slowly she turned

Living the Slow life in North Carolina

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  • London, May 13, 2024

    London, May 13, 2024

    On May 12, 2024, my sister Lisa and my friend Susan and I traveled from Raleigh Durham airport to London, via Boston and on Jet Blue. I just want to mention briefly that the Jet Blue experience was great for the three of us. We were surprised at how good the food was, and that free mixed drink on the way to London came in handy for settling down for an overnight flight. Not that I slept. We turned out to be excellent traveling companions, but that was no surprise to me.

    We lucked up and found this comfy spot to hang out during our long layover in Boston airport.
    Just out of the Earl’s Court tube station, where this navigator with no sleep led us in a much longer walk than necessary to get us to the hotel.

    We were staying in an iBis hotel on the edge of Chelsea and Earl’s Court, and it turned out to be under heavy renovation. Maybe this is why, when we trudged in at 10 a.m., they were quite generous in letting us check into rooms early. We were exhausted enough that we managed to get some napping in that day despite the drilling and hammering.

    Just down the street was a pub called the Lillie Langtry, and we walked down there for a mid-afternoon lunch. I probably ate healthier here than I did for days (that’s jackfruit), and had to document my first meal and Guinness in London. The chips were REALLY good.

    Then, we decided to walk up the street and check out what appeared to be an abandoned cemetery on our way in. Oh no, it was not. It was the huge Brompton Cemetery, a Royal Park dating back to 1840, “where the entire landscape was conceived as a garden as valuable for the living as for the dead.” The overgrown wildflowers and “weeds” were deliberate. There were forget-me-nots in bloom everywhere. This may have been my favorite place I visited in London. If my phone battery had not died, I would have taken many, many more photos.

    We crashed again for a little while, and then Lisa and I walked to a wonderful pub called The Fox and Pheasant and had a late dinner. I had the chicken pie, and Lisa had pork belly. It was a much longer walk that we had anticipated, so we caught an Uber back, which was really easy.

  • Saturday coffee pot post

    I haven’t posted for over a month, which is probably the longest or close to the longest I’ve ever gone without writing. It’s not that I’ve had nothing to say, or that I’ve done nothing. All in all, retirement is working out well for me. Time goes very quickly. I am never bored. As I suspected, the best part is sleeping late when I have trouble getting to sleep at night. I feel much better now that I am not sleep deprived.

    It seems that this area of my life has been supplanted by the stitch meditations, and if I have something to say or post, the quicker, easier choice has been in social media.

    Right now I am working part-time remotely in a temporary project scoring fourth grade writing tests. I’ve been doing it for two weeks. My eyeballs hurt, and my heart hurts. Why are these young kids expected to do these tests? Most of them don’t seem to understand what is expected of them. Occasionally I’ll get a very good writer that doesn’t understand the instructions.

    I’ve made a lot of jokes about working for the Robot Overlords, but it really does concern me sometimes. Since I applied in December, I had no human contact (and that was by chat) until a week into the project. I still don’t know who my team leader is, and when I ask, I get no answer. I was told by a team leader to inform the scoring director of my upcoming two week absence, but the scoring director brushed me off when I asked how I could contact her in the proper communication channel. She said she would contact me. She has not.

    However, I did get paid yesterday, so…it’s not a bad gig to work from home. At least I’m not grading the same prompt repeatedly. There’s some variety. I suppose at some point we readers/evaluators will be replaced by AI.

    When I begin, I thought that I might work 8 hours a day up to 40 hours since I will have to leave the project early. Now my eyeballs are saying differently. As if staring hard at the computer screen will make the students understand! I feel strongly about giving them the most accurate evaluation that I can. 20 hours is probably going to be the maximum that I can stand. I usually do a few hours in the late morning/early afternoon and then a couple more later that night.

    I haven’t gone to the studio as much, but when I have, I’ve worked on the pages for what I am calling my Dark Forest book. I couldn’t find the color and texture of paper that I wanted for some of the pages, so I painted some of my handmade papers an almost black green. I feel eager to go ahead and bind the book and finish the cover, but I am still deciding on whether to embellish or write on some of the pages within, and I know that it will be better to bind the book after I finish the pages. Some ideas: text from the Hobbit about Mirkwood. Wendell Berry poetry. Other poetry about wildness and forests. Sketching or stenciling inside. Leaf prints inside.

