slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    I am spending a few minutes at a time tying on a new warp. Maybe I will get these curtains finished before the end of the year!

    Looking back to yesterday. I did garden clean up, threw down some fertilizer, and put in a small area to plant peas with metal hoops and the screen fabric I saved from when we took down the gazebo roof and screening. Inside I planted Zephyr squash, tromboncino squash, and some kind of cucumber seed that I got at a seed swap and no longer know what it is. One luffa gourd seed. Gosh, maybe I should be crazy and plant two, ya think? They might come in handier than I expect one day.

    One thing about being a papermaker is that I can always make my own damn toilet paper, thank you very much.

    Since I will be doing a lot of collage, I inventoried and found that the only thing I am short on is PVA glue so I ordered that from Amazon. As long as I was doing that I ordered some Equal Exchange hot cocoa mix and coffee beans.

    My main goal today is to get some more yard/garden work done, and prepare for some online classes. I need some easy projects to pick up between phone calls and emails and breaks from work that don’t require a lot of brain power too, so I’ll put together some stitching projects.

    I have a Coronavirus Chronicles art journal going, from a book I made in a class with Traci Bunkers eleven years ago. I have a bunch of postcard sized junk mail and I’m going to sand and gesso them for a junk mail journal and collage.

    I got out the Nature Journal I did in Roxanne Stout’s Mixed Media Nature Journaling class from Art-is-You Petaluma 2014 and found that it is mostly done as a photo and sketch album of the trip, with many photos from Cornerstone Gardens in Sonoma, California. I can do backgrounds for these pages since many of the photos are barely attached and sew in the photos. Fun!

    Roxanne is offering this workshop free online (without the trip to Cornerstone Gardens, of course) on her website under workshops. Check out all her workshops. I love her style.

    Other free art stuff: as always, Jude Hill’s web site is a treasure box. Please send her a donation.

    Karen Abend is offering a free workshop called Sketchbook Revival that begins on Wednesday.

    Many art communities are revving up on Facebook. Seth Apter and Crystal Neubauer are two that I love for collage and mixed media. Oh gosh, I cannot possibly name all the inspiring artists on the web and Facebook.

    Of course there are literally thousands of online classes available for a fee. Support your artist teacher community at a time when they are reeling from their workshops being canceled. Personally, I don’t like learning through video for some reason. I don’t even like watching movies and TV that much for very long. I much prefer books. But I have taken quite a few classes online and I’ve learned a lot and had some fun. I just take a whole lot longer to finish them.

    My next-door neighbors got home last night from Thailand. Whew! I was worried about them, and I still am considering that they just flew halfway across the world in airplanes. It’s good to have a child growing up on the street again.

    Here is Pablocito to say that every little thing is gonna be all right.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    It hasn’t sunk in yet, else I might be curled up in the bed with a panic attack. It occurred to me that I’d best ration out my Xanax for the much tougher times to come. We are probably prepared more than many people but both of us, Sandy especially, are at risk and his way of coping tends toward denial. Neither of us are particularly nurturing types either. He came from a childhood of neglect and when he gets sick he hides away. Since that is how he handles his own sickness, he assumes that when I am sick or hurt I want to be left alone. I am more nurturing than that since I was cared for as a child and I have the background to know what to do for someone, but I am selfish with my energy. We might have to do better for each other.

    My posts will probably not be very entertaining and more than likely be quite whiny for some time while I adjust to the new reality. I will continue to make most of them public anyway.

    Wednesday I got the email saying that the art retreat in Ireland has been rescheduled for next June, at the same time as the Focus on Book Arts Conference. So there has been no offer of a refund. I understand that it is wrecking small businesses everywhere, but I don’t know what to do. One of my Irish friends sent me a link to an Irish government web site that plainly says that I am entitled to a refund, but I will wait a little longer before deciding whether to ask for one. My travel insurance will not cover the expense.

    I haven’t canceled any of my hotel rooms or my flight. Boy, I hate to give up that good deal on the flight – $541 RT to Dublin. It seems probable that I won’t have a choice since it is predicted now to go on for months instead of weeks.

