little ray

New Journal!

2011-10-19T16:57:00.000-05:00

I started a new journal today! Actually, I don't think any of y'all have seen my old journal, since I started it when I was at the cabin this summer, and I don't have any 'real' internet access there. OK, I do have dial up, but you just can't upload files of any size using dial up these days; it times out too quickly.

I made this book cloth by painting cotton fabric.

First off, here's a picture of my last journal, which ended up being titled Cap'n Midnight's Museum for Exceptionally Intelligent People. The title came from an essay in Joseph Mitchell's Up in the Old Hotel about Captain Charlie's Museum for Intelligent People. I don't remember which story it is; you should just read them all; they're wonderful. It had one less signature than I usually put in my journals: eight instead of nine. I'm trying to downsize and lighten my journals, once again, to lighten the load that I carry.

A few of my favorite things: Kenny inspecting my journal, and my cup of coffee.

Here's the new journal, titled Crazily Paisley. It's the brightest journal I've ever had, and possibly the brightest one ever made. It glows in the dark... Well, it glows in the dark if you have a black light, anyway. I was hoping to marble end sheets for it with day glo paint, but they were just too transparent to really see, except with the black light. I ended up painting stripes on paper instead.

Yipes, stripes!

This journal is even smaller than Cap'n Midnight whose pages were 7 1/8" wide by 8 1/2" high. Crazily's pages are 77% smaller: only 5 3/4" wide by 8 1/8" high. It's very hard to get two columns in unless I concentrate on writing really tiny.

To protect this journal - and the last - I'm carrying them in a plastic baggie in my purse. (Thanks, Roz, for that tip!) I feel somewhat odd about this, because the idea is to make semi-indestructible journals. There is some kind of a varnish you can put over day glo paint to protect it, but for now I'll use the plastic baggie. As you can see from looking at the top of the pages, there are two sheets of black cover stock in the journal for me to color on. I like coloring on them with my NeoColor watercolor crayons. Here's a paean to Pierce Bros Fogbuster coffee and non-electric coffee grinders.

The electricity went out at the cabin for over a week this summer after Hurricane Irene swept through the Catskills. I can live without lights - especially if I have one of those little headlamps - but I cannot live without coffee. So I had to beg and borrow a hand crank grinder. Then I found one at the flea market in Woodstock, a real beauty and capable of grinding for espresso makers, little Bialetti Mokas.

I'm typing this from my new iPhone...

2011-10-16T08:10:00.002-05:00

When the iPhone first came out, I held off from buying one for several months... At least three, anyway. I lost my cell phone in May, right as I was getting ready to go to the beach with my Dad and his wife on what I called the 'Fogies Trips.' Dad and Ginger and two other couples - and sometimes a couple of other people - would rent a house on Bald Head Island for a week. Dad was in a wheelchair and needed help doing stuff, so I would go along as his 'nurse.'

I was really upset when I lost that phone. I knew the iPhone was being launched in another month and I really wanted one even though I'd never seen one. No one had. All I really knew was that they played music. I mentioned this when I went to the AT&T store, and the lady who helped me said that lots of phones played music, and wasn't I just being silly to want an overpriced phone. Who knew then what an iPhone really was?

I happily bought a Razr phone, which played music and connected to the web and did email, if you didn't mind hitting a key three times to get a 'C.' So, when the iPhone launched at the end of June, I put my hands over my eyes and went around saying 'Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah, Nyah," like a PC person.

It wasn't until I went over to my friend Clark's house right before I left for the cabin that summer that I saw my first iPhone. I played with his phone the whole time I was there and drove from his house to the AT&T store and bought one. It was a completely different animal from the Razr... Completely! Evolutionary speaking, it was a new species, or maybe even a kingdom!

My first iPhone's screen cracked after a year, but it still worked. I got the 3G eventually. Im not slavish about it. I buy the new one when my old one craps out and I'm eligible for an upgrade. I didn't get the 4 when it came out because of reception issues. I was eligible, but I waited. And then, two weeks ago, it rained.

Now if you don't live in Texas, you may not know that it hasn't really rained here in a really, really long time. Months, really. Johnson grass was growing in my backyard and the soil was too dry to pull it out. So the morning after it rained I went out into the dewy grass with my cup of tea and my iPhone to weed. Because the ground was really wet, I didn't want to place my phone down on it, so I very carefully balanced it atop my mug of tea. Ahhh, I hear you gasp. Sadly, you are so prescient. Indeed, my iPhone dunked itself in that mug of tea.

I tried to order the new iPhone online, but the wait was already backed up. Since I still had my old Razr, I went straight over to AT&T and had a SIM card put in it so I'd have a phone for the duration. I mentioned the long wait to the AT&T kid and he said, "Oh we'll have plenty of them in stock; just come to the store on Friday the 14th!" And that's where I was just after 9am Friday... In line at the AT&T store.

It only took me an hour to get inside. There I talked with the Director of Sales for Central Texas. I told him and my sales rep the tea story. They thot it was very funny. I said, "That's nothing; my daughter dropped hers in a White Russian!" (Laugh.) "Then she got her replacement phone and dropped IT in a White Russian. That's when I told here she had a drinking problem!"

So I have the new phone. Frankly, I wasn't expecting much, so I've been completely blown away by it... Sure, sure the camera is awesome (or at least more awesome than the old one.) It's new and shiny. But it was the feature most hyped - Siri - that I expected the least out of. I had the Siri app on my old phone and it was coolish, but not integrated into the phone itself. Now it is and...

It has a sense of humor!

The folks at Apple took the time to think about and program these things into their personal assistant. They anticipate their audience.

It's not that I'm smart, or even that my phone is smart.

It's that the people who make my phone are smart...

RIP Steve Jobs

2011-10-14T14:55:00.000-05:00

If it weren't for Steve Jobs, you wouldn't be reading this, because I wouldn't be typing this.

Many, many years ago, perhaps back in 1970, I took a computer course in college. It was actually a 'computer graphics' course. That's in those little quote marks because to do computer graphics in the early 70s you first had to learn how to program. So I was also taking a course in Fortran and flow charting as well. I can't remember if they were the same course; I think they were, but it was very, very long ago, and it was very, very painful.

The object of the computer graphics course was to write a program that drew a little tetrahedron - on a CalComp plotter - that could send the tetrahedron spinning across an XY grid. This would be drawn in black on that white weird paper with the perforated edges. Not only did one have to write the program - which frankly was beyond me - but one had to punch the little cards that were used to tell an IBM 360 to tell the CalComp plotter what do do. It involved hundreds of cards, at least in my memory.

I not only proved completely incapable of writing the program, I couldn't, for the life of me, punch the damn cards right. This was not surprising, really, as I didn't know how to type at the time. It took every ounce of conniving, wheedling and ingenuity I possessed to copy someone else's cards and take them over to the basement of some science building where the 360 resided. And there, walking in the through the doors, I bumped into somebody. My cards flew into the air and came down like leaves around me. Lovely disordered leaves, floating all about, unnumbered and so impossible to reorder. I had to borrow another student's cards and run them to get the little drawing of the little tetrahedron poised on one edge of the little grid getting ready to jump forward into the future.

This was NOT cheating, at least not in our department, the Design Department. We were being trained to be generalists who interacted among specialists, and I, along with several others in the CG class had quickly figured out that computer graphics was a specialty... And not one any of us were going to be taking up anytime soon. As generalists, it was our job to find out who could do things and to get them to do it, so running someone else's cards was a perfectly viable solution to the problem. A few people in the class were able to write to the program. Many of us could not, and so we formed a club - the only club I officially belonged to in college - called the Fraternal Order of Computer Fuck Ups, better known by its acronym: FOCFU (pronounced FOCK PHU). We took a solemn vow not to touch a computer until they could talk to us.

All thru the 70s, I waited.

In the early 80s, I waited.

I had told the FOCFU story to many people, people who seemed to be able to use IBMS to do things, but, even though doing things no longer involved those stupid cards, it still involved programming... Or at least writing 'commands,' which is not my style.

It's not like I was holding my breath or anything. Frankly those computers, with their black screens with the green or blue or amber monospaced fonts didn't interest me in the least. They didn't SPEAK to me.

Then one day, I think in the spring of 1984, my friend John Salik came over to my house. He said, "I have something for you. I have a computer that will talk to you." And he put a Mac 128 down on the table and started to leave the room. "But, John," I said, "I don't know how to use it!"

"You'll figure it out," he said and walked out of the house.

How hard could it be? It only had one button on it. I pushed the button and a black and white, low-res screen came up with two icons on it: a word program and a paint program. Of course at the time, it wasn't a low-res screen, and I didn't know those little things were icons. I used the weird little thingy attached to it by a cord to move a pointer around the screen - the mouse, as I later found out it was called - and touched one of the little icons.

When John came back an hour later I was painting happily away.

A computer had talked to me. Thank you, Steve Jobs.

The first computer I got was not that one, but a used Mac 512. The second was the only non-Apple computer I've ever had, an Atari Mega STE. It was great, actually, because it could switch between Apple and Mac platforms and had a great desktop publishing program. The next computer I got was the iMac in August of 1998, one of the Bondi Blue ones. I got the iMac G3 in tangerine a year later, and have been hooked ever since.

They talk to me. In my own language.

No punch cards, all love.

musings...

2011-03-29T09:27:00.000-06:00

I encountered an interesting word this morning: hedonics. I have been meditating on nuclear power since the recent unpleasantness in Japan, which is how some nuclear proponents seem to be viewing it. Mitch McConnell said that we shouldn't let what was happening in Japan affect how we think of nuclear power in the US. I guess Mitch has been listening to Frank Zappa's It Can't Happen Here.

The lead Talk of the Town New Yorker article is about nuclear power and mentions that, at its inception under Eisenhower in the 50s, insurance companies decided it was too risky to insure. They said they would only insure plants to one tenth of what they estimated a nuclear accident would cost. A government insurance pool was created for the nuclear industry instead.

All power generation has environmental costs, of course, even solar. I wondered what the effect of solar panels was on the resale value of a home, mostly because there are a LOT of houses with solar panels in my 'hood. The city of Austin, which owns its own power company, has generous rebates and citizen-friendly incentives for putting panels on your house. It's still freaking expensive, but pays out in a bit less than 10 years, with a life rating of 20, so you get perhaps 10 years of free electricity. Not a bad thing for someone hoping to retire...

I couldn't find a lot of info on the resale issue, but this little blurb from the Christian Science Monitor caught my eye:

Abstract

This study uses a large sample of homes in the San Diego area to provide some of the first capitalization estimates of the resale value of homes with solar panels as compared to comparable homes without solar panels. While the residential solar home market continues to grow, there is surprisingly little direct evidence on the market capitalization effect. We find evidence using both hedonics and a repeat sales index approach that solar panels are capitalized at roughly a 3% premium. This premium is larger in communities with more registered Prius hybrid vehicles and in communities featuring a larger share of college graduates.

he·don·ics (h-dnks)

n. (used with a sing. verb)

1. The branch of psychology that studies pleasant and unpleasant sensations and states of mind.

2. Philosophy The branch of ethics that deals with the relation of pleasure to duty.

hedonics [hiːˈdɒnɪks]

n (functioning as singular)

1. (Psychology) the branch of psychology concerned with the study of pleasant and unpleasant sensations

2. (Philosophy) the study of pleasure, esp in its relation to duty

The part of the abstract where it says that the 'premium is larger in communities with more registered Prii' cracked me up. I joke that in my neighborhood you're most likely to be run over by a bicyclist or a Prius driver who's talking on their smart phone while sipping their green tea from a eco-friendly cup.

And, finally this morning, a present from the NY Times... Pictures of clouds.

A couple of recent-ish journal spreads...

pages 60-61 from Red Lead...

pages 72-73 from Red Lead...

Post 2...

2011-03-02T16:53:00.000-06:00

I'm almost caught up with my envelope exchange doo dah. I mailed my February envelopes off today, and feel totally inspired for the upcoming months.

Pen and ink... And really cool Abstract Expressionism stamps from the USPO!

These ones went much more quickly than last month's. That's supposed to be me, saying the names and addresses of the recipients...

Last weekend, I went to the rally in support of the unions in Wisconsin. Felt kinda cool, 'cos I knew that some of my friends were up there protesting. The funniest thing about the rally here in Texas were the anti-rally protesters... All six of them. They were motorcycle people, five guys and a woman, and the guys were all rigged out in their leathers and colors and caps and boots and were carrying a sign that read "Protect us from the Union thugs!"

Here's what the demonstrators looked like:

Really thuggy looking folks! I learned lots of interesting things at the demonstration, mostly from talking to the State Troopers on bicycles. Who knew Texas had State Troopers on bicycles? The bikes have flashing lights and everything! They told me about how they can use their bicycles to form crowd barriers in riot situations and how much they LOVE being on bicycles. One of them told me he'd done time in the military and been in law enforcement for twelve years. He said the only time he's almost been killed was while riding his bike - as a Trooper - when a lady turned into him. Fortunately, she saw him in time.

Otherwise it's spring here! The trees are all blooming and going for my afternoon walk is a joy because of the flowers and warmth... And the beautiful blue skies...

What's up!

2011-02-18T15:09:00.001-06:00

I'm supposed to be participating in an envelope exchange with the San Antonio Calligraphy Guild. Somehow I'm very behind on doing my envelopes! These are January's. As you can see, I have to do four envelopes a month... Through May! I've got my idea for February's and hope to catch up in the next couple of weeks....

A couple of other things. In my latest journal, I added two fold out pages of black Fabriano Tiziano to play with. I really like using pastels, colored pencils, and watercolor crayons on black stuff. Of course I get to these pages and they interrupt of my flow, since I don't have the time to work on them just then... But they're so fun! And, if you've read my recent (sort of) posts, you'll know that I've mostly given up coffee. I get a cappucino (decaf, with skim milk) once, maybe twice a week these days. It's my big treat! This was done with Caran d'Ache NeoColor II crayons (water soluble).

What else? Ahh, here's a recent page. Not great art, but colorful. Again with the C d'A crayons. I truly love them!

Freezing in Florida

2011-01-13T09:36:00.000-06:00

I guess if you're going to make a NY's resolution about posting daily, you should make sure you have internet access where you're going.

For those who are wondering... I have quit coffee, and don't even seem to be craving it, in the sense that I don't slobber when I smell it brewing... But giving it up forever? We'll see.

I'm in Florida with my family. We're staying on a 300 acre ranch with a huge lake, groves of oranges, and hydroponic strawberries and blueberries. We haven't actually found the blueberries yet, but we have found the strawberries and the oranges are all around us. One of my stepsisters gets up ungodly early every morning and goes out and takes pictures of birds and wildlife. This morning she awoke us all just past the crack of dawn and told us we had to get up, not to change into our clothes, just to grab a blanket and come. Fortunately, I put some pants and shoes and a sweater on. It was FREEZING outside! She drove us to the road alongside the ranch and there we saw icicles all over up to about 3 feet. The lower oranges on the trees had them. The light was shining through them. It was beautiful, very beautiful.


Sprayer with oranges and icicles.

Cold Les and Ginger!

It was also bloody cold! The earth is sandy here. The irrigation lines lie on top of the ground, so they wouldn't be good for a hard freeze, but it's supposed to be in the upper 50s today, so that's fine. I'd love to be able to enjoy all this frozen orange juice, but oranges and grapefruits aren't on the elimination diet for some reason, so I watch others drinking it. Strawberries are on the diet, so I can eat them! There's a little park a couple of miles from here, Lakeland Highlands, it's called. 250,000 years ago it and a few other highlands were all there was of Florida, although 65,000 years ago there was apparently a lot more of it. Who knew?

Lovely longleaf pines grow there, and everything here is covered with spanish moss. There are lots of birds: ibis, egret, Sand Hill cranes, great blue herons, anhingas. I'm not good at taking pictures of birds; that's Pam's job.

Here's Ginger looking for what's making the little trails in the sand... Pam says it's worms... Leslie confirms it.

Are we having fun yet?

You betcha!

It's fixing to get loud... And weird...

2011-01-07T13:45:00.000-06:00

I finished the first wax resist in my new journal, Red Lead. I started it on December 22nd, but had trouble completing it until this morning. It was bugging me, sitting there at the beginning of the journal, unfinished.

The problem I was having was with my crayon holder. I got one from Jerry's Artarama, stuffed my favorite deep blue crayon (Caran d'Ache NeoColor I Wax) into it, and couldn't get the crayon out when I was ready to switch colors. I did color with the other colors holding them by hand, but after I broke two of them - they're very brittle, these crayons - I gave up and went looking for my other crayon holder. It's the same kind, but I couldn't find it.

So there the page sat looking pale and unfinished. I needed to be able to color really hard on a hard surface so there were no uncovered bits of paper showing. Finally this morning I found the other crayon holder, went out to the studio and colored away.

Red Lead, pages 2 and 3.

The odd thing for me about wax resist is that it's unlike many other media that I use. When I get to the part where everything is blocked in and a preliminary coat of color is on the paper, I have to go back over the whole thing and 'color hard,' to fill in those spots. It's boring. I usually do it while listening to podcasts. You might not want to watch a movie, but something is needed to occupy the mind.

Gall/Pizi

2011-01-05T21:37:00.001-06:00

In the picture I posted yesterday, you might notice a poster on the door beside me. That's what happens when you live in an 800 sf house and you have a lot of art; you run out of walls and start putting things on the doors and ceilings.

It's a poster I did back in 1992 for my friend/bandmate Brad Massengill who was part of or was allied with - he'll correct me on all this, I'm sure - the 100th Monkey Project.

It's one of my favorite posters that I've done, even though it doesn't really work too well as a poster; it's too intricate. Here's a detail from the lower left border...

See the monkeys? and the mushroom clouds? and little nuke symbols? Yep, you have to be pretty damn close up to this poster to see all this stuff, which is why I think it doesn't work so well as a poster.

Gall (Pizi in Lakota) was a war chief at the Battle of the Little Big Horn. He was in the area attacked by Major Reno. His two wives and several of his children were killed. "My heart was very bad that day," he said.

After the battle, many of the Indians fled to Canada and didn't come back for four or five years. Gall surrendered to the US government in 1881, and settled on what became the Standing Rock Reservation. He became a Christian and a man of peace. He turned away from the Ghost Dance movement, which Sitting Bull had become involved in. This is all much more complicated than I can tell here, but the Indian Agents were terrified of the Ghost Dancers and orders were sent out to arrest Sitting Bull. A shoot out followed and he was killed, along with seven of his followers. Other Ghost Dancers, led by Big Foot, fled through the snow to Wounded Knee Creek, on the Pine Ridge Res where they were massacred by US troops.

Why was the government so spooked by the Ghost Dance movement? Who knows... It's just one of those things that seem to inflame people. Valentine McGillycuddy (how's THAT for a name), a one-time Indian Agent on the Standing Rock Res, said "The "The coming of the troops has frightened the Indians. If the Seventh-Day Adventists prepare ascension robes for the Second Coming of the Savior, the Unites States Army is not put in motion to prevent them. Why should not the Indians have the same privilege? If the troops remain, trouble is sure to come."

favorite things

2011-01-04T20:09:00.000-06:00

I get on kicks where I eat the same thing for several days... Sometimes it's peanut butter - well, not now on the ED (elimination diet) - or onion soup, or squash soup, or raspberries. I am perfectly happy eating these things, but then, one day, I'll want something else, or, at least not want what it is that I've been eating avidly, and it's over. This week it's avocados... Avocados with lime juice, lemon pepper and pink Himalayan salt sprinkled on them. The ones I've been eating are the big ones, from Florida, and I only hope that I'm still on this kick when I'm in Florida next week.

It's the same with clothes. Last year I was into leggings with big shirts and a vest cinching it in. This year it's been blue jeans that are more like leggings with a couple of shirts... And my space boots.

I bought them from Zappo's a couple of years back. They're bronze metallic and they made me laugh when I saw them, so I bought them. Who knew they would be so comfortable? Just before Thanksgiving, I sprained my good knee. Within two days my bad knee was out as well. Strangely, these boots were the most comfortable footwear I had. It's not that I don't have other flat-heeled shoes, just that these worked the best. They're warm, too, but most of all they're shiny! I'm also wearing my favorite winter shawl, one that I got in Mitla, in the state of Oaxaca. It's wonderfully warm and cozy, and makes me think of Oaxaca...

When I was younger I used to say contemptuously "Oh, yeah, I'm shaking in my space boots."

It's nice to actually own a pair to shake in...

Day 3...

2011-01-03T19:18:00.000-06:00

I am definitely affected by the weather. Today was one of those grey cold days - ok, it got up to 60, but, somehow it still felt cold - and I never seemed to really wake up. I suppose the decaffing is really catching up with me. I feel terrifically proud that I haven't bitten anyone's head off! Of course, I didn't see that many people today, so that may have something to do with it.

I did get up, make my pitiful allowance of coffee, and start writing in my journal, so at least the day started in a wonderful way. I wrote about one of the most wonderful winter things: the light... And the color the sky is, a deep pure blue.

Pages 10 and 11 from Red Lead.

I love to look at the sky and at clouds. I can still remember clouds I saw in my childhood. My Dad would pull over to the side of the road and stop the car every now and then and say "Look at that cloud!" and the two of us would sit there and admire it. He didn't usually do this with my Mom in the car; it was our thing. It wasn't that Mom didn't like clouds; she loved the house she had after my parents split up because the living room windows faced the west and she could watch the sunset at night.

You see a pair of glasses peeking out from the margin. I bought them - tiger print on a silvery-purple color - at Central Market yesterday. Somehow I have lost my other glasses, perhaps a symptom of the fuzzy thinking that comes with caffeine withdrawl. Hopefully at some point I'll start thinking straight again...

And writing about something other than coffee!

Day two...

2011-01-02T14:27:00.000-06:00

For the New Year, I started an elimination diet, one of those ones where you eliminate all the foods that are most likely to annoy your body: dairy, wheat, beef & pork & shellfish, most citrus, nightshades, alcohol, and caffeine, as well as assorted other items, processed foods, etc... The Usual Suspects as it were. I've done this before, but I never even tried to give up caffeine. I might cut down a bit... Up the ratio of decaf that I use, but QUIT caffeine? Not going to happen!

This year I figured, why not go whole hog? Why not give up caffeine, or die trying, which, I swear to the gods I don't believe in, is what giving up coffee - my form of caffeine - and the primary one they're talking about, feels like to me. There are the headaches, the lethargy, the sleepiness, the general fog that come with a serious coffee drinker giving up their drug of choice.

Pages 6 & 7 from Red Lead.

Now for those of you who may be thinking that this is a blog primarily about my journals, let me just say that an awful lot of coffee drinking goes on in my journals. An awful lot. There are coffee rings on pages of journals, photos of coffee mugs, commentaries on coffee, shoot, there's a lot about coffee...

So quitting drinking coffee has serious repercussions, on top of the lethargy, fatigue, sleepiness, wooly thinking and all the other stuff. I'm losing something to write about!

Perhaps I'll start writing paeans to herbal tea.

Detail of really cute mug...

Perhaps not.

Now in case you're wondering about that mug... I saw it at the HEB (the large family-owned chain of grocery stores here in Texas) and it was $2. You can't tell it from the drawing, but it's H U G E! (Actually, it seems like an interesting approach to putting up Christmas lights...)

So, I've cut down daily for the last three days on my ratio of caffeine to decaf, and cut down on the amount I make, and, yup, the headaches - I never get headaches, for pete's sake - have come, and the lethargy, and the wooly thinking and the sleepiness. Last night I went into my bedroom around 8 thinking I would sit down on my bed for a bit and look at a magazine I'd gotten. I fell fast asleep immediately, with the lights and my clothes on, and didn't wake up until midnight. I sat up, and thot "Uh oh, I won't be able to go back to sleep now," changed into my pjs, lay down and woke up at 8 am. That's twelve hours almost of sleep. TWELVE HOURS! Teenagers sleep for twelve hours; adults do not.

Well, apparently caffeine-deprived ones do...

And thank you to all of you who posted encouraging words.

1•1•11

2011-01-01T18:36:00.000-06:00

My friend, Ricë, has once again been guilt tripping me about my blog, so I'm writing. I've just started a new journal, titled Red Lead. My last one was Mellow Yellow, so maybe I'm on some kind of a roll here, or maybe not. Red lead is a pigment that was used by scribes to make the initials in red. This morning I wrote 1•1•1 1, and it made me quite happy. I threw a bunch of gold in between them, and was even happier!

My friend, Roz, thinks that you should set your intent for the coming year by doing what you want to do in the year on that day. So today I'm writing on the blog, doing art in my journal, and eating healthy food. I may try to paint a bit, and, of course, I'll read.

My grandson, Arlo, came over for a bit this afternoon, and I take that as a good sign, as well.

Traveling...

2010-05-11T08:25:00.000-05:00

I call this melted Ricë! It's a screen shot I took during

our video chat when I was at the beach...

The first thing that would come back into focus was,

of course, her mouth!

Last night Ricë and I were talking about traveling, and what one thing you could do that would make your traveling 'easy.' I came up with two, of course. The first was the coffee. I need to be able to make coffee in my room or wherever I'm staying. I don't want to have to go to a hotel lobby to get coffee. I want coffee while I'm in my PJs, without having to put on make up. And, yes, dear reader, a trip outside the hotel room would require that I was showered, had my teeth and hair brushed, and had on my make up. But I can't put on my make up if I'm asleep, so I need the coffee right away.

Most hotels these days - I usually stay at Days Inns - have those little coffee makers with little pods of disgustingly weak coffee. I carry filters and bags of my lovely 50/50 mix of dark French Roast and Midnight Sun. I also carry a French press and a little water heater thingy, in case I stay someplace weird where they don't have a coffee pot. I make enough so that I can have my coffee, get dressed, write a tad in my journal, and then make a bit more before I get on the road.

I also need some way to de-stress when I'm traveling. (Don't even bother suggesting that it would be less stressful if I gave up caffeine. Don't.) I carry a yoga mat and some exercise bands so I can stretch. The problem is that there's usually not enough room to do yoga easily in a hotel. They have refrigerators - not working, but there taking up space anyway - and TVs and stuff. So I guess the yoga matt is more for my mind. I like to walk every day, but that's hard to do at most Days Inns as they're right beside the highway... Not usually a good place to walk.

I'm going to have to give this whole thing a bit more attention on my next driving trip. I prefer to just get in the car and drive until I'm where I want to be. I stop for gas, and do a bizarre set of movements and stretches while I'm gassing up, but I don't generally stop for anything else... Except if I hit rush hour in a strange city. A couple of years ago, I hit Memphis at rush hour. Traffic was crazy and people were nuts but they were Memphis nuts, not Austin, Texas nuts, so I wasn't in sync with them. I pulled off the road at a huge shopping mall and went inside and got a hair cut, bought some make up and looked at shoes for an hour. By the time I left, traffic was moving fine and I could drive another hour or so to a cheaper Days Inn. The ones near big cities are more expensive.