    Last weekend we were at Oak Island with friends, in a lovely little cottage on the Intercoastal Waterway (salt marsh) side. I think my favorite part was watching the big storms roll in with good friends who appreciated weather watching as much as I do. I used my Merlin app to identify a colorful painted bunting! Afterwards we stopped at Lake Waccamaw on the return home and visited with my sister and niece. A male wood duck came near Lisa’s back porch and I was able to see this shy bird up close, as well as a pileated woodpecker from ten feet away across the road on the canal side! And about as many gators as I’ve ever seen (in the canal), I think. I haven’t become blase about the gators quite yet.

    I walked a bit on the beach with the “girls” but I can’t do a whole lot of walking right now. I will get a steroid shot next Wednesday and hopefully it will help with the walking pain when I go to England with my sister and friend in two weeks. I am determined that I am going to walk again on that beautiful coast path in Cornwall.

    Today I need to plant some seedlings that I grew in upcycled plastic jugs – two kinds of snapdragons, black hollyhocks, and coreopsis. Juliet tomato seedlings will be ready to plant in containers soon.

    So, you may not hear much from me on this blog or Substack (which, quite honestly, I am waffling on continuing, AGAIN) for several weeks. I’m trying to save my eyeballs for my work and for my stitching.

  • 100 Days of Stitch Meditation

    ^Today’s stitch meditation

    Here’s another path I followed away from my funk into creative mode. This time of year a lot of artists do some kind of 100 day “challenge.” I’ve participated in one of these challenges once before but it was for any kind of artistic effort and I was circling the hole of deep depression. It didn’t work for me and I went in the hole and didn’t finish the challenge. Nowadays my mental health is much better (thanks, vitamin D supplements and therapy!) and I’ve found that the way my brain works it can persist in a long term project much better with some kind of structure. I think that is why I am more attracted to fine craft rather than anything goes kind of art.

    Artist Liz Kettle is leading this community project in a private Facebook group but many have tagged their meditations in Facebook and Instagram. I’ve made a slideshow on the front page of my website and will be adding to it as I get around to uploading photos.

    The point of this is the meditation – NOT slow stitching, which is very similar but generally has more design thinking involved. In these stitch meditations, you settle into the process of the stitching itself. No pins, no taking out mistakes. Just stitching.

    I can’t say that I’ve completely followed these “rules” but for the most part I have and it has been very calming and centering once I enter the flow of the stitching. Usually what works best for me is just straight running stitches and using my scraps just as I pull them out of the box. Later I may or may not trim the edges. I might pay attention to the color of the thread or I might use whatever I pick up first. The blocks are approximately 4 x 4 inches but I don’t worry about keeping them square. I’m using a very loosely woven old curtain for my backing cloth.

    At the top is number 33, and I’ve added 28 and 22 below as some examples. I skipped a couple of difficult days but usually I simply started something and then finished it the next day if there was a problem with pain or travel.

    If you follow me on Instagram or either of my Facebook pages, I post these daily (usually) with a bit of commentary (usually).

  • Catching up with my latest book art

    ^Pages in progress for the Asian Inspiration board book.

    I am once again dithering about whether to continue on Substack or go back to only here. Each has its frustrations and plusses. I haven’t been inspired to blog lately, even as my birthday came and went and my 19th blogiversary sped by, the longest dry spell by far, and it makes me wonder whether I want to continue with a blog at all. If you follow me on Facebook, you pretty much get the gist of what my life is like, but on my blog, I go into more detailed thoughts and minutia of the day-to-day.

    Lately I have been in a creative whirl so life has been good. I joined the print co-op studio at Greensboro Cultural Center again in mid-February and it was the best possible thing I could have done. I finished two WIPs – one was a new board book that I had barely begun in an online class of Sharon Payne Bolton’s a couple of years ago called “Between the Pages.” I settled on a Asian inspired design theme since I had so many beautiful papers and ephemera to mine.

    The cover spread
    front cover
    Inside the pouch

    Then I moved on to rebind and add a lot of content to the Pocosin National Wildlife Refuge book I made in Dan Essig’s mica book class at Pocosin School of Art in 2016. A couple of years ago I noticed it had become loose and without really thinking it through I cut the binding apart. Then I realized that I had bound some of the pages as signatures and then glued them together. I had a lot of problem solving to do with this one, since all the pages are different widths and some were single sheets and some were signatures glued together. By the time I finished I was glad that I rebound it because I learned a lot. I also learned that I’m not as fond of working with mica as I once was!

