer, and the other three in our vacation party can fly together from Raleigh on United. We’ll meet up in Dublin. I don’t mind flying by myself. The only issue left is dates.

    Vaccination against Co-vid 19 is naturally the key. If it becomes available as expected, I will not be in the first groups to get it. I’ll turn 60 in February and fortunately in pretty good health. The other three are over 65 and will likely be able to get it in time for summer travel. I guess I’ll just have to wait and see, but as an INTJ, contingency planning is “my thing” and this much uncertainty is driving me a bit bonkers, considering that my planning (with wasted money on travel insurance) didn’t mean much this year.

    I remember pronouncing, “I’m going to Ireland even if I have to swim there!” HA! I’m not that strong a swimmer.

    Anyway, I am bitter and angry, mostly about politics, but also circumstances that I won’t mention here. Let’s just say that I am very disappointed in a few people and leave it at that. I should store that up for the Airing of the Grievances on Festivus. And I am SO TIRED of all the cheery gratitude and sappy Christmas songs and I’m gonna stop here before I regret that too.

    I talked to my sister for about an hour on the phone on Thanksgiving Day. Usually we spend this holiday together, and it is the only holiday that I actually celebrate and enjoy any more. Our personalities have a lot in common, even though our personal styles could not be more different. I love and miss her deeply, but I’m not sure that we could live together without making each other crazy. We have talked about doing that as we get older, and maybe we will both move to Portugal. It could happen, but she will be doing all the interior design and decorating, and I will just try not to embarrass her with my total lack of care about fashion and style trends. She would probably be good for me, but I’m not sure that I’d be good for her.

    Just looked at my last few posts and realized that I am obsessing and repeating myself. But whatever. At least there has been progress.

    The turkey dinner from Deep Roots was pretty good. The only thing we really did not like was the brussels sprouts – they were tough. But the cornbread dressing was delicious, as was the bacon/swiss quiche and cherry pie. It’s been really nice to have plenty for turkey sandwiches and leftovers. I think that I’ll make turkey tetrazinni today or tomorrow.

    I haven’t sewed up my masks yet. I found that 2013 was a very photo-heavy year for me on this blog, in part because I took up a visual journal project. So I got obsessed with trying to get this blog/photo project done and it is taking up a LOT of time. It is also dredging up some unhappy memories and I expect that is part of my current malaise.

    The man is up and about, complaining about it being too hot in there and turning off the heat. It’s really funny because we have switched in this respect. Now he is the one who is always too hot, and I get spells where I am so cold I wrap up in blankets and shiver. He used to be the cold one, always wearing sweaters and wrapping up while I was getting ice packs out of the freezer and turning off the heat. We keep the thermostat at 68 F and that hasn’t changed.

    Time to finish up 2013 and begin 2014, which was a very, very tough year and I’d like to get that one over with.

  • Thanksgiving weekend projects

    A Take-Out Thanksgiving

    I laid awake last night thinking of all the art projects I could finish or begin or work on this holiday weekend. We ordered a large turkey dinner with side dishes, dessert, and a quiche from Deep Roots Market so I don’t have to cook. I just talked with my sister on the phone for an hour, and I deeply miss her.

    Then, looking at the mess on my studio table, I decided to open my laptop, at which time I realized that I still have about 6-7 years worth of blogging to finish up. Fortunately I did the big travel posts first, and I slowed down blogging considerably after I got on Facebook. So I may be able to knock this project out and forget about it in time to cancel that expensive Flickr Pro account.

    I have a lot of WIPs to finish. The masks I cut out should probably be next. Then the woven cloth blanket that I was making from strips of Sandy’s old shirts and pants. It is awesome and I should finish it.

    I have several online workshops that I am in the middle of or have bought and not started yet. I still need to get supplies to do the Leslie Marsh metal cover necklace book, and I am eyeballing Black Friday sales online. (Even though I celebrate Buy Nothing Day on Black Friday.) I bought both of Sharon Payne Bolton’s online workshops. All three of these workshops I have taken in person, but either didn’t have the motivation or the confidence or the information written down to continue working on my own. But all three of them were some of the best workshops I ever took, so it will be good to have the video versions to always go back to for reference.

    One project still in my brain is to downsize my massive “old books for collage” collection by offering collage packs for sale. I have many old dictionaries, atlases, encyclopedia, and interesting old books in several languages. I am still working on this idea, but I will probably sell them through this blog and on Etsy. I still have my old store there, but it’s been in vacation mode for so long that it has totally changed and I will have to learn the software again. If you are interested, leave me a comment and I’ll make sure that I let you know when they are ready.

