slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • Sunday morning coffee FILTER post

    Random stream of consciousness writing is what I categorize as “coffee pot posts” since they usually happen on weekend mornings when I have time to drink a small pot of coffee. At first it was an exercise to simply write until the coffee ran out. Today it is a pot AND filter post.

    I started saving my used paper coffee filters made by If You Care back when I realized they were not breaking down in the compost pile and are made of high quality paper. I buy these from Deep Roots Co-op in Greensboro because I am committed to buying recycled products when possible. It is most ecologically sustainable to use the reusable washable filter that comes with the coffee maker, and that is mostly what I do, but that’s not what this post is about.

    Anyway, I am working on an accordion style book that is supposed to hang on display in the Triangle Book Arts group show in 2018. The book’s theme is “FLOW” which is turning out to be rich creative ground for me, almost too much. As I started thinking about the back side of the pages and the connectors, these coffee filters came to mind. I knew that they took markers well so I decided to do ink washes on them.

    I found out that some of them have wonderful resists to the ink. Next time I pull any out of the compost I will set them aside to see if it was the compost effect.

    Now the problem is too many ideas. This might be a good problem to have if it helps me make a unified body of work, but as someone with panic disorder it can stop me cold. I will try to focus on getting this one book finished over the next three days and jotting down the other ideas for later.

  • Recovery

    Above: Borage that reseeded from spring.

    I’m on the front porch, attempting to blog from my Kindle, which is not always a good platform. A lot of times I will write the post, schedule it for later, check it on my big screen at work, then release it. Since I’m home for a few days more, I’ll be less picky.

    My gallbladder was removed on Thursday morning, a procedure which I was never fully convinced that was necessary, but after seeing the ultrasound I went with the surgeon’s advice. Fortunately I only had a couple of attacks this summer and they weren’t as bad as my husband’s attacks seemed to be, but bad enough. It was full of “sludge” and wasn’t going to get better so now it’s been fired and marched out of the building.

    I had been told there would be two incisions, but right before the surgery the wording had been changed from laparoscopic to minimally invasive and I have three inch-long incisions in my abdomen area and one small one at my navel. I signed off on it because he had also told me beforehand that he would change if necessary. I plan to ask him why it was necessary.

    The level of pain afterwards surprised me. Hydrocodone has not been very effective for me in the past and I was on oxycodone after my last surgery. I didn’t consider talking to the surgeon about that before the surgery. Fortunately the nurse gave me an oxycodone in the recovery room and that helped for a couple of hours. I had surgery and was sent home before noon! That was different from Sandy’s surgery in 2006, when he was in a hospital room until about 9:30 that night.

    By the time I realized that the hydrocodone was not going to control my pain, it was after office hours and I decided I could stick it out overnight. Sandy stayed home for another day and picked up a new prescription around noon. Now I have been able to sleep and although I am not painfree it is much more tolerable.

    My dreams have been fun and I have played with Lucille Ball and Jerry Seinfeld and Elaine Benis. This is quite different from my ordinary dreams which usually involve moving a lot of stuff from one place to another.

    Now I just finished a little pot of coffee and Sandy is making pancakes. Today should be a much better day. Will post again later, since I hope to do some work on my books for the Triangle Book Arts group show, and maybe some tapestry weaving.

  • Making brushes and a walk in the woods


    I had a good weekend. On Saturday morning I drove to Chapel Hill and played with the Triangle Book Arts group. We spent the first few hours making brushes with bamboo and driftwood and deer tail and horsehair and feathers and various plant materials, then the last two we spent making marks with things such as small pieces of wood and bleach on black paper, and using salt on wet pigments and spraying through made stencils and such. When I got home Sandy and I went to the Deep Roots Grand Reopening. A fun day.


    It seems to be a good time for fungi, even though we haven’t had any rain since we got back from Colorado. The temps are still in the mid-high 80s and it’s muggy. You’d think that we would have gotten some of this hurricane action on the edges, but no.

    The Sierra Club sponsored a short hike on the West House Trail and I made myself get out in nature. A good group and a nice walk in the woods. I took a few more fungi shots. The hands are not mine – my nails have never looked that good!



    On Sunday I was a domestic goddess and my house still looks terrible but it looks less terrible, and sometimes you just have to go with what you got. I am told all the time that my house looks “lived in” which is meant well and I take it as a compliment. People don’t worry about putting their feet on the furniture at my house. I’m always more at ease in a friend’s messy house.