My mom used to travel with a bottle of Jack Daniels and a couple of real glasses. She had one of those old, plaid thermos bags that had at one time carried two thermi. She would have a thermos of coffee (which she drank from the thermos top) and the bottle of Jack Black with the glasses. When we got to a hotel, my job was to get the ice. Her comfort and relaxation came in the same container.

Smart lady!

Home

2010-05-10T08:55:00.001-05:00

I love traveling, but I love being home, too. Such a dilemma! Home is all the small joys... My favorite coffee - a mix of Equal Exchange coffees that I buy at Wheatsville, my local food co-op. It's a wonderful thing to sit in one's own house with a cat on one's lap and drink a cup of coffee and fiddle on the computer... Check your email, read the NY Times and BBC sites, and contemplate your day.

There's so much to catch up on when you get home, even from a short trip. There's all the mail. Just sorting it - the junk from the stuff that's important - is a PITA. There's laundry to do, so, when I first get back, I feel like I'm just a tad 'behind the beat.' On this last trip, most of that came from getting up at 4 in the morning to leave Chapel Hill and fly home. It totally discombobulates me to get up that early. There's such a huge difference - for me - between getting up at 4 am and getting up at 6 am. I know myself, and the surest way for me to get sick is to have to get up before 6 am and do something stressful, like fly.

Not that flying itself is stressful, but you're so completely NOT in charge of anything once you get to the airport. And the food at airports - other than Austin's airport - just sucks. It's not food; it's some kind of plastic food-like substance that tastes gross and costs big bucks. I usually take my own food. Thank goodness no one's tried to put a bomb in a mango lately! I carry an empty plastic water bottle with me to refill at water fountains. Plus, at RDU, both Terminals 1 & 2 have 2nd Edition Booksellers, a locally-owned second-hand book store. Terminal 1 has the 'big' store; Terminal 2 is more of a kiosk type thing, but still, locally-owned! Used!

Austin's airport, for those of you who have not been lucky enough to fly into Austin, has no chain food places. Or bookstores. It's real food. It may not be healthy food - it's still BBQ, ice cream, Mexican and pizza - but it's actual food cooked by real people. And the bookstore is our local, independent BookPeople.

This year I'm making a real effort NOT to buy anymore bottles of water, and to carry a reusable coffee cup with me so I don't have to use another plastic/styrofoam/paper cup. I have one in my car, but remembering to take it into a coffee place is difficult.

And I haven't even tried to get one through airport security. Maybe next time.

At the beach

2010-05-06T07:03:00.003-05:00

Old Baldy, the oldest lighthouse in NC. Not a working lighthouse, but still cool.

May and October are the best times to go to the beach, I think. It's not too hot yet, and it's before the kids get out from school, so it's relatively uncrowded. I'm on Bald Head Island, the southern barrier beach in NC, where Cape Fear is. To the east is the Atlantic, to the west (more or less) is the Cape Fear River. In between is a barrier island with a beach on one side and tidal marshes on the other. I like the marshes.

There are birds here. Big birds! Egrets, ibis, herons. There used to be a lot of clapper rails, but I haven't heard any in the last couple of years. I never saw one of them; they just kind of hung out in the reeds and made noise when you went by in a kayak.

Ibis Lake. No ibises (ibii?) here, but lots of egrets.

The vegetation looks a lot like my part of Texas. Texas is a big damn state, so it does NOT look like the vegetation out where Ricë is, which would be no damn vegetation. The only thing they have in profusion here that we don't in my part of TX are pine trees. The live oaks and palmettos and various palms all look familiar.

I think the air here is the most delicious air in the world. It's sweet and tangy. I ride around on a bike taking big gulps of it. Riding a bike here is good because it's mostly flat, the island, and almost anyone can ride. There's an old coaster bike in the garage that works mostly. One pedal is a little wonky - it's set in to the crankarm at an angle, so your knee moves in an ellipse as you pedal - but no one goes very fast here. On the island, only emergency services, Island services, and contractors can drive cars and trucks. The rest of us get around on electric golf carts and bikes and by foot! That's partly why the air is so heavenly, I do believe.

The view from the porch. The creek at high tide.

One of my sisters brought kayaks, small ones, so we've been able to take to the creek and paddle about and float. I love being on the water. I actually love paddling.

We're here to scatter my Dad's ashes. I know, it's illegal, but we're not letting a little thing like that stop us! We scattered some in the Atlantic, and dolphins came and swam offshore. The day before yesterday, it rained all day. Just before sunset, the clouds opened a gap up in the west, allowing the day's pent-up sunshine to flood through with it's warm red light, and turn the tops of the marsh reeds to a stunning red.

We all ran to look and then saw the rainbow. No! Two rainbows, the inner one complete, starting on Middle Island across from us, and ending somewhere off Cape Fear in the Atlantic. I got some ashes and headed out in a kayak to a place in the creek where I could see the Village of Bald Head and Old Baldy, NC's oldest standing lighthouse (it's not the real lighthouse anymore for the ship channel; I think that's the Oak Island Light, but it's cool looking). I dribbled the ashes in the water, looking at the clouds, golden on the bottom, ragged and dark on the tops, the Village backlit in a wash of gold light.

Dad would've loved it.

Gimp Leg Winnie the Peach Wilson... or something

2010-04-27T08:49:00.000-05:00

My friend, Nancy, sent me this. I love the blues and was playing some on my guitar just last night. It's funny because I was listening to Larry Monroe's Blue Monday last night, during his Hound Dog Taylor set and thinking similar thoughts. And for all you people who don't live in Austin, you can listen to KUT online. We've got some fabulous music shows! They've even got an iPhone app.

HOW TO SING THE BLUES: A PRIMER
--submitted by Charles Johnston

1. Most Blues begin with: "Woke up this morning...."

2. "I got a good woman" is a bad way to begin the Blues, unless you stick something nasty in the next line like, "I got a good woman, with the meanest face in town."

3. The Blues is simple. After you get the first line right, repeat it. Then find something that rhymes... sort of: "Got a good woman with the meanest face in town. Yes, I got a good woman with the meanest face in town. Got teeth like Margaret Thatcher, and she weigh 500 pound."

4. The Blues is not about choice. You stuck in a ditch, you stuck in a ditch--ain't no way out.

5. Blues cars: Chevys, Fords, Cadillacs and broken-down trucks. Blues don't travel in Volvos, BMWs, or Sport Utility Vehicles. Most Blues transportation is a Greyhound bus or a southbound train. Jet aircraft and state-sponsored motor pools ain't even in the running. Walkin' plays a major part in the blues lifestyle. So does "fixin' to die."

6. Teenagers can't sing the Blues. They ain't fixin' to die yet. Adults sing the Blues. In Blues, "adulthood" means being old enough to get the electric chair if you shoot a man in Memphis.

7. Blues can take place in New York City but not in Hawaii or any place in Canada. Hard times in Minneapolis or Seattle is probably just clinical depression. Chicago, St. Louis, and Kansas City are still the best places to have the Blues. You cannot have the blues in any place that don't get rain.

8. A man with male pattern baldness ain't the blues. A woman with male pattern baldness is. Breaking your leg 'cause you were skiing is not the blues. Breaking your leg 'cause a alligator be chomping on it is.

9. You can't have no Blues in a office or a shopping mall. The lighting is wrong. Go outside to the parking lot or sit by the dumpster.

10. Good places for the Blues:
a. highway
b. jailhouse
c. empty bed
d. bottom of a whiskey glass

Bad places for the Blues:
a. Nordstrom's
b. gallery openings
c. Ivy League institutions
d. golf courses

11. No one will believe it's the Blues if you wear a suit, 'less you happen to be a old ethnic person, and you slept in it.

12. Do you have the right to sing the Blues? Yes, if:
a. you older than dirt
b. you blind
c. you shot a man in Memphis
d. you can't be satisfied

No, if:
a. you have all your teeth
b. you were once blind but now can see
c. the man in Memphis lived
d. you have a 401K or trust fund

13. Blues is not a matter of color. It's a matter of bad luck. Tiger Woods cannot sing the blues. Sonny Liston could. Ugly white people also got a leg up on the blues.

14. If you ask for water and your darlin' give you gasoline, it's the Blues. Other acceptable Blues beverages are:
a. cheap wine
b. whiskey or bourbon
c. muddy water
d. nasty black coffee

The following are NOT Blues beverages:
a. Perrier
b. Chardonnay
c. Snapple
d. Slim Fast

15. If death occurs in a cheap motel or a shotgun shack, it's a Blues death. Stabbed in the back by a jealous lover is another Blues way to die. So are the electric chair, substance abuse and dying lonely on a broken-down cot. You can't have a Blues death if you die during a tennis match or while getting liposuction.

16. Some Blues names for women:
a. Sadie
b. Big Mama
c. Bessie
d. Fat River Dumpling

17. Some Blues names for men:
a. Joe
b. Willie
c. Little Willie
d. Big Willie

18. Persons with names like Michelle, Amber, Jennifer, Debbie, and Heather can't sing the Blues no matter how many men they shoot in Memphis.

19. Make your own Blues name Starter Kit:
a. name of physical infirmity (Blind, Cripple, Lame, etc.)
b. first name (see above) plus name of fruit (Lemon, Lime, etc.)
c. last name of President (Jefferson, Johnson, Fillmore, etc.)
For example: Blind Lime Jefferson, Jakeleg Lemon Johnson or Cripple Kiwi Fillmore, etc. (Well, maybe not "Kiwi.")

20. I don't care how tragic your life: if you own a computer, you cannot sing the blues.

Art with a capital 'A'...

2010-04-25T22:37:00.001-05:00

That's me! Taken by Ricë!

Another FABulous day here in Austin. My friends Ricë and Earl came to town today and we walked down to the Art Festival on Cesar Chavez. It was a sunny warm day, but with enough of a breeze that it wasn't overwhelming. We ate Amy's ice cream and wandered around and looked at everything, but, then probably most of you know that since Ricë tweeted about every two minutes. Lots of people stopped to talk to Ricë because she's so, ummm, unusual and colorful looking. Earl was pretty colorful, too. Me? Drab!

I was planning to work on my new journal today, but I didn't get much done on that. After we walked around every booth at the Art thing, we went over to Congress and had flights of wine and cheese at Cork & Co. It was quite delicious, but triply so because of the company. Ricë had a flight called "It's complicated," and I had one of all Cabs, and Earl had some that were fairly sweet, but all nicely balanced with the cheeses. Fortunately we walked back up SoCo to get home. A guy offered to sell us some vagina necklaces. We weren't really sure where on your vagina you'd put a necklace, and didn't really want to ask, so we just said "No, thank you!" We did have to stop and get a cupcake at Hey Cupcake on the way home...

Ricë and Earl photographing me photographing them on Congress...

Next were the trips to Whole Foods and Central Market so Ricë could get genmaicha tea and vegetables and cheeses and stuff. They were playing a cool mix of sixties stuff - Beatles and MoTown - that had me dancing the mango mambo in the aisles. Ricë was dancing, too. As we were checking out the security guy, a DPS agent asked Earl if he had it (us) under control. "Got any handcuffs?" Earl asked.

"Oh, a DATE," the guy said.

Hah!

So maybe tomorrow I'll finish the journal.

Elmer Day!

2010-04-23T09:55:00.002-05:00

I show Ben Franklin my journal.

He shows me the Declaration of Independence.

Fair trade, I think.

I am in Austin again after being wined and dined and made much of. I went to Franklin College, in Franklin, IN, my grandfather, Elmer Davis's alma mater, for an awards ceremony. This is the 100th anniversary of his graduation from Franklin and they occasionally give an award to an alum who has distinguished himself in the field of Journalism. Joe McConnell was the honoree. It's not an annual thing, by any means, but every now and then the college chooses to honor someone, and, since this year was the centenary of Elmer's graduation, Franklin invited me and my step-mom to come and be honored, too.

It all had a rather ridiculous aspect to it. No one knows who my grandfather is/was anymore. No one. If you're over eighty and can remember anything, you might think his name was familiar, but how many people is that? And among young people? My generation? No one. I have met only two people my age who knew who knew who my grandfather was in my whole life: both were in radio.

So to go somewhere, and have people pick you up in a limo, to have college students tell you they are honored to shake your hand, to have a whole fraternity of young men wear caps with your grandfather's name emblazoned on them and give you an award just for being the progeny of a now-unknown man, well, you begin to think you're stuck in some kind of movie, like The Truman Show, or you have slipped into some alternate reality.

Admittedly, Franklin College, with 1000 students, is a small alternate reality. It's a truly beautiful, tiny liberal arts college in a lovely tiny town in the middle of Indiana. It could be used as a movie set for a turn of the century movie... The last century, of course. There were dogwoods, redbuds, lilacs, violets all still abloom, making the campus even more beautiful.

For all its tinyness, it has a journalism school, not a school of communications, like the august university in my home town, with its emphasis on broadcast media. No, this is a real 'J' school, with the emphasis on writing and the critical thought it brings with it. Yes, Franklin has a broadcast studio, and a radio station, and video and audio editing capabilities, all up to date with the latest equipment. And they have a public relations department, because, I found out, that is what a lot of J majors go into. But it all begins with writing. (The college president, Jay Moseley, and I had a chat about the importance, not only of 'writing,' but of handwriting during the honors dinner.)

The college is named for Ben Franklin and there are statues of him all over. One statue gets repainted frequently by students.

Here Ben is, painted pink, with a silver metallic bra,

for breast cancer awareness.

Ginger and I stayed at the lovely Alumni house, and ate lunch at the student union, which had a wonderful peanut butter and jelly sandwich station: six kinds of bread, bagels, butter, cream cheese, peanut butter and two kinds of jelly! They had regular food too, including a great salad bar.

Seniors Whitney and Isaac with Prof. Ray Begovich

on the porch of the Alumni House.

I find it very hard to return to reality. No limos, no one knowing who my grandfather is or why he was important, and, sadly, no pb&j bar.

Darn.

SXSW kicks my butt

2010-03-19T09:23:00.000-06:00

Ooof. What can I say? I had too much fun yesterday. It's a damn good thing I got as much exercise as I did, or I'd really be hurting!

It's SXSW here in Austin, the huge music/film/web fest that's been going on for almost 30 years. It started out as a way to promote local bands, but now they bring bands in from all over and have big concerts of well-known acts. If you like music or film, it's a heck of a lot of fun.

My neigborhood, SoCo, is chock-a-block with alternative venues. They're not part of the official SXSW, and do tend to feature local bands. The San Jose Motel, Güerro's and a bunch of little shops have music. The vendors that usually only appear on weekends are set up, but best of all the streets are filled with people. Cool people. People wearing wonderful clothing! People with foreign accents! I swear I saw Xeni Jardin at an event yesterday! I even drew a picture of her in my journal because her outfit was so cool. I bought drinks for a singer. I talked to a journalist in a bar. OK, it was really a restaurant that serves drinks. (OK, OK, it was Manuel's!)

It's something like $495 to get a badge to get into all the featured things, but you can troll the streets for places that don't require badges and there are a lot of outdoor concerts to keep the natives from getting too restless. They get restless because they're stuck in the fucking traffic. Half the streets downtown are closed off for this event, and the other half seem to have one lane closed for road construction. Now whose brilliant idea was that? (The construction, I mean.)

So. The cats are getting fed late. My feet hurt from all that walking. My head feels strangely OK, considering.

And I still have another two days to go!

I will survive.

Post-Babylonian Pediment

2010-03-18T08:34:00.000-06:00

Post-Babylonian Artifact is a term my friend Brad Massengill came up with years and years and years ago. I have, in my 'collection,' a couple of Brad's PBAs, and am now happily making my own.

After eleven years of living in this lovely little house, I am finally getting around to putting up the trim. Why, you may wonder, has it taken me eleven years to get around to doing this? The truth is that I have paid for this to be done twice, and it never got done. Other things got done instead; there were some misunderstandings about what could be done for how much, and, well, it came down to me having to do it myself... Which meant I needed the tools to do it... And then I cut my hand off with the table saw... (No, no, not quite... It just seemed that way.) (There's a post about that somewhere here.)

So, finally, having overcome my reluctance to use the table saw again, I finished the floor, which meant I could do the trim. Then I decided I wanted to do the beadboard, which meant more trim, and then I had a vision... A vision of things sitting on top of the doors. Carved things. Suns. Moons. Stars. Hearts. Hands. All sorts of visions filled my head. Unfortunately, I don't carve and I'm not about to start trying. I do, however, have a jig saw, and thought perhaps I could create the thing I had seen with it.

It's a pediment. I'm not sure why something that goes on top of something is called a 'pediment.' It seems to me that a pediment should be at the foot of something, but what do I know?

Somehow the whole Post-Babylonian thing is much in my mind these days. I have been reading with sheer and utter delight the Thursday Next series by Jason Fforde. It's a series of alternate reality detective novels set in a England in the mid-eighties where literature is much, much more important than it is in the generally accepted reality of 02010. (This blog is and always will be Y10K compliant.) (Unless I forget.) Don't bother if you're not into books or alternate reality or silliness. The books are sort of a cross between Philip K Dick and Brazil but in a literary vein. I loved PK in college, especially Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? and Ubik.

The sport of my mad mother...

2010-03-12T11:04:00.000-06:00

Michael Nunley and me...

Looking through an old photo album today, I came across photos from my high school play, the one I 'acted' in. The one I helped with, Henry V, was a much better play, but I only helped with makeup and costumes on that one. I can remember speeches from Henry V - the ones my friend, Nancy Lee, as Chorus had - but none from TSOMMM. I don't think I did a very good job of remembering them at the time, come to think of it. As I recall, it wasn't the best play in the world, but I love these costumes... And the make up!

Wendy, John Samford, Phyllis Wheeler (at bottom), Joyce Fischer at left.

Don't we all look like vicious thugs? The costumes were made out of fake fur and were very hot, as I remember. As I recall there was a lot of snarling in the play. And here is one of my favorite photos from the play. It wasn't at the time, but somehow the image is oddly reminiscent of a more recent one. At least I didn't have to stand on a box and worry about electrodes being attached to my genitals...

visitation

2010-03-10T21:49:00.001-06:00

Last night I went to the visitation of an old friend of mine. Let's call him George. He was in the Optimist Club with me, and was my mentor, so there was no way I could get out of going.

I'm not big on visitations, you know, where you view the deceased. I don't think it's a Unitarian thing, at least I never remember one as a kid. We're more the 'burn 'em and urn 'em' types.

There were a lot of other folks from our club there and we stood around and told stories about George and the things he had done. He was the resident pessimist in the club, and as such, will be sorely missed. At a certain point I went over to one of George's sons to offer my condolences. He's a nice man, and we chatted briefly, and then I guess he assumed I would want to view his dad, and so he sort of shooed me into the viewing room. I didn't want to duck out, so I walked up to the casket and looked.

George looked very, umm, well, dead, which was to be expected, I suppose. Normally the people in coffins look a bit more like waxed fruit and I guess that's what I was expecting, so it was a bit of a shock. There was another man also viewing George just to my left. He turned to me, stuck out his hand and said "Hullo, I'm Alan H. How did you know George?" (The names here have been changed a bit... Perhaps.) I said that we were in the same club. He told me that he and his parents had rented some property from George over on 6th Street. "My parents were So and So H. and Such and Such H. Did you know them?" he asked. I allowed as how the names sounded familiar. His father, he told me, was a famous physicist. "Ahh," I said, having no idea why the name was familiar but that wasn't it.

He said that, in their decline, his parents had lived in a nursing home. They had died in 2000 within five months of one another! George used to come visit them. There was a 95-year-old woman in the nursing home named Laverne, which is only odd because George's wife is/was named Laverne. One day Alan asked George if he wanted to meet 95-year-old Laverne. "There's only one Laverne in my life," George told him.

The whole time we were having this long and somewhat bizarre conversation I pretty much had to stare at George. The very dead George in his coffin. It was either that or stare at Alan, and, frankly, I didn't want to encourage him. I wanted to run. Finally I had the brains to look to the other side and saw a long line of people waiting for their chance to view George. A very long line of polite people, people unwilling to interrupt the tete a tete that Alan and I were earnestly having in front of the coffin. And I knew one of the people in the line, another Optimist, and could turn to Alan and say "Dear me, I see a friend I must go say "Hullo!" to, " and dash off.

It was only when I'd entirely escaped the funeral home and was driving home that it occurred to me that the reason the name 'H.' sounded familiar was that this very same man had buttonholed me at Laverne's funeral five years ago, where we'd had a very similar conversation.

dream images

2010-03-05T20:36:00.001-06:00

Pages 92-93, Through a Glass Darkly

Sometimes images come to me in dreams, as both of these did this week. The one on the right came first, and the one at the lower left, second. They're both mixed media: watercolor crayons (Caran d'Ache Neocolor II), watercolors, including metallic ones, gloss medium, and varnish.

There's some marginalia, too. The bindery got in a lovely little book of hours, written out and illuminated in Paris in the 1470s. The calligraphy is gorgeous. The illuminations are gorgeous. The marginalia is gorgeous. The page size is about 5x7", and the text area is really tiny, maybe 3x4," so there are BIG margins. The illustration on this page is about double the size of the one in the text. I'm using cheesy gold pens; the book's pages are, of course, gilded. Oh, it is a thing of beauty!

new images

2010-02-11T20:41:00.001-06:00

Image from Through a Glass Darkly, pages 78-79

Here are two images from my journal, a jaguar and Abner. This is me messing around with photo transfers, gold leaf and crayons. You can't really see the gold leaf, but it's there, in the eyes.

I put a lot of goopy stuff on the page, shoot, I don't know what all... Light modeling paste among other things.

small joys...

2010-02-11T09:25:00.000-06:00

Spotiswode, on the stove...

Shit. You just cannot be excited - about the weather, anyway - when it's 37 when you wake up and the high expected is 38, AND the fucking bouncy stuff is bouncing off the frozen grass in your back yard... Alternating with freezing raindrops... They're not actually freezing, they just feel that way when they slide down the back of your neck when you're out feeding cats. Nope. Just not very exciting weather.

It's a good thing I'm working on the beadboard panels today for the house, because flinging paint around IS exciting. And I'm mostly flinging around red and yellow paint, so it's primarily exciting. The baseboard trim is mostly done. It's not nailed in because I don't have a nail gun, but I'll borrow one soon. For now it's in place and looks like it's been put up and gives me a feeling of small joy and accomplishment every time I walk in the house. I'd take a picture but it's nothing really, a truly small joy.

On top of that, it's Thursday, the day Mi Madres has tortilla soup. The special is a huge bowl of tortilla soup and a beef taco, which I always get to go. They have good hot sauce. Today is a perfect soup day. Plus, I have a cat on my lap, one who looks up at me every now and again with a look that says - to me - "I absolutely positively adore you." It probably more accurately is saying "When are you going to feed us our warm cat food?" but everyone needs their little illusions to get by.

From that, you can infer that the cats are in the house today, or in and out, as they choose. It's too cold on the porch to leave them there all day, although some of them like it. That, too, is lovely, if you like cats.

Abner goes away

2010-02-08T20:46:00.000-06:00

Abner!

I had to have one of my favorite cats, Abner, put to sleep today. He's been diabetic for about 3 years and was having a lot of bad days recently, days where he wouldn't eat. But he would purr for me, and talk to me. Saturday was a bad day, and, if the vet had been open, I would've taken him in and had him put to sleep. As it was, I went out and lay down in the grass in the backyard next to him and talked to him. It was a beautiful day. No rain. Warmish and a blue sky with nary a cloud. Yesterday he perked up and ate some of my special food for him: canned salmon (people salmon) pureed with water. I had a heating pad and blanket rigged for him and made sure he was sleeping there. Went out a couple of times in the night and moved the other cats so he would have the prime spot. But sometime this morning he got down off the bedding and snagged his claw in it. He couldn't get it loose and lay on the deck in the rain until I found him. I don't know how long it was, but, in his condition, any time was too long. He meowed several times when I picked him up, and I took it to mean that he knew it was time and wanted me to know. I put him back on the heating pad and wrapped him in blankets and fed everyone and called the vet and off we went in the rain.

I had to wait almost an hour at the vets. I didn't want to wait inside with the other animals and cheeriness, so I sat outside on a bench with him, cradling him and talking. The sun came out and I held him so that it shone on him. I called jc and put him on speakerphone so he could talk to Abner and tell him how much he meant to him. And then they came and got me and we did it and it was over.

It was the right thing. I know that.

Abner was one of those cats who establish a mind communication with you. I've only had a couple in my life that I felt that way about. I could tell Abner, who lived on the front porch, to 'bring' me another cat, a standoffish one, and Abner would siddle up to him or her and head butt them and start working them over towards me, rubbing his head against theirs, but looking up at me every so often to make sure I knew they were coming.

So I'll miss him very very much.

New stuff

2010-01-12T21:40:00.003-06:00

Pages 46-47 of Through a Glass Darkly

I had been meaning to write about how I bind the split boards books, but somehow that hasn't happened yet, so I thought I'd show you some of my recent pages.

I went to NC just after xmas. I had to go to Barnes and Noble to buy a gift certificate for my sister-in-law, and, of course, I got sucked in by the bargain books. (I always do, I always do...) This time it was The Tudor Chronicles by Susan Doran for only $19.98! t's a coffee table book with lots of pics that goes year by year through the reigns of the various Tudors. There are a lot of cool examples of calligraphy, but, most excitingly, this is the time of the Northern Renaissance, and there are a lot of Hans Holbein the Younger's portraits illustrating the book.

Just seeing them put me on a Hans Holbein kick, so when I got home I had to get a couple of books on him from the library and one on the Wars of the Roses, which preceded the Tudors. It's the most amazing thing. The pictures of all the kings before Henry VII (the first Tudor) are caricature-ish stick figure Gothic things... And then blam! Along comes the fine, realistic portraits by Hans Holbein!

I decided I wanted to do a portrait like one of Hans Holbein's. And who would be a better person for me to do a portrait of than my Dad? There are only a couple of problems here. One) I can't draw portraits. Two) I can't paint like Hans Holbein. But I'm not going to let little things like that stop me...

Here's another image. This one came to me in a dream. It wasn't part of the dream story, it was just there. It lingered when I woke up, so I decided to put it in my journal.

Speaking of dream images, here's a detail from the first image, another one that came to me while I was dreaming but not part of a story. It's a cat's eye on a pedestal. Does it mean something? Who knows?

Okra, who knew?