    There is also the matter of the Handweavers Guild of America conference in late July. I have paid for that in advance and have two workshops booked. I have reservations but not prepaid for the hotel.

    The other two workshops are with Leslie Marsh at her studio in Topsail Beach, one in mid May and one at the beginning of August. They would be small groups, but I could see good reasons for Leslie to cancel. Some beaches are closing to non-residents too – it is easy for N.C. islands to restrict cars because most have to be reached by bridge or ferry.

    The toughest part of this has been that I have obsessively focused on these trips, especially to Ireland, place of my heart, in order to cope with the election year and climate change and heartless actions of our government. Now most of that is stripped away and I am vulnerable to some massive hurting.

    I am definitely trying to focus on the positive aspects of where I live and how Sandy and I are prepared. It is helping a lot. For example, I am sitting on my screened front porch with my cats, listening to the birds sing and the Yoshina cherry trees are in full bloom. My neighbors are the kind that help each other and I am watching them do so across the street as I type. We are close to good hospitals, although they are already getting overwhelmed. My new next door neighbor, Datus, is here and his wife Katie and their child are flying back from Bangkok today where she has been working. I was worried about them all getting back here. This is a wonderful street to live on.

    Yesterday I planted lettuce, carrots, radishes, and parsley since my parsley is on its second year. There is too much mint growing, of course, but I am stocked for tea! Feverfew is self-seeding and there are a couple of asparagus spears coming up. I meant to plant more this winter, oh well. The raspberry cane is looking healthy. Roma and Brandywine tomato seedlings are poking up their heads under the grow light, and so is bright calendula. Other seeds planted under the grow light are arnica, coreopsis, and a huge variety of peppers. Enough to share. My eucalyptus tree made it through the winter this time. I am well set for herbs and medicinal plants. I have walking onions from last year and a few more leeks.

    The tough part is that my garden space is a restaurant for critters. I haven’t seen the groundhog family yet, but that doesn’t mean they are not around. A big rabbit who probably has a family is here, whoa, there he goes as I type this, but in my experience they prefer to eat the violets in the yard. I have the little greenhouse for the heat loving plants and will see what I can do for critter protection with wire fencing cages and hoops.

    Yesterday I pulled up eight big leeks and one big green elephant garlic, washed and sliced them, cooked them, and put them in small containers in the freezer. Earlier this week I cooked rice, chicken, onion, garlic, beef, carrots, and potatoes in a variety of combinations and put those in small containers in the freezer. The idea is that we can make quick soups or other concoctions in the microwave if neither of us feels well, and it won’t be the same thing every time.

    To think that I almost recycled all those Talenti containers that I saved! For once my hoarding was a good thing. (However, they are NOT microwavable.)

    They are still hosting food trucks at Oden Brewing across the railroad tracks so we got dinner from the Succotash Durham truck (SHRIMP PLATES, y’all) and take-out beer from the outside window. Expensive, but we are supporting local businesses while we can and the “crowlers” are 19.2 oz. each.

    Chewy shipped another bag of prescription cat food to us yesterday. I figure that Diego will still have his dental surgery on Tuesday, unless we hear otherwise. Sandy is rightly concerned about the cat litter situation but I think that we have enough for two weeks if he scoops it out and doesn’t dump it all out. He stocked up on bird seed earlier this week. I don’t want him to go to the stores right now, although I can’t stop him if he is stubborn about it.

    Fortunately he bought a large pack of sanitizer wipes for his CPAP machine and I had stocked up on rubbing alcohol a while back. We have healthy aloe plants.

    I am grateful we do not have children or grandchildren or parents to care for. I’m not sure that I could do it. Thank God Sandy is on social security and Medicare now.

    I do have to work in the middle of all this. But I am so lucky that I will have a job and that I can do it in isolation from home. I have never been so thankful for having a good job as I am now. It will give me something beyond survival to focus on.

    I am glad I wrote all this. I feel better now. I really am where I need to be.