    Okay, first things first. Food. Then clean off that studio table. Then transfer a year of Flickr photos to WordPress. Then sew masks. Yes, a plan.

  • Sunday sweep

    Just finished up 2011 on the Flickr to WP blog project. And boy, in hindsight, it’s obvious why I ended up needing hand surgery. I was a busy bee. There were SO MANY photos of books that I made in these posts that I forgot about entirely, and were either sold or given away. I was also stitching and weaving. I wish I could conjure up some of that creative energy now. It’s been good to see that I am capable of all this, though.

    Today is the anniversary of my father’s death, which was in 1986. However, this morning I was thinking about the day that I walked away from my mother, the last of her children to depart after the funeral. I felt her eyes on me long after I drove away, but maybe that was just me. She was pretty angry with me for minor stuff, like what I wore to the funeral, and we would have the worst fights of our lives for the next six months, saying awful things to each other that still haunt me. In my defense, the worst came from her. I really put up with a lot and tried to appease her, since I realized what she must be going through.

    I wondered what she did after she turned and went back into her house that day. Did she sleep? Did she cry? She was living alone for the first time in her life.

    Later, she thrived in her independence. She traveled without having to worry about my father or her children. She had part-time work as a temp for the local postal service and made enough money to get by. She could have married again to a boyfriend who she really loved, but decided against it because they lived about a hundred miles apart and neither wanted to move. She was the Queen Bee of Marietta, NC, and stayed constantly busy in church, community, and art groups. Her children actually worried about her doing too much when she hit her 80s, and she was, until back pain and frustration with computers slowed her down. She worked until she was 83 and had a huge garden until a couple of years after that.

    I’m glad that we finally started getting along. I miss her. I think that Daddy would have been happy with the way her life continued after he died. On one hand, I wish she was here for me to turn to in these dark days. On the other, I am glad that she didn’t live to deal with it. She would probably be in a nursing home and miserable, and by the time she died she was ready to go.

    I was proud of my mother. She lived her life fully. I was Daddy’s girl, but by the end, I was Mama’s girl too.

  • Natural dyeing on paper

    Posting these photos before I forget again! It’s been over a week since Susanne and I pulled these bundles out of a dyepot with black walnuts and a bunch of leaves we didn’t use inside the bundles. We didn’t put a lot of effort into this – it was just fun.

    Susanne tried a long roll of handmade hemp paper wrapped around a copper pipe. I rolled commercial papers that I think were cotton based around copper pipes with various leaves, and a small stack of watercolor scrap pieces with sheet metal and grape leaves layered between them and bound with rubber bands between two small wood pieces.

    We had some successes and some disappointments – I really expected prints from the fig leaves – but all of it was fun.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Last night I slept the longest and the hardest that I have slept in months. I did it without alcohol or Xanax or melatonin and if there were any large firework explosions in the middle of the night I slept right through them. I didn’t even get up to pee until 8:30, then I fed the cats, and went back and slept another hour until I woke naturally. It amazes me how much the need to sleep rules my desires. I mean, I forego almost anything in order to wake up without an alarm in the morning. This did not start with the pandemic, but the pandemic and election depression certainly doubled the insomnia and desire to sleep until I wake up like Dorothy and find out that it was all a dream.

    I haven’t done much this week – it’s been a particularly bad one for my mental health. I’ve been very angry and cranky about small bureaucratic stuff. I haven’t gotten a response from Orbitz about my Aer Lingus credit despite a couple of follow up emails. The little dipshit technical things at work which usually involve many emails about changing a number from one column to another, or three forms with verified signatures that get sent without copying me, or having to do triple the work to change two letters on a form – those are the things that make me nuts. I will miss my department co-workers and buddies, but I won’t miss the job. It has changed so much since I have been there, in the name of “simplifying” for other departments. I do so many different things I can’t keep up with the changes any more, which makes those people who only see their part of it cranky with me.

    I need to be careful what I wish for, though, because who knows what budget cuts might bring next year. I need to keep this job at the minimum until Feb. 17, 2021, which I am not worried about, and preferably until May 1, 2023, when I will be 62 and have 20 years in with the state. That’s my target date.

    Thanksgiving at Lake Waccamaw is out. My sister and I decided to follow the advice of the public health professionals. I thought about going by myself to our lake house and backing my car in so that nobody can see my liberal bumper stickers, but that county is one of the red hotspots in North Carolina with the highest rate of Co-vid 19 infections. It is too bad that such a pretty tranquil place is in the middle of a bunch of white supremacists and hard-headed people. And I am not exaggerating about the white supremacists. My brother-in-law and his friend went to a meeting that advertised a lecture about Lincoln. Turned out it was a negative lecture and it was an organized local White hate group, complete with a ladies’ auxiliary called the “Confederate Roses.” They found out a whole lot about their neighbors and local businesspeople.