    Mica is hard to photograph and I’m not an experienced videographer so please excuse the wobblies.

    https://videopress.com/v/6AUpDkGc?resizeToParent=true&cover=true&muted=true&persistVolume=false&preloadContent=metadata&useAverageColor=true

    I have a lot more to post here: my ongoing “100 Days of Stitch Meditation” with Liz Kettle, and my most recent weekend trip to John C. Campbell Folk School for “Decorative Weaving on River Stones” with Pattie Bagley. Stay tuned.

  • Weekends have no meaning

    Other than certain events happening only on weekends and many of my friends having them off, I now understand this.

    Also, having to check my calendar and my pill box to see what day it is. Geez. I guess I need to register for some kind of class to have some structure to my week.

    This week I’ve been seriously looking at my budget and the workshops and retreats scheduled for this year that I have any chance of squeezing into it. A perfect life for me would be traveling 2-3 weeks out of every month and filling that travel with art classes and beautiful nature. The downside of this would be that I would miss my cats and that my husband would probably not be willing to go along most of the time so I’d miss him too. However, I have found that I enjoy traveling alone. An odd thing for a recovering agoraphobic, but there you go. Life is weird. Once I get beyond the city limits, I am generally just fine.

    I’m not reeling. I’m fine. I’m better than I have been in years. I am happy to be retired now. I don’t think I fully realized how stressful that work situation was for me, although I loved the job itself. Mainly it is a relief to get the sleep that I so desperately needed. (Skip to the bottom if you are still interested in the shitshow at UNCG.)

    I got the payment for my unused vacation and bonus time (North Carolina state employees received extra vacation time instead of raises for quite a few years) and the pro-rated longevity bonus I would have gotten in May. I socked most of it away for vacation and will use some of it for bills in February since I won’t get my first social security payment until mid-March.

    ^El Duderino from my friend Dawn, Big Lebowski mousepad from my friend Ian. Cat hair by Pablocito.

    In the meantime, I’m abiding, pushing around art and collage supplies, occasionally printing off some public domain images to use, and putting my new paper cutter to use. I logged into the online class that I bought from Sharon Payne Bolton a couple of years ago to get myself going. I have so many unfinished projects and ideas that it is overwhelming, and Sharon has a clarity that helps cut through that. She isn’t futzy about measuring and I like that too. I had taken this class from her in person, so it is comfortable, and I loved the book that I made then (see below) so it will be fun to do it again.

    Other ideas: a tunnel book with a sea biscuit on the bottom layer. A mica covered book on the theme of hands (in progress, actually, because I can’t focus!). I have the Pocosin book to rebind that I made the giant mistake of taking apart, forgetting that I glued together layers so that the sewing was INSIDE the glued pages. I have the Portuguese sea life book to finish as well, which will be fun. The Pocosin book should be moved up on the to do list, since it was one of my best and actually made it to the back cover of the Pocosin Arts School of Fine Craft catalog one year.

    Guess I’ll leave some writing for tomorrow. Below is the shitshow news.

    Those fools in the UNCG administration did it – they axed 19 programs and relegated Religious Studies to a concentration in the Liberal and Professional Studies department. I have an MA in Liberal Studies from UNCG and after working in higher ed for 25 years I can tell you that academics have little respect for degrees with those types of general program titles. They got rid of Anthropology, Physics (even though UNCG has an observatory!) and graduate Math and Language, Literatures, and Cultures (LLC) degrees, among the many smaller programs. Keep in mind that if I had allowed myself to be transferred into that other position, it would have included being the admin for the grad degrees in LLC. I would have been divorced completely from the job duties that I had come to UNCG for – working with grad students – and probably would be gone with the next budget cut.

    It really has huge consequences for the whole aspect of academic freedom when senior administration is able to skip any kind of process (even the one in which they set the rules) and university governance rules to arbitrarily close programs without financial exigency or giving the faculty a chance to argue for their continued existence.