    There is a plethora of free art workshops to do online now. I hope that somewhere in the middle of preparing my garden and working from home I will have something arty to share tomorrow and next week.

  • Social Distancing, Day 1

    Hello! I am taking a break from the first day of working entirely at home. I don’t have a lot of work to do anyway, since I busted my butt to get as much done as possible earlier this week. Actually, I have been preparing for this possibility since the beginning of March. That is me and my INTJ personality – perfect for a crisis such as this.

    I will likely be learning to use WebEx and Zoom, and will have to resign myself that yes, I do have to keep up with new technology since I will probably have to work several years longer than I planned to.

    Yesterday Sandy and I went to my office and we took home my plants in case I don’t get back there any time soon. They weren’t doing well anyway.

    Update from 2 days later. I jinxed myself by writing this post on Thursday morning. The third paragraph ended when I got an alarming email from work. I should have known better. Much of the work I did previously will have to be redone, and of course it all has to wait until somebody or other decides something or another and then I will have to be snappy about getting it done.

    Now I’m going to write my actual post that I meant to write on Thursday, but with the knowledge that everything has escalated rapidly.

  • Sunday morning coffee post

    Yesterday and today I woke up very late. Yesterday I think that I was just mentally exhausted. Then last night I didn’t get to sleep until after 2 a.m. despite taking a xanax. Once I do get to sleep, I have all my typical anxiety dreams.

    We went to the Greensboro Curb Farmers’ Market late yesterday morning. They probably had about half of the vendors and they were set up outside in the parking lot. The leadership of the market is handling this beautifully. They were spread out and customers were asked to only pick up items they intended to buy. There was a handwashing and sanitizing station set up outside. The weather was perfect and apparently they had great sales. By the time we got there many vendors had sold out and the crowds were gone. We still got the things that we went there for, mainly soap from my friend Carol (Mimi’s Soaps). Sandy snagged one of the last two tomatoes. I bought baba ganoush from Anna and some candied walnuts for a good fruit salad. It is important to support the small vendors and businesses right now – they may not be able to set up later, for all we know. Right now, they are encouraging the vendors to set up again next week, because the business is great.

    Then we stopped by Deep Roots Market, and I have never seen it so crowded. The employees were working hard to get the shelves replenished. Hats off to Nicole Villano, the manager. There was still mostly everything that I normally buy on the shelves, but, yes, the toilet paper was gone. I am so glad that we bought a huge package of it about three weeks ago at Costco, before this panic began. Normally I say that we don’t have room, but occasionally I give in and so we still have enough to last us a few weeks. If not, I have a bathtub with a hand sprayer next to the toilet, and we have plenty of old towels to cut up for rags.

    I was ready to pack it in for social distancing at this point but there was an Irish duo named Jig Street playing at Oden Brewing from 2-4, the new place just across the railroad at the end of our street. We decided to check it out and they had outdoor seating and the garage style doors thrown open. The listeners were able to spread out and the air was fresh, so we enjoyed them. It is too bad that they aren’t local because I would follow them around here. We enjoyed swapping Ireland travel stories with one of the musician’s grandfather.

    It gave me an excuse to wear this t-shirt that I bought at the Dublin airport in 2017. It’s the first time I’ve worn it in public, but there could not be a better occasion than early St. Pat’s celebration and pandemic combined.

    We enjoyed it so much that we said that we would go back for the second band at 7:30 but by that time I got with the program and decided we needed to pack it in. Sandy is at risk for his age and underlying health issues, and my dry cough from my allergies is scaring the hell out of everybody.

    Last night I cooked. I sauteed onions and celery and garlic and boiled chicken tenders and froze different combinations of them in small containers for the freezer. I cooked brown rice and a pot of beef, carrot, onion, potato, and garlic soup with mushroom broth. Today I am baking a turkey tenderloin roll (???) that I picked up at a local grocery store when I was searching for chicken. I will make turkey tetrazinni and freeze some for sandwiches later. Normally I don’t buy meat or poultry that is processed into unusual shapes and/or isn’t verified humanely raised, but this time I made an exception since it appeared that there was also a run on chicken. I was able to find chicken at Deep Roots later, though.