2009-11-27T07:45:00.003-06:00

Yesterday I had another Thanksgiving dinner that couldn't be beat at my friends Ray and Aline's house. They live outside of Austin in what used to be the country, although civilization is encroaching yearly.

My Thanksgiving started the night before when I cooked my own small turkey at home, just for me and the cats. I'd gotten home late from the tree lot, so I ended up popping it in the oven, going out for a drink with my daughter, coming home, going to bed and setting the alarm to get up at midnight and take it out of the oven, debone and destuff it and put the bone in my ongoing pot of chicken broth. I heated that up, turned it off, went back to bed, reset the alarm clock for an hour later, and got up and put that in the fridge. So I had turkey yesterday morning when I got up.

I made gravy and cranberry orange relish and then went and taught my exercise class at the retirement home. I teach there on Thursdays, so I always go on Thanksgiving and a couple members show up and we breathe and make room for turkey! I called family. I packed my car to go to Ray and Aline's: bread pudding and whisky sauce (1/2 a bread pudding recipe, 3 whisky sauce recipes) and an appetizer: cream cheese whipped in a bowl, a hunk of smoked salmon, a little ramekin of habañero jelly and some water crackers. Easy-peasy and yumm. My strategy was to stick with just appetizers and desserts since I had my own turkey at home, and that's pretty much what I did. Cassie, R&A's daughter, had made a wonderful corn, squash and red pepper soup. There were ten adults and five kids sitting down to dinner and it was all good and wonderful.

We did the obligatory things: a blessing holding hands, drinking lots of wine, a walk to the end of the driveway and back between dinner and dessert. A stroll in the overgrown back yard/garden between dessert and The Game. (UT/Aggie for those of you who aren't from Texas.) Their beds are full of Texas winter garden plants: carrots, beets, lettuces, broccoli, arugula, but there is a whole row of still functioning okra. I never realized how beautiful okra plants were.

My friend, Diane, says they're related to hibiscus. I picked this one and brought it home to remind me of the bounty and beauty of Thanksgiving.

Just a quickie!

2009-11-25T10:06:00.005-06:00

Here is the next page in TAGD. Another waterish color illustration, some lettering, and a business card from my friend, Amy Nelson. It's one of those new, cool, tiny business cards, expensive, but great images and a nifty little carrier. Two-sided... But, what I'm actually writing about is the importance of always having some kind of label or sticky stuff to stick stuff into your journal with.

You can see the little bit of label in this photo. It's just an Avery mailing label that's been spattered with paint... Lots of paint. Metallic paint! Other things you can do are to run the labels through your printer. You can use any size or shape of label; the little round ones are extra cool and you can use the grid they pop out of for decorative effect, too. I also carry a glue stick with me to stick stuff down to the page, but if you want to be able to see what's on the back of a card, you'll want to use labels and some kind of little hinge.

Off to do Christmas tree stuff. I just can't resist posting this pic of a really cute little Noble fir! It's 2 ft high and 2 ft wide...

Ta Dah! The newest journal!

2009-11-22T16:34:00.007-06:00

Yup. It's that time. I titled this one Through A Glass Darkly. There's nothing significant about the title, exactly, it's just that I planned on using a sheet of mica inset in the cover, and, well, you can see through it... Darkly. Sometimes what seems obvious is even more obvious than you thought. You might notice that the word D A R K L Y isn't on the cover. It's on the front flysheet, and you're supposed to be able to see through to it, umm, darkly. The mica came from Asheville Mica. They have a cool sample kit of 6"x6" sheets in several colors, two thicknesses (.015 and .030) apiece. I used a sheet of copper stained mica, the .030 one.

But you can't really read it from the cover, so I made a title page, too. Those are faux typewriter keys from PorkChopShow on Etsy. I just could not bring myself to buy real typewriter keys - I would've needed two sets - on eBay, and besides, I needed to be able to get them so they were the same thickness as the top board with the leather, which would have involved more engineering.

Normally book boards are just that: some kind of board - usually something resembling cardboard, although binders insist on calling it 'binders board.' It is not see through, though, so I used plexiglas for the front board, with a second, thin chipboard on top of it. It's a split board binding, meaning that the support that the pages are sewn on (muslin, in this case) is trapped between the boards. There aren't all that many glues that I know of that stick to plexiglas, but spray adhesive does, so that's what I used. The stuff you use to glue the rubber seals around car windows will work, too, but it's not clear. It's kind of a bastard version of a split board binding because of how I did the cover, and we'll just have to see how sturdy it is. Being carried in a purse for five to six months is a true test of how strong a binding is.

I actually had a page left in my old journal, but I went ahead and started this one anyway because it's November 22. My grandmother died on this date 52 years ago, and Kennedy was assassinated on this date 47 years ago just a couple of hundred miles north of here. Kind of gloomy, but there it is. BUT! My first post was from the Empty Bowl Project which is a wonderful thing.

I went there with my friends from my Sunday morning tai chi group, Ladies League. You buy a bowl for $15 - which goes to the Capital Area Food Bank - and then get it filled with soup from a local restaurant. You're limited to two bowls, but I managed to buy three (don't tell!). I love these bowls! Some are very sophisticated, some are very plain, some are very handmade, some are very colorful. All the soups we had were good and it was a wonderful journal inauguration!

Holy Cow!

2009-11-15T15:30:00.002-06:00

I have either crossed over the line into foodieland or insanity... Or both. Or I crossed over before and just now have the perspective to see that I have crossed over. I just spent $12 for a pound of butter.

It wasn't just any butter, of course, it was "Fresh, unsalted, raw butter from grass-fed pastured cows from a local farm." You call a number and they answer the phone and you tell them you want a pound - they won't deal in less - and you go get it. Cash only, of course. Wrapped in a baggie. Sound familiar?

So far I can tell you this about fresh, unsalted raw butter from grass-fed pastured cows from a local farm. It somehow seems more greasy than regular butter, even 'European-style' butter. It's pale. It has a flavor that regular butter does not have, which, I'm assuming comes from grass. I melted some to put on top of popcorn, and there are no solids or foam in the butter.

It tastes great. But it's really really expensive.

So I was thinking... What if food with lots of fat or sugar or chemicals cost a lot more money than unprocessed food? Kind of like the 'cap and trade' ideas that are going around for carbon now? What if all pounds of butter, margarine, spreads, oils, etc were at least $12/pound? and cakes and donuts and cookies and ice cream were $20/pound? Would people change their eating habits? Would you?

FYI

2009-11-04T21:36:00.002-06:00

Just FYI... You cannot get DNA from a smear of poop. You need a whole turd. I am sure this information will come in handy at some point in my life, or perhaps in yours. If you can use it, please do!

I am still in shock over the events of the last few days, weeks, months, year. You'd think - with the miraculous recovery of my guitar - that I would be happy, and I am, I am! Unfortunately it alternates with bouts of crying, which makes me hysterical.

Way back in 1964, my parents split up and my Mom and I moved for one year to Palo Alto, CA. We'd lived there four years before that, and Mom thot it would be a fun place to go. We got an apartment in a building with a pool, which was a sort of novel concept and very swinging Sixties at the time. The landlady, also divorced, was a numerologist. Mom was having a bad year, and the landlady told her that it was her 'ninth tide,' which was some kind of bad juju numerology-wise, but it would all be over on Mom's birthday and things would get better. Mom listened to what people had to say (except me, sometimes), even if she didn't really believe what they were telling her. She didn't believe this, but she found it really amusing, and also strengthening; everything was going to get better by April 25. What a very comforting thot! On her birthday, a friend of hers brought her a cake decorated with a small box of Tide laundry detergent (empty) with nine candles on top of it. Things did not get better immediately, that's for sure, but thinking they were going to get better helped Mom.

Nine years ago, I had a bad year. I got Lyme disease (discovered and treated right away so I'm fine), fell off a ladder and shattered my leg (bone graft, steel plate), and then, a couple of months later, my appendix ruptured. Strangely, it didn't hurt, so I didn't go to the hospital for a couple, three days. By the time I did go, I had serious peritonitis. A very bad year.

I'm figuring this year is my 'ninth tide,' and, in just a couple months, it will all be over and things will get better.

I'm just hoping someone makes me an appropriate birthday cake.

Bad news and good news...

2009-11-03T16:54:00.003-06:00

Let me start with the bad news first, mostly because it came first, and this only makes sense chronologically.

I was burgled Thursday night/Friday morning. I found this out when I was feeding the cats and saw that the door to my studio was open. I was working in the studio Thursday night, went into the house for something, fell asleep and never woke back up to go out and lock the door. Missing were my iMac G5 (4 years old), my digital camera, the hard drive I use to back up both my computers, my Fuji Crosstown 1.0 bike, and... and... And, my 34-year old Gibson 12 string, that I've had for all those years... My first 'real' guitar, Isabel. (Yup, all my guitars have names... My cars have names... It's sick, I know.)

I called the police and my insurance company. I couldn't find the serial numbers on anything except the iMac. I know that somewhere I used to have the receipt for the guitar, but couldn't find it, and don't have any recent pictures of it. I felt like an idiot, but although I had the receipts for the camera and hard drive, I hadn't written down the serial numbers... Which took me to the shed.

On the way to the shed, I noticed my weed whacker propped against the back of the studio. That was weird, 'cos I store it in the outhouse. The thieves had been in my outhouse! I noticed the door on the shed was ajar slightly, and went in. At first I thot nothing was disturbed, but then noticed that a box was open that shouldn't have been and went in to investigate further and found... A t-shirt that someone had used - recently, very, very recently - to wipe their ass.

I screamed and threw the offending shirt out of the shed and just stood their literally shaking with the whole willies of it. ICK! And then I started crying... Full out sobbing and weeping.

Perhaps picking up rags that people have wiped their asses on does not affect you in this manner, but I have been under a fair amount of stress in the last year what with putting my hand through the table saw, getting mugged, having Dad almost die, a weird almost romance, getting my wallet stolen and then having Dad actually die, and, well, I've just had enough. I've been bearing up pretty well, picking myself up and dusting myself off and continuing on, but the shit thing completely unhinged me. I couldn't stop crying. It occurred to me that the shitty rag was a clue, and I should save it. So I got some disposable tongs, picked it up, put it in a plastic bag, put THAT in a plastic bag and put it in my refrigerator, and tried not to think about having a shitty rag in my refrigerator. And then I went for help.

I notified some friends. Ricë talked to me for a L O N G time. My friend Clark took me out for drinks and food. I was still crying on and off over the weekend, but I was well-fed and tipsy, and that made it some better.

I kept saying to everyone "They can have the computer and the bike and the camera; I just want my guitar and the hard drive back." Wishful thinking! You betcha. I knew it was wishful thinking, but that didn't stop me from doing it.

And then - again, after talking to Ricë - I came to believe that there was a metaphysical issue here, or a metaphorical one, or a karmic one: I have too much stuff to keep track of.

I vowed to go and clear my stuff out of the shed, at least the easy stuff. I gave myself permission to take time before I threw away papers and photos and books, but told myself I had to get rid of clothes and linens and dishes and kitchen stuff and whatnots.

I did some yesterday. I did some today. I came across a whole bunch of religious art that belonged to my late mother-in-law, very Catholic stuff, very pretty, but no one in the family is Catholic and no one wanted it. So today I took six boxes, three bags, and a dutch oven over to St Vincent de Paul on Congress. One of the boxes was full of the religious paintings. Who better to have them than St Vinny's?

Afterwards, I went to the store, bought cat food and came home. I sat in the driveway, exhausted. It was mostly emotional, but still I was really tired and I just sat there and stared at my beautiful studio/garage which has been so violated and thot "What the fuck is that leaning against the side of the studio?" For there was something leaning against the side, sort of tucked under my big, big ladder... Something that looked an awful lot like my guitar.

I got out of my car very very slowly because I knew I was hallucinating and I didn't want it to end. I walked over, and there, leaning against the studio was my beautiful lovely guitar. I didn't think about fingerprints. I just grabbed it and started crying, and then looked in between the studio and the house next door, and there, halfway down, lying in the leaves and mud, was my hard drive. I approached it very slowly, sure that at any moment I would come to my senses, but no. It WAS my hard drive. It's power cord was missing, so I can't use it to see if the data is ok, but even if it isn't, it might be recoverable.

I called the insurance agency. I called the police. State Farm was really happy and will cut me a check tomorrow. There's a $1000 deductible, so I'm out a lot of money, but it's almost enough to get a new iMac. I'll treat myself to a new bike, too, at some point.

I thot about how really lucky I was. It's been raining like crazy lately, trying to make up for two years of no rain, but it hadn't rained in the last four days. I was shaking as I called friends to tell them the wonderful news. I'm still shaking. It damn sure beats crying.

I talked for a long time to the detective assigned to my case. He's actually interested! He's calling the DNA lab tomorrow. He may want the poop!

I still have a lot of things to think about and a lot of stuff to get rid of. I feel like at any moment bad luck or karma or fate could strike again.

Hopefully, if it does, the me that it aims at will dodge quickly... It's so much easier to dodge if you aren't carrying a bunch of shit around with you...

recent journal posts

2009-10-19T10:34:00.009-05:00

Don't ask me why, but grackles fascinate me. Around here we have great-tailed grackles, which are larger and blacker than common grackles and which have, ummm, great tails. Most people hate grackles. Positively despise them... Yah, yah, I understand... They poop on things - especially cars - and make a LOT of noise, and eat other birds and are scavenger city birds who've learned to co-exist with humans. Well I figure that makes them pretty smart, and I love their cries, and I just try not to park my car under a tree branch...

A couple of years ago, Ricë and Earl and I spent Christmas day in San Antonio at a fancy-pants hotel on the Riverwalk. We had a fabulous time just walking around and having drinks in the bar, which was a whole scene in itself, because it was decorated as a swanky old English manor house type library, with leather couches and chairs and a fireplace flanked with bookshelves filled with books. Being us, Ricë and I immediately went to the bookshelves to see what they had. They were all these moderately old leather bindings in German and Swedish (at least we thot it was Swedish) and books on engineering. Nothing really interesting, but the Swedish books were some sort of encyclopedia and they were OUT OF ORDER!

Oh, NO! This could not be! While Earl got us our drinks - we wanted Pomtinis but ended up with something else - Ricë and I began organizing all the books on both sets of bookshelves... Yes, down on our hands and knees, saying "Oh, I think this one goes over there with that..." I think the bartender got a little concerned, and Earl had to tell him he should just leave us alone, we were happy and not causing any trouble, but I may have hallucinated that part.

Now what, you're probably wondering, does this have to do with grackles? At sunset we went up to Ricë and Earl's room and had wine and cheeses and breads from Central Market. The sunset was gorgeous and we were pretty high up and could look across to the buildings on the other side of the 'river' where hundreds, possibly thousands, of grackles were lining the edge of the rooves of the buildings. Cackling... Letting our their long grackle cries into the coming night. Suddenly, all ten thousand of them (perhaps I exaggerate the number) swooped over to our side of the river, while an equal number of birds from our side swooped over to theirs! The air between the buildings was filled with black birds. And then they all sat and settled in for a bit, and then did it again. Ricë and I tried to figure out if there was a signal, a lead bird, someone saying "OK, now, guys! SWOOP!" But it was getting dark and we were drinking wine and we never did figure that part out.

That wasn't the beginning of my grackle fascination, but it helped: I think they're beautiful. Probably some part of it is that they are BLACK BIRDS, and one of my favorite poems is Wallace Stevens' Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird. When I was doing these pages, I was thinking of stanza III:
The blackbird swirled in the autumn winds./It was a small part of the pantomime. That's where the swirls came from. I used my usual Caran d'Ache Neocolor II Watercolor Crayons for coloring the bird, and india ink and then a lovely coat of Golden Acrylics Interference Blue to make it iridescent afterwards.

Sad news...

2009-09-26T17:13:00.004-05:00

My Dad died two weeks ago. It was very sudden. I wasn't with him, but, essentially, it was a replay of what happened at Christmas - he choked on food - only, this time, none of us kids were right next to him to save him.

He choked at a picnic, outdoors, eating a hamburger. This, I truly believe was/is a good thing.

My Dad was 90. When I was a kid, he was an incredibly active man, doing hours of calisthenics every day, walking to work AND playing tennis. He did it because he'd suffered a lot of injuries, some in WWII, some before, and he felt that if he didn't keep active, he'd lose the ability to move.

By the time he hit 80, he was definitely having trouble getting around. He and I went to Oaxaca for my 50th birthday, and he could barely walk around a block, but he tried. In the airport, we needed a wheelchair. Two years later he got ill with C diff, and was hospitalized for two months. I don't think they thot he was going to make it, so they didn't do physical therapy while he was abed. When he was finally well, he had lost the ability to walk, and so he spent his last five years using an electric wheelchair as his primary means of moving around.

He never once complained about it. He wasn't happy about it, but he didn't complain. For the first three years, he could do transfers to and from the chair with a little help by himself, but he eventually lost that ability, too. When I would ask him how he was doing, he would usually say 'Good,' or 'OK,' or, if it was a bad day, there'd be a pause, and he'd say 'Más o menos.' Up until his choking incident at Christmas, he was able to 'swim' a couple of times a week. He used quotes when HE said it, because, it was really therapy with a person with him, supporting him when he needed it. The buoyancy of the water offset his weight and he could walk around. He loved it.

He never really recovered from Christmas. He was sick for a couple of months, and very confused mentally about timelines and dates. He got better. He got C diff again. He got better. He got a nasty bedsore. He got C diff. Our conversations - my Dad and I talked every night almost - dwindled. Before Christmas, we would often talk for over and hour. After, sometimes five minutes was pushing it, and it was me doing most of the talking. On a good night, I could engage him for twenty minutes, but that was it. He wasn't interested in things like he had been before. He watched television, for pete's sake!

I went to see him each month, each time for about a week, and finally, in August, he seemed better, more alert mentally. But his alertness would come and go. Once every three days he would have a good day. The only thing he ever complained to me about in all this time was that he didn't get to go outside anymore. Most days he wasn't put in his wheelchair, but sat in a more comfortable recliner. No one thot it was really safe for him to be driving around loose. He tended to fall asleep at the wheel, or run off the sidewalk.

So. The day he died, he was in his wheelchair. It was a bright sunny beautiful day. He was at a picnic celebrating Carol Wood's 30th anniversary. Someone took a picture of him a minute or two before he choked. It's not a good picture. He's sitting, holding the hamburger he's about to choke on. Someone's sitting next to him and someone's leaning over talking to him. He's not looking at them. He's about to die. He doesn't know it... It's only us who know it, and only now.

And I can only think I am glad he died before he got any worse mentally or physically. I am glad that my active, sporty Dad is free of his uncooperative body. I will forever miss his mind and humor and love but I will only be sad for me... Not for him.

I love you Dad.

Julie & Julia, redux...

2009-08-08T08:09:00.004-05:00

Finally, I got to see the rest of the movie. I was at the 11:20 am showing early, 'cos, who knew, maybe there would be swarms of foodies thronging the theater. I went to another Regal theater because I had my free pass from them after the last debacle... And they honored it. Of course, I spent $12 for popcorn (bad popcorn with bad grease) and a fucking bottle of water, so they certainly got their money out of me.

I didn't at all mind watching the first half again. Since then, I've since read The Julie/Julia Project blog, and read My Life in France, so it was interesting to see where Nora Ephron had decided to change things. Some were kluges of incidents to move the story along more quickly, but, some, especially the parts with Julie, seem to have been made up. There's an article by her in The Atlantic about it that I think is quite good.

There were not throngs of people at the movie, but there were a respectable amount of people, mostly women, mostly older. The previews totally sucked. This is the second time I've seen a preview of 2012, and it looks like it's one of those special effects movies where the world gets destroyed every way possible. I always thot the idea was to pair the previews of 'coming attractions' with the main feature, and if so, this was a crappy pairing. The second preview was for The Stepfather, and even worse paring. Shit, even the preview was scary!

When I left the theater, there was a line of people waiting to get in to Julie & Julie, again, mostly older, mostly women, probably women like me who miss the hell out of JC. Meryl Streep does a wonderful job with her voice, which, as everyone knows, was one of the things that made JC so wonderful to watch.

All of this Juliaizing has made me pull out my MTAOFC and cook a fricassee, one that Julie cooked. It's your basic fricassee: soft saute carrots, onions and celery in 4 T of BUTTER, push aside in the pan and add your chicken parts (I used thighs, skin on) and make them golden, not brown. Sprinkle them with seasoned flour on both sides. Add boiling chicken or veggie or whatever stock and alcohol (white wine, vermouth, whatever) (I used vermouth, 'cos I had some) and cook. Cook some boiler onions using water and a glob of BUTTER, and saute some mushrooms in BUTTER. Pull the chicken from its sauce, and the mushrooms and onions from their liquids. Pour the mushroom and onion liquids into the chicken stuff and cook it down by half. Then add a cup of CREAM. Let it cook a bit and then pour it over the chicken, onions and mushrooms which you've appetizingly arranged on a platter.

Can you say rich? Can you say too rich for eating when it's 105 out? The first bite of onion and BUTTER squirts all over your chin. I mean, it TASTES fabulous, but it's... Just. Too. Rich.

I honestly prefer foods where the food itself is the centerpiece and not the sauce.

Which saves me from ever, ever having to make aspic. That alone qualifies Julie Powell for a Hero award.

And, in case you're wondering what's with the cute cat picture... It's just that. A cute cat picture. That's Spot. On a pedestal. He did it first thing this morning just to see if I was awake enough to grab my phone and take his picture...

Teaching...

2009-08-02T08:15:00.002-05:00

I'm teaching this weekend at the Art School at Laguna Gloria. It's a great place to teach and I always have a good time teaching there. I teach three times a year at this place: two, five-week classes, fall and spring, and a summer weekend class.

For the five-week classes, I teach four structures: a fun 'longstitch' book which is non-adhesive and really simple; a 'wrap/strap' book, also non-adhesive and pretty simple, coptic stitch, which is simple, but sometimes difficult in terms of getting the tension of the sewing right, and a flat-spine book.

For the weekend class, I do the long-stitch, wrap/strap, and a simplified version of the flat spine.

The first two, longstitch and wrap/strap, are pretty simple and can be made just about anywhere. I've made the first one in Mexico using paper I got at the corner copy shop and dental floss, because I couldn't remember the spanish word for 'thread.' (It's 'hilo,' in case you ever need to know... But dental floss - mine was cinnamon - adds a certain je ne sais quoi, to mix my languages...)

I like non-adhesive structures. I am especially enamored of them this weekend, as the PVA I had in my car for the class, dumped over, the lid came off, and I now have to figure out how to get it out of my car's upholstery.

Yuck.

2009-07-31T00:37:00.004-05:00

I downloaded a bunch of brain wave apps for my iPhone recently. A couple nights ago I used one to sleep by: Brain Baths, I think is the name of the app. You pick a background sound (I picked rainy porch) and a wave (deep sleep) and put your headphones on and zone out. I can do this AND charge my phone at the same time, so I'm mutifuckingtasking even while sleeping. What a concept. Or not.

It worked quite, quite well. Sure I still woke up in the night, with the heat issues (which would prob'ly go away if I would just turn the AC lower, but, by golly I won't), but I could go right back to sleep. The funny thing was how used to the sound I was each time I woke up. I thot the silly thing had turned off, because it was so much in the background of my brain.

About 5:21 am (more or less) I became aware of a strange chirbling noise outside the bedroom door. My door is always closed to keep the cats out because there's no way I can sleep with them all in the room, and most of them are too 'kneady' in the middle of the night for me to even let them in one per night... So, I hear 'chirble, chirble, chirble...' and while cats do occasionally make that noise, raccoons always make that noise. I jumped up, opened the door, flipped on the light and there were a mom and two kits trying very, very hard to look like tabby cats. One climbed atop the scratching post; one hid its big brushy tail and tried to sneak behind a cat and the other popped under the table.

I yelled "NO!" which was a silly thing to do. It's not good to have raccoons in your house, but scared raccoons are even worse, and while one scooted for the cat door, the other two ran and hid in one of my cubby holes for shoes. The cats ran over to show me where they were in case I, in my human-ness, just happened to miss it. The raccoons were not happy about the cats being so close, so I had to put on my happy voice, pluck the cats away from the cubby hole and coax the two raccoons (the mom and one kit) out of the cubby and out through the back door. (I'd already thot to open it all the way to make their exit easier...)

Now I had three raccoons on my back porch. I'm sure they got in back there somehow, but the door was latched and they couldn't get out easily. Again using my happy voice talking to them, and, ok, I admit it, chirbling at them, for fuck's sake, I managed to get by them enough to open the porch door and they all slipped out into the night.

Big excitement.

But that's not what I was going to write about... It was just background...

I had to write about it all in my journal, because, well, let's face it, some days are a tad less interesting than others. I couldn't get my stupid Rapidograph to work, even after changing the ink, twice! and it splooted ink, watery ink, on my page. The ink sploots became the eyes of the raccoon...

Hah!

Julie & Julia

2009-07-30T08:59:00.003-05:00

Well, I tried to see Julie & Julia last night on my free pass to an early screening. Somehow the second reel was wound upside down and backwards (I guess if it was one, it was the other, but I thot everything was digital now...) and they never could get it rewound correctly...

So I've seen a part of Julie & Julia, which opens one week from tomorrow and the part I saw was really fabulous! It was so good that most of the audience stayed for over an hour waiting for them to fix the problem, but, alas, then we lost hope.

The Arbor - the theater where we saw this snippet - gave us all free passes to a movie, bless 'em.

I had thot that I would only really like the Julia (Child) parts, but, not so. It's all good and funny.

Go see.

Some recent pages...

2009-07-29T07:13:00.006-05:00

This is my favorite recent page spread. I try to go to one of the local farmer's markets on Saturday mornings even if I don't need any food. (I always buy too much!) I always buy something: some kind of iced tea (I love zhi tea and Oaxacan tamales!) is necessary when it's as hot as it's been here. The right side of this page documents my purchase of Texas olive oil from olives grown in Carrizo Springs. I've been waiting for locally grown olive oil for awhile now. It's hard to eat local and consume certain foods like coffee, and, until I found Texas Olive Ranch, olive oil. Locally roasted coffee is no problem, of course, we've got lots of that in Austin.
Here's a detail of the image. It's done with Caran d'Ache NeoColor II, which are their water soluble crayons. Caran d'Ache has the best pigmented crayons I know of. I use a Niji waterbrush to work the colors. I also carry around a little set of Winsor Cotman watercolors to play with, and the usual suspects for my calligraphish: Zig Memory markers, Pentel brush pens of all types and Koh-I-Noor Rapidographs. You can see the little zippered carryall I use for my pens at the top of the top photo... Most of my purse IS art supplies and my journal!

