Sad news...

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...

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...

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.

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

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...

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

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...