    This is a situation which we were almost prepared for. We have been backstocking our pantry items since Twitler was elected, but recently we have been rotating the oldest items out (eating them) and I had not replaced a lot of them. When Jeanne’s husband got sick with Covid-19 at the end of February, I started taking it seriously before most people did. I hustled to get the pantry restocked, my beloved La Croix water piled up (it still probably won’t be enough, I am addicted), bottled orange juice, the freezer full of meat and cheese, and my prescriptions filled. Just before my insurance announced that it would pay for refills early, I went ahead and paid for an extra 90 days of my anti-depressant, since I really cannot go without that. The generic was not that expensive, surprisingly. We already had rubbing alcohol, and pain and cold medications on hand.

    Last week I paid for travel insurance on the non-refundable expenses of my Ireland trip, which were considerable and I had to wire transfer the money from my saving account. At the time I thought, okay, I’m lending money to myself and I will pay myself back as if I was paying off my credit card. In the end it will save me money. Now I wish that it could have been put on my credit card. I could not get the “covered for any reason” insurance but if I or a family member have an emergency, such as getting sick, it covers that. The trip is in the last half of June, so there is three months of uncertainty to go.

    Mostly, I worry about Sandy, and if I will be able to care for him if he gets sick.

    I realize this is an anxiety brain dump…that’s okay, that was the original purpose of this blog back in 2005!

    Later I hope to post some artwork. As it is now, I am expected to go to work this week. Things might change because I am set up so that I can do almost all of my work from home.

  • Friday, thank God!

    Well. This was the longest week ever.

    Following the lead of most other universities, UNCG announced that it would suspend classes for one week to give faculty and staff time to get ready and then all lecture and seminar classes would continue online in some form or another beginning March 23, indefinitely.

    And while I am relieved that steps are being taken to slow the progress of the pandemic, my allergies and anxiety symptoms combined are mimicking the virus symptoms so I am in quite a tizzy emotionally. I get sick with this kind of thing every single March, but I don’t have a fever.

    I’ve got no clue whether I should stay home or not so I’m isolating myself as much as possible. I’m an introvert and a contingency planner (INTJ) so this is good for me. Luckily I have my own office. But I am ready and able to work from home next week if necessary. I’m glad I bought that laptop!

    Last night I finally sowed my first tray of seeds. A large variety of peppers, sweet and hot, lots of Roma tomatoes and a few Brandywines, calendula, arnica, and coreopsis. I am using a different kind of tray this year and will transplant the seedlings into bigger pots once they develop two sets of true leaves. I’ll go down to the UNCG community garden to sow some carrots and lettuce. I missed out on getting the garden club students to help me because I forgot about it with everything else going on.

    One thing is for sure, I never lack for something to do at home.

    The weather is beautiful and we are hanging out on the screened front porch again. I think that winter just might be behind us now.

  • Collage from this weekend

    Collage from this weekend and chronicling…

    I like that word – CHRONICLE. Especially for this pandemic time: “The Coronavirus Chronicles”

    I think that I am done with the first collage. It’s called “The Choice.”

    Still working on this next one, called “Illustrated Question Box.” They are related.

    Then this one is at the beginning stages. I found a battered, nearly illegible voter registration card in the parking lot of the Chapel Hill Library. The graphic in the middle is from an 1886 political booklet, “Hood’s Political Points.” It interspersed advertisements for Hood’s Sarsaparilla with facts and figures about the candidates for president and vice-president in 1886 and a few other charts about congressional pay but most of it is really about the sarsaparilla, baby. This working title is “100 Doses, One Dollar.” I think it will be the beginning of the Coronavirus Chronicles. Thinking as I write now.

    I have lots of 19th century magazines and maybe it is time to get them out of my mother’s cedar hope chest and do something interesting with them.

    At work we are all scurrying about uploading files to the cloud and getting prepared in case we have to start working from home.