    So I preordered a turkey dinner with side dishes and a pie and a quiche from Deep Roots Market. Although we will miss my sister’s cooking, at least I will be able to enjoy Thanksgiving without worrying about the food prep. I ordered enough that we should have leftovers for a few days.

    This will be a beautiful weekend. We had a freeze this week but my front garden with the bricks around it did okay. We brought in the lemon tree and large aloe plant, but I think that they can go on the front porch for a few more weeks at least. I need to clean out my garden plot at UNCG and bring the wire supports home.

    I’ve ignored my online classes again. I wish that I was one of those people who could escape into art when they are depressed, but all I want to do is sleep, read, and play mindless games.

    I see that I never posted photos of the papers Susanne and I dyed and printed last Sunday. I will try to remember to do it later. I want to work on transferring the rest of the 2011 posts over from Flickr before I do anything else.

  • A little talk about the future

    Today is my sweetheart’s 68th birthday! We won’t be going out to eat tonight because we are cautious, but I’ll cook him his favorite dish tonight.

    Again, I spent a good bit of time this week transferring photos from Flickr to WordPress and updating links. It’s not a terrible task. Once I get into a groove it goes very quickly. However I still have almost nine years of blog posts to finish before my Flickr account renews in January, so I’ve had to make it a priority. The memories have been bittersweet for sure – posts about my mother, my beloved cats that have passed on. I just passed Sandy’s heart attack in April 2010 and am now on our trip to Colorado in June 2010.

    Our goal is to move to Portugal in 2023. At that point, I’ll be able to get my social security early and most of my pension from my job. That should be enough for us to live on. We are frugal people anyway. But it really can’t be soon enough. Sandy will be 70 by then and he is getting less able to walk for more than short distances. Hopefully he will see a doctor soon about it. Neither of us are getting the exercise that we need but I have a feeling that this is something more. And the climate crisis is urgent. I truly do not think that we have a lot of quality time left.

    It will take a lot of energy to downsize and pack up this house and sell it in the next 2-3 years, and I guarantee you that Sandy will want to wait until the last minute to do it. I have very low energy, myself.

    There are services in Portugal that help ex-pats with the logistics of getting visas, residency paperwork, a place to live. I believe that you can ship two times to Portugal as an incoming resident before they hit you with tariffs big enough to make shipping a terrible option. Some people pack their stuff in a large 8×20 foot container and send it by container shipping. I think that would wreck my nerves, waiting almost a month for that much stuff. Although I do have trucker friends…

    In the meantime, I think that I will get rid of a lot of these old books I have collected and raise a bit of money by putting together collage packs for sale here and maybe on Etsy. I still have an Etsy account but I haven’t used it for years.

    And it sounds like it might be okay to book plane tickets to Portugal this summer! The vaccine news is good. I want to book the tickets by the end of the year to get the no change fee for United. I still haven’t heard back from Orbitz about the credit that I am due for Aer Lingus, but they have raised their prices so much that it probably won’t be worth using it, and I have to book the tickets with a flight originating in the U.S. It’s the principle of the thing. They said I had until the end of November to use the credit, and then they said it expired at the end of June. I am booking tickets for four people this time, so I need to get relatively cheap tickets for all of us instead of booking Aer Lingus again.

    It’s exciting to be thinking about travel again! The hardest thing, after figuring out the dates, will be where to go. There is a lot to see and we are not up for any more whirlwind trips and checklists.

  • A little talk about the past and present

    I’ve distracted myself from the distress of the U.S. Election by spending a lot of time updating my blog from years ago – going through each post quickly to find photos that are hosted on Flickr, downloading them, and uploading them to WordPress and changing the link. This is going to work. I worried that I might not have enough room for all my photos on WordPress, so I began with the big travel blog posts and then started at the beginning.

    This week has been 2007-2008, a particularly emotionally volatile time in my life. I was severely depressed in 2007, lost several friends, a cat that I handfed as a feral baby, Squirt, and his mother and sister, Mama Kitty and Miss Peanut. My husband’s work situation was awful. And I managed to squeak out finishing my M.A. in Liberal Studies in the midst of it. There are clues to my misery in the posts that I transferred over from when I hosted this blog on GoDaddy, but I noticed that I left out dozens of posts that I wrote. They are gone forever now. I can’t say that I am sorry that I made that choice, but I am glad that I left the clues.