    The main focus was dealing with the fleas again before they reproduced a lot so I did a lot of washing bed linens and the rugs in my bedroom. The diatomaceous earth did work well on the carpets and I’ll continue to use it, but I think that I’m going to have a problem with fleas as long as the boys hang out on the front porch. Putting the d.e. on Pablocito was an experiment and it did help a lot for a couple of weeks. Diego got the dose of CatMD during the same time, which is a cheaper version of Advantage. When the fleas came back on Pablocito, I decided to dose him with the CatMD stuff too, and boy, was it strong. My poor boy blinked his eyes rapidly and squinted all night from the fumes and my throat tightened up and got sore just from being in the same room with him. We were both fine the next day but it makes me hesitant about these other five doses. They were still expensive. Maybe I’ll try the pill route.

    Dried more peaches and tomatoes in the dehydrator too. I joined a dehydrator group on Facebook and now my head is swimming with other ideas.

  • I think of all the things I want to write about constantly, thinking that I’ll start doing it after this, after that, and then I don’t do it. Then the words float away, buried by the debris in my anxious brain, or pushed away by mindless game playing that absorb my thoughts lest they go to dark places. I do this to myself. It’s the same reason I don’t get art done.

    It’s a pattern for me to get depressed after my last trip west for the year, without any trip planned to keep my INTJ cells active. This coming year I’m sure that I’ll go somewhere for a retreat, maybe to the HGA (Handweavers Guild of America) Convergence in Reno in July. I’d love to take one of the ATA (American Tapestry Alliance) three-day workshops. However, I’ve never been able to get into one, even when I set an alarm to register online at the very moment registration begins, because donors to the organization get to register a month early and the workshops fill up. If I was to donate $125 before Oct. 17, I’d get a shot but I’m feeling the squeeze of medical bills and household repairs that I need to hire someone for. Then I might not get in the class anyway and I’d be out the money. And I’d have to make a firm decision about going to Reno before Oct. 17. Ay yi yi. This is the kind of thing that makes my chest hurt. So maybe I’ll try to register for one of the classes again on Nov. 17 without the extra donation. If I get in, then Fate has decreed that I should go.

    Fortunately there are lots of book arts classes that are in driving distance and don’t cost so much. I’m getting involved with the Triangle Book Arts group, which has its meetings in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill and are about an hour’s drive away. Tomorrow morning I’m going to a mark-making workshop at the Chapel Hill Public Library and it will be my first meeting with this group.

    Have I mentioned that my agoraphobia now has no problem with hopping on a plane to fly thousands of miles away, but rears its head at a car trip by myself more than 15 minutes away? Mental illness has no logic. This is the kind of thing that slips up on me. I have to push through this. Boo, panic disorder! Go away!

    Then I’m going to join this TBA group again the following Saturday in Durham to play with creating a panel for a collaborative accordion style book that will hang at the ReFuse show in January.

    I’ve got all kinds of ideas for this panel BUT I realize that right now it might be best for me to just pull out a bunch of collage materials and found objects and then follow my nose.

    And I’m working on appreciating Greensboro and North Carolina. I know it’s a case of the “grass being greener on the other side of the hill.” I realize that Greensboro is actually a great place to live, and that North Carolina is a beautiful state. I’m trying to see it with new eyes instead of the eyes of someone who has lived in the state for 56 years and in Greensboro for 38 of those years, never anywhere else.

    So I’m going for a hike on one of the lake trails on Sunday.

    But all I really want to do when I get home from work is play computer games, read, and sleep. I gotta snap out of it, but it’s not so easy when I want to be kind to myself too. Like right now, I’m gonna have a real hard time not laying down on the bed, much less even thinking about cooking dinner. Last night I ate some crackers and went to bed at 7 p.m. I don’t know how people with children manage.

    You’ve probably guessed that I’m having a hard time with thinking about politics, natural disasters, and personal worries.

    Oh yeah, my gallbladder surgery is scheduled for October 5. Trying REALLY hard not to think about that, except for keeping my diet fairly low-fat. My neck is much better, and I’m getting a home traction device soon that should help a lot.

    Okay, that’s enough whining. I’ll write about my gardening plans and more substantive subjects later.