    It’s pretty weird. I would be paralyzed with worry if it didn’t seem so surreal.

    My friend’s husband’s condition hasn’t changed much. He is still in critical but stable condition. She’s still in quarantine.

    I listen to what the local nurses say, and they say that it is here but not being tested. They have seen it in the ERs and tested for flu and it wasn’t flu. Hopefully testing will ratchet up soon and boy howdy then we’ll see the numbers go up.

    The soup that was on order didn’t get here. I got an email on Sunday night saying that it was damaged in transit and I would get a refund. Of course, it is not available to reorder now. Guess I will make some chicken soup and freeze it in small containers. I still have a couple of cartons of chicken stock.

    I guess I’m not surprised at this government’s response since the people in control think that everything is about business, and NOT preparation for disasters or long-term planning or helping sick people, but executive orders don’t mean shit to a virus.

    Wondering whether we should go to the lake Easter weekend. My brother-in-law has a heart problem.

    Maybe I should get a refill on my Xanax.

    Too bad this coincides with major allergy season. Nobody knows what to think about their dry cough and sore throat. I get this every March.

    Gah.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    I figure I will write until I am out of coffee, eat some oatmeal, then head to Chapel Hill for my monthly collage group meeting.

    The coffee is a gift from my next-door neighbor, who will be a permanent resident soon. Right now he travels back and forth from Tanzania and Bangkok, where his wife teaches. The coffee is from Tanzania, grown on the slopes of Kilimanjaro. We think that they are going to be great neighbors.

    Of course we are all starting to get sick…of the constant news about novel coronavirus. But it is important for us to be prepared, especially since I work at a university where a lot of students are coming back from spring break travel. I am an INTJ, which means my biggest talent is contingency planning. We had let our pantry supplies dwindle down as I was saving for Ireland, so we stocked up on a lot of soup and La Croix and V-8 and orange juice and chicken stock. I don’t consider this hoarding. We do this anyway – this was just a reminder that we had not replenished our stash. I still have lots of rice and pasta and canned and frozen food and tea so we will be fine in a quarantine. I gotta have my La Croix water. Will stock up the coffee this weekend, and I’ve decided not to buy beer for a while – try to lose some weight.

    I have said that I am going to Ireland if I have to fucking swim there, and I am keeping that mindset because to lose this trip would be devastating to my mental health. I have travel insurance now. But it is happening. I am going to Ireland. Don’t tell me that I might not be able to go.

    Our taxes are almost ready and we get the solar panel tax credit this year, which will go straight to the home equity loan. I’m going to focus on getting that paid off once all my travel expenses for the year are paid. I’ve paid for most of these in advance.

    I haven’t been writing every day because this is the kind of stuff that I would write about. Boring and anxious crap. Repetitive noise in my head. I don’t want to write about politics because I am sick of it. I haven’t been doing art because I come home from work with a headache or depression and go to my bedroom and fall asleep early or read and play games on my Kindle. Not healthy, but it is what it is. Budget cuts loom at work, and the stock market is killing my retirement savings. I don’t want to think about it, but I knew all along that I probably would not be able to retire early.

    Escapist reading: I laughed when I found a free copy of Forever Amber by Kathleen Winsor, remembering my glee in reading it during my high school years, and the torrid book covers of the 70s and 80s with Fabio. I even suggested the name to one of my friends when she got pregnant and she named her baby Amber! This copy was from the 60s, and it was written in 1944, one of the first so-called bodice rippers. I promptly tore off the cover and glued it down for a substrate for collage. Then I started reading it out of curiosity and got hooked on it. It is a fun adventure in Restoration England, the sex scenes are hardly there at all despite my memory, and takes my mind off my present reality.

    I have been switching back and forth between this and The Milagro Beanfield War. As I get closer to my trip, I think that I will pick up another Tana French mystery. I have been reading Yeats off and on, but I need something a bit lighter.