Sometimes I work out the details of a page before I start writing, like this Fourth of July spread. It's fun to try and write at weird angles. A lot of people ask me about my writing: how I get the lines straight (or in this case curved). I don't normally draw guide lines on the page, and my lines aren't really all that straight if you really look closely; they just appear to be straight. I do it by eye, and lots of practice, but I'm not above ruling in some guidelines if I'm worried about it or want it really really 'perfect.'
This 'R' was drawn using a Zig Memory marker, with the filled in parts being the Caran d'Ache crayons in the lines of the letters and the top counter of the 'R,' and photos taken on my iPhone in the bottom counter. I peel most of the paper backing away from the back of the photos so they will be more flexible and 'work' with the page, instead of stiffening it and trying to pop off when I turn them. I never really thot about it, but a person who saw my journals recently said "They look like illuminated manuscript pages," and I had one of those stunningly obvious realizations: They ARE illuminated manuscript pages!

Creating the perfect journal... part ii, stuff

2009-07-22T10:34:00.008-05:00

Fruition's pocket...

There are a lot of things that contribute to a perfect journal for me... I like to be able to fold a book backwards on itself. I need a pocket to hold stuff. I have to have pages I can cut out, to 'hold room' at the spine for all the stuff I stick into the book.

The pocket is critical, though. I usually make a pocket into the book itself, but you can just stick an envelope in with double stick tape or glue into the back of your journal. Use it to hold the 'ephemera,' aka 'crap' that you collect and might want to use later or reference... Stamps, business cards, menus, photos, doilies... Hell, I don't know; whatever appeals to you. That way it stays with its journal instead of getting lost everytime you open the book.

A page spread from Sirena...

Which leads to another important thing: having your own stickers to stick stuff in with. I put a lot of stuff into a book. Photos. Stamps. Stickers, especially those ones you get when you travel.

I usually have some form of Avery labels floating around: mailing labels or sometimes those little round one. You can paint 'em, print on 'em, whatever. With the round ones you can use both the round part and the negative label for cool stuff. The important thing is that you have something in your pocket to use when you get something you want to keep.

I don't always use stickers to put photos in a journal. Every now and then I print a passel of photos out on a piece of glossy photo paper and glue them in, usually with a glue stick. I peel as much of the paper backing from the glossy photo as I can, so that they're really thin and flexible and can bend with the page, otherwise their stiffness makes them tend to pop out of the book after the page gets turned a few times. Of course I could use a real, archival glue, but I probably couldn't carry it in my purse...

And I always carry my journal, pens, a small set of Caran d'Ache NeoColor IIs, and glue stick in my purse... Because you have to be able to journal anytime, anywhere...

Again, thanks to Wendy Ogle for the photos...

Creating the perfect journal... part i, paper and ink

2009-07-21T10:03:00.006-05:00

Fruition, my latest journal...

When I was making my current journal, I had a long think about what makes the perfect journal... Of course, that's the perfect journal for me, but there are several things I've noticed from teaching over the years, and they're consistent.

Number one is paper. My favorite paper is Hahnemühle Schiller, a hard, white-white, which I get from Atlantic Paper. It's 140 gsm, so, thickish, but not cover stock weight. I have used lots of other papers, mostly from Hahnemühle: Gutenberg and Biblio are my second choices for journals. (My last journal, Hope, was on Gutenberg, 'cos that was what I had enough of when it was time to make the journal...) But I love Schiller. I love writing on it.

Page spread from Fruition...

Which brings me to an important point. Writing... The physical act of writing. It's really crucial that your pen or pencil or crayon or paint flow smoothly across the paper. I use mostly Rapidographs for writing the body of my posts, and a variety of brush and felt-tip calligraphy pens (Pentel brush pens and Zig Memory markers) for capitals and such. The big deal for me, especially with the Rapidographs, is having the ink flow out of the pen so I don't have to stop writing and shake the pen or mess with it in any way. This means you need to have the perfect ink for it. I go back and forth and up and down on my ink. I have made my own from sumi ink sticks, but that tends to get granular enough to impede the flow pretty quickly. Currently I am enamored of Dr. Ph. Martin's Black Star Matte India Ink, which is truly black, truly waterproof and flows well. Now, mind you, I'm not using those teenitesy Rapidographs. I never use below a Size 1, and mostly use Size 2, 2 1/2 and 3, so we're talking BIG, here. I don't use the smaller ones because I use Schiller paper and it's just too rough for those little points.

And that's what I'm talking about: the necessity of matching your paper to your medium. If you do like to work with those tiny Rapidograph points, you're going to need a smoother paper, just like if you do a lot of true water color (as opposed to just using water colors as color spots like I do), you'll want a heavier paper than Schiller.

In the page spread above, you can see me using many different things. The capital 'a' in the left column is a Zig marker, 'the daily fruit' and 'Sunday' are Pentel brush marker with my own mix of waterproof ultramarine and walnut ink to create a blackish color, the text body is #3 and #2 Rapidographs, 'June 7th' is Pentel ColorBrush, as is 'Wednesday' and the illustrations are done with Caran d'Ache NeoColor II crayons and a Niji waterbrush. Just FYI, this is a full-leather, split board construction journal. The leather is dyed with various metallic inks and powders and has two gouache insets in the front and back covers.

Both photos were taken by my fabulous photographer friend, Wendy Ogle.

The Midge factor...

2009-07-20T08:34:00.002-05:00

I have been dating, and it hasn't gotten any less weird than it was in high school. Of course, I didn't really DATE in high school; I would go out with someone once and then either we were going steady or we didn't go out again. I don't think that was the most successful strategy for finding a good partner, so now I am trying to actually date, as in go out with several people at the same time. Not on the same date, of course, but you know what I mean. 'Seeing' several people...

Of course finding several people that I want to 'see' is still a problem. Over the last few years I had met one man that I was interested in (one!), and he wasn't interested in me, even though we're perfect for each other. He LIKES me, we go out and eat dinner together, but that's it. Reading dating books has led me to the realization that we don't have that important 'emotional connection.' I have evidence that he likes women significantly younger than me. And there's just nothing I can do about being younger.

The other night, I was out for my walk. It's been hellaciously hot here in Texas - over 100 - for a really long damn time. I actually missed 3 weeks of it, 'cause I was at my cabin in the Catskills, where it was freezing (for me) and raining, but I'm back for a bit and going for my walks at night, when it has dropped below 100. I walked down South Congress and, since it was still hot at 8+ pm, I stopped at Jo's for an hibiscus mint tea. They were showing Vertigo. Apparently they're showing Hitchcock's movies on Thursdays (8pm-ish, if anyone cares to join me... this Thursday is The 39 Steps!)

So, if you haven't watched Vertigo, it has Jimmy Stewart as Scottie, a retired detective with acrophobia, Barbara Bel Geddes as Midge, his girl friend (who is perfect for him, and whom he thinks of as 'just a friend,' although it's obvious she's nuts about him), and Kim Novak as Madeleine, the woman he's hired to follow, who's a fantasy and whom he falls for hard. I don't want to say more, in case you somehow missed the movie and want to see it. My point is just what a revelation it was to watch the interplay between Scottie and Midge and Scottie and Madeleine... Because I always seem to end up as the Midge with guys I like and Madeleine with the guys I don't 'spark' with.

Interesting, very interesting...

So, I was talking about this yesterday morning at Walton's with some of my poor friends who have all at this point probably heard way too much about my trials and tribulations dating. I was telling them the interesting thing that I've noticed about profiles at my internet dating site. Many men seem to echo this sentiment: "Classy, looks good in jeans/thongs (as in flip flops), a tight skirt/heels or a ball gown fit for a duchess"... That seems to be a sort of theme with the guys who write this type of profile... Looks good in a ball gown and without makeup barefoot and wearing jeans. Another odd thing is the number of men who seem to want to have kids, but who are still interested in women in their 40s, 50s, and 60s.

I have looked at several women's profiles, too, and I haven't yet found one that says she's looking for a guy who "Looks good in a Speedo or a tuxedo," as my friend Elaine put it yesterday.

I'm not really drawing any conclusions here; I'm just noticing things. About myself, about men, about life.

Which is what I'm all about, anyway.

Party weekend...

2009-05-04T09:40:00.004-05:00

Christy and me, looking fabulous.

It was a great weekend for a party person. (That would be me.) Friday night I went to a friend's law firm's party. It was at the Driskill Hotel, which was reason enough to go, since the Driskill is a fabulous place. It was a Casino Night themed party, with a buffet. The food was perfectly acceptable, with a lovely buffet up on the mezzanine, and gambling in the Ballroom.

Now I am NOT a gambler, at least not with cards and stuff, but I didn't let that stop me. That's how casinos make money, I am sure, on idiots like me. We were each given a $10,000 chip at the beginning of the evening and the object was to amass as much money as possible. MY object was to be able to keep gambling until it was over, with occasional short trips to the dance floor to rid myself of excess energy. I succeeded. My friend coached me on how to play blackjack. I didn't really get the hang of craps, but I like dice, so it was fun anyway. It just seemed like a lot of rules for throwing dice around, to me, BWTH.

Saturday I spent the whole day cooking. Some people might groan at that, but I love cooking. I put the stereo on LOUD and boogied away while making mole.

If you're going to make mole, you pretty much have to have some kind of a party. It has a ton of ingredients. There's not much of any one thing - except for a pound of chilies - but there are so many things that you end up with a pile of mole. So you have a party, put the excess mole in jars and spread the joy. Mole also takes hours to make. You have to de-seed the chilies, and roast the seeds until they are black. This releases the capsaicins into the air big time, and your eyes water as you, shake, shake, shake your griddle. You also have to roast your onions, garlic and tomatoes, slowly, as well as soften the chilies, grind the spices and the nuts and soften the dried fruits and then puree them. Hours, dear people, hours! This is one of the moles with chocolate, but that's just a little splash at the end, not the hard part. Anyway, the point is you end up with a dutch oven full of mole, and it's something you drizzle over stuff, so ya gots to give it away! (It does freeze, too.) While I was doing that I was slow cooking the shredded chicken, and soaking the black beans.

Yesterday morning, starting early, I cooked the beans, and made the cheesecake and cut up the strawberries and made the Cardinale sauce for its topping. Lots more music was required for all of this. After days of rainish, it cleared up and turned gorgeous in the afternoon.

People began arriving around three, beginning with my daughter, Sara, and newest grandbaby, Arlo. The whole famdamily showed up (ex, ex's ex and her husband, two daughters who live in town, grandkids), plus the most wonderful musicians.

These are guys I played with thirty years ago. They've veered off into bluegrass. Since putting my left hand thru the table saw last fall, I haven't been able to play even as badly as I used to, and I could not keep up with 'em, but I had fun trying, 'til I just sat back to listen.

Lots and lots of folks showed up, drank, ate and enjoyed the music. It's important to have an audience when musicians play on your porch.

Which brings me to the point of this post. I have been thinking a lot lately about people I admire and respect. Now I'd like to be one of those people who puts down that they admire, oh, say, Abraham Lincoln, Susan B Anthony, Hans and Sophie Scholl, and, goodness knows, I do. But I also know that they're not my role models. The people I really admire and aspire to emulate are Gerald and Sara Murphy.

And I think Gerald and Sara would've enjoyed the party.

Audio books

2009-04-26T08:17:00.003-05:00

Dad, me, and my cat, Birthday, reading The Hobbit, 1957.

Well, since we're talking about reading, I'll comment on the book I'm currently into: March Violets, by Philip Kerr. It's a detective novel about Nazis. Now, if ya'll know me, you'd know that - for me - that's going to be about as good as it gets: detectives and Nazis in the same novel! Woo hoo! As good as detectives and Indians, but Tony Hillerman is dead and won't write any more Chee/Leaphorn novels.

What started me with March Violets is that another novel about the same detective is about to come out. I heard about it on NPR, I think, and, like Ricë, I like to read an author in sequence, if possible. The only way this novel is available from the fabulous Austin Public Library is as an audio book, and so I've spent the last two days listening to it and trying to figure out what is different about listening to a book from reading a book.

This book is read by John Lee, and in googling him, I find that he reads a lot of books, which is cool, because he's really good at it. With just slight nuances in his voice he can shift characters.

My big problem with listening to books is that it puts me to sleep. Yup. If I need a soporific, just hand me some headphones and a cd player and I'll be out of it in thirty minutes. Better than Benadryl, Tylenol PM or Ambien! It's one of the reasons I'm kinda scared to listen to these things in the car, like my sister does when she drives from NC to OH. Of course maybe if I was doing something else at the same time, I wouldn't fall asleep. But what happens is I start to doze off, wake up a bit, and then doze off again and end up having to re-listen to the part I dozed over or I'm clueless. And that's ok, truly it is, because I like being read to.

My Dad used to read to me when I was a kid. He did it because he liked it, first and foremost, but also because he insisted that we NOT have a TV. He believed that if we had one, I'd never learn how to read properly and to love books. My Mom worried that I would grow up culturally stunted and deprived from not seeing TV shows that my peers were watching, so it was perfectly OK for me to watch TV at other people's houses... Just not my own. Not even when we sublet a house with a TV in it for a year!

And, of course, I didn't mind a bit, because I was about the only kid I knew whose Dad spent an hour or so a day with them. It was a family thing. Mom would sit in the living room with us and do something like darn socks or sew on buttons or mend things, and Dad would read. I would act out all the parts, zipping around the living room.

But that's not what I meant to write about.

What I was wondering was if anyone else notices the phrases in a book more if they listen to it than if they read it? It seems that certain phrases pop out at me in this book. Is it Philip Kerr's writing, or John Lee's reading?

How is listening to a book different from reading it?

Damn, I've been outed...

2009-04-25T07:18:00.002-05:00

Damn! Ricë outed me... Now ya'll know my dark secret: I will read anytime, anywhere.

Before I got to Texas, I lived in Dodge City, Kansas. I moved there from Madison, Wisconsin, which was a very hip a go go place. Dodge was not. A friend of mine at Dodge City Community College, where I worked, told me she wanted to introduce me to a couple of cool guys who were trying to start a public radio station, and one of them was Quentin Hope.

Quentin, and his friend, Malcolm, lived in Garden City, about 50 miles west of Dodge on US 50. I took the bus over to visit them for the weekend right after I met them. When I got there, Quentin was on the phone, hustling people about the radio station*. His apartment served as his office, too. There was a couch in the living room and tons of magazines and books. I think there was a current copy of In These Times, and about a hundred books. I just curled up on the couch, grabbed something and started reading. I don't know how long I read for, but at some point, I realized that Quentin was not on the phone anymore and I hadn't even said "Hello!" I jumped up, and started to apologize. Quentin told me not to; if you could sit and read in front of somebody, it meant you were comfortable with them. I knew we were going to be friends.

Actually, it was a funny thing, that. At Christmas, I went back to North Carolina to see my family. My brother Steve was there. I'd spent some time a couple years earlier in Yellow Springs, Ohio, working for Steve's Fly By Night Construction Company when I was in between jobs and traveling around the country. My brother introduced me to tai chi while I lived there, and I met a lot of his college friends (Antioch). They would talk about people from Antioch who'd gone on to other colleges and drink scotch and practice tai chi moves. (This has NOT changed. They are still wont to do that on occasion.)

So, at some point during Christmas week, when my family asked what I was up to, I told them about Quentin and Malcolm and the radio station, for which I was now designing logos. Steve looked up at me and said, "Quentin, Quentin HOPE?" and I said, well, yes, I thot that Hope was Quentin's last name. "I was at Antioch with Quentin Hope," Steve said... And then I remembered some discussion about some guy named Quentin who'd gone off to Oberlin, and, yah, sure, it was the same guy.

So when I got back to Kansas, I got to tell Quentin that I was Steve's little sister. Quentin hadn't thot of it because, although my brother and I have very common last names, they're not the same last name, 'cos he's really my step-brother.

A lot of what I read is magazines. I get both The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books, and those, alone, can keep me busy. But, like Ricë, I read detective fiction for fun, along with fantasy and some science fiction. I read biography, history and science stuff, too, as well as how-to books. I don't read those in bed, though, because I always want to get up and try whatever they're writing about.

So. If you meet me, and I pull out a book and start reading, just assume that I'm really comfortable with you.

*BTW, the story has a happy ending. There IS public radio in western Kansas, and on the High Plains, thanks to Quentin and other folks who worked really hard for it.

North Carolina

2009-04-22T07:14:00.003-05:00

I paid a quick visit to North Carolina - Chapel Hill, to be specific - this weekend to visit my Dad. Somehow I forgot that it would still be spring there, beautiful east coast spring, with azaleas and dogwoods and phlox and... Violets!

When I was a kid I loved the little flowers in the yard, the violets and bluets and buttercups and clover. We had a patch of violets in our backyard that had some of the purpley blue ones, and some white ones and I would lie down in the grass and examine them all, trying to ascertain which one was prettiest.

I didn't do that with the little patch of violets I found this week. I just enjoyed them, along with the pink dogwood alongside one of the buildings in my folk's retirement village.

I had also forgotten about pine pollen. Here in Texas we have live oak pollen: yellow, voluminous, covering everything. I'm used to that, or, rather, I should say my sinuses are. In NC, it's pine pollen that covers everything. You could see it lurking from the third floor window's of Ginger's apartment. It got me.

But that's spring in North Carolina.

Out and about in South Austin...

2009-04-16T08:45:00.002-05:00

I live in a fabulous neighborhood. It's always been one, although in different ways over the years. When I moved here thirty years ago, it was a very mixed and poor neighborhood: an old blacklands 'hood that had shifted to Hispanic and then to musician. Houses were board and batten and tiny, from the early 1900s. There was a lot of prostitution on Congress Avenue, and when I walked to and from work, I would get offers of a 'ride' every block. But people knew each other and there were a lot of parties. It was edgy.

Now it's all gentrified. The blacks and Hispanics and musicians are mostly gone. It's more upscale, but the restaurants are a whole lot better and no one asks me if I want a 'ride' when I walk downtown. Don't even think of suggesting that it's because I'm thirty years older, cher, I'll backsmack you!

One of the constant things in the 'hood is the Continental Club. Last night James McMurtry was playing there at mignight and, well, I hadn't seen him in a long time. He plays with the Heartless Bastards. They're a power trio, and not for everybody, I'm sure, but I love to listen to him when I drive. And there is a move (albeit a really tiny one) to make Choctaw Bingo the national anthem.

I had to raid my piggy bank to go. Ok, and to take a nap, too. How did I ever play shows that ended at 2 am? Oh, yeah, it was twenty years ago! So there I am walking down South Congress at midnight with my quarters jingling in my pockets. The requisite street musician is sitting in front of the South Congress Cafe with his cds and his guitar. "Wanna hear a song?" I told him I'd love to, but I had just enough to get into the Continental Club.

Ok. So they laugh at you when you pay your cover charge in quarters. I'm tough. I can take it. I stayed for an hour (had to be up early this morning) and started to walk back home. Just up the street was the same musician, with his cds. "Now do you have time to hear a song?" He asked. "I have no money," I warned him. "I don't care, I just want to play you a song..."

So I sat on the bench beside him and listened to Ian Pummel (I think) (it was 1:30 am) play Tame the Mystery. And then I walked on down Congress to my cosy home.

I love South Austin.

Road trip...

2009-04-13T15:00:00.018-05:00

I took a road trip a couple of weekends ago with some friends. Well, they weren't friends, exactly, when we started. In fact, I'd never even met two of them, and the other one I'd only met a couple of times. But, shit, if you want to get to know someone, go on a road trip with them. And this one was such little work, for me, anyway, since someone else did all the planning.

It was a road trip to Louisiana to listen to Cajun music and zydeco, feast on food (especially seafood) and have a good time. You can tell we're all pretty hardy, adventurous souls, if we're willing to spend four days in a car with people we don't know, albeit, a very, very big car, a Suburban, in fact, owned and driven by Steve, the person I know. The other couple, Duke and Carol, apparently only had one question for Steve about me before we started: "Does she like to laugh?" That's a good question to ask about people you're traveling with.

We started late in the evening and drove from Austin to Eunice, which is the nearest place to Mamou, LA, where there's a reasonably priced hotel. We got in at 3 am and were up at 7:30 so we could make it to Fred's Lounge by 9 am. We didn't want to miss a minute of the broadcast, not that we understood a word of it since it's in, ummm, French-ish.

We had a great time dancing. An actually amazing time, since, frankly, I can't dance with other people, but I guess I can now. Who knew? All that dancing makes you hungry, so Steve and I had a bowl of hen and sausage gumbo at a little restaurant across the street. I wish I remembered the name of it, because it was the best gumbo of the trip.

From Mamou, we went to Floyd's Records and had more gumbo. Then we drove down to Lafayette to check into the Blue Moon Guesthouse, which is a glorified hostel. We stayed in that room upstairs on the left. (Beware, they empty the dumpster across the street at 4:30 am on Monday morning!) Sitting on the front porch to check in, we met up with Two Hoots and a Holler, an Austin band, who were playing at the saloon that evening. Across the street from the Blue Moon is an old Borden's Ice Cream Shop. Carol and I sat on the porch and an ice cream angel brought us cones (coffee dipped in chocolate is yummy) without us even asking!

We headed back to Eunice, to the Liberty Theater, to hear DL Menard, at the Rendezvous Des Cajuns, which is broadcast from there every Saturday night. Then we hit the Palace Cafe in Opelousas for dinner, and headed back to the Blue Moon.

We did a swamp trip (Henderson Swamp) on Sunday. It was misting and gorgeous and we saw birds: egrets, herons, bald-head eagles, wood ducks, owls, and alligators and turtles, and a beautiful cypress forest.

We ate at Randol's, which is kind of a touristy place, but they had a great zydeco band and a bunch of kids dancing who were fabulous dancers! It was fun watching them, although I think we danced at least one number.

Monday we headed down to New Orleans the lazy way. We hit a museum and a looked at a couple of plantations. Now the guys had no intention of actually going into one, but I really wanted to see Laurel Plantation, since it was run by women, and they kept memoirs and record books of it, and ya'll know how into those things I am. It was highly interesting. These were cold-hearted business women, buying rafts of young female slaves - the cheapest slaves - and breeding their own workforce, instead of paying for it outright.

We ate at the wonderful Luke Brasserie on St Charles, which had ohmigoodness wonderful raw oysters. I had the white bean and duck cassoulet which was too delicious for me to describe. I'm running out of adjectives here. I had it with a couple shots of Basil Hayden, (rocks, water back, please) which was just perfect with it. We headed over to Canal Street to Chickie Wah Wah to hear the stupendous Evan Christopher accompanied by Shannon Powell, who is too delicious for words. The whole trip was an education in drumming, really. If the drummer is dragging or not in the pocket, the music doesn't swing and you can't dance to it. But when the drummer's on and smokin' well you damn near have to dance to it!

Late, late, late we headed over to Abbeville. It's a three hour drive and we got into the most ridiculous discussion of sex, spirituality, nuns and frogs. It kept the driver awake, but the rest of us were dazed and confused! In the morning we looked at the windows of St Mary Magdalen and then had raw oysters (a bit saltier than the ones at Luke, and fantastic, as well) and the crab plate, before heading back to Texas on the old Gulf Coast road. We stopped just before the Sabine Pass and bought huge Gulf Coast shrimp at a roadside stand.

So. All that was just the set up. What this post is REALLY about is the book I made about the road trip. Nah, just kidding, although I did make a book. I wrote a poem about the whole thing and stuck in a bunch of photos I took with my iPhone. Here's the poem:

Bons Temps...

Four people set sail in a car one fine night
Under the moon, to take their delight
In music and food and that other thing
(I’ve forgotten quite what) in Old Louisianne.

They made for Fred’s Bar on a Saturday morn
To hang with Tante Sue and bikers galore
To dance and to stomp and to have a fine time
And then to search out a gumbo divine...

...And records and flirting and old fashioned talk
On the porch of Blue Moon, where ice cream angels walk.
But there must be more music before there is sleep,
And food, of course, but that other thing?

Well, there are some pictures of them playing at sport
Tho’ who in hell knows what they really purport.
For they’re off on a tour of a swamp in a boat
And a whole lot more dancing and ice cream and food.

Elusive, indeed, was their much-needed sleep
Due to trucks emptying dumpsters: beep, beep, beep, beep.
But bravely, oh bravely do the four carry on
And leave for New Orleans at the first crack of dawn.

They looked at museums and plantations, too
Before treating themselves to dinner at Lüke’s.
Two dozen oysters all raw and Gulf Coast
And more talk and food, hey! can we have a toast?

But, non, they are off to Chickie Wah Wah
To hear Evan Christopher and the fab Shannon Powell
Then back to Abbeville in the middle of night
Talking of nuns and frogs with strange eyes

And spirituality and that other thing
Such heat and emotion lead to self correcting...
After some sleep, have they had it with food?
A chorus of voices says “Oh, no, no, no!”

Boudin and oysters and white lump meat crab
They can’t possibly drive; call them a cab!
But, no, they’re off on the old Gulf Coast road,
With a stop for fresh shrimp, before they head home.

Flying through Houston, how can that be?
Oh, thank the stars for that great HOV!
Only in Elgin does the food god desert them
Then they’re back home in Austin, with their poor stomachs hurting...

But their heads and their hearts are filled and replete
And for our fab four, that’s quite a feat!
All thanks to Steve, whose plan extraordinaire
And, ummm, wonderful driving! got them all there...

And back... And now, perhaps they’ll catch some z’s
And dream of new road trips, can there be a reprise?
With music, and food, and that other thing
On the porch of the Blue Moon, where ice cream angels sing.

I make yogurt

2009-04-01T08:21:00.004-06:00

When I was in New York last summer I became addicted to Fage 2% Greek yogurt. It's thick and tastes - to me - almost like sour cream. It's also pretty durn exensive ($4.99 a tub).

In the olden days, I made my own yogurt. I had a Salton yogurt maker which made yogurt in neat little ceramic containters, although I also used the oven method before I got the yogurt maker. Of course, in the olden days I made my own yogurt because you couldn't get real yogurt in stores, stuff with lactobacillus in it; you could only get the stuff with sugar and fruit flavorings, and additives.

So for close to nine months I've been shelling out the big bucks for Fage, which is pronounced fa-yeh, and makes me happy when I say it. But the $4.99 part? well, I've never been really happy about that. So I looked up 'how to make Greek yogurt on Google, and found this wonderful video by Crebs, which I just love. This guy is cheerful! I pretty much followed his instructions, except I used 2% and no half and half, and I only let it ferment 11 hours. It's pretty tangy that way. If you want it less tangy, you let it ferment less. I made it in my oven. I used to have an oven with an oven light in it and I would just pop the saucepan in the oven with the oven light on, but my current oven has no light. So I put a small lamp with a 60 watt incandescent bulb in there.