  • Colorado, Part III: Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument, etc.

    That morning we went to Florissant Fossil Beds National Monument and saw the petrified stumps of ancient redwood trees. We walked the trails a little. They were gentle. It was a gorgeous day. We were disappointed that we couldn’t pick up fossils, but I guess that’s why it is protected with national monument status. There are many great examples of insect and plant fossils in the visitors’ center.

    Stopped for scenic photo shoots along the road, including an old mine site. There is still plenty of gold being mined up on those hilltops.

    This looks like an oil painting to me:

    Those vistas. Those skies.


    On the way back we stopped at Manitou Springs again and had coffee and walked through several shops and galleries. A beautiful little town, although the parking situation is extremely frustrating there.

    The next morning our flight was delayed and so we went back to Boulder and had brunch at an excellent farm-to-table vegetarian restaurant, Leaf. After we got to the airport, our flight was delayed two more times, and we didn’t get home until 1 a.m. I don’t think that we are going to fly on Frontier any more, although they did give us each a food voucher for $10 at the airport and a $50 credit for flying with them again. Maybe, I don’t know.

    Now I’m back home thinking about views like this. But home is good. I like home, too.

  • Colorado, Part II: Cripple Creek

    Early afternoon saw us on the road to Cripple Creek, Colorado with a stop for Mediterranean food in Manitou Springs. We fed a friendly little squirrel pumpkin seeds and saw an elk doe and two fawns on the way.

    Once we got there we checked into Cripple Creek Hospitality House, which turned out not only to be inexpensive and historic but fascinating and beautifully decorated as well. It was the former Teller County Hospital, built in 1901. All the rooms had names of the former use of the room. For example, the room on the left in the photo below had “Quarantine” on the door. Guess I’m glad I didn’t have that room!

    Cherie and I drove and walked around Cripple Creek later that evening, but not much was open other than the casinos, and we don’t gamble. We had a light dinner at an Irish pub that had no stout (!!!) and my food was awful so I won’t mention its name. We did go into the Brass Ass Casino, where they had actual human interaction with roulette and blackjack and craps and that was fun to watch. The other casinos seemed to be only machines, which I find very sad. We saw a skunk run into an abandoned building. We loved the colors and styles of the small turn-of-the-century houses.

    The big animal highlight was the herd of donkeys wandering around town. They are descendants of the old mine donkeys, and they are very well taken care of. They could be a little aggressive if you had something that they liked to eat.

    We ate lunch at the Red Rooster bar in the Imperial Hotel, which is haunted. That is the ghost of Sandy photobombing Aunt Delaine and me. The other ghost, George, was not around. Which was just fine with me.

  • Colorado – Part I, Boulder

    View of downtown Denver as we flew in

    Going to Colorado to see my aunt and cousin and doing a bit of sightseeing has become an annual event for me. I love Colorado and its climate and its beauty and its skies and its mountains and its rivers and its plains. I’ve never been there except in June and September, so I’ll admit that I’ve probably seen it at its best.

    This time we came in late on a weeknight so we took a bus to Boulder and stayed at an AirBNB hosted by an astrophysicist who was the most helpful, accommodating, interesting host I’ve ever had. We took her out for a late dinner, ate breakfast with her, and she and I really connected over early morning coffee. She walked with us halfway to downtown, and explained the way that the sun’s image is projected through the leaves in a tree (or other small spaces) onto the sidewalk, much like a pinhole camera. The round spots are images of the sun.

    Then we walked down to the Pearl St. Mall and moseyed around the shops. I bought a used copy of Frederick Franck’s Art As a Way: A Return to the Spiritual Roots. We had a drink at Foolish Craig’s, where I got this random photo of the ceiling. The phone camera was on the bar pointing at the ceiling and I happened to notice that it had captured something that I like a lot:

    We tried to go back for a meal on Sunday but they were too crowded. Downtown Boulder has lovely gardens, fun statues and shops, and art deco architecture.

    I wish that Boulder and the general area was not so expensive…I would move there in a minute if I could afford it.

    Later we both had a grilled peach stout at West Flanders Brewing, then we took a bus to Broomfield where we joined our family for dinner for my cousin’s birthday and stayed at my aunt’s apartment that night and the following morning. (See next post.)


  • My mood was so dark yesterday that this morning my shadow had a shadow.