    I am amazed at the photos of the Back Forty. WOW. It was beautiful. I worked SO HARD on it. There was a lot of food produced, pre-groundhog days. I mean, LOOK>

    Also, my God, the energy I had! I complained a lot about the same old physical stuff, but I got shit done. I was involved in the community. I finished a degree and started back on the Studio Art BA degree that I had abandoned in the late 80s.

    2008 was also an election year and I suspect that I left out a lot of political posts as well. I was happy that Obama won, then disappointed in his food policy, which was my big focus at the time. I would leave the Democratic Party soon after.

    What a difference 12 years later when Obama seems like a dream President, witty and intelligent. I have been a Bernie girl since long before he ran for President in 2016, but I have come to believe that this country needs a centrist president. My personal political opinions skew much farther left, but I am a realist above all else. We can’t waste time trying for the impossible when we can at least get the direction pointed away from total disaster.

    I have hope for getting the pandemic under control and progress on reducing the effects of climate change, although, again, I am a realist. That point tipped several years ago. There is no reverse.

    So yes, I am happy about Biden and Harris, and I hope that we get to Inauguration Day without a civil war and white domestic terrorism unleashed. I am not yet, nor likely to be, filled with glee. My main concern, getting an insane criminal out of the White House, seems likely to be accomplished. That is enough for right now.

  • Pre-Election Day Jitters

    OH LORT

    I know I am not the only one in distress. I have been grinding my teeth again and I have to take a Xanax to go to sleep at night.

    Life right now in the U.S. feels like sitting in a hospital waiting room for hours to hear about a loved one in surgery. What is the chance of recovery? Are all our lives in this “family” going to change forever? I feel kind of numb. It felt familiar and I finally remembered when I had felt this way before. I don’t know how else to describe it. Sort of in shock, a bit of dread, but also hollowed out. I felt this way in the hospital waiting to hear about Sandy’s heart attack, Mama’s kidney infection, Daddy’s cancer.

    Not panicked. Just…waiting. Waiting, thinking that surely the unthinkable will not happen, but knowing that it could.

    I can’t not look tomorrow, or even today, even though I know from experience that the polls mean nothing.

    Thirty minutes down the road from us, the police made international news for pepper spraying people in a permitted planned protest/walk to the polls event. Children were in the crowd. No one was violent except the police.

    We will not be healed, not in my lifetime.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Well, lookathere, it’s now Saturday afternoon. Time has been all whacked out during the pandemic. You would think that it would go more slowly, being mostly stuck at home, but instead it races.

    I’ve been avoiding politics as much as I can make myself do it, and since hospitalizations are at a high with not many (or any) ICU beds available it has become time to really hunker down again. When I went to work yesterday I mostly closed my office door and had little contact with anybody, even at a masked distance. I plan to keep it that way for a while. I don’t think that we are going to do Thanksgiving, even. My brother-in-law is having heart surgery soon, and they need to be extra careful. I am still considering going down to the lake house but Sandy doesn’t want to go.

    Twitler and Mikie and the Ratlickers have been hitting North Carolina hard this week and last, bringing more Covid to our state. North Carolina has always been a purple state. It’s been gerrymandered badly during the past decade so it has been a tough slog at the state level. We have a Dem governor and attorney general and a deeply red state legislature. The GOP is not even embarrassed at what they do to suppress the vote and get their people into power by any means necessary any more. So I am looking forward to getting my Social Security and getting the hell out of Dodge at age 62. Hopefully we can wait that long, and we will survive in good health that long. I spend a lot of time on ex-pat Portugal Facebook pages these days. It’s doable, but it’s gonna be rough on my anxiety and the cats.

    On Election Night I am doing a Zoom meeting with some artist friends connected through Leighanna Light’s Facebook page, where we will all have some kind of creative work that we are individually doing and some emotional support. I expect that unless it is a landslide we will not know who won that night. Certainly it was a devastating surprise in the 2016 election the following day.

    Anyway, another hurricane remnant came through this week: Tropical Storm Zeta. This one was fast and strong and blew out a lot of power in central/western NC. We had no problems. We seldom lose power in this house.

    The other thing that happened was that I did an online chat with an Orbitz rep to ask some questions about my Aer Lingus credit, and it was good that I did, because they told me that it expired at the end of June and was surprised that someone from Orbitz told me differently. Fortunately I had enough misgivings that I had not booked our flight. Now it has been passed up another level and I might get a refund since I have documentation of the Orbitz rep saying that I had until Nov. 30.

    That would be splendid if I get the money back.

    On the tax refund front, however, we are still stuck with nobody to help. I think that when Kathy Manning gets elected to Congress and we actually have a Rep who might help us we will call her office. I highly doubt that Tea Party Ted could be bothered to help out a Dem/Independent couple. I would at least like to know if we should re-submit our tax return.