I was really worried that Al Gore would be dropping by to beat on me for that, but I had my whole rant/rationale ready for him.

You see what prompted this whole yogurt making thing - other than the $4.99 part - was that yogurt comes in plastic containers. And plastic containers and bits of plastic containers have somehow ended up in the middle of the Northern Pacific Gyre (Turning and turning in the widening gyre...) in what is called the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. This thing is the size of two Texases! Now, ya'll who don't live in Texas just may not realize just how huge that is, but it's pretty damn big. The closest border to me is the one with Mexico, and that's some 7 hours away from here. When I leave the state to visit the cabin, it takes me 8 hours just to get out of Texas... And it's 6 hours to Ricë's house, and I don't think of her as being all that far away. Far out, maybe, but not far away.

I learned about the Patch from John Colapinto's article in The New Yorker about David de Rothschild's plan to build a boat out of plastic bottles and sail it across the Pacific to raise awareness about plastic bottles. de Rothschild is talking about upcycling instead of recycling, and that's cool, but I started thinking about how much plastic I use. It's probably not as much as most people do, since I don't eat much commercially packaged food (except for Fage), but even if you shop at Whole Foods these days, everything comes in little plastic containers or on styrofoam trays. In the old days, when Whole Foods was ittybitty, you could take your own containers in and they'd put stuff in them, and you can still do that, but it's a bit more of a hassle now.

The City of Austin has a good recycling program and takes all rigid plastics, 1-7, including yogurt containers, but still, these get downcylced into stuff and eventually they're going to end up in that Garbage Patch and kill some poor albatross, and ya'll know what kind of bad luck that is.

The yogurt came out fine, thank you Crebs. And I have whey to feed to the outdoor kitties, which is a good thing. Next I'm going to figure out a way to carry to go containers with me to restaurants, so I don't have to take home anything in styrofoam ever again.

ps. The image was created in Wordle, and is licensed using Creative Commons.

Oscar night

2009-02-23T19:37:00.005-06:00

At the last minute last night I got an invite to a fabulous Oscar Party at Charlie and Sarah's house from my friend Wendy O. The idea was to dress for the red carpet. Wendy (O) took pictures of the guests at Charlie and Sarah's fabulous house.

What could I wear? Somehow, with all the clothes I have, I don't have a formal, and really, nothing else will do for the red carpet. I did have a pair of 4" pewter strappy lizard skin heels, which would've looked wonderful with something as long as I didn't have to walk very far, but I had no dress.

I looked in my teenitesy little closet and saw my hand-painted black velvet circle skirt with thousands of sequins. I've had it for nigh on to 25 years, and I think it was probably pretty close to that old when I got it, so it is an ancient and venerable thing. And ancient and venerable and very flashy thing. It would certainly do for flash, but no one in their right mind would really wear it to Oscar night...

Unless they were the Best Foreign Film of 2008. So that's what I went as...

Of course, since I was wearing my Taxco skirt (that's what's painted on the border; apparently it's a scene from Taxco), I could wear my cowboy boots, which meant I could walk like a human.

ps. Wendy O - very smartly - went as the Press!

chicken tamales

2009-02-21T19:46:00.009-06:00

Oh, I do so adore chicken tamales. I had a craving for them last week. My faves are the Oaxacan Tamaleo ones, wrapped in banana leaves. But you have to go to the farmer's market to get them, so I occasionally buy ones in stores. I bought some at Central Market recently mostly because they came in a little cloth baggie. I'm a sucker for things that come in little cloth baggies. So, of course, you have to figure out something to do with the baggie depués, and I thot, why not turn it into bookcloth and bind a book with it? So that's what I did.

Perhaps you can guess what the problem is when you turn a baggie into bookcloth: the baggie determines the size of the book, unless you want to run the design over the edges. I didn't want to do that, so I measured and then cut some boards to get them to fit the back cover. It had more type on it and so was the determiner of the size. I wanted to have some thickness to the book (it's blank, 80# Strathmore writing text in soft white), but couldn't have too much because there wasn't much room between the front and back of the bag.

I could've done a few more signatures, but I just wanted to get started binding. First I had to sew a headband. That's the thing that peaks up on the spine of the book - usually a piece of cloth just glued on, but in this case it's a sewn headband.

And then, of course I had to come up with some endpapers, so I found some images of a chicken and an ear of corn and made up a couple sheets in InDesign, and ran them off on my new Epson printer.

And, that was basically it, in terms of design, anyway. The hardest part of binding books, for me, is letting them dry in the press overnight. They really should dry a lot longer than that. I actually let this one dry about 36 hours before I had to take it out and show it to someone because it was just so darn cute!

And now I'll have to figure out what to do with it.

The inauguration

2009-01-21T08:12:00.002-06:00

I have no tv. I grew up without one until I was fourteen, and have never really liked the damn things. I'd rather read or listen to the radio.

But yesterday I wanted to SEE the Inauguration, and I wanted to see it with people. So I was really happy when MoveOn sent me a notification of a viewing at the Dog and Duck Pub, which was opening early, people, to allow us to watch the End of and Error. The event was supposed to be for about 30 people, but there had to be 75 to 100 folks there, watching on tvs both inside and outside. Some were drinking coffee, and some were starting with the fabulous selection of draft beer that Dog and Duck has. Noisemakers were passed out to those both sitting and standing. I think you could fairly say that most of us were old enough to know who Aretha Franklin is/was and could probably do a fair version of Respect if asked.

And so we watched, cheering occasionally, and yes, booing occasionally too. A little growl of disapproval went up when Roberts fucked up the words to the oath of office. But we were mostly silent for the Address. We cheered and clapped a few times, and went nuts at the end. When Reverend Lowery said "That all those who do justice and love mercy say Amen," we all said "Amen!" with him and millions of our fellow Americans, loudly!

And, when the Navy Sea Chanters came up to sing our National Anthem, and Diane Feinstein told the crowd in Washington to rise, we rose too, and sang.

Call to Renew America

2009-01-19T07:14:00.003-06:00

Today we here in Austin have the opportunity to participate in USAservice.org's Call to Renew America. I know, because I got my empty grocery bag stuck in my front gate yesterday!

My neighbor, Joel, stuck it there for me. My councilmen, Mike Martinez and Lee Leffingwell had the idea, I think. And, the idea is simple. We take these bags to the grocery store, fill it with things like canned tuna, stew and chili (preferably with pop tops), canned vegetables, pasta and pasta sauce, beans, rice, healthy cereals, peanut butter and baby food. The food will go to the Capital Area Food Bank.

The cool thing is that Joel will actually take the bag to the food bank or the Texans for Obama HQ for me!

The other cool thing is that I read Mark Bittman's NY Times column Fresh Start for A New Year? Let's Begin in the Kitchen and loved it. Most of this stuff I already do. There are NO salad dressings in my fridge that I haven't made myself. I grew up in a family that always used the same oil and vinegar salad dressing. My Mom made it, but my Dad taught her the recipe. It's just oil - when I was young it was vegetable oil, but, of course, now it's olive oil - vinegar, salt, pepper and lots of garlic. Mom slivered her garlic and added it to the bottle, but I chop it up. I do have a couple of cans of beans in my cupboard, just in case I get a last minute invitation to a party and have to throw together either Austin, Texas caviar or black beans layered with guacamole and topped with Mexican fresh cheese. So, I have beans and cans of gold and white corn. I also have a couple of cans of tomatoes and, gasp, a can of Campbells Cream of Chicken soup. All I can say about the latter is that I grew up in the south and there are a LOT of casseroles that require that particular ingredient. But I'm putting those cans into the bag. They don't all have pop tops, but I hope the food bank will forgive me.

Among my New Year's resolutions is to cook at least one pot of beans a week and eat them... Or I guess I could feed them to someone else. Right now there are two pots going on the stove: a pot of black beans, for black bean soup; and a pot of garbanzos for hummus.

New Year's resolutions are kind of a hokey thing, but they are a chance for us to think about the past year, evaluate it and decide what needs to change. We have a sort of artificial 'start date' to begin that change, January 1st, or if you miss that date, the somewhat later Chinese New Years. Of course you could start at any time, too...

This year we have an even greater opportunity. We have a new president after eight years of pure disaster for our nation. He's not just any new president; he's our first black president, which might not mean as much to you if you didn't grow up in the South in the years of segregation... If you don't remember the water fountains with 'WHITE' and 'COLORED' on them (and before you understood what this really meant as a kid, you thot it referred to the color of the water)... If you didn't see the guys with the white hoods marching down the street... If you can't remember the marches against the guys in the hoods... And, he's a president whose slogan is change.

And here's the thing... He can't do that by himself. We have to do it with him. We have to save ourselves. Given that he got 52% of the vote, I'm figuring I'm gonna have to save myself AND someone else. Probably a unrepentant Republican...

New Year's

2009-01-16T07:33:00.003-06:00

Well, I didn't have much of a New Year's this year. We were in the hospital with my Dad, of course, and that's just not a place conducive to a New Year's celebration. I loved Roz's post about her New Year's ritual, only, obviously I couldn't do that on January 1st. But I can do it on Chinese New Year's, so that's my plan.

I'm getting really excited about the whole thing.

For Chinese New Year's - as I understand it - there's a lot of preparation involving cleaning your house, paying off debts, cooking ritual foods, a LOT of red and orange, and visiting friends. On top of that, I want to do the things that make me happy and that I love, a list that is not unlike Roz's: art, bookbinding, music, cooking, walking, dancing, exercising, and spending time with cats and friends. Oh, and seeing if I can find a Dragon Dance somewhere in Austin.

It's the year of the Brown Cow, BTW, which is supposedly a sign of stability, and I think many of us will appreciate that! So I'm making my list, balancing my checkbook, organizing my clutter and thinking in red and orange...

the functional family

2009-01-01T11:57:00.002-06:00

If you'd asked me about my family, oh, say twenty years ago, I probably would've said we were a dysfunctional family... My parents divorced, my Dad remarried (but not my Mom), I acquired two step-sisters and a step-brother, whom I had known before they became part of my family... And there were issues, the usual ones that such families have...

So this is the family that I came to visit, to be part of, this Christmas. We are at this point: my Dad and stepmom, Ginger; my brother (it's too tiring to keep typing step) Steve and his wife, Saihan, and their two daughters; my sister Pam (the photographer) and her husband Jed; and my sister Leslie. It's a lot of people in a small apartment. My Dad is permanently in a wheelchair and has been for six years. He has one of those electric ones and can get around their retirement village just fine.

We decided to do our unorthodox Christmas on Tuesday. I'm calling it that because we're not religious people, mostly. I was raised Unitarian, and I'm a lapsed one, at that. My sibs didn't really go to church, but said prayers every now and again... Anyway holding xmas on Tuesday would give us time to cook the turkey and eat it on unorthodox Christmas Eve - which was Monday - which is what is done in this part of my family. (My Mom's family are the ones that do lasagne on xmas Eve, and we're not even Italian...) On unorthodox Christmas, Jed prepares a kringle, which is a delicious pastry slathered with jam and sprinkled with almonds. We eat it while we open our stockings.

Now I, personally, am not very big on presents at xmas. I don't know why, I just don't really like the whole present exchange/stocking thing. A present from one person to another, yes, but several? Wads of wrapping paper? Hours of unwrapping? Uhh, no. But that's what the family does, and it's one of the reasons I don't usually come home for xmas. (The other is that up until last year, or really, since it's a new year, the year before that, they always did xmas on xmas day, and I'd rather be in Texas with my kids and grandkids.) Anyhoo... this year unorthodox xmas was after traditional xmas and I could come so here I am and you get this post...

So there we were opening stockings and eating kringle, except for Dad, who went to his spanish 'tertulia,' which is where a bunch of residents get together and speak spanish to each other. Dad got back in time for opening presents and as that was all winding down, he ate his kringle, and choked.

Since my Dad is in the wheelchair and he's not small, it took two people to Heimlich him, my sisters. Then he vomited, sort of interiorly and aspirated it. Then he started to turn blue. This all happened really, really quickly. And just as quickly, Jed ran into the bathroom to pull the cord to summon the retirement village emergency crew, and I was screaming "Call 911, call 911 NOW!" while trying to keep the bacon I was cooking from catching fire. Steve and Saihan lifted Dad out of his chair - no mean feat as he's 200+ lbs of dead weight - and Pam started CPR.

Jed took the little ones outside, Leslie and I moved furniture so EMS could get in, Steve went down to the parking lot to get ready for the ambulance/fire truck and Pam kept on with the CPR with the folks from the retirement village. EMS got there with suction and suctioned Dad's airway and got him stable and pink again and took him and Ginger to the emergency room. Pam and I followed in a car very sedately.

Leslie followed with food, water and books. You don't want to drink from emergency room fountains, really. You don't want to breathe the air. When your sister tells you to put a mask over your mouth you do so. Yes you look silly, but you're less likely to get sick.

It turned out that in suctioning my Dad (or in the compressing, or really anytime, but prob'ly during suctioning), Dad's stomach had been perforated and air was getting into his abdomen from the GI tract. This is unhealthy and can lead rather quickly to peritonitis. We lucked out in that the ER surgeon was Dr Charles, who is a whiz on GI surgery. Dad appeared to us to be cognizant of the world and us, but not able to talk because they'd taken his teeth and shoved a tube down his throat, so we made the decision to do the surgery...

He came through that and is now in ICU. If he can get rid of the stuff in his lungs he stands a good chance of recovery. But that's not what I wanted to write about...

What I wanted to write about was how functional my family was in an emergency. Without talking or ordering or anything, each of us chose something to do, something useful to do, and did it. The EMS people told all of us as they left that we had done it perfectly. Maybe they do this to everyone. Maybe not. I hope to hell I never have to find out by going through this again.

But it remains. We functioned, as a unit, and we functioned well. Shoot, I can't really write about it without crying.

We didn't really have much of a New Year's Eve, of course. Gone were the plans for the fabulous dinner at the Angus Barn. We were all asleep by midnight last night. But I do have a resolution for 02009 (I'm Y10k compliant and urge you to be too). I'm going to take CPR again... 'Cos what happened is that they've changed the compression to breath ratio since I took it from 5-7 compressions to one breath, to 30 compressions. Now that's a BIG difference.

And if you haven't recertified your CPR - or certified - I urge you to do so this year, too. It can save someone's life. Really.

traveling...

2008-12-27T21:19:00.002-06:00

Yesterday I flew to North Carolina to spend, ummm, Christmas with my family. We're not christians, but we celebrate anyway. Or maybe some of my family are, but mostly not. Anyway, I was to fly thru Dallas Fort Worth, and due to airline weirdness, I ended up flying out an hour earlier than expected...

Which was great, because, although Austin's airport is pretty cool and has only local food (no chains... You cannot get MacDonald's at the Austin airport!) the DFW airport has - a wine bar! It's in Terminal A (ok, there's one in D, too, I think) and I was hoping that I'd be able to find it.

Sure enough I landed at gate A 19, La Bodega Wine Bar is at A 15, and I was leaving for RDU from gate A 14. I could drink and not have to worry about missing my plane. I figured that fate was telling me to sit down and have a drink, and you just shouldn't argue with fate...

So I sat down and ordered a glass of La Bodega's Cabernet Sauvignon. This wine bar makes it's own wine... Or rather there's a winery and if you want to sample their wine, you have to go to this wine bar. And they make a damn fine Cab, IMHO. It's a very tiny bar, maybe seats 8, 9 people. There's a little side area where they sell wine/liquor tchotchkes but, all in all, it's highly intimate. Plus you're in a bar in an airport, and what's the likelihood you're going to see any of the people at the bar again? So people tend to start talking - ok, people tend to start talking when I'm around anyway - and tell things about themselves that they probably just wouldn't share with the average person they'd known for five minutes...

Yesterday I shared the bar with an Air Force colonel getting ready to deploy to Iraq in January and an unmarried couple just back from a seven-day vacation. There were other people, too, further down, but they were talking amongst themselves. And then there was the bartender, Harrison.

Somehow within five minutes we were talking about marriages. The colonel had a failed, seventeen year marriage behind him and was trying to get engaged to someone that very day, but she wasn't returning his calls because he'd done something wrong. I owned up to having two exes. The couple weren't married. Harrison has three ex-wives. Like I said, I'm not even through my first glass of wine and I know a lot of stuff about these people!

The lady of the couple handed the colonel The 7 Principles of Making Marriage Work, and he told her about The Five Love Languages. The latter is pretty religious, I find, from looking at the website, but the little quiz is kinda neat. I found it interesting that both the books had numbers in their titles. I'm sure there's some theory about self-help books needing finite numbers of things to do to fix your life. SMALL finite numbers. Like you wouldn't really want to read The Four Thousand Six Hundred and Seventy Three things to Make Your Marriage Really Rock.

And the colonel, bless his heart, didn't take the book. No, after the couple left, he handed it to me.

I'm hoping that's not some kind of a sign...

Post party

2008-12-26T08:01:00.009-06:00

My Christmas Eve party went just fine. I had too much lasagne left over and too little salad, but that was my grandkid's fault. They'd been to another party beforehand where they'd eaten seven something really rich (donuts? pieces of cake or pie? cookies?) and didn't want lasagne; they only wanted salad. But I had enough wine (very important!), firewood for the chimnea, and Christmas cookies.

Ok, it's probably not fair to call them Christmas cookies, since I make them for Valentines, Easter, and every other holiday that requires cookies, but that's what they're called. It's my grandmother's recipe and my Mom made tons of 'em every year (twelve batches, usually, for xmas). I started making batches even before I had kids, but it sort of amped up when they came along, and then, when Mom died, I inherited some of her cookie people, so now I'm making twelve batches. When you make this many cookies, you collect a LOT of cookie cutters. A LOT. Stars, hearts, conifers (what people who do not run tree lots probably think of as pine trees, when, of course, they're usually fir trees), alphabets, dinosaurs, chickens, eggs, cats, guitars, Texas, musical notes and probably some more that I can't remember without going and looking at 'em all... The Christmas batch has always been: stars, hearts, conifers, and Texas, with occasionally some cats thrown in.

This year, when I was at the hand surgeon's, I saw one of those women's family magazines and it had polar bear cookies on the cover. Polar bears! I've never seen polar bear cookie cutters, but immediately went on a hunt, right after the doctor's appointment, mostly 'cos I was up near Williams Sonoma/Crate & Barrel/Whole Foods. None of 'em had polar bears.

So I went online. The Cookie Cutter Shop online had the best deal between prices and shipping. Unfortunately they also have 700 cookie cutters, so I didn't just get a polar bear. No! I got a lovely penguin and a beautiful cardinal, as well...

Sorry, all the penguins have left the building...

Making twelve batches of cookies requires that you have a cookie decorating party. You mix up a shitload of the 'frosting' (powdered sugar, salt, vanilla and water), get out your food coloring (I use the concentrated ones from Michael's as well as the ol' regular ones from the grocery store), a bunch of small containers and spoons and invite your kids, grandkids, and friends over. You cover your table top with plastic, put the cookies on wire racks and go to town. In our case, eggnog and Maker's Mark are involved for non-pregnant adults. It still takes hours... But it's hours of fun. You have to have non-sweet things to eat, too.

Then all you have to package everything up and start sending it off.

Here's the cookie recipe.

1 cup butter
1 cup sugar
2 eggs
1 teaspoon vanilla
1/2 teaspoon salt
1/2 teaspoon baking soda
3 1/2 cups flour (low protein)

Now, just a word about baking cookies for those of you who haven't taken chemistry or didn't have a grandmother who baked. You want your butter at about 65 degrees, so you take it out of the fridge and let it approach room temp but not quite get there. You cream it with the beater attachment after cutting it into 1/2 inch squares. Add the sugar and beat, scraping the sides of the bowl. You're incorporating air into the butter. Add the vanilla, and beat. Add the eggs, one at a time, and beat. By now it should be a light and fluffy mixture. Then start adding in the flour. Low protein flour is good for cookies and pie crusts; high protein flour is good for bread. If you only have high protein flour, you can substitute a half cup of corn starch for a half cup of flour. Use the dough attachment to incorporate the flour. Beat until just incorporated. Get out a sheet of wax paper about 15 inches long and put the dough on it in a long roll and refrigerate overnight. Roll out to 1/4 inch thick, cut with your fabulous cookie cutters, and bake in a pre-heated 375 oven until they just start to brown on ungreased cookie sheets. Allow to cool and frost.

The Maker's Mark helps.

How green can you be?

2008-12-22T13:43:00.003-06:00

Ok. I don't normally post photos of toilets on my blog. Heck, I don't normally post photos of toilets on anyone's blog, but today I was at the new UFCU branch in Austin. It is VERY proud of how green it is, with rainwater harvesting and optimal solar placement and lord knows whatall.

And, in the bathroom is one of those new 'dual flush' toilets... You know, the ones with different amounts of water for, ummm, number 1 and number 2? And that's cool, and it's cool that it's filled with rainwater, but do people really drink out of toilets?

Maybe the sign is for dogs.

the economic downturn

2008-12-14T06:46:00.002-06:00

Well, you couldn't prove it by the tree lot this year. It's doing fabulously. Running a tree lot in Texas is always a crap shoot. Essentially it depends on the weather, most particularly the weather on the weekends.

If it is cool and dry on the weekends, the tree lot does well. If it is cool and damp - say a fog or light drizzle - less well; hot and dry, even less well; and cold and wet, not well at all. There's also a lot of variations on how long the 'season' is, depending on when Thanksgiving falls, because our tree lot, which is the oldest tree lot in Texas, if not the world (we started selling trees in 1951 or '52), opens the day after Thanksgiving. The Tree Lot, no matter what will NOT open before Thanksgiving, and certainly not just after Halloween, which is when some people think the Christmas season begins these days. (Can you hear the 'sniff!' that accompanies that?)

So this year was a short season. We were somewhat helped, I do believe, by the UT/A&M game being played on Thanksgiving, instead of the day after (our opening day), and probably by the fact that Texas positively trounced A&M this year. Usually opening weekend is kind of slow, which gives us time to 'open up' the trees, which are shipped bundled up, wrapped in a gazillion miles of polymer twine. You have to slit the twine, pull the tree upright, and somehow shake it out, to get the branches to drop into a normal position. Then you have to tie it up to a line, so it won't fall over on anyone.

Some of these trees are really big, 9' - 10' tall, and they weigh a ton, and cost a fortune. Essentially the bigger the tree, the more it costs by a geometric factor. So the smaller trees are quite reasonable: you can pick 'em up, you can afford them and they will fit in a house. The bigger ones take two people or three to pick up and carry. You gotta have a pretty big room to put them in, and I'm always happy to meet people who can pay for 'em.

Last year, the big trees, which normally sell out really fast, moved very, very slowly. That was highly disturbing, because we have the most money tied up in them. So this year, I put on my magic prognosticating hat, got a glass of wine, and decided I would order the same number of trees as last year, but smaller trees. We'd make less profit, 'cos there's less mark up on the small trees, but people would be able to afford them. And, we'd keep our prices the same as last year.

My tree suppliers were quite compliant and sold me the trees for the same price as last year. Actually they probably made a bit more money, 'cos gasoline was down, although diesel was not down as much as regular gas. And, I could use last year's price cards! I checked with the Board of the charity, and they agreed on my strategy.

So, we were wrong. The trees, wreaths, garland and tree stands flew off the lot. The big trees flew off the lot. By the beginning of last week, I was having to order more trees. Not tons more, but a few hundred. What happened? Well, we had nice cool weekends, dry for the most part. But that couldn't be all of it.

I also noticed that people were using credit cards more. Last year it was 40/40/20: 40% check, 40% credit card, and 20% cash. This year it's 80/10/5, that being 80% credit card, 10% cash and 5% check. Weird to have such a sea change in spending habits in one year. Now some of these may be debit cards, but we don't do the debit thing, and just run it all as charge. It's more expensive, but easier, and our cashiers are untrained volunteers, so we use the KISS principle.

So are folks in Texas ignoring all the warnings to pay off credit cards instead of charging on them? Are they just more optimistic than the rest of the nation? Is our economy more insulated? Are we just in denial?

My guess is that it's a bit of all four. People around here talk about how our real estate market is strong, but I think that's baloney. It's not moribund, but houses that would have been snapped up in a day or two eighteen months ago are sitting unsold for months. All the fancy pants high rise condos that are being built downtown are now exploring the option of 'leasing!' Fancy that!

Whatever it is, I'm glad people are buying trees.

winter light

2008-12-12T22:07:00.006-06:00

Me on right with my friend, Andy.

Yes, Roz is right, I don't quite understand snow. Ok so I WAS born in Michigan (shhhh, it's a secret!) and I have adorable pictures of me in a snowsuit. I quit understanding snow the year I lived in South Dakota/northern Nebraska, when it was 117 on the Fourth of July and -42 in December. Admittedly, there wasn't that much snow involved in the whole process, because it doesn't rain out there very often... But still, snow and my brain just sort of did a disconnect, which was reinforced when I lived in Madison, Wisconsin the next winter...

But winter light is winter light and I love it. I try to analyze light. I think about it: would I know that this was December if there were no other external clues, just the light? I think the answer is yes, because here in Texas at least - where we do have palm trees, although they don't really sway - the other clues are highly changeable. It can be warm or it can be cold, but the light is that sort of weak, lemony, but kind of harsh light... Raking light from the angle of the sun.

This week it has been cold - a couple days - and warm... Also a couple of days. And today was a warmish one... Mid sixties. I went for a walk late afternoon. I went to the Golden Slipper, my local shoe repair shop. "When do you want 'em?" the guy asked me. "Umm, today?" I replied. After all, it was my favorite pair of Børn Cardinal boots. I wear 'em at the tree lot. It's part of my high fashion lumberjack look. He said he could have 'em ready by five. I said that was cool 'cos I needed to go to Farm to Market Grocery (Look for the radish!) on South Congress. So I walked there, enjoying my neighborhood and the fall colors of the leaves, and the neighborhood goat.

After I shopped at Farm to Market, I went next door and ate dinner at Woodland. Ok, it was a bit early, but it was happy hour, so I had the white bean and sausage soup with a glass of Malbec. And damn, I missed not having my journal with me! After the mugging, when I go shopping, I take just a bag and a credit card or $$$ in my pocket, but NOT my purse. So I didn't have a journal, and I was hard up.

I'm going to have to work this whole thing out. I don't want to be mugged again - and, oh horrors, if they'd gotten my purse with my journal in it! - but, I can't go around without my journal.

So, I've got some thinking to do.

What's up...