    When I’ve been on the computer, I have been moving my photos from my big travel posts from Flickr to WordPress and updating the links. I am working on the ones from our 2017 trip to England now. Some of these posts had an enormous amount of photos and so I split them into thirds. They still have a lot of photos and probably take forever to download, but I am generally the only person who reads them anyway. The Ireland posts are finished and I am so glad for these memories!

    Once that huge blog project is done, I’ll be making some gallery pages.

    Okay, done with coffee. Time to move on with my day!

  • Super Tuesday and a caterpillar

    I started hemming the caterpillar tapestry on Sunday and noticed that it wasn’t laying flat and was ready to steam and block it when it occurred to me that it didn’t need to be and should not be flat and rectangular! I am so used to working in 2-D and in rectangular shapes that I had not considered otherwise. It does need to hang for this show (the non-juried small tapestry show at Convergence this summer) in a particular way, so I am stuffing it lightly in the middle and leaving it flat on each end. When I get it back I may take off the backing and stuff it more.

    Spring break means that it is very quiet at work, giving my nerves a big break in spite of our offices still being open. I got outside for a little while yesterday and did a bit of yard clean-up. We still need to get some outside help with all the wood in the yard. I had hired our next-door neighbor to help and he volunteered to split wood. Said he loved doing it, then he smashed his finger and broke it. Somehow I need to deal with all this wood. Now I wish that I had let the tree guy take it all away. I was doing him a favor and instead he left it in chunks too big for us to handle…he turned out to be a real jerk. Corey split enough for us to use all winter and it burns very well in our wood stove. I am going to text the guy who dug my garden bed and hugelkultur bed and see if he wants it.

    I panicked a bit this weekend when I heard that my friend’s husband is in critical condition with coronavirus. Her mother had pneumonia and was at a nursing home facility recovering, then her husband had pneumonia a few days later. Then he was tested and the whole thing was hitting the news and on Monday the Washington Post reported that one of the two people in critical condition had died. When it affects someone you know and love, shit suddenly gets real. I’ve tried not to pester her with texts but we are still playing Words with Friends and I’ve checked her daughter’s Facebook page and so he must not be any worse.

    I realize that it is not nearly as important in the larger scheme of the world, but I can’t help but worry about how the pandemic will affect my Ireland trip, which is less than four months away. I bought travel insurance for the flight but not the art retreat, which was very expensive and I had to pay it in cash from my savings. So I don’t even have it on my credit card. It’s paid for, but what happens if I can’t get there and she doesn’t cancel it? I had it in my head that I had covered it with the travel insurance for the flight, but I didn’t. I’m waiting for my insurance agent to call me back with information. Oh, me.

    We went to Oden Brewing last night and played rummy and then bingo. We have become such an old couple! It’s been nice to have it so close by. They are going to host an Irish music jam twice a month. Now if they would just brew another malty stout or porter that isn’t high alcohol, it would be perfect.

    If you haven’t voted yet, please do so! Every vote does count, no matter what you’ve heard. Even if your candidate has dropped out, the numbers say something about how you would like for our government to work. And be nice to people who aren’t voting the way you are. Everybody is sick of the sniping.

  • Saturday afternoon after voting post

    I really struggled at the end on who to vote for in the presidential primary. The rest was pretty easy. I’ve been a Sanders Sister for years, even before he ever ran the first time. But I really really really like Elizabeth Warren. I could not decide right up to filling in the ballot, and then my pen automatically went to Bernie Sanders. So there my decision was made. I hope that Liz is his VP, or he is her VP.

    Because of this heavy thinking on my part, I found it very hard to stomach all the vitriol aimed at Bernie’s supporters. Also because most of my friends were struggling with the very same decision. I haven’t seen any cult-like or ugly behavior in person, and it pisses me off to be lumped in with a few loud assholes on the Internet. (There are a few loud assholes in any given group, especially on the Internet.) My guess is that about half of my friends and family will vote for Sanders and the other half for Warren. And I am absolutely fine with any vote other than Twitler or Bloomberg, although if it came down to it in the general election, I would choose a sane person over an insane person instead of a third party or write-in or not voting at all.