    Still working on moving the Flickr photos over to WordPress and changing the links in my blog posts. That is a pretty tough job considering this blog has moved three times and I’ve been posting since 2005. However, on the second move I lost a LOT of posts because it was so boogered up on GoDaddy that I moved a lot of it manually, and in doing so I skipped a lot of the more mundane entries. I lost the links to a lot of my photos too. In the noughts I wrote a lot, often daily. I have been working on this project for a little more than a year, and plan to not pay Flickr anything come 2021. They became too expensive and I’d rather pay WordPress to host my photos. Then I ended up dealing with moving the Tapestry Weavers South mess of a web site and I lost a lot of time. At least it is on WordPress.com now where I can deal with both of them in much the same way.

    Sandy has been doing a lot of handyman work around the house and it has been a very good thing. I got some more of the front porch painted but it was stormy this week and I have dealt with my mental health by spending a lot of time in bed, unfortunately.

    Okay. Back to cleaning and a bit of art work. I finished The Good Lord Bird this week and it is a great book. Amazing that the subject of John Brown could be made so entertaining and funny. I want to read more James McBride. Right now I am sticking with mid-19th century U.S. historical fiction and starting Lincoln in the Bardo.

  • Rainy Sunday Afternoon

    I start out every blog post I write with a rant about the new WordPress block format, and how tired I am of having to learn new tech and software when the way I did it before was perfectly fine. Sometimes I mess around until I find a way to go back to something similar that they had before, but I never know how to find that way again. Then I usually delete the paragraph. So THIS TIME, I have figured it out and I’m documenting it. I saved the draft of this post, then when I opened all posts to work on it again, when you hover over the name of the post, links appear beneath it and one of them is “classic editor.” Whew!

    Last weekend I had a lot of fun in Leighanna Light’s “Layered Faces” Zoom class. It is definitely not my style but it was a lot of fun and got me out of my head. Here are the photos from my piece after day one and at the end. I got a wild feline feel from the face as it was developing so I went with that. Sandy was all blah about it until I finished and then he was saying “Don’t do another thing to it! It’s perfect!” LOL. I won one of Leighanna’s faces in a random drawing on the second day, so my luck was with me this week.

    I’ve mainly been concentrating on work, cleaning up the garden, cooking, and today, cleaning house, so I don’t have anything exciting to report. I voted in person on Wednesday with a friend, and I didn’t have to wait long. No funny business going on. Paper ballots, but no straight ticket options. I painted another section of the front porch yesterday, but a cold front came in last night and it is about 25 degrees chillier and rainy today.

    Some fall shots from my yard and my walk around the block:

    Reading: I finished “The Windup Girl” by Paolo Bacigalupi. At first it was a bit of a slog only because it is dystopian and my emotions are on edge. It ended up being very good with a complex plot and several different points of view. Now I am reading “The Good Lord Bird,” and had I known that it would be this funny (I mean, it’s about John Brown, what a surprise!) I would have started it long ago.

    My fixation on traveling to Portugal with the idea of scouting out places to live is back, and I almost booked tickets to go in June, but the fricking searches were confusing, and then I figured out that to get my Aer Lingus travel credit I have to go through Orbitz, who is charging $100 more per ticket than going straight through Aer Lingus. I got disgusted and decided to start over again this coming week. I have until the end of November to book Aer Lingus tickets to get my credit for my cancelled flight this past June, and their prices went way up.

    This year my sister and brother-in-law are going to travel with us. This should be interesting to see if we get sick of each other. We have not traveled together before – just stayed in one familiar place like the beach or the lake. Of the four of us, only Sandy has a lot of patience, so he will be fine. I have been looking forward to traveling with my sister for a long time but they haven’t been able to do it for eldercare and other family reasons. All four of us are interested in emigrating to Portugal, although that’s might change after the election. I’m ready to go regardless, but for financial reasons I need to either wait 2.5 years or get permission to work remotely from there.

    We’ll spend a couple of days in Dublin since they haven’t been to Ireland before. It’s cheaper to fly to Dublin from Raleigh and then catch TAP or Ryanair to Lisbon from there.

    This also means that I will not be going to the art retreat in west Ireland or FOBA this summer. I hate like hell to miss these, but this is more than just a vacation – it is also a scouting trip. It’s important to do it soon, and I promised Sandy that we would go in 2021 before we knew that my trips would be canceled this year. We need to spend enough time in Portugal to explore different areas to see where might be the best fit for us. I am reading a lot of ex-pat advice.

    Of course, all bets are off if there isn’t a vaccine by then.