2008-12-12T18:37:00.008-06:00

Ricë told me that if I didn't blog today, she was going to unlink me! Alright already! She said I'm even behind Miss Doxie in blogging, and Roz positootley puts me to shame. Sigh. It is true. I figured at the very least I could list my excuses for not blogging.

First, I went to the cabin in NY. It is kinda primitive, essentially a shed. There's no heat, unless you are one of those silly people who thinks you can heat an uninsulated cabin with a fireplace. There is also - gasp - no internet, at least no hi-speed internet, unless I drive into town. And, in August, with gas at $4/gallon, I didn't feel like driving anywhere very often. A couple of friends from Texas came to visit me and we did drive into the city, and over to Woodstock, where I spent way too much money on a really cool silk jacket. Almost all my clothes come from thrift stores (I shopped several times at the Salvation Army store in Kingston) except shoes and things like really cool black silk jackets with faux fur lining the cuffs and collar.

On my way back to Texas - mind you, I drive to and from NY, so I'll have a car while I'm there - I stopped to visit my sister in Ohio. It was sort of a surprise visit and we had great fun calling the folks and talking to them since they didn't know I was going to visit Pam. Hell, Pam didn't know I was going to visit Pam. My cell phone would not work at Pam's house, so we talked on her phone. Stupidly, I left my cell phone in the living room... Stupidly because Pam and Jed arise early enough in the morning to leave the house at 6:15 am! I am NOT awake at that hour, so they told me just to lock the door behind me. I rose, showered, dressed, made a cup of coffee, packed and left, locking the door behind me. Of course, I'd left the cell phone in the living room. I couldn't call Pam to ask if there was a key hidden somewhere, 'cos, well, my cell phone was in the living room. I remembered that the window was open in the room I slept in, so I figured I'd just go around the house to the window and slip it open, pop in and retrieve the phone. I just didn't reckon on the house being completely surrounded by huge bushes in an impenetrable thicket. It had rained, so as I tried to slip along between the wall of the house and the bushes, I got completely soaked and covered in wet, decaying pine needles. Sure enough, the window was open, but I couldn't get the screen out, so had to go back to my car, get my trusty Opinel French Fruit Knife (#4), wend my way back to the window, and slip out the screen. Ahh, one more problem, even though I was wearing 3 1/2" heels, I was not tall enough to jump into the window. Once again, I slipped back between the house and the bushes, to the garage, where I found a bucket, a sturdy bucket, which I carried back to the window, climbed in, retrieved my phone, climbed out, closed the window, put in the screen, grabbed the bucket and wound my way around the house one last time... I put the bucket back and looked at myself in my car window. I was covered with wet pine needles, and had dirt and muck all over me. But I had my cell phone. And no one had called the police, so I drove off and called my sister and told her how easy it was to break into her house.

Back in Austin, I proceeded to cut off my fingers on my left hand with a table saw. Wait, wait, I'm making that much more dramatic that it really was. I actually just ran the fingers lightly over the whirling blade when a piece of wood backed up as I was ripping it. It hurt like a melonfarmer. I couldn't believe I'd done what I'd done, but I had enough sense to run into the bathroom and put my fingers under cold running water. I managed to reach my Vicodin with my right hand and promptly took one. Twenty minutes later the bleeding was manageable. I could bend the fingers, so I knew I hadn't severed a tendon or a bone. To celebrate that fact and to try and overcome the pretty horrendous pain, I took another Vicodin, and fell sound asleep. When I woke up, I soaked my fingers in warm salt water, changed the bandages, took more Vicodin and went back to sleep. I think I did that for two days. Then I decided that, despite the salt water soakings, my index finger was getting infected, so I called my doctor's office. When you tell them you've run your hand through a table saw, they'll see you right away. They just want to see what kind of a person would be silly enough NOT to go to an emergency room, I think. Anyway, I ended up going to a plastic surgeon who told me that my fingers were going to be horribly deformed. For that he charged me $166. Actually, my fingers are going to be fine, I think, and my index finger is kind of cutely deformed. But they hurt like cold fire when they get cold.

Let's see. Oh yeah, ten days after that I taught my first fall class in bookbinding. It went ok. I'd quit taking the Vicodin, 'cos I just can't teach on the stuff. I was feeling pretty perky and chipper. I got home from class and realized I was out of wet cat food. So I walked to the grocery store five blocks away, talking on my cell phone to my Dad the whole way. I had my wallet and a nice 'shopping' bag I'd gotten in Guate this summer. I put the cans in the bag with my wallet and left the store. A car followed me out of the lot, turned onto the street I turned onto and parked and turned its lights out. (It was 9:45 pm.) I saw the cars lights go on and then WHAM!, something hit me really, really hard on the back of the head. It hit me so hard that I just sort of flew to the ground. I didn't even put my hands out (a good thing, considering) to break my fall. And then some melonfarmer was wresting my bag off my shoulder, and I was telling Dad that I had to get off the phone, I was being mugged. I sat up and yelled "You're only getting four cans of cat food," at the young man who was running to the car that had pulled up alongside us. And then I remembered my wallet and thot "Shit." I called 911, and four police cars came. They wanted to take me to the emergency room, but I didn't want to go. I knew I didn't have a concussion, and I just wasn't in the mood... The police had those big flashlights and they found my hat and glasses, and bluetooth earpiece... And my wallet! Apparently when the guy jumped in the car, my wallet fell out of the bag. Everything was there. The police offered to take me home, but I told them I had to go back to the store and buy four more cans of cat food, so, bless them, they took me to the store and waited, and then took me home.

So, have you been in the back of a police car recently? I hadn't. They're all molded plastic, from the back of the driver's seat to the back of the back seat, with a plexiglass divider in the middle. I think this should be an option - the 'travel' option - for all family cars. You can just hose it out if there are any accidents, and the kids can see each other but not touch each other. Fabulous!

Ahh, and now it's tree lot time. I run a tree lot for a charity at Christmas. We sell somewehere between 2,500 and 2,700 trees and all the profits benefit youth charity. The lot is staffed by volunteers and part of my job is to 'organize' them and their schedule. It's like herding cats. However it's really fun because I get to pretend I'm a lumberjack for three weeks and play with trees and chain saws! Vrrrooom! Vroom! The only problem this year is that it's been pretty cold here in Texas, which is good for tree sales but really bad for my fingers. It will be over next week, actually, if we don't run out of trees first. We turn the lot over to a Boy Scout troop for a week and in return they set up and tear down the lot for us. So, on Wednesday, the tree lot is theirs and I begin my frantic cookie baking project.

A future Tree Lot Chairman

And that's it.

Whew.

Quetzaltenango

2008-08-04T19:06:00.011-05:00

That's right, I'm in Guatemala, where it's pretty darn cold. Yes, I know that back home it's something like 105 degrees (which is something like 40 degrees in C, I think) but here it's in the 60s and raining. It's because we're at 7,500 ft (no, I'm not going to do the whole meters thing, thank you). I'm here with my daughter Ali and my granddaughter Kaya at spanish language school, Casa Xelaju. There should be an accent on the 'u' to let you know that that's where the emphasis goes, but this is a spanish language keyboard and I haven't gotten the hang of it yet.

Xelaju is the actual Maya name of Quetzaltenango. I'm not sure which Maya language, but one of them, anyway. The school is fabulous, giving us five solid hours of one-on-one instruction a day, plus room and board for $190 per week. Of course you DO have to get to Guatemala, and from Guatemala City to Xela, but still, it's a great deal, especially if you get to stay with a family like the one we're staying with, who feed us well, take great care of us, and live only a block from the school!

So far we have been to Antigua, which is a very cool town with a big ex-pat scene and bars that have a really good mezcal named Ilegal, which comes from Mexico. We were there for a couple of days visiting a friend of Ali's also named Wendy and meeting lots of new friends. The bus trip here was totally scary as you go up into the mountains and then down and then up again and then down into Xela. The roads are pretty iffy with great views, or 1000 foot dropoffs, depending on your point of view. I'm ashamed to say that the latter was mostly my point of view, but it probably had to do with the exhaust fumes and the smell of burning brakes.

We went halfway back to Antigua last weekend only the weather was pretty scary for this microbus trip. It was raining and foggy with 1000 foot dropoffs, only you couldn't really see them because you couldn't even see the road. We were going to the lakeside (Lago Atitlan) town of Panajachel, which is very touristy, but the tourists are from all over the world and it's really fun. We stayed at a quite nice hotel... $45 a night for 3 people in a room, Hotel Kakchikel, if you go to visit. It had a pool... It was a cold pool, but it was a pool and it was actually warm enough Sunday afternoon for me to dip my toesies in the water. I did a lot of shopping. I ate numerous bowls of fabulous chicken soup and ate baskets of freshly made tortillas and guacamole at Pajaro Azul. Friends from Antigua came, too, and made it a real sort of vacation... (Sitting in a classroom speaking spanish five hours a day is pretty hard work for some of us.)

I visited a chocolate 'factory' last week, too. They're kind of like the ones in Oaxaca, but a bit more primitive. The machinery was very cool. Electric, with long leather belts cobbled together with nails. The guy in the couple who worked there was just finishing putting a belt back together when my teacher and I arrived. They ground the cacao beans first into a metal tub with sugar in it and mixed the ground cacao, which looked like thick Hershey's syrup, into the sugar by hand. That tub was picked up and moved to another mill and ground again twice with some other stuff like vanilla beans and pine nuts. It is then patted down into plastic tubs - the heat of the hands makes it kind of melty - and given to women to form into bars in old metal molds. Yes, of course I ate it. It's delicious... Kind of grainy and completely unlike American or European chocolate. The little factory smelled like heaven, or what I think heaven would smell like, anyway.

Just a few quick things about the highlands of Guatemala...

- Houses are open to the air. They have windows and doors, but usually, somewhere, there's some place that's open to the outside. There's no heat or ac, because normally you don't need it. Occasionally people use space heaters...

- A lot of the streets in the center of the bigger cities are cobblestone and kind of one way (una via) and only for fairly small cars. There are maybe two or three traffic lights in this city, or at least that's all I've seen, and damn few stop signs either. There IS a fair amount of horn honking, and people actually look when they get to a corner, because buildings are built right up to the street and you can't see around the corners.

- There are some sidewalks, but they are also cobblestone and very narrow. Apparently the most common injury to students here is falling down on the sidewalks.

- Tortillas here are thick and small and made of corn, but tamales are made of cooked rice mixed with oil and wrapped in plantain leaves.

- You see lots of dogs here on the streets... Skinny dogs that live on garbage and handouts. So far I've seen three cats, two on rooftops and one at a vender in Pana. I bought a bedspread from him. It was very beautiful as was the cat.

alla prima painting class

2008-05-05T10:21:00.016-05:00

I had a fabulous weekend. Friday, Austin Museum of Art's Art School (where I teach bookbinding) sent out an email about an alla prima (Italian meaning 'at once') painting class taught by Laurel Daniel, that was going to happen over the weekend. One of the fabulous things about teaching at the Art School is that you get to take, ummm, I think it's one class for every class you teach, per semester, FREE! Art classes, for FREE! Never mind that somehow this gem of information had escaped me in the last umpteen years I've taught there; it came this weekend, and for a painting class that was FABULOUS!

The whole point of alla prima painting is that it's done quickly, so it's just what you need for painting outdoors (or plein air... Note that to be really cool, all artist's terms are in a foreign language...) where the light changes from moment to moment, giving you at most about 2 hours to paint something before the light is so radically different that it's a completely different painting.

But we were not painting out of doors, because, frankly, the light changes a leetle too fast for beginners to deal with. No, we were working in one of the wonderful new studios at AMOA/Laguna Gloria, with spotlights on little vignettes (see, another French word) set up by Laurel. Still lifes (ok, that one's in English), as it were.

Laurel's technique involves using a warm and cool of each primary color and raw umber and titanium white. So our palette (!) was: cadmium yellow pale, cadmium yellow, cadmium red, alizarin crimson, ultramarine, and pthalo blue... (plus the umber and white). Laurel uses no turpentine or mineral spirits, which makes it a fairly non-toxic art class (you still can't suck your brush or anything, because cadmium is poisoinous and besides, it's hard to get off your teeth and lips). You just use refined linseed oil and Masters Brush Cleaner.

First you mix up blobs of alizarin crimson, ultramarine and raw umber to create a really dark neutral color, like a black but not black. You don't paint with black, actually, because it doesn't really exist in the world of art because it's the absence of color, or something, and it just deadens anything you add it to. So you use dark neutrals or purples. You mix in a bit of linseed oil until you have a nice yogurt-cream consistency mixture and paint your underpainting, complete with some drybrush shading.

Here's a small underpainting for the first painting I did. Notice that the original drawing is scrubbed out because it was too small. This is what you paint over using your limited palette of color. One of the things you have to do when painting is figure out the 'value' of everything, how light or dark it is. To help us start thinking about value, Laurel had us do a value painting using only 6 or 7 tints of the dark neutral paint. Here's that little painting. (These two paintings were on 12x12" canvas boards.) After that we were ready to start our 'big' painting, in color!

At the end of class the first day it got kinda hectic, with Laurel telling us we had 15 minutes to finish so to start throwing on our background colors. Sheesh! Actually, I think that that was the best thing about the class and these paintings: working under a deadline... Because I've never been happier with paintings! Sure there are things 'wrong' with them, but as a whole, they are what I wanted. The painting style is loose, which is something I've wanted to achieve for years! (You'll notice a lot of exclamation points, because I'm just so jazzed about this!) I could go on and on, but frankly, I'd rather be painting!

My Dad

2008-04-02T21:00:00.007-06:00

I call my Dad every night... Well almost every night. He lives in NC in a retirement village and I live in Texas, and I call him after 8pm, when my free minutes kick in. He's in assisted living now, 'cos he's in a wheelchair and can't really get in and out of it without help. And, he's getting kind of old (almost 90!) and can't hear too well and has trouble concentrating.

That's something that happens when you get older... You lose the ability to multi-task. Now some of us think multi-tasking is a moral weakness, so this doesn't bother us, but still. Dad can't really concentrate on more than one thing at a time, so, if you want to talk to him it's actually easier to do it over the phone, after he's in bed and the nurses have him all tucked in and everything. He can actually hear you and nothing distracts him and it's this kind of insular little thing between us... And my computer.

We start off on a discussion - tonight we started with him telling me about zarzuelas, because a group had performed one at the retirement village tonight. So he says "Zarzuela," and spells it and I look it up on wikipedia, just like you probably just did... And then I read him anything interesting I find on wikipedia... The zarzuela he heard was Cecilia Valdes by Gonzalo Roig, and I noticed that the singer was Aida Pujol. Now Pujol is an interesting name to me because it's the maiden name of my 2nd ex's mother, whose family was from Cuba. And Dad said he didn't remember that (after I mentioned it to him) but he remembered that when he'd met her, she'd shown him a bunch of old family letters in some variant of German...

Which is because before they went to Cuba, they lived in Alsace Lorraine. So I go to Alsace Lorraine in the wikipedia, but, see, this is the fabulous thing about my Dad...

He already knows all this stuff... Without the wikipedia. Now somehow from here, and I can't quite remember how, we got off onto Finno Ugric. I truly do not remember how, but on this, I could actually read stuff to my Dad that he didn't know! Boy, howdy was that exciting! And we had to hit the Proto Uralic page, too, just for good measure and I was trying to describe the pretty colored map with all the language groups on it and go through the cognates, as well as I could because these are NOT easy languages to pronounce... At least to me.

And then Dad noticed it was after 11 his time and I guess he'd had enough of Finno Ugric so we said good night.

In English.

sick cat day

2008-04-02T18:04:00.003-06:00

Ok. Ricë posted a sick cat story, so I have to post a sick cat story. It's not a competition or anything, it's like a theme, a leitmotif... A metaphor. No, maybe not. I guess, really, that reading about Cutie Pie (who sleeps with me when I visit Ricë and Earl so I won't feel lonely) made me remember this story. It's about Abner, who is one of the 'front porch cats.' My next-door-neighbor moved about six years ago and left 22 cats. Now, mind you, she took 38 cats, and would've taken these but she ran out of cars and cat carriers, and so the ones that were hard to catch and the ones that were hanging out on my porch, got left behind. I guess it was some kind of kitty rapture thing... Anyway. It took her car, her sister's SUV and her nephew's van to move the 38, and all she ever had after that was her tiny little car, so the rest of the cats never got moved. That's how I got Abner... And a bunch of other cats, but this story is about Abner.

I truly think that kitties are only really happy when they're well. A couple years ago Abner got into a fight with something. Dunno what it was but it bit him on a front paw when he was out being a cat and by the time he came home, the infection had gone to the bone. When I finally caught him and took him in to the vet's, the vet wanted to put him to sleep, because the leg needed to be amputated, and what good was a three-legged feral cat?

Well, I didn't know, but Abner was a friendly cat, always greeting me, and nice to the other kitties, letting the older cats and lady cats and kittens eat first, so I wanted to save him. What if I just gave him antibiotics? I asked. The vet exasperatedly explained that then at best I'd have a limping cat, which was about as useless as a three-legged cat. And then he quit talking because he could see by the look in my eye that I just wasn't buying it. Didn't help his cause that this was about a year after I fell off the roof and shattered my leg and was told I might never walk again, would surely never dance again, and the best I could hope for was a not-too-noticeable limp... No one suggested putting me out of my misery... At least not within my hearing...

So we did antibiotics. And sure enough, the vet was right. Abner was positively miserable... For about six months. He limped when it was cold or damp. He didn't seem very happy to see me, and there was no little sparkle in his pale green eyes.

I don't know what happened: if the pain got better or he just figured out he was ok and was going to live or what... But now he smiles when he sees me and comes to say hullo and can climb trees just fucking fine, thank you very much, and has very little limp at all...

About as much as I do.

So we commiserate on the cold wet days...

That's what friends are for.

fortune cookie

2008-02-23T18:09:00.003-06:00

So, I'm getting ready to teach in the new studio (What? What's she talking about... New studio? Another post, I promise!) tomorrow. This is scary. Do I have everything? I just don't know. I tried to run through the whole process in my mind, but my mind is just, well, I just don't know. I went to the bindery and loaded boxes up with things i know I'll need and then stopped at the local eco store, Ecowise and bought some hemp twine to make the cords out of. I also bought a chocolate bar and chatted about my composting toilet with the owner... Got back in my car and drove home.

I decided after unloading all the crap from the car to walk to a local Chinese restaurant where they used to have curry chicken. It's not too far. So I walked, and of course they don't have it any more. So I ordered another chicken dish and sat there eating slowly like I learned from Ricë and Earl and they brought me the check (the waiters, not Ricë and Earl) and my fortune cookie. I looked in my purse and... No wallet. I remembered leaving it on the dash of the car when I left Ecowise. So I had to convince them to let me go get it, which they were loathe to do without an ID, but, of course, I didn't have an ID because it, too, was on the dashboard of the car. I told them I'd leave them my iPhone, but they didn't care. "How do we know it's yours?" they asked. I couldn't for the life of me figure out why it mattered if it was mine; it's still worth more than a $9 Chinese dinner no matter whose it is, but when I promised to leave my whole damn purse with my DIARY, they agreed.

So I RAN home. Well waddled. But still, very quick for me. And I retrieved my wallet and went back and paid and resumed eating.

My fortune?

Your heart is pure and your mind is clear.

Goodness gracious....

2008-01-08T12:02:00.000-06:00

... It's been a long time. The last time I was writing, I was getting ready to set off on a road trip, The Cake Baking Road Trip, which took me from Texas to upstate New York and involved visiting a lot of friends and relatives and baking a lot of cakes. It was very fun, and I was just too busy having fun to write. And then, when I got to Phoenicia, NY, I had no internet access and my cell phone didn't work, and to reach civilization, I was forced to drive 20 very scenic miles to Woodstock and sit in the library parking lot where I could access the internet on my computer and talk on my cell phone at the very same time.

It took me a week to get to NY and about 2 1/2 days to get back, which was not a good thing. Too much driving for too long. The trip back, however, did involve a stop at Hot Springs National Park, which is one of the weirder national parks, considering it is on the main street of downtown Hot Springs AR. It's there because that's where the hot springs are... Under the street on Bath House Row. What's so cool about the park is that you can stash your car in a garage, and walk over to the Buckstaff Bathhouse, which is a fabulous old timey bathhouse that makes you feel as if you stepped back into the '20s. You can also fill up your bottles with water from the hot springs at a fountain on the street. The water comes out at 147 degrees, though, so you don't want to use flimsy plastic bottles!

After I got home to Texas, I promptly flew back to NC for the semi-annual famdamily beach trip. It wasn't the whole family this time, and it was probably our last beach trip with Dad, as it's gotten too difficult to get him out of bed and into his wheelchair. So... Sad, but fun and Bald Head was beautiful. Got back to Austin and went to Midland to do a book signing with Ricë... And give a 'sermon' at the UU church... And party and have fun... And then I was off to Oaxaca for ten days with twenty crazy artists and Michael deMeng. Now that was a total and complete hoot! Michael does 'ahhsemblage' for those of you who are not familiar with him. The trip included several days of hitting markets in and around Oaxaca, and did I mention it was over Dia de los Muertos? How could I have forgotten THAT! So cemetery visits, and ruins and museums and restaurants and bars and mezcal and oh my land.

Then it was back to Austin and the tree lot. Yup. I run a Christmas tree lot every year for one of the animal clubs in town. You know... The Lions, the Elks, the Rotarians, the Kiwanis... Animal clubs... And I are one. It's how we raise money for youth charity, and it's a lot of work, but really fun and about the best damn smelling job you can have on the planet, providing you're not allergic to conifers.

And in and along with all of this I broke a bone in my foot, had boils and had my kidneys fail... So it was a real doozy of a year.

One more about the Rez...

2007-06-18T08:39:00.000-05:00

...And then I promise I'll stop! Through various circumlocutions in the blogosphere, I found an article in Nature. As I mentioned before, I took a bunch of classes that summer, and one was led by several medicine men. They took us out and showed us plants they used to heal and we were allowed to attend various ceremonies they performed.

The most famous Lakota ceremony is the Sun Dance. This is a celebration of the summer solstice that's held some time during the summer near that time. A couple of different medicine men on the Rez had sun dances that summer, but the one our class participated in was by Pete Catches.

In order to participate in the sun dance - known for people who 'dance' suspended from a pole to which they are attached by long strands of rawhide held by stakes that pierce the pecs - you have to be clean, purified... You have to undergo a sweat lodge, and this in the middle of the South Dakota summer heat! Of course, if you're going to be staked by your pectorals to a pole in the hot sun, I guess a steam bath is a pretty moderate thing...

Sweat lodges are sort of tents made from flexible willow poles, covered with old blankets and quilts. There's an opening with a cover and a pit in the middle, which is filled with smooth rocks from the river that have been heated in a fire. The rocks are really, really hot. The participants go inside and the medicine man throws water on the rocks, making a lot of really, really hot steam. Everyone sings sweat lodge songs and tries not to pass out. Our class was designated to cut the willow branches for the sweat lodges, a big honor in and of itself!

Now, because this is a sacred ceremony, you have to cut the willow branches in a sacred way. You can't just go down to the banks of the lovely Little White River, where the mint grows wild in the shade of the willows, and start chopping away, no, that would be too easy.

You have to say prayers, out loud, to the willow spirits while you cut them down. You don't want to offend the willows, because that would be bad, ummm, karma (wrong Indians, I know). First you drape the willow you're going to cut down with tobacco ties. Almost anything religious is going to involve tobacco ties. I think different medicine men may make them different ways, but the ones we made had cloth of six colors: blue (sky), white (north), red (east), yellow (south), black (west), and green (earth), each with a pinch of Bull Durham in the middle, tied onto a piece of yarn. You say a prayer for the success of your project each time you tie a piece of cloth on. Usually you have to make 49 of these, so that's a lot of praying before you even get started with the damn willow trees.

You go down into the grove and focus on a good looking little willow plant and tell it how sad you are that you have to chop it down, but that it's for a good cause, it's going to be part of the sweat lodge for the sun dance, the annual renewal rite for the people, and, boy howdy, what an honor that is; it should just be glad it doesn't have to hang suspended from the pole! Then you grab the plant right next to it and cut it off at the ground!

Of course the willow you had hung with ties and were talking to was terrified the whole time and shaking and stuff. And the little willow next to it was being all sympathetic and unawares and NOT terrified, so it dies a little willow death with a clean, uhhh, whatever willows have that keep 'em going. And the willow you didn't chop down is soooo thankful that you didn't chop it down that it breathes a sigh of relief and all the willows in the little grove feel better! Needless to say it takes a long damn time to cut down enough willows to make a sweat lodge.

There were ten or fifteen people in my class, so we spread out in the shade of the willows on the banks of the Little White. Since there were so many of us, we were in groups of three or four, each person tying his or her ties on a willow, talking earnestly to it - which is hard to do with a straight face in front of witnesses - and then grabbing the tree next to it and hacking it down. "Oh, yeah, I felt THAT collective sigh of relief!" the guy next to me said as I hacked down my poor little willow.

The medicine men were standing with our teacher, Scott Quimby, on a bridge. (They called him 'Spiritual Leader' when they shook hands with him at the beginning of class. "Ahhh," they would say, "Spiritual Leader! How are you today?" And Scott would blush, and say "hullo," and the medicine men would laugh.) I walked up onto the bridge to ask Scott a question. Below me I couldn't see my classmates, I could only hear the murmur of voices as they talked to the trees and see the trees tremble. And the medicine men were laughing...

Nowadays it seems like there's a lot of talk about Indians holding ceremonies for white people and how it pollutes the pureness of the ceremonies. It's a big topic on the Rez, so I'm glad I was there thirty years ago and got to do what I did.

Serendipitydoo... Indian country!

2007-06-09T11:23:00.000-05:00

So, in that last post, I wrote "The politics on Pine Ridge, and, to some extent, on Rosebud in those days have filled several books. They were over my head at the time, and probably still are. Let's just say it could be a pretty dangerous place." OK, folks... This is actually an understatement. It is a BIG understatement. I just understated it so ya'll wouldn't pester me with questions that I couldn't answer.

I went to the library the other day to pick up a couple of books. At the big library in town, there's a little display area at the entrance, and there, sitting on the shelf, was the book: The Unquiet Grave: The FBI and the Struggle for the Soul of Indian Country, by Steve Hendricks. I grabbed it. The other books I'd asked for were mysteries, perhaps good ones (I'll let you know) but they weren't real and they weren't about the Rez. I picked up this book and I couldn't put it down. It's fascinating. You need to read it.

