Craft III

So, as I was saying, I think I've vented too much and given my readership--representing an astonishingly small fraction of the human population--a warped view of what goes on in this monkey's mind most of the time. Or not; perhaps there is a little too much truth in it, and I really am agitated most of the time. Hmmm.

Ah! A segue!

One of the things that makes me less agitated, happy even, is doing stuff with my hands. Whew. I've arrived.

Craft. Websters defines it:

Noun: an art, trade, or occupation requiring special skill, esp. manual skill: the craft of a mason.
2. skill; dexterity: The silversmith worked with great craft.
Verb: to make or manufacture with skill and careful attention to detail.

PBS has actually been pretty entertaining lately, what with their National Parks shows and now, even better?, their series called Craft in America. I am receiving much justification, unneeded, but still, for my inclination to learn to do stuff with my hands, from scratch, even though it's completely unnecessary in our world.

And I like that about myself! That is an area where I think I'm doing just fine. Of course, it doesn't keep me from lamenting at times about my desire to master something, be it handquilting or making pie crust. I want to become an expert at something before I die. Until I become an expert at enlightenment, that is a requirement for 'true' happiness. If I live out my life span I'll be irritated if I didn't learn to do something or know something well enough to pass it along.

So I'm getting to it. I make a pretty good pie crust, but there are secrets I have yet to unlock in the seemingly simple fusion of fat, flour, and moisture. I don't think I could walk into the kitchen at this moment and get it right without the recipe. Even with the recipe, there are mysteries. Where was the wheat for this flour grown? Did you know that wheat grown in different regions has different moisture content? Did you know that the Toll House cookie recipe was developed using a local flour that has a different moisture content to most of the flour used today, thus frustrating scores of bakers who can't get the formula straight and end up with flat chocolate chip cookies even when they follow the recipe? Flour moisture, the necessity to keep things super cold and not overmix the dough--which you'll only know you've done once the pie comes out of the oven--these things make making pie dough difficult to master. But when you do, it's worth it. I'm getting there.

Then there's other stuff in the kitchen. I like making things from scratch. And I can get it really wrong. Mostly, though, I get it right, and the effort is worthwhile. And each success makes me want to know more, and I find myself loving shows like America's Test Kitchen and coveting cookbooks that teach you a thing or two. And, no matter how trendy, I'm intrigued by the idea of working my way through Julia's Art of French Cooking. Hells yah! An excellent meal is one of life's accessible treasures. If you can't afford to go to the finest restaurants, or live where there are none, you'd better get in the kitchen and make some noise with the pots and pans.

And why stop there? If you like food, you'll like it even better if you grow it yourself. I fussed over my tomato plants like I never fussed over my children. Pruning them, gently tying vines to carefully placed stakes with scraps of quilting fabric. And I ate delicious tomatoes all summer and fall. And when you make something with food you grow yourself....

Which brings me to effort. People ask me how I have time to do all the stuff that I do. And when they ask me that, I think about what I do and it really is a lot. But it's only natural to make time to do the things you really enjoy, right? I don't even think about it, but all the extra stuff I do--make things from scratch, raise animals, grow a garden, quilt--I might have started doing subconsciously to keep myself from freaking out. I'm self-soothing without fully realizing it. There was a scientist on the radio the other day talking about how craft is a natural anti-depressant; that she has seen people get the same positive effects from knitting as they do from medication, only with a scarf as a side-effect as opposed to things that are 'mild in most people'. That has certainly been the case for me. When I make soup and bread for guests, or a quilt for a friend, I think about those people--what they mean to me, their pleasure as a result of my effort, and my pleasure as a result of that. Good stuff!

And there's something else about effort. I discovered a while back that most of what makes people great or even good at something is the fact that, like Woody Allen said, they showed up. They put in the effort. If I ever want to see one of my quilts hanging up at Quilt National, I'd better put in some quilting time. My latest quilt is a simple design but I've decided to hand piece it. Doing it on a machine would be much faster but less accurate (unless I spend the time to master the machine). And I wouldn't learn how to do it. Remember that I am always preparing for the apocalypse at some level, and I want to learn how to quilt when there is no power to feed my sewing machine. I've seen improvement in my stitches--I can stitch a little faster, my stitches are smaller and more even, and I know what to do when I come to any variety of seam situations. This I like about myself--I could just buy a blanket. Instead I buy fabric, cut it up, and try to stitch it back together to make something a little more interesting. I don't know why, and I don't really care why. I'm glad I found it. I'm glad I take the time to do it. And while I do squawk (inwardly, silently) about not having the opportunity to do it all the time, which is what it would take to get as good at it as I'd like to be, I'm making peace with pragmatism.

And then there's this--I don't feel like I have 'something to say to the world' that can only be expressed through some quilt that I make. Thus it's no real tragedy that I'm not wealthy enough to stay home and make quilts all day. And thank goodness! The pressure from sitting in a studio and having to make something cool is more than I could bear! This is how I know that I'm not an artist. I guess. It's all kinda complicated really. Right now I'm more interested in technical mastery. But, as I sit here thinking about it, I might just want to be a quilt artist. With cooking, I'm happy enough to master someone else's recipes. Lord knows there are enough of them. And I'm happy enough with the music in the world to not have the urge to make the effort to learn an instrument (though I'm sure it would be really fun!). But with quilts...I see quilts in everything. Watching that crafting show last night, I loved so much of what I saw, but had the desire only to use those ideas to make quilts as opposed to making things out of glass or beads or iron. I should not ignore that!