    What’s most infuriating is the obvious lies that the chancellor tells the press – it reminds me so much of Trump and the fact that he is forgiven for blame shifting. God forbid he be an actual leader and own his mistakes. He’d gain a lot of respect for it, but he crossed the line yesterday and he’ll never get that trust back from most of the faculty. Many of them will be (and have been) job hunting, and believe me, there aren’t a lot of academic jobs out there for the humanities. And these “academic portfolio reviews” led by cost-cutting consultants are spreading like a contagion across this country.

    Anyway, I am so sad for the people who will lose their jobs, and the students who aspired to studying/graduating from a robust program of study at a university that used to care about education and not doing the will of politicians. The students and faculty fought so hard against these cuts.

  • People not numbers

    This week I’ve relaxed into my new lifestyle for sure. Tuesday we went to our big used bookstore in town, and we absolutely hate that it will be moving about 40 miles away – grrr – and traded in a few books for credit. We immediately used the credit and I bought two books on wire working, The Searcher by Tana French, and a Robert Parker book for Sandy. On the way out, I noticed some nice looking stand alone shelf units beside the dumpster, and a few were narrow and tall, perfect for several spaces in our house but particularly my studio. After checking with the manager, one of them came home with us in the Honda Fit. My wire baskets fit into it perfectly!

    I still need to get rid of stuff though. 😦

    I decided to finish warping the Macomber floor loom and it has been so long since I started doing this that when I ran into a problem almost immediately, I have to wonder if this is why I stopped this WIP in the first place. The problem is that I didn’t write down what the problem was! Basically, I don’t have as many warp bundles as I thought that I had. The ones left in the project basket have been cut at the cross – I do not know what I was thinking but #$%&!!! So I think that I will thread this narrow warp as double weave and weave it double width as a rag runner, get this thing off the loom, and start something new. And I need to get back to Miss Sissy’s tapestry.

    Wednesday I walked over to UNCG to join in the Rally Against Cuts with my former co-workers and students, where I picked up a sign that I did not make, but was perfect for me, since Dean Kiss was the person who cut my position in order to add it to a different department which had its position cut after several people have come and gone in it over the last few years. Not a lot of thought went into this. It was totally about position numbers and pressure from the Provost not to hire any more staff, not the people involved. Others in his office and my department head argued against it and he would not budge. Now the Dean has announced that he is moving to a provost position in Florida, and my friend, former department head, and current associate dean RESIGNED his associate dean position in protest over the whole messed up process of determining the program cuts.

    Now, if you knew and worked with this guy, you know that this was an incredible action on his part. He has always been cautious in judgement and a consensus seeker, and willing to give the benefit of the doubt. I decided to go sit in the gallery of the Faculty Senate meeting where a friend who is our Faculty Senator read his letter into the record. Let me tell you – it was blunt and powerful. It made all the local news outlets. I am so proud of him.

    I am proud of all my friends, staff, faculty, and most of all the STUDENTS, who are standing up for the UNCG community. The Faculty Senate is voting to censure the Provost and Chancellor today, and I hope that a no confidence vote for at least the Provost will follow. She is like Trump in that she will double down on a wrong decision rather than admit a mistake. She also doesn’t hesitate to get rid of those who oppose her decisions.

    My first pension check hit my checking account yesterday. I completed the next step in the application for the part-time temporary remote job. Now I’m really considering going to Focus on Book Arts for real in June.

    Right now I am reading The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles in my Libby app and Fellowship Point as my print read. I think that they are suffering from my finishing Demon Copperhead just prior to beginning and during these, but I’m starting to get into both.

    We’ve got two more seasons to watch of Doc Martin, and Sandy has gotten me into watching Loudermilk. I want to start watching All Creatures Great and Small next, and finish The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, which I somehow left behind in the middle of the last season.

    Tomorrow I get to meet my nephew’s wife and child for the first time! Our family tree is a dwindling one, so I only have one grand-nephew and one grand-niece in this generation. We chose to be child-free. It is a decision that we never regretted.

  • Sunday sweep

    I have made a little bit of progress on my tapestry, “Rascal and Sissy Share the Sunbeam,” this past week. There’s more than one reason why I named my studio “Slow Turn Studio,” but a big one is that I tend to choose media that take a long time, and even if they don’t, I take my time anyway. In the case of this tapestry, I have made the color blending so complicated that I have a hard time getting my brain into it most days. If I can relax into it, I do better. However, no matter what, I do a lot of unweaving and reweaving, and that makes an already slow art glacial in speed.