    I feel better for the rant, though, and that the weekend is here. Here’s another photo from my walk to work:

    Sounds like Irma might take a path to the west, but of course, nobody can accurately predict a hurricane’s path this far out.


    If we get high winds, I feel sorry for my neighbor across the street. Look at all the black walnuts on his tree, hanging over his house. It’s gonna sound like hail on his roof. Of course if the wind is high enough some of them might make it over here too. I’ve been collecting some. There are lots of black walnut trees around here. Almost every part of the tree makes good fast dye.

    On Labor Day, I cooked all the corn shucks I’ve been saving in my freezer with soda ash so that I can break down the fiber for paper pulp. I’m going to try to make some very rough textured paper this weekend, but there is SO MUCH going on around here!


    I pulled this book that I made in 2013 off the shelf and decided to work it some more for an exhibit with the Triangle Book Arts group this coming winter. It’s called “First the Seed,” and the cover has a seed catalog print gel transferred onto handmade paper, with some dried “whippoorwill” field peas in a mica window on the front. The pages are handmade paper from both recycled green office papers and recycled handmade papers with different plant materials in them. I decided to use it to showcase the seed packets that I have hoarded for years. I feel like they need to be framed, either with this rough corn shuck paper I’m about to make or with drawing frames in ink around them. I can’t add too much more paper to it or it won’t shut. I’m not satisfied with the front cover either.



  • The Apocalypse!!!

    All eyes on the East Coast are on Hurricane Irma, while Texas is still underwater and the West is on fire.

    Climate change deniers confuse and disgust me. I’m a person who depends on logic, and this kind of nonsense wouldn’t sit well with me even if it didn’t mean the destruction of our planet as we know it. The worship of money in this country causes such mental dysfunction that even the fate of the children and grandchildren doesn’t get through the psychological walls of the brainwashed.

    I resigned myself quite a while back that it’s too late to do anything meaningful on a large scale now. You can say that’s pessimistic or selfish. I say it’s being realistic, and I don’t much care what other people think about my attitude. So I do what I can in my small corner of the world to make things better in the time we have left, thank God I decided not to have children, and hope like hell that I don’t get reincarnated. I support without criticism whatever anybody is trying to do to improve or save our land, water, air and soil, because all the money in the world will not save us if we don’t save them. The great work is being done without the idea of being rewarded for it.

    And there’s the social catastrophe in the United States. You can’t even have a civil discussion here on any controversial subject without getting attacked, even from those who agree with you. Nobody’s listening to each other. There are kneejerk reactions to everything according to whatever filter that person is using. People believe insane things that are based on bullshit propaganda and celebrity tweets. I am very glad that I am a political independent, but no one seems to be immune to this sickness. That’s the way I feel today, and why I won’t address social issues here. It might change by tomorrow. I’m distressed right now.

    The current forecast is for Irma to skirt the east coast of Florida and make landfall in Georgia or the southern South Carolina coast and come up through the Carolinas. I feel like we are ready here. We haven’t had any real damage from a hurricane since Fran here in Greensboro, but North Carolina has had more than its share of flooding. Floyd drowned eastern North Carolina. Hugo proved that even 200 miles inland is not immune to serious damage. Matthew submerged the little towns along the Lumber River where I grew up last October.

    The states in the West that I fell in love with and hoped to migrate to for our retirement are burning up. Oregon has had much more intense heat waves that we have had in North Carolina this year. Glacier National Park is burning. The Columbia River Gorge is burning. People can’t breathe because of the smoke.

    I am concerned that we plan to fly to Colorado for a few days next Wednesday, as we try to do every year to visit my aunt and cousin and celebrate my cousin’s birthday. Right now it looks like that plan is still on track, thank goodness.

    But I don’t count on anything. It’s a crazy world, and nothing surprises me anymore.

  • Eclipse Day in Greensboro, North Carolina

    I’m late to the party, as usual, but here are my photos from the Great Eclipse Day, where we had 93% totality in Greensboro, NC.

    I was ready with my hi-tech eclipse viewer, similar to the one I used in 1970.

    Unfortunately, this happened, which kind of confirms my suspicion that God is mad.

    So, since I couldn’t really look up for long with my neck issues anyway, I watched the crows and then I found my own eclipse photos.

    I have to admit that I enjoyed this eclipse even more that I thought that I would.