It's not just that you need to read it because you're interested in this blog and my story about the gas cans. You need to read it because it's about the utter, cold-blooded perfidy and incompetence of an organization which states that their mission is: “...to uphold the law through the investigation of violations of federal criminal law; to protect the United States from foreign intelligence and terrorist activities; to provide leadership and law enforcement assistance to federal, state, local, and international agencies; and to perform these responsibilities in a manner that is responsive to the needs of the public and its (sic) faithful to the Constitution of the United States.” That's right... The FBI.

Now, I know you. You may think you don't have time to read this book. It's summer.... You're on vacation. Ok. You can listen to the author being interviewed by KEXP's Mike McCormick. It's in two parts, and it's about an hour long. Believe me, it just scratches the surface, but it's fascinating.

What it is with the gas cans... Part I

2007-05-26T19:14:00.000-05:00

A long, long, long, long, long time ago I lived on a reservation for 8 months. I got there entirely by accident. I was living in Peoria at the time. My first marriage was in major trouble and so I took off for a two week camping trip with a girlfriend, Kathy. She wanted to check out two universities to see which one would be better for grad school: the University of South Dakota, or the University of Colorado. We threw a bunch of camping stuff in the back of her car, some books to read (I had Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, by Dee Brown), and I took my journal and some art supplies and we were off.

We were pretty heedless and happy go lucky. We camped at an abandoned farm the first night. The guy whose land it was dropped by. He was nice and told us we were welcome to stay, and he thot we'd be safe. The second day, we hit Vermillion, SD, where USD is. Kathy went to check out whatever program it was, and I wandered the halls, looking at the flyers on the walls. There was a really interesting one for a little college in Rosebud, Sinte Gleska, which had a summer studies program that looked kinda interesting. Since we were sort of just bombing around with no agenda other than checking out the two universities, and since Rosebud was kinda on the way to Boulder, we went.

I don't think many white people dropped into SG asking about the summer studies program, but they were very polite and handed us flyers and we took off. We were planning on going to Wounded Knee, because it was pretty famous at the time - just two years after the occupation. On the way we passed by Ft Robinson, NE, where Crazy Horse was killed. I'd just read about it in the book, and was telling Kathy about it, and, foop! There it was.

And that was it. We spent the rest of the time driving around visiting places in the book, except for a quick dash down to Boulder, which took us by Ft Laramie (very impt in the book!) and back. We had a lot of amazing adventures. They could each be a blog. My brain's exploding... But, back to the story about the gas can. (This IS a story about a gas can.)

So. We eventually returned to Peoria. Absence had NOT made the heart grow fonder, and so I separated from my husband, took one of our cars, and drove back to Rosebud to attend the summer studies institute. I enrolled in four courses, I think. Lakota Thought, Lakota Medicine, Lakota Song and Dance, and, umm, something else. I can't even begin to tell you all the cool things that happened that summer, but by the end of it, I was working for the Media Services division at the library taking pictures and videos of whatever people wanted documented. Mostly I got stuck doing the monthly meetings of the National Indian Alcoholism Task Force. These were in Lakota, which is unlike any European language, and has sounds that are really difficult to make unless you grow up making them. Then you can do them without spitting. Watch Dances With Wolves, if you want to hear people speaking Lakota.

The infamous incident at Oglala happened when I was on the reservation. The politics on Pine Ridge, and, to some extent, on Rosebud in those days have filled several books. They were over my head at the time, and probably still are. Let's just say it could be a pretty dangerous place. But it was also a wonderful place... A magical place... An ancient place. It was just a fairly violent wonderful magical ancient place.

For one thing, everything out there is really far apart. I ended up living in Valentine, NE, and driving up to Mission to work every day. That was 42 miles one way. And usually during the day I had to drive to Rosebud, and then I'd drive home through Kilgore, a notorious town just off the Rez, where the bars were. All told that's about 100 miles round-about, and that doesn't count going out for lunch or anything.

One night I was driving home really late from Rosebud down through Kilgore. This was a little bitty road, dangerous at night, 'cos folks coming back from the bars in Kilgore wouldn't always remember to turn on their lights. And this was winter, and it's fuckin' cold there in the winter. I saw a car in the ditch on the side of the road. In those parts you're kinda honor-bound to stop for cars in ditches. People could freeze to death. It was kinda spooky, but valor got the better of me, and I stopped. There were two people in the car: an older man and a young girl... A really young girl, like teens. The man was loud and drunk. He told me he was a tribal policeman and he'd run outta gas. I was to take him to Kilgore and a friend there with a gas station would sell him gas and I could bring him back and he could be on his way.

I had about enough gas in my own car, a school bus yellow VW Rabbit, to make it to Valentine, and told him so, but he seemed to think his friend would sell me enough gas to make it back up the road and then back down to Kilgore and home again. I was not relishing the thot, because, among other things, this guy was obnoxious. Really fucking obnoxious. He sat in the front and the girl sat in the back. I couldn't see much, but she seemed to be toying with something.

We got to the 'friend's' house and the guy got out and went and pounded on the door. No one answered. He started yelling and pounding on the door and kept it up... Which was a good thing, because the minute he got out of the car the girl started talking a blue streak. This man, she said, had murdered his father and was going to rape her. Please, please, please, she begged me, do NOT leave me alone with this man. The thing she was toying with was a small, metal nail file. She said she would stab the man with the nail file if he tried to rape her. She was desperate. She was earnest. She was very, very scared. I was, too, because the man was coming back to the car, cussing a blue streak at the guy who wouldn't get out of bed.

"Take us to Valentine," he commanded me, "I'll get us a hotel room there and get a ride back in the morning." The girl was staring at me in the rear view mirror.

We drove on to Valentine, another twenty some miles. I was really worried about gas myself. The man was telling me what a piece of shit my car was, not like a good American car. I told him he'd better quit cussing my car. It got about three times as many miles per gallon as his car, and if we were in his car we'd all be walking. He just talked right over me.

I was trying to figure out what to do. Before I did anything, I needed gas, which I could get at the Home Cafe and truck stop. Then I'd drive to the motel in town, and let the guy out of the car, and shoot off with the girl still inside. I mean, this guy's a cop, right, so I'm wondering... Does he have a gun? Will he shoot me? I have no clue.

We get to the Home Cafe, and the guy, thank goodness, goes in to pee, while I fill up. I explain my brilliant plan to the girl. She looks doubtful, but I tell her just to lock her door, so he can't open it from the outside, and we'll wing it. He gets back in, directs me to the motel - "They know me here," he said. "Uhh huh, I bet they do," I thot... - and gets out. He doesn't thank me or anything, just tries to yank the back door open. And with his hand still on the handle, I pushed the pedal down, made a U turn and screeched out the motel's parking lot.

We'd made it! We were laughing! We were free. I was also really, really tired. It was after midnight and I really didn't want to drive back to the Rez. "You wouldn't want to stay at my place for the night, would you, and drive back in the morning?" The happiness went out of her face like a light turned off. "No, I thot not," I said. I told her I'd drive her home. She lived in St Francis, which I knew pretty well, as it was where I first stayed on the Rez. I asked if she'd left anything in the car. Well, there WAS a case of beer in it, she said. Did she want to drive by the car and see if it was still there? Seemed like a good idea to her.

So. That's what we did. We drove to the car, got the beer, and then I drove her home. When she got out, she told me her name.

Now that might seem like a kinda normal thing to you and me. You meet someone, you tell them your name. But it's not on the Rez. These people have lived with each other for thousands and thousands and thousands of years. They KNOW each other's names. They know each other's parents names, and sister's and brother's names, and grandparent's names and great-great's names and what have you. And if you don't know their name, well then you're not one of them... And if you're not one of them, then you must be... The Enemy. So introducing yourself to someone is like saying, "Hi, I'm you're enemy!" It's not something you do, unless you have to or want someone to know your name. So I felt really honored that she told me her name.

Now, I must admit I did wonder if the girl's story was true. You know, the part about this guy murdering her father. And I knew someone who would know: a friend who worked for county assistance. I called her the next morning and asked her. And, the story was true. She filled in all the details, which I have forgotten now. Just the main parts stand out...

And that's the first part of the story...

gas cans, part 2

2007-05-25T21:12:00.001-05:00

In the new year (1976), I left the Rez. It wasn't any one thing... It was a whole buncha things, like the weather. On the Fourth of July, it had been 117. On the fourth of January, it got down to -30. See that was the whole thing: everything was extreme, and all of a sudden I just felt like I could use a good dose of subtlety. It's a rare thing for me, and, when it comes upon me, I try to listen. So I packed up my trusty '75 school bus yellow VW Rabbit and headed east... To Yellow Springs, OH.

My stepbrother, Steve, was going to school there. For a free place to live, he managed some apartments, and was renovating them. He had a little construction company, the Fly By Night Construction Company (it had a little flying angel logo, like a Playboy bunny with wings), and I became an employee. I shared a two-room apartment (living room and kitchen) with two ladies and a baby. I'm not sure where we all slept, but we were young and communes were cool, so we called ourselves the 'Kitchen Kommune.' Spelling things with a 'k' was also very cool. And, boy, howdy, did we think we were kool.

Ok... I was basically drifting. My Aunt Anne, my Dad's sister, was going to the family cabin in Phoenicia, NY, for the summer and invited me to stay with her, so I drove up in late May and spent the summer and early fall there. In June, I got a call from the guy I'd worked for on the Rez, John. How would I like to spend a week in Washinton, DC, helping with the tribe's exhibit on the Mall? It was the Bicentennial, and the government wanted to invite all the tribes, First Nations, Indians or whatever you want to call them, to come show off their cultures... Those very cultures that the government had done so much to destroy and undermine years before. John had a bunch of tapes we'd made of dances and ceremonies and stuff and basically needed someone to babysit the machines with him and another guy so that we could all go visit everyone else's displays. I'd get gas money, a place to crash and a hundred bucks. Such a deal!

Other than that, the only thing I did that summer was to write and produce a cookbook for the little colony of cabins that we belong to. My aunt and my friend, Susie, helped and we did a lot of cooking and eating and general fun stuff.

In the fall, I headed off to Madison, WI, to share a place with my best friend from high school, Michael. Actually, I have two best friends from high school, Michael and Nancy, whom I refer to as my BFFHS(M) and BFFHS(F). So, just in case you need me to connect the dots, Michael is my BFFHS(M). We lived on Williamson St in Madison, in between the old Willy Street Coop and the Crystal Corner Bar. It was a great place, but October is NOT the time of year to move to fucking Wisconsin if you hate cold weather.

I started looking for work, and had applications in all over the place when I got a call from John on the Rez. He had another pick-up job for me... It would pay a couple of hundred bucks. I could come visit his family for Thanksgiving. Sounded cool.

So I got into my '75 school bus yellow Rabbit - notice how I left the word 'trusty' off? That's a CLUE! - which was acting up. The clutch was funky. It wouldn't work when I would first start the car, but by the time I would get to a mechanic, it would be working fine. The mechanics would send me off on my merry way figuring I was just another crazy woman who didn't know shit about cars. Hell, back then, women couldn't even buy cars on their own if they were married, without the husband having his name on the title, too. Wasn't legal, 'cos, you know, women are such twits. I found a couple folks to pay for gas on the way out if I'd drive thru Minneapolis St Paul. Since what they were willing to pay was the cost of the whole drive out to Valentine, I was willing to take a detour. Most of the time, I would have driven US 18 across from Madison into Valentine, but if you're going through Mpls, you have to drive IH 90. Which was just as well, because the first winter blizzard hit as we were leaving...

The clutch was acting really cranky. Essentially, I had two gears, 4th and reverse. When you're driving in the snow and ice, this isn't totally bad; you can't accelerate too fast in 4th gear, so you have a better chance of not spinning your tires. Kinda made it an 'Indian car,' which was what all the held-together-with-gum-and-baling-wire cars on the Rez were called.

I dropped my riders off and continued on, stopping only for gas. It was snowy, but not too bad until I got to US 83 between Mission and Valentine. And, then the road just disappeared.

I guess they were fixing it, but you couldn't tell where you were supposed to drive. It was darkish... And snowing. And the road and the fields looked just about the same. So, I just tried to keep all the earthmoving equipment on my right, and that worked. I was pretty damned glad when I came over the bluff and could see the lights of Valentine on the other side of the Niobrara River. It was probably the last time I was glad about anything for over a week.

The job had evaporated. John, the guy I was visiting, was having family and financial problems. My car was fucked. I thot about going to North Platte, about 100 miles south, to the VW dealers to see if they could fix the clutch. But when I talked to them on the phone, they said they had no clue how to fix a Rabbit. They were terrified of 'em. "Honey, you bring that car down here and you'll see grown men running from a Rabbit," they told me on the phone. Guess not...

I had about $17 to my name, which was enough to get back to Madison and then some... If nothing went wrong... Every day I stayed my money seemed to dwindle, so I decided just to drive... The day after the second blizzard... The one that closed the Interstate. Only I didn't watch TV, so I didn't know about that.

I drove north on 83 and stopped at Murdo for gas and a cup of coffee. It had taken me about three hours to go 77 miles. I definitely needed a cup of coffee and I had ten cents. I went in to the truck stop and ordered my coffee. As I sat drinking it, staring into the blackness of my cup (free refills), the hair on the back of my neck started to stand up. Someone was watching me. Now, I'm NOT dumb (really) (foolhardy, yes; guilty of wishful thinking, yes; but dumb, no) (although I can see why you might have your doubts) so I didn't just turn around and scan the room. No, I've been to the movies; I looked in the mirror behind the counter. And there he was, staring at me. Did I panic? Yes, but very, very quietly. He was just your average youngish white guy dressed in winter clothes. Nothing remarkable about him, except he was making my hair stand on end. So I got up off my stool, left a nickle tip, and went to the restroom. Although some of my best thinking is done in the rest room, (hey, guys, it's where we women communicate with the mother ship) no great ideas came to me. Maybe he'll be gone, I thot.

Fat chance. When I came out, he was still there. Damn. I thot about going into the gas station part and, umm, like reporting him to someone, but it seemed much more likely that he would know the people in the truck stop than I would. So I didn't. I just got into my school bus yellow 1975 VW Rabbit and drove off... Very, very slowly in 4th gear. And the guy got into a blue-ish pick up truck and drove off behind me.

The interstate was closed. There was a BIG sign saying 'CLOSED,' but people were driving on it, anyway, in the one lane that was ice-rutted but driveable. I guess they put those 'CLOSED' signs up just to let you know that if anything happens, well, it's your own damn fault. They told you the road was closed, but, no, you drove on it anyway. And there I was driving on it, with the asshole who scared the shit out of me tailgating me. Then, he passed me, which was no easy feat. I thot he was trying to run me off of the road. So, the minute he got beside me, I took my foot off the gas and then he was in front of me. I slowed down. He slowed down. We came to an exit and he started signaling. Hope grew in my heart! He was leaving the interstate! But, no, he was just trying to let me know that I, we, whatever, should pull over.

Honey, the thot didn't even cross my mind. I had managed to write down his license plate number on a couple of pieces of paper. I stuck them under the seat, in the glove compartment, shit, anyplace I could think. If the motherfucker got me, I wanted his ass caught!

We drove along that way for about 200 miles... At 30 mph. That's right, for seven fucking hours I drove with this fucking asshole. Sometimes he'd pull in front and do the signal thing. Sometimes he'd drive behind me and tailgate. It was grey. It was well below freezing. It was getting late.

And then, miraculously, as I neared the state border, he went away. I kept driving, but he wasn't behind me. I thot he might have taken another route to come upon me unawares in the night, so I went north about 60 miles to drive east on US 14 for awhile. I thot I had enough gas to make it in to New Ulm, but I didn't. I ran out just inside the city limits. I could see a fucking gas station, an open fucking gas station, but I was going to have to walk to it. I got out of my car for the first time in hours. It was cold and black with little stars shining very far away. And then a car pulled up behind me.

It was an older, brownish station wagon. "What now," I thot, as a man got out. "Hi," he said, "You look like you might need some help!" Truer words were never spoken. He didn't come up close to me but stood back at his car. He looked ok. My hair was not standing on end. I exhaled and said "I've run out of gas."

"No problem," he says, "I can drive you to that gas station over there and we'll get ya going in no time! Get on in!" I thot of the girl I'd picked up between St Francis and Kilgore about a year before; the girl who'd sat in the back seat of my car with a small, metal nail file clutched in her hands. Shit. I didn't even have a nail file... But I got in the car. Amazingly, the man drove me to the gas station. And that was where my next troubles began.

They wanted a $10 deposit for the gas can. I had a bit less than that, and, if I gave them everything I had in my wallet, I wouldn't have any money to put any gas in the gas can. I explained this very calmly to the attendant. "Gas can's $10," he said.

It had been a really long day... A really hard day... I was emotionally a bit on edge, and in a bind, and this motherfucker was not going to let me give him all the money I had on me, plus my drivers license and walk out with a gas can. I couldn't help it. I started to cry. He was totally and completely unmoved. "Gas can's $10," he repeated.

The guy who'd picked me up came in. He said "What's the problem?" The attendant told him the gas can was $10. The guy who'd picked me up handed him a $20. "That should take care of it," he said, "Give the young lady the gas can." So I got the gas can. It was a big one. I was just going to put a gallon in it, but my guy said to fill it up, so I did. We got back into his car and drove to my car. On the way I told him a little bit about my day. "Wow," he said.

When we got to my car he helped me fill it. "I guess I'll see you back at the gas station," I said, as I got in my car. He said he wasn't going back to the gas station. "But you have to get your $20 deposit," I said.

"That's your money," he told me. "You take the can back and fill up your car and go on to Madison. You get something to eat if you need it... And make sure he gives you the change!" (Those were the days!)

I asked him for his card so I could send him the money back. "I have a daughter about your age; if something like this ever happened to her, I'd want someone to help her out," he told me. He was a nice man. He was an insurance agent from New Ulm, MN. He saved my life.

It's not just that he bought me gas on a cold and starry night. On that cold and starry night he gave me my belief back. It's probably a belief I shouldn't have: you know, that the universe is a nice place. 'Cos it isn't... But I'm not sure you're better off if you go around believing that it isn't a nice place.

I don't know where evil comes from, but when it's here on earth, it's manifested by men. Or women. But I do know this. The good on this earth, that's manifested by men and women too. And that's why I carry a gas can... And jumper cables. And why I'll buy you a gallon of gas, if you need it.

You betcha. Small price to pay.

No caffeine...

2007-05-25T07:13:00.000-05:00

There is no caffeine in my coffee... I guess I need to say that louder. THERE IS NO CAFFEINE IN MY COFFEE! This is because there is no caffeine in my house; there's only de-caffeine and it just doesn't cut it. Normally I wake up in the morning and the first thing I do (well, almost) is make a pot of coffee. I use Central Market's Double French Roast and Double French Roast Decaf. I use mostly leaded, but I throw in some of the unleaded just to prove I am NOT an addict.

I ran out of leaded yesterday morning, actually, but did I remember to go to the store and buy some? No. I did not. Instead, I went to lunch downtown at the Moonshine Grill with Aline. A lady in Ricë's yoga class had told Ricë about it and Ricë asked me if I'd been there, and I said, no, at least not since it's been the Moonshine. It used to be a restaurant called Emilia's, and I'd been there (at least once with Aline, come to think of it, along with Ray and Anne and Gus), but I'd never been to Moonshine.

Ricë's friend had told her that something there was 'FABulous,' but I couldn't remember what it was. So before I get to the restaurant, I called Ricë to find out what was fabulous, and damned if she could remember. "Honey, I can't remember what I ate yesterday, let alone what someone else ate two months ago!" I was on my own.

Well, except that I was with Aline, and she got there first and had already ordered the corn dog shrimp, which is exactly that: big shrimp, skewered, battered in corn dog batter and deep-fat fried. (Of course I could just say fried, but 'deep-fat fried' is so much more euphonious, is it not?) (See what happens when I don't have caffeine? Words like 'euphonious' start popping out of my hands before 7:30 in the morning!) Next we had fish: the Broiled Rainbow Trout for Aline, and the Horseradish Crusted Salmon for me. These came with vegetables (carrots, al dente, and lovely summer squash and zuccini) plus a side. Aline got the polenta and I got the sweet potatoes. I was, of course, very tempted by the Coffee and Ancho Rubbed Half Chicken, too.

It's not that we weren't full, but when you're trying a new restaurant, you should always have dessert. So we had the Signature Skillet Apple Pie. The menu says "It's Big!" and boy, howdy, they aren't kidding! We left half of it, not because it wasn't good, but because we were already pretty full, and, umm, it's big! And we had coffee (two cups for me) and then we were ready to leave.

Aline had valet-parked, but I had opted for the free parking down the street. So I mosied down the street just in time to see a woman pushing an older car around the corner... By herself... Holding the steering wheel in one hand while pushing the car.

I quickly dumped the stuff I was carrying in the front seat of Yax, my trusty little '95 Honda Civic, and went to help. Another guy saw her, too, and the two of us managed to push her car into a parking space while she actually sat inside it and steered. She was already cussing a blue streak, and I was having a little trouble understanding her, but I think what she told me that she had borrowed the car from her boyfriend to go visit him and run out of gas. This made no sense to me, but she still needed gas, and a gas can, and I can do that. So Julia and I set out for the gas station a few blocks away.

I really was having trouble understanding her. She was telling me about her boyfriend telling her to 'shut up,' and how she told him he had to say it louder, because she couldn't hear bad talk and he'd better not be talking any... And there was something about an old lady in her neighborhood who told her that he was "A wannabe that don't know how-to-be." Yeah! We filled up my gas can and drove back to her car and I left her and the gas can beside the road, cursing. Not at me, of course, but at the boyfriend for lending her a car with no gas in it.

I could've waited to get the gas can back, but handing out gas cans to people in distress is a mission I have taken on in life. It has to do with someone saving my life once, but that's a whole 'nuther post.

Or a sermon, if you're a Unitarian. I've already subjected Ricë's Unitarian fellowship to it, and, no doubt in time, I'll subject others. You may be next. Unitarian or not... Be warned.

Vacation

2007-05-14T08:25:00.000-05:00

'Sorry, friends... I've been on vacation... Or what passes for a vacation when your parents are, ummmm, older. Twice a year my Dad and stepmom go to the beach. This is somewhat difficult 'cos my Dad's in a wheelchair, one of those hulking electric things that weigh 300 lbs when you aren't sitting in them. The chair is, of course, a very cool thing because it allows him to be pretty mobile without anyone having to push him, and his shoulders are too arthritic for him to push himself.

The folks live at a retirement village in North Carolina. They have their 'own' duplex, but the place also has assisted living apts, and a health center where they do long-term nursing care. It's a very nice place. You get one meal fixed for you a day (you fix the others yourself in your very own kitchen) and the food choices are good. There are maids. There's a pool with a wheelchair ramp (very groovy!). Of course, it's hideously expensive by my standards, but Dad worked backed when there was retirement, so they can afford it. (Retirement! What a concept!)

This winter, Dad got a cold, which turned into pneumonia, which meant he had to stay in the health center for fourteen weeks. He got a bedsore on his heel and it's not been responding quickly to treatment. Which means that he still has it, and, in order to take him on vacation, someone (that would be me) had to learn the 'protocol' for dressing the wound twice a day. Sounds like a vacation already, huh?

We always take a LOT of stuff to the beach. We go to Bald Head Island, which is where Cape Fear is. It is nothing like the movie, Cape Fear, but it is a lot like the sixties TV show, The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan. I guess part of it is that you're only allowed to drive around in a golf cart when you're on the island... (Unless, of course, you're a contractor, putting up another multi-million dollar house on the protected sand dunes...) (Protected from people walking on them, that is... Not from houses dropping on them...) There's a store on the island, but things there are expensive, and they don't know how to store wine, so we take our own... Here's a partial list of what we take:

- a couple cases of wine (important things first)
- food
- Dad's medical stuff... this year it was about four boxes full...
- suitcases
- rubber boats
- dvds... Hey, you never know what the weather's going to be like!
- a regular wheelchair

This year the weather sucked. Let's be up front about it. It was rainy, cold, windy and buggy... North Carolina has a lot of mosquitoes and they all decided to go to the beach at the same time we did. They also have 'no see ums,' and ticks. The two days it was sunny, it was incredibly windy, but there were no bugs (except the ticks) and the sky was a beautiful blue. The palm and palmetto leaves whipped in the wind making a kind of clacking sound...

Dad likes to swim. Since it's really hard to cross sand in a wheelchair, we take him to a pool. It took four people to get him from the 'push' wheelchair into the pool, which we accomplished by having him sit on the edge of the pool on a towel and then picking up its sides and carrying him down to the next step. Now, that's a workout! Once in the water my Dad can run around and do exercises and all sorts of stuff. He can't really swim anymore 'cos of the arthritis, but he tries anyway.

There are marvellous birds on the island because the back side of it is a tidal marsh formed by the Cape Fear River. There are ibises (ibi?), egrets, herons, clapper rails, and this year, for the first time in my life, I saw a painted bunting. I thot for a minute I was having a flashback, but, no, it was a bird. I did not see any alligators this year, but I saw a lot of turtles.

Since it rained a lot, we watched dvds. My sister Leslie had brought along the first season of Supernatural. Now, I admit it, I'm a weanie. I hate being scared. I do yoga and tai chi so I can maintain my calm demeanor in public. And to me, these shows were terrifying. I mean why oh why on earth would any two people enter a haunted house, armed only with a fluttering candle and then split up when they hear clanking chains? Not that the boys in Supernatural are that stupid... No, they have a complete arsenal of things designed to kill the bad guys which they keep in the trunk of their car (a '67 Chevy Impala) and they listen to anthem rock, which was what made the show for me personally... AC/DC, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Foreigner, Bad Company, and Blue Oyster Cult, whose logo features in one of the shows, (and is the clue that lets our boys figure out what is going on).

I have to tell you I don't watch a lot of tv. Hell, I don't even own a tv! I mostly watch things on my computer if I need to or wait 'til the famdamily goes to the beach. That's how I found out about Firefly, which I absolutely loved. So it's odd that I mention three tv shows in one post. Get your fill... It probably won't happen again!

We also go around and look at the houses... My sister, Pam, takes pictures of the birds and lizards and other wildlife. We read, mostly trashy mysteries (hey! we're at the beach!) except Dad, who only reads fiction in Spanish and is stuck in the middle of the Alatriste books by Perez-Reverte.

So one of my favorite things about going on vacation is flying. I love looking at clouds from above and landforms. (I like looking at clouds from below as long as there's blue space between the clouds.) This year when I flew home, we flew over thunderstorms as the sun was setting. It was very beautiful. My camera was in my suitcase, but I have my trusty new cellphone, a Motorola RAZr phone (their spelling, not mine), which takes pretty good pictures and has a zoom function! The pic at the top of the page is the view from my window...