    This tapestry was designed from a photo that I took of my sister’s cats a year ago. I then put it through a lot of different filters in the Deep Art Effects program on my computer, and chose the one I liked the most.

    Sissy’s top eye shape still wasn’t perfect, but I finally decided that it was good enough and decided to move on. The yellow cast on her white fur was one reason I loved this design, but my left brain keeps yelling “Sissy is NOT yellow!” Sigh. I’ll keep plugging away.

    Diego went to the vet for his very expensive blood panel work and for the first time in ages he was given a clean bill of health, teeth and all. Apparently he charmed the veterinary staff in a big way this time because they were all gathered around him in the back oohing and aahing over how adorable and sweet he was, and cooing over him when he emitted a surprised MAOW! This is why people lose their minds over Diego. He works those kitty cat eyes. Maybe this will be the basis of a tapestry if I’m not too tired of weaving cats later.

    In all fairness, my puppy cat Pablocito is a cutie patootie also. He’s a good dancer.

    The London/Cornwall trip for my sister and me and a friend is in the works now. Plane tickets and trip insurance have been bought. Reservations for most nights have been made. I’m used to doing research on how to travel as cheaply as possible without getting into the slums, but London is a whole nother thing. Airport and hotel fees and taxes are crazy expensive. We did better in Cornwall, where we rented three bedroom holiday places in Penzance and Port Isaac. I’m not sure where we will land on the last couple of nights on our way from Port Isaac back to London, but it’s good to keep a little bit of a mystery yet. We won’t rent a car, and plan to use all public transport, trains, and Ubers/taxis. That’s going to be a bit tougher in Port Isaac, but by that time we will probably be exhausted and ready to soak in those Doc Martin scenes. (Port Isaac is Port Wenn in the British TV series Doc Martin.)

    Lastly, I leave you with a photo of one of my favorite trees, a loblolly pine that has lived on our street for many decades through many tornadic storms. Nevertheless, the neighbors keep making noise about having it cut down, so I decided that it’s time to show some appreciation for the old girl. White pines are notoriously unstable in storms, but loblollys are solid, and people don’t understand the difference. I grew up in the land of pine and swamp, so I have a fondness for them. This is one of the tallest and oldest trees in our neighborhood.

  • Saturday morning coffee pot post

    Good morning! Two weeks since I’ve written and I have to say that I am feeling better about retirement. Really good, actually. People who know me well said that they thought getting away from my job would be good for my stress level, and they are right. Even though I’m keeping up with the totally FUBAR situation that UNCG is right now (note: Richard Barton and Mark Elliott are faculty that I supported as admin, and Rick is a personal friend as well), I feel so much calmer without checking that work email constantly and without the view of the administration building through the window behind me. I often turned to that office window and gave that view a double bird. My hope is that the faculty will hold a vote of no confidence at the very least.

    Anyway, my Social Security application was approved and I’ll get my first check in March. I was concerned about the possible government shutdown, so I’m glad I decided to go ahead with this. It’s a relief. I was surprised that my dental and vision insurance through COBRA would be the same cost as now, and after COBRA it may not be much more expensive, but with a much lower maximum. I was born with a wonky set of teeth due to my mother taking tetracycline when I was in her womb, so my mouth is full of old fillings and root canals and crowns. So, I’m feeling much more secure as far as income and insurance.

    The pandemic shutdown was good training for this. I learned that Sandy and I could be together in the house all day and night day after day without murdering each other. Therapy helped me a lot too – I don’t get as irritated at little things any more. If we weren’t both introverts, it might have been much harder. It’s good that we mostly leave each other to do whatever we want to do.

    However, I am still concerned about my almost overwhelming desire to stay home. This week has been bitter cold, with today’s high in the 20s and the wind chill has been brutal, so I’ve given myself a pass as far as cocooning on the worst days. On Sunday I went to brunch with the friends I planned to go with to London/Cornwall in May, and I did go out to grocery shop this week and for a massage last night, and Wednesday evening we both went to Oden Brewing, where they roasted oysters outside for customer appreciation. The owners are our neighbors too, so it would be good to get to know them better. We met another couple at the firepit that I enjoyed talking to, but later I looked them up on Facebook and they are major MAGA, so I won’t be pursuing that friendship. Can’t respect a Trumpie who condones criminality and cruelty.