    I am not a Democrat any more and frankly, I despise both parties, but I vote Democrat because I am practical. I think that we need bold solutions fast but I don’t see how other parties or independents have a chance here in the states for the short time we have left to act. In fact, I think that our time is already up but that’s me being negative again. So for me, progressive politics is actually the middle ground.

    Now that that is taken care of, I have a wild collage in progress on the work table. I wanted to play and push myself by starting with some colors that I don’t like. I may end up making this into a book cover – I think that would be fun.

    I got rid of a bunch of books this week but brought home twice as many from a free pile outside of Pages Past used bookstore. Old books are an addiction, but in this case I was looking for old cloth covered battered ones that nobody wants that can be torn apart for collage. I will give about half of them to the collage group members. Of course, after I picked them out based on color and damage and material, I brought them home and got interested in them, like these…

    Two books by the author of Beau Geste, Mary Renault, saucy political books from the 20s-40s. “The Nine Old Men” is about the Supreme Court.

    A preachy patriarchal book published in 1914 about how to raise your children, “Life’s Golden Ladder from the Cradle to the Throne for The Young and the Old,” is a delight.

    My other project this weekend is to set up the four foot wide grow light. I actually have it out of the box and a space set up for it, so it might really happen! I told the director of UNCG Gardens that I didn’t think that I would be physically able to handle cleaning up my plots to garden there again this year, and so the students in the garden club cleaned them up and put down new soil! She said that they loved the work and would help me more if I came out to direct them the Wednesday after spring break. That really did my heart good, so I’m starting seeds. Once it gets out of the 20s and low 30s at night I will move them out to the little greenhouse.

    And I am doing better physically. I think this is the first February in a long time that I have not gotten sick, and my neck and elbow and shoulder is better. My major issue is anxiety right now, to the extent that I nearly had a panic attack for the first time in ages on Thursday. Fortunately, work stuff is about to slow down just a tad, and with Spring Break (shouldn’t they call it Late Winter Break?) next week it will be much quieter.

  • Big weekend

    On Saturday morning I worked on collages again. They are still in progress, but I may be close to finished with this one. It tells a story about choice. I pulled the text out of a Victorian novel called The Brown Eyes of Mary. At first I intended them to be random blocks of text, then I realized that I liked the way they pulled my imagination when combined. So this is a “choose your own relationship story” collage.

    One choice I made was to pull out the silver wrapping paper so that it showed at the bottom. I think that I might glue some very small snippets of silver near the right top side.

    Stitching on it later? Maybe.

    I also played with a collage that I’ll share later, maybe. I deliberately chose a bright pink that I normally would not use in order to loosen up and not get attached to the materials. It is a good exercise.

    Later that day, my friend Joe, who is a luthier, came by with Susanne and delivered my woodrow that he has been working on. A woodrow is basically a dulcimer that you can play like a banjo. Sandy bought it for me for Christmas in 2012. I don’t know how to play stringed instruments, but I’ve noodled around on it from time to time and it is pretty easy to play. Joe made some improvements and added a couple of knobs for a strap. He might teach me how to play – I just don’t have enough hours in the day to do everything I’d like to do.

    After that we all went to see the Alison Saar exhibit at Weatherspoon Art Museum. So inspiring and powerful. Made me want to do wood and linocuts again.

    Sunday night was the twice-postponed Gordon Lightfoot concert at the historic Carolina Theater in downtown Greensboro, which is a superb venue for music. Gordon is 81 years old but still held his own in a 90 minute concert that was the last of a nine show run before he takes a break and does it again. His voice was not as powerful as you might expect but was still wonderful. He did most of his big hits and a few deep cuts. We were impressed.

    Before the concert we went to M’Coul’s Irish Public House and took goofy selfies, as we like to do. The concert photo is not good, but I decided to take only one quickly and then put my phone away and allow myself to be fully present for the concert.

    Other than that it is a very busy workweek and I came home extremely anxious, mostly about political commentary I’ve seen, so heading to bed early.