Weekend marbling/pastepaper workshop

2007-04-30T09:31:00.000-05:00

What did I do over the weekend? Ooooh, I had fun!

Nena, Amy and I went to a marbling/pastepaper workshop in Smithville, TX. The marbling was taught by Pam Smith and the paste paper part by Priscilla Spitler.

Nena, Amy and I are known - to the Austin Book Workers - as "The Three Broads,' Personally, I like WeNenaMy, better, partly 'cos it reminds me of my Aunt Patsie doing the litany of names (mine and my cousins) when she caught us filching salad from the bowl while we waited for Sunday supper when I was a kid... Anyway, the three of us drove over to Smithville and back each day, which gave us time to talk and eat Annie's Cheddar Bunnies. Eating Cheddar Bunnies is a crucial part of our Artistic Life. You have to eat them BEFORE you art, of course, because art itself is a dirty job and you don't want your hands going into your mouth after handling, say, cadmium red. That's right... Art is also a DANGEROUS job, because paints are made with all sorts of toxic materials, like lead, and you should never, ever nibble on your paintbrushes...

The workshop was actually held at Buescher State Park, where they sell hunting and fishing licenses, but not artistic licenses, at the gate. We were in two groups, and, after we got checked in and introduced ourselves, we broke into the groups. Half of us began the day marbling, and the other half doing paste paper.

Marbling is done on a 'size' of caragheenan, which is a type of moss that makes a kind of jello like substance. You can float colors (water colors or acrylics) on top of the size using a variety of techniques - wisks (we made those, too, out of broom corn), eye droppers, styluses, atomizers. You also use a dispersant, that pushes the colors around. You can just 'pull' the sheets off the size - picking up the colors because the sheets have been sponged in alum water and alum is hydrophilic, so it draws the colors to the paper - or you can comb complex patterns into them.

My favorite patterns were made with the stylus. You do three little dots of color and then draw the stylus through them. Depending on which way you draw the stylus through (the last drop first or the first drop first), you get a 'feather' or an 'oak leaf.'

I didn't really like too many of the papers I made, but I got some wonderful ideas, so it was completely worth it.

Paste paper involves making paste (flour and water cooked together) or using methyl cellulose and adding acrylic paint to it. It's a pretty stiff paste, and you paint it onto dampened paper with a brush in a thinnish coat. Then you comb patterns through it. It's sort of finger painting for grown-ups. There are a hundred little additional techniques you can do with it, and it's very therapeutic.

At least that's my story and I'm sticking to it.

The party was fab...

2007-04-24T07:46:00.000-05:00

The party was fabulous, darlings! I do wish ya'll could've been there, mostly because, had you been there, I wouldn't have so much leftover food! I have leftover food because most of my friends brought food, wonderful food, and the ones who didn't brought wine or flowers.

Now, here's the odd thing... Most of my friends didn't know each other. Hmmmm... How did that happen? I have a lot of groups of friends - family, Ladies Sunday Morning Tai Chi League, Austin Book Workers, Nia, neighbors, musicians from various bands I've been in, and those miscellaneous people that you can't even remember how you met - and I've never thrown a party to which all the groups were invited. I DO have a pretty small house (800 sf), but, fortunately, I have a big back yard, and in Texas you can be outside most of the year. (Ok, in the winter, you may only want to be out during the day, and in the summer, you may only want to be out in the evening.) So, if you include my backyard, I have, like, a 6000 sf house, and right now it's carpeted! (Mid-summer is a different story, as those of us who don't water our lawns for religious reasons kinda lose the grass part.)

My friends Aline and Ray arrived first; they're the ones who have the marvelous Thanksgiving dinner I go to. I met them about fifteen years ago through my friends Anne and Gus. Anne and I knew each other from the gym, and, being women of a certain age, we hung out there together, chiding the muscleheads who forgot to re-rack their weights. It always just amazes me that a man is so proud that he can do dumbell presses with 110 pound weights - he has to have three or four guys around him spotting him and cheering him on - and then he'll just drop his weights and leave them there like his mom or the maid is gonna come pick up a couple 110 lb dumbells and re-rack 'em for him. Come on, big guy, re-rack those weights and the rest of us will cheer for you too! (Whew! Glad I got THAT out of my system!)

Anyway, I mentioned to Anne one hot August day (the 'hot' was thrown in for those of you who don't live in Texas, and who may not know that it's always hot here in August) that I had to go to a Cajun dinner party that night and was dreading having to bake the bread pudding that I was supposed to bring... Dreading it because I did not have air-conditioning. Older houses in Austin don't have central air and heat. They have funky ass space heaters with radians and, maybe, window units. They also have double hung windows that open at the top, and trees around them, so you cool your house by opening the tops of the windows during the day to let the hot air out. As long as you don't move, and have an iced drink and a fan, it's not too bad, but you don't want to turn your oven on to 350 for an hour, even to cook bread pudding.

But my friend Anne had air-conditioning, two ovens, and a pool at her house, and invited me to bring the ingredients and my bathing suit over there and cook. So, that's exactly what I did. Her husband Gus, and a friend of his (whose name I cannot recall, but think was Ed) were working on the deck, but not to the point that we couldn't swim. So I made the bread pudding and the whiskey sauce (which is the whole point of bread pudding) and swam. When the pudding came out of the oven it seemed rather rude not to cut them off a little bit and share it with them. I was sure the folks at the dinner party wouldn't mind an end missing. So that's what I did. Gus and his friend's eyes glazed over. "It's better than sex," he said... "She has to come to Thanksgiving," which in those days, was held at Anne and Gus's house. So a couple months later I did, and met Aline and Ray and their kids and a whole host of other people all of whom cook and like wine. So that's how and why I met Ray and Aline. Later, Aline and I found out that our birthdays are only 4 days apart, and Anne and Gus left to work in odd places (they're in Africa right now), but I still make bread pudding and whiskey sauce for Thanksgiving, although I make less pudding and more sauce, as whiskey sauce goes with everything: sweet potatoes (fabulous!), turkey, chocolate cake, pecan pie... Well, everything except the green beans n' bacon.

And then my ex-ish came, and my friends Mike and Debbie, whom I've known the longest in Austin. Mike and Debbie and I lived in a housing co-op up near UT together in '79-'80, named 'V.' Mike forced me to start my first band, which was the Half-Assed Dance Band, and was in the second, Wendy and the Magnets, and in the last band I was officially in, Peacemongers. He plays bass and tuba, and in Peacemongers, that was a fearsome thing. We went through a LOT of bass players. It was an improv rock band, a jam band, and it got kinda repetitive for the bass player. But Mike also plays tuba, and that was what he had at the party. And then we found out that Ray (remember Ray?) had lived in the same house (1919 Robbins Place) before us, only it was called something else, and everyone said "Far out," which is the hippie way of saying "Amen," I think.

And Steve-O and Judith showed up... But ya'll have already met them in the post about the guy who moved the shed. Judith brought wonderful couscous and flowers from her garden... And Ricë and Earl showed up, fresh from the wonderful news that he was going to have enough money to retire and have insurance, so we had reason to celebrate! Shari and Al came, too. I know Shari from LSMTCL, and, since they live way north, when Al usually brings her to it and then goes to the Shambala Center. He's frequently included in LSMTCL functions, so he's like, and adjunct member. Clark showed up bringing chairs and demanding tequila, which he said I'd promised him, and, which I might've, but don't remember. Fortunately, having a liquor cabinet, I was able to provide him with this substance, even though it wasn't the best tequila in the world. And Bruce and Leela, my neighbors came, bringing Leela's fabulous Hatch chili hummus, and Amy from Book Workers and Sarah from LSMTCL. Steve and Jessica came all the way from Georgetown. Steve was Peacemonger's drummer - and a drummer in another band I was in before that: Civil Serpents - and Jessica is a fabulous cook, especially of Middle Eastern and Indian food. She brought a delicious tart made with orange water, among other things. And maybe some other people came, but I sort of lost track after that and was worried about getting the food out...

Later on we had music in the garden. It turns out Al is a drummer and he and Steve happily drummed on 5 gallon plastic water bottles, which make wonderful drums. Mike played tuba, jc played my little Martin Backpacker guitar and I played my beautiful Gurian. We did Millennium, Fallen from a Dream, Li De Di, Heart of Darkness, Ferris Wheel, If Wishes Were Fishes, House of the Rising Sun - one of the first songs I ever learned - and It Burns.

And then everyone went home and left me with a ton of food!

In which I throw a party

2007-04-20T08:30:00.000-05:00

I do so wish you could all be here. I'm having a party.

I am having - food wise - tostadas, with shredded chicken, Oaxacan black beans (the secret ingredient is toasted avocado leaves, which impart a truly unique flavor, somewhat reminiscent of anise), crumbled queso fresco, pico de gallo (chopped tomatoes, jalapeños, cilantro, red onion, garlic, lime juice), Oaxacan mole, which I'd never made before and isn't smooth enough but fucking tastes fantastic, if I do say so myself, and only fucking took me six goddamn hours to make, Texas caviar (a three bean salad), and toffee pudding and fruit salad. And, of course, wine and beer and Pomtinis, 'cos this is a Fiesta de las Flores de la Granada. That's right, granada is the spanish word for pomegranate. Who knew? Fuck, who can even spell pomegranate anyway?

Of course, I have my crosses to bear. For some reason, the stores are all out of CitraSolv, my universal cleaning solution, and believe me, I am cleaning the house like a melonfarmer. And, even worse, Rues Antiques, which sells the only stuff my furniture likes to be treated with, Natchez Solution, has up and moved off into the ozone. They were a cruddy antique store, but they had NS, and I could walk there. Shit, shit, shit. Now my day is going to include melting beeswax, mixing it with mineral oil and lemon oil and really having fun.

On the absolutely wonderful side, I had the eleven boxes from my aunt's estate in the living room, but I didn't want them there for the party. My ex, jc, has been coming over every evening this week to hold ladders and spot me while I'm on them. (Ssshhh, don't tell him, I get up on them all the time when he's not here, but if he comes, he'll pet and play with the sadly neglected feline denizens of the house, so it's a good thing.) I've been painting the window jams with a weird mottled orange faux finish that I think I like, but won't really know about until I get the outer trim up, and that isn't going to happen by this afternoon. And today is the day I clean the house, (The Final Cleaning, which sounds like one of those horror movies). So. I'm busy and do not need to be making secret formula furniture polish.

Anyway, the other night he came to late to move the boxes, which go into the shed. We can't have the shed door open 'cos the outdoor cats will go in, hide and then crap all over everything, as well as possibly die, which would be worse than crap, in several ways. So, it's a two person, DAYLIGHT job, which, since jc doesn't get up til 6 pm, is a problem. But yesterday he made a special effort and got here at 6, told me there was room for an elephant in the shed, if things were arranged better, took half the stuff out, organized it according to his own arcane system, and put it back in along with the boxes. There's still room in there! A Newfoundland would perhaps be able to fit in and still turn around! Amazing! And I hardly lifted a finger! Even more amazing! (Ooops, the exclamation mark says it's tired of all that standing up and down, up and down; get a life, it says.)

He's been out of work for several months and hasn't been able to 'organize' a stage and boss inanimate objects around and make them be logical, so he really went after it. Of course, it's arranged to HIS logic and not mine, which are two very different animals, and is one of the reasons he's an ex. But it just means I'll have to call him up and ask him where things are. After 7 pm, of course.

Gotta let the boy have some coffee before he talks to the ex.

Anyone need an absolutely fantastic live sound engineer? Who can organize a stage logically? Makes singers heard about the band?

In which I become a Grand Champion...

2007-04-10T07:05:00.001-05:00

Sunday, Easter Sunday that would be, was positively disgusting here, weather-wise. It was cold. It was raining. It had actually sleeted - sleeted! - the day before, the day of my friend's Leela and Bruce's Annual Spring Garden Party. There may be some who read this and think "What's a little sleet?" but they probably do not live in Texas. Here we do not complain about the heat... We complain about the cold. Especially when it's cold in April, when it's already been spring for a month and a half.

So. The weather was abysmal, but I rose and rather belatedly made my way to Ladies Sunday Morning Tai Chi League (Ladies League). We all were students of the late, great Stan Rossi. Long ago we decided to get together on Sunday mornings at Bailey Park in Austin and do our stuff. We do a Yang Long Style, Chen Zhao Bao, a saber set, and some of us can do parts of a Yang long sword form. We're a highly social group who believe that life and tai chi go better with good food and champagne. Heck, we believe that everything goes better with good food and champagne. We bring food to the park for special occasions, or meet at each other's houses for 'conviviality.'

Ok, so I got there late, so late that no one else was there, although Christy had been there and done the sword set. One of our members, Ann, was having an Easter party for us at noon, and here it was just before 10 am and I was up in north Austin. I knew if I went home I would be so totally depressed by the weather that I would never make it out again, so I went round to Gwen's nearby house and begged for coffee. Her charming daughter Anna Bella let me in and I had a wonderful time drinking coffee and watching Gwen make a delicious salmon and asparagus quiche. Oh, and I had a shot of lemoncello. I mentioned to Gwen that I'd seen people on Sex and the City drinking it and had no idea what it was... Gwen had some in the freezer and it seemed like the perfect way to start the day.

You can walk from Gwen's to Ann's. It's only four blocks. Admittedly, most Texans would not walk four blocks, they would drive. But Gwen and I are transplants, so we did. It was no longer raining. It was just cold.

Ann lives in the most fantastic house. It's International Style, built in the 1930s, and is just completely cool. Plus, it' a great party house. The other LL's had arrived, and, since it was a function, there were spouses and significant others for those who have them. So there were a LOT of us. And Ann's other friends and family... And ham and about seven kinds of quiches, and deviled eggs and asparagus and strawberries and cream and, my contribution... Cookies. (Yup, those same darn cookies.) And champagne and orange juice.

So we ate. We ate for quite a long time, actually, and then it was time to play croquet. We were supposed to do this outside, in the backyard, but, since the weather didn't cooperate, they had set up a course inside in the family room. There were the traditional wickets, stood up in little lumps of clay, and some other obstacles... Odd bits of pvc pipe to negotiate through... And a ramp into a back bedroom... And tables and chairs... And feet, lots of feet, since we all sort of played at once.

We played with tennis balls, labeled with our names, and all we had to do was complete the course, going through all the things in the right direction and count our strokes. People held back, so I grabbed a mallet and started.

Forty-seven strokes later I had completed the course. No one helped ME by moving the wickets to 'catch' the balls... We made up some rules as we went along as balls seemed to get stuck under the furniture, but all in all, it was a terrific game. No one died. And then came the trophies. There were four of them, but I can't remember what they all were. By that time I think I'd had a fair amount of champagne, but I can't really remember. So, even though I had the highest score - by far - I won the Grand Champion trophy! I've never won a trophy in my life, I don't think. And this is a real trophy...

You may notice that the top of the trophy seems cut off. That's 'cos this is an illustration of the trophy from my journal. But, still, you can tell it's a damn fine looking trophy... And it's sitting on my piano for all the world - well, all the world who come to my house - to see.

(A side note about complaining about the weather in Texas... You cannot complain about the heat. It's just not allowed. Of course it's hot, you fool, it's Texas. If you live in the south part of Texas, you can complain about the cold. The north part of Texas is very far away, and I don't think they're allowed to complain about the cold, but I could be wrong about that. You cannot complain about the rain - unless it rains in July or August, when it's never, ever supposed to rain because it makes it humid - because we need it. Very rarely do you hear anyone say "We shore don't need anymore rain." You can complain about hail and sleet and snow, at least here in the Hill Country, because they are bad for the peach crop, and everyone knows the peach crop is sacred. Hail also damages cars, and even trucks, which are also sacred. You can complain about flooding, but carefully. We get a lot of flooding. Usually if it rains we get flooding. That's what happens when you live some place where it doesn't rain very often. It floods. You can complain about floods, but it's not very good form. Mostly you say things like "I hadda drive forty miles around to get home 'cos the low-water crossing was out." Or, "Didya hear about them what went through the low-water crossing in their truck? That sure was a shame." Going through a low-water crossing with water in it is a bad idea. That's why there are measuring sticks in the middle. If you live and the RFD have to come get your happy ass out, they will charge you money.)

How I got my name

2007-04-05T14:43:00.000-05:00

Years ago, I mean years and years and years ago, like in 1992, for pete's sake, I worked for Madalyn Murray O'Hair. In case you haven't a clue, she was the head of American Atheists, among other organizations, which she ran with her son, Jon, and daughter/granddaughter, Robin. Mrs O'Hair's other son, Bill, the one she filed the lawsuit against prayer in school for, worked for her for several years, too. Then he went off to do his thing and left the young Robin with Mrs O'Hair, who adopted her. Later Bill became a christian minister and went around raising money denouncing his mother and her evil ways. Which, of course, makes you wonder how he reconciles that with the seventh commandment... I mean it does if you're the sort of person who wonders about things like that.

But, then, Mrs O'Hair was a 'real piece of work,' as my friend Gus used to say, as well as an exceedingly abusive employer. Actually, she was an abusive person, who just happened to be an employer... One of those ones who calls everyone - including her family, or maybe, especially her family - an asshole or a sumbitch. In some people, of course, cussing can be funny, or an art form; in others, well, it's just obnoxious. Mrs O'Hair was one of THOSE people.

When I first started working for the O'Hairs, Mrs O'Hair liked me. Had I known better, I would've worried about that, because she appeared to hate most of the other employees, but I was too busy trying to be a good little worker unit. Eventually, of course, she decided she hated me, too. There were deadline issues, since each of the three O'Hairs, Madalyn, Robin and Jon, thought they were in charge of the universe. Each one would give you shit to do and insist you do it before you did the stuff you already had to do.

At the time, I thought that Mrs O'Hair wanted me to cry, or something, when she yelled at me... You know, to have me break down sobbing in a puddle of tears... I thought she liked being scary. So therefore the only revenge that was really possible - unless you, like, killed them or something - was being cheerful. And since I'm not a murderer, that was what I tried to do.

Of course, now I think she was just trying to get me to quit so she wouldn't have to pay unemployment... She'd been tagged as an abusive employer by the Texas Workforce Commission., so you actually could quit working for her and and they'd give you unemployment anyway. She thought she lost all her cases before them because she was an atheist... But really, it was because she was an asshole.

I remember walking into Mrs O'Hair's office one day with a pad of rough sketches in my hands for a cover for the magazine. "Robin says you need to pick one," I said to her. "I HATE THEM ALL!" she screamed at me, before she'd even looked at a-one of them. "Well, pick the one you hate the least and get back to me. The deadline is tomorrow," I told her, putting the pad down on her desk and smiling. Ok, this sounds pretty namby-pamby, but my blood pressure goes up when I write about this and I need a glass of wine or a Pom-tini. I could tell you about the time she told all the workers that they weren't getting a Christmas bonus because I'd fucked up the printing of the solstice cards. Now, think about it. Why would atheists expect to get a Christmas bonus? And then there's the time she told one worker he could kiss her ass, or... But, no, no... I'm just going to smile and forget it all.

It was my attempt at a smiling, cheerful demeanor that made her say to me one day, "You're just a little ray of sunshine around the office, aren't you? (No, no, try again; you're not saying it right. You have to use the Wicked Witch of the West voice for it.... Really creak it out... That's better.)

So that's how I got my nickname. I'm just a little ray of fucking sunshine.

Oh.

I should tell you.

There WAS a murderer in our office. David Waters, who was a typesetter when I worked there, was a multiple murderer... Which is different from a serial killer. Multiple murderers kill people who piss them off. They don't use the same MO every time or anything, and it's not a ritualistic thing... I don't suppose the victims really care, but I guess the police do.

Anyway, there was a lot of stuff that happened after Mrs O'Hair laid me and most of the other employees off. There's even a book about it (America's Most Hated Woman: The Life and Gruesome Death of Madalyn Murray O'Hair, by Ann Rowe Seaman) (or you can read a short article from the Austin Chronicle here), but eventually David Waters and some of his friends kidnapped the O'Hairs, robbed them, killed them, and then chopped them up and put them in blue, 55 gallon drums and buried them on a ranch in south Texas. And then all the money - some $400,000 - they stole from the O'Hairs was ripped off by a couple, three kids on a lark, who just happened to break into the right storage locker.

Pretty icky.

2007-04-05T12:53:00.000-05:00

So, yesterday afternoon, I am peacefully cleaning out my little pond-on-the deck (which I say like I have another pond somewhere, which I don't, but) and my cell phone rings. I answer and it's my friend Clark. "Hey," he says, "Remember that storage shed I gave you?" He's referring to the 12'x16' steel shed that sits in my back yard that he gave me a couple years ago. "Remember the guy who moved it? he asks.

The guy who moved it was a magician. He managed to get this shed into my back yard, wrangling it between the house and the garage, where he had a 1" clearance on either side. He couldn't do it with his truck, which only fit in my driveway when I took down one of the fence posts in the front yard. He and his son rolled it on pieces of pvc pipe through the gap, around in a circle and uphill to its current location behind the garage. It was a marvelous feat, kinda like having a circus come to your very own house and do strange and wonderful things, and then, when they leave, you have a very practical shed just sitting there, waiting for stuff. When you live in an 820 sf house, this, in itself, is a miracle.

Now the weird thing is, neither Clark nor I could remember the name of this wizard. We've tried before, when Clark wanted to move his other shed (he bought them when he and Steve-o were remodeling his house for what seemed like several years) to his sister, Catherine's. He called me then and said "Do you remember the guy who moved that shed I gave you?" And I said, yes, of course I remembered the wizard guy. Did I remember his name or phone number? Strangely, no, I didn't. Nor could I find the card he gave me. I think I put it in the shed, in case I ever needed to move it again, but then I filled the shed up with shit, and now I can't find the card... However, if I ever need to move the shed, I'll have to empty the shed anyway, and then I'll find the card, so that's ok.

"What about the guy who moved the shed?" I ask.

"He's dead," says Clark.

"He's DEAD?" I said. (The capital letters are supposed to indicate how incredulous I was at this piece of information.) "He's DEAD???" (Ditto with the three question marks.) "How can he be dead, he's like what, younger than us? Our age?"

This just goes to show you that even though you are getting older, you never believe you're really getting older, all evidence to the contrary. Like when you look in the mirror and, ummm, never mind about that. My point is that, in spite of all your aches and pains and wrinkles and shit, you still don't think you're old enough to die, until you're like my dad's age (he's 87), and then you're surprised that anyone's alive. There must be some kind of a line you cross over, but I'll worry about that later.

"Steve-o says he's dead," Clark says. "What was his name? I want to call Catherine and tell her he's dead." I get the bright idea to go online and look at the obituaries to see if any of the names ring a bell with us. So there we are, talking on our cell phones, me online reading Clark all the possible obituaries, which, fortunately, there are only two of, all the others being people that you're not quite so surprised that they're dead 'cos they're 90 or something. Nothing rings a bell. Clark hangs up and says he'll call back when he knows more.

He calls back in about five minutes. "Steve-o says he's not dead, it's some other guy who's dead, some guy he worked with." The wizard mover guy worked with his son, who is, of course, even younger than he was. "His son is dead?" I ask... No, it's not his son, it's some other guy who's name we don't know. They'll call me when they know who he is. Now why I should care why some guy whom I don't know who works with some guy whose name I can't remember (but think is a wizard at moving sheds) is dead, I can't say, but I'm pretty caught up in this whole thing right now.

For one thing, I'm still stuck at the online obituary page on my computer, where I've learned that on top of the regular obituaries, they have these, ummm, photo essays about folks who have died, called 'Moving Tributes,' and being the sucker I am for people's life stories, I am now reading or viewing or whatever these tributes and crying, for pete's sake, about people I've never even met. Which probably explains the whole thing about why I'm worried about this wizard shed-moving guy maybe being dead.

"Hey, Clark," I said, "That reminds me, I have a shitload of New Yorkers for you." What really reminded me was that I'd finally dragged myself away from the Moving Tributes on the computer, tears streaming down my cheeks, and seen the stack of New Yorkers perched on a table. "And I have Easter cookies!"

Several times a year I make cookies... Christmas, Valentine's, sometimes Easter. These are a refrigerated sugar cookie that are then glazed with brightly colored glaze. (1 cup butter, 1 cup sugar, creamed with 2 eggs and 1 1/2 teaspoons of vanilla, then 1/2 teaspoon each of baking soda and salt and 3 1/2 cups of flour mixed in. You form this into a long roll and refrigerate. When it's pretty firm, you roll it out and cut it into shapes with your marvelous collection of cookie cutters. Then you bake 'em at 350 until they're slightly brown, and glaze them with a mixture of powdered sugar, water, vanilla, salt and food coloring...) I couldn't find my Easter egg cookie cutter this year. It's my biggest and the grandkids love it because, umm, it's the biggest, I guess. I don't know where the damn thing is. Probably in the shed with the box of less-used cookie cutters and the business card for the wizard guy who moved the shed into place using pvc pipe.

Clark was very interested. "You should come over," he said. "I have vanilla vodka." Now, to be frank, vanilla vodka sounds hideous to me, but then all vodka sounds hideous to me, having had an unfortunate vodka incident in my youth involving getting sick in an outhouse, which, due to the delicate sensibilities of some of my readers, I cannot expound on. Needless to say, I THINK I hate vodka. However, I seem to love Bloody Marys, which I somehow forget are made with vodka, and I have a new fave drink, the Pom-tini, which is vodka and Pom's pomegranate juice, in whatever proportions allow you to drink vodka without knowing you're drinking vodka. "I don't have any mixer, though," he said.

So I drove up to Clark's, carrying New Yorkers and Easter cookies. I stopped at the grocery store and got Pom, which is not, of course, kept with the juice, it's kept in its very own, special section of the store, so you know just how wonderful it is after looking up and down every goddamn aisle for twenty minutes. I also got ginger ale and then showed up at Clark's.

Steve-o was already there, and finally knew who'd died. It was Don. Don had died. "Who's Don?" I asked. Neither Steve-o or Clark knew, but he was dead, and he moved sheds (maybe) (possibly) and so we had a wake for him. The Pom-tinis were a tad strong for us, (Steve-o's a diabetic and has to be careful) so we threw in some water and made some really nice sipping drinks. At some point Judith, Steve-o's wife, called and figured out we needed food, and Steve-o went to pick her up and they brought back two Amy's pizzas, which they doctored and baked and we ate with our Pom-tinis.

Several times we talked about Don, even though we didn't know him, and the wizard shed-moving guy, whose name, at least his first name, is Jerry, it turns out. But things never got any more clear than that.

And then sometime before midnight we all went home and left Clark alone. His Easter cookies were all gone by that point, but he still has the New Yorkers.