    The trick is, I learned, that I’m going to have to find some things outside of the house to do by myself. Sandy is quite willing to go with me for almost any errand but that willingness fooled me into thinking that I was not agoraphobic back before I was diagnosed. After all, I went out all the time with Sandy, didn’t I? I was not housebound. What I hadn’t thought about, before that fateful trip alone to Penland in June 2001, was that the only places that I went to alone were work, the grocery store, and to see my mother. Driving alone to other places started giving me panic attacks. Yikes. And I used to drive alone for miles for work and to see family, and just to joyride at times. Next week is supposed to warm up considerably, so I’m going to get back to walking every day. I think that I’ll drive to a different neighborhood or park every day by myself and walk. That should be good behavioral therapy.

    Tonight we are going to a party with friends for a milestone birthday, and tomorrow will probably be a soup cooking day. I’ve been weaving tapestry, and I finished Demon Copperhead. I’m reading a lot more now. I’ll write another post about the other stuff going on in my life and in my head, but I wanted to address the retirement and agoraphobia issues in this post and get them out of the way. There will be photos soon, if Substack will accept them!

  • Sunday morning coffee pot post

    The first week of retirement is a wrap now. It feels very weird, but I’m doing okay. When I think too much about it I get a strange sick feeling, so I immediately switch my brain off that topic and move to something else.

    On New Year’s Day I joined a couple of friends and we dipped fabrics and papers in a black walnut dye pot. Unfortunately, I’m not excited about those results, but we’ll see if I feel differently when I cut them down. I used my new tabletop paper cutter for the first time and this might be a game changer for my book art. I have always torn my papers for signatures because I like a deckled edge and I wanted all the edges to be soft, but this cut down the prep time and will leave more time for the parts I enjoy most about bookbinding. I’ll still tear when I feel that the book asked for that treatment. I’m considering framing that piece with the leaf prints.

    Now it’s time to get back to these unfinished projects such as my two tapestries and the wooden cover and mica books.

    It’s funny how often I wished for retirement on social media and my blog for the sole reason of being able to sleep late. When you have chronic insomnia, you tend to see everything through that lens. But this week I mostly got up at my normal time because I was pet-sitting for my neighbor, whose elderly dog, Franny, needs to go out and pee early in the morning. Franny’s companions include a cat and an African grey parrot. Djula finally started talking to me and that was fun, but I will not get any of my body parts near that beak.

    My neighbor has insisted on paying me the going rate for petcare, which I very much resisted because he has taken very good care of my cats for long vacations more times than I can count for free. He says that once Franny dies, we’ll be back on even terms again. That money went to Christmas gifts for my co-workers and my vacation fund.

    Anyway, other than that my focus has been on cleaning out drawers and storage space because cleaning my studio space is the only way I’m going to get any artwork done. I couldn’t find things as it was, and my worktables were covered with stuff I’d brought home from the office. This time I was determined to actually get rid of stuff and not just move one pile to another place, and I’ve made a lot of progress.

    It also sent me down some rabbit holes, since I found notebooks and papers from high school and college, love letters from my mother’s boyfriend when she was in her late 70s-early 80s, and lots of photos. After flipping through my teenybopper scrapbooks with photos and articles cut out from Tiger Beat, etc., I consigned John Denver, David Essex, and Freddie Prinze to the garbage can. Sorry, guys. I hoped to find my autographs from John and Freddie, but they weren’t there so I guess they are gone forever too. I pronounced one half of a drawer to be my nostalgia storage, and put the rest of the Laurie ephemera there. We won’t discuss my mother’s hope chest at the foot of my bed.

    Walking the dog and going back to the office for a birthday party and a retirement task with HR meant that I got more exercise and I’m going to try to keep that up on good weather days.

    I heard back from John C. Campbell Folk School and I didn’t receive a scholarship. Considering I had two stellar recommenders, that doesn’t bode well for the future, but I’ll try again next year. Now I’m thinking about the trip to Cornwall with my sister and friends, and that is coming up a lot quicker than any of us realized, I think. Fortunately I have most of the money and the airfare points saved up for this trip, but London is very expensive, oy.

    Okay, time for another cup of coffee.

  • Looking ahead at 2024

    It’s always fun to look back at last year’s looking ahead post and see how much I got wrong. So much depends on your and your family’s health as you get older. With that in mind, most of my plans are for later in the year and I am definitely making either refundable reservations and/or buying trip insurance.

    I guess that the first thing that I need to address is that I’m not quite totally sure what my monthly income will be. However, I have finally settled in my mind that it will be enough to live on even if I don’t work temp jobs or part time, and I should be taking home about the same amount because I’m no longer putting in savings for retirement. When I stopped dithering and submitted my application for Social Security to begin February 2024, it was like a light switched on. I went from completely obsessive thoughts about my financial situation in retirement to letting that worry go. I can’t tell you what a relief that has been. I am so lucky that I get a pension from the state.

    So I’m beginning the new year in a rare optimistic mood! I hope this will be an ongoing trend for the future.

    Right now the only thing absolute is that I am registered for this class at John C. Campbell Folk School, “Decorative Weaving on River Stones.” March 15-17. I can see so many applications for these skills, especially for my book covers and collages with found objects. The only thing I don’t like about it is that it is only for a weekend, which is a long haul on the road. However, I did apply for a scholarship to an encaustic painting class that takes place the preceding week, and if I get that, it would be a really sweet art vacation with high educational value for me. The other class I put down for a scholarship takes place March 24-30, and THAT would be an issue if I got that. I might have to turn it down. I don’t know. Maybe I could find a cheap place to stay for a week.

    Other than that, I am currently planning a vacation to Cornwall with my sister and a couple of friends in May. We were going to go in June, but the airfare is considerably higher then. The plan is to stay in London three days, take a train to southern Cornwall and stay somewhere there for 3-4 days, then head north to spend our final four nights in a rental home in Port Isaac, where “Doc Martin” was filmed. Sandy and I stayed a couple of days near there during our 2017 trip to Cornwall, and I have longed to go back ever since. We have a lot of Cornish and Welsh ancestry in our family, and Cornwall is at the top of my sister’s travel wish list. We’ve been planning to go for a couple of years, and I’m determined to make it happen this year.

    Focus on Book Arts happens in late June this year. Their class lineup is spectacular. They’ve changed location to Western Oregon University in Monmouth near Salem, which makes me sad because I loved Forest Grove so much, but at least it has air conditioning, which was a real problem in years past when the temps went into the high 90s. I don’t know if I can afford it because they haven’t posted prices. It used to be affordable even with the cross country flight, but it wasn’t the last time they did it. Also I no longer trust that they won’t cancel it at the last minute like they did in 2022. It is seriously tempting because I love Oregon and this is the best book arts retreat out there since Journalfest ended in 2011.

    The Scotland vacation plan for Sandy and me is still on, but for later in the year, maybe September. Two UK trips in one year – okay – but I think that Sandy is going to pay a lot on this one. It will include lots of train travel, since Sandy is pretty much disabled as far as walking very far and there is a non-zero chance that we will rent a car. Extremely unlikely after our last two car rentals in the UK and Ireland, but we did get to explore some awesome places on our own by renting a car, so there are up-sides.

    As you can see, travel is at the forefront of my thoughts. For an agoraphobic, it is a strange phenomenon. I have trouble leaving my house to go to the grocery store, but I think hardly anything of hopping on a plane or train and traveling thousands of miles.

    Of course I plan to continue with my weaving and book arts and collage, but I’m also letting go of the idea that I have to make it pay. Making art pay has never been a good solution for me. It might help pay for supplies, but it generally takes the joy out of creating, and life is too fucking short for that. I’m not saying that I’ll never sell any work, but I am a SLOW creator and I don’t want to hurry up my process, and it is a lesson that I’ve had to relearn over the years. If I feel like I have to produce, that’s a sure way to slam the door in my muse’s face.

    That being said, I have an appointment with a friend with a black walnut dye pot this afternoon, so I’m going to get a few items ready to dunk into it. I’ve been clearing out drawers with SO MUCH junk in them – why did I hang on to so many bills and financial statements and medical documents in 2018? I also got rid of an enormous amount of travel ephemera from 2017-2022. Let’s face it – if I didn’t use it right after the trip when I was still excited about the place I just left, I’m not going to use it later. The main thing I have to do is clean up my studio workspace so that I have a clear open space to work. Bringing home twenty years of personal stuff from the office did not help in that regard.

    Okay, onward!