I wonder about my artistic leanings. Just how original do you have to be? What is the difference between a pretty, well-made quilt and one that hangs in a gallery? I think I'd like to find out. There are several things that have attracted me to quilts for a long time. One, they're pretty. Two, most of them are made by women, and mostly by women who had precious few other ways, or no other ways, to express anything about themselves. Three, they're functional. But what really gets me is that the women who made them back in the day didn't have to do anything more than sew together scraps of clothing and flour sacks to be thrifty. They were using relatively rudimentary tools and had bad lighting. There were no books filled with inspiration, quilt stores, or army of rulers. Just a bunch of scraps in limited colors. So why not just cut them into squares and sew? The effort they took to cut them into sharp points, to match seam-to-seam, to work out the often-daunting geometry (!), to recreate flowers and people and all the other stuff. Why make it so difficult when they didn't have to?

I know why. It's the same impulse that drives me now.

As I sit here, I've acquired two boys. It's impossibly cuddly, and cuddly and accurate typing don't mix. Good day, dear reader!

Craft II

What am I thinking? I can't go back to bed. That would be lame! I've been itching to post for a week or so. My blog is the conversation that I need to have with people because I don't have a lot of time to converse or people I care to converse with.

Plus I just reread some of my last post and the anonymous comment about 'why can't you just let Glenn Beck have his own opinion?'. I realize that I've used the blog to vent, which presents the world--and future me--with a warped view of where I really am. I'm not angry or in the throes of despair ALL the time! I do seriously dislike Glenn Beck, though, all the time, though I've never tried to stand in the way of him expressing his opinion, however much it changes depending on who his corporate master/money spewer is at the moment. The only reason I 'care' about what he says is because he seems to have a lot of sway among dumbasses and loose cannons who I fear will do something really stupid and violent. Like speak in public.

But this post is about craft! But now that the neocon fucksticks have been introduced into the picture, it's sullied. In the words of SpongeBob, I've "SOILED IT! SOILED IT! SOILED IT!" Gotta start fresh.

Craft

It's 5:21 a.m. I've been up for about an hour and have spent most of that time attempting to log in to my blog with an email address that hasn't been in existence for over two years. My access to my own blog is tenuous at best.

And I've been trying to log in to this computer to tell the world my thoughts about craft.

I'm tired now, but I guess I'll get to it. Forgive me, dear reader, it's been two months since my last public confession.

Ah, to hell with it. I'm going back to bed!

A Great Way to Ruin a Beautiful Day

Warning: This post contains excessive swear words...unless it deals with health insurance and credit card companies, and it does.)

The weather is stunning today. Actually, no. "Stunning" might make you think of something hard or sharp. It's more like "soft". Soft light, soft breeze, soft grass. The air wafts around the skin. Nothing jarring, nothing excessive.

And it's Sunday, making the weather even better.

So why am I so fucking miserable?

Because I decided to be 'productive' and pay bills this morning. And I can't shake my anger and sense of hopelessness! I know better, but it's not going away. I feel like I need a shrink.

I've been doing the bills for 10 years. It's never fun, but it's been doable at different times--those times when our debt did not outstrip our assets; those times when the money we made more than covered the money we spent.

Things have changed. For the last two years, doing the bills has been tantamount to shoving sharpened pencils into my eardrum, or perhaps a pap smear, the early stages of labor, or getting jalepeno juice in my eyeballs. I hate it so, so much. I've asked Kevin to take over; to help! To at least do it together so that the stress load gets distributed more evenly or something. But has he? No. And maybe that's 1/2 of why I'm so pissed and tuned off to this gorgeous day that should be a salve to my super busy days of late.

You know how people, usually kids, have to die a bloody death before they FINALLY put that stoplight in at that super-dangerous intersection? That's kind of how it went with the bills this morning. I was fuming; hitting walls, looking for things to kick and coming up empty because I can't afford to replace anything that I break, even throwing a walnut at an innocent barn (yes, I can hit the side of a barn. Pretty hard, actually.)

The seething pit of anger I mostly suppress, anger at assholes like Glenn Beck and other Republican fuckheads and big corporate CEOs who care about NO ONE but themselves and their mad lust for money and power, no matter how ill-gotten, those fucks, I hate them. And my hatred only reminds me that, when I hate, they win the battle for my peace of mind, and I really hate them then.

Besides our truly crushing debt load, I also received notice that our already nearly useless catastrophic health insurance coverage is increasing in cost by 33%--an extra $100 a month because, in these economic times, the cost of health insurance is increasing. We pay out-of-pocket for everything, receiving nothing but maybe 5% discounts on our medical costs and the luxury of deferring payment until the paperwork gets processed. And then those same fucks come out and say--or get their sniveling little fuckface tools on Fox to say--how a government-run health plan will fuck everything up and kill us all. Fuck what up? It can't get worse than it is now! And then dumbasses everywhere suck up the party line and urge their fuckface tools in Congress to vote it down, effectively fucking themselves up the ass and into ever-deepening poverty. Good call!

I also received the bills for Marky's trip to the ER for a finger that might've been crushed but wasn't. I saved 10% on the total cost of over $500 for taking a couple of X-rays and having the doctor look at the results and tell me to take two bandaids and call the hospital in several months time to figure out what the hell I owe and for what because the bills are hopelessly confusing.

Again, fuming.

What do I have to do to get along? I work so hard. I don't have expensive things. I don't go out. I pay my bills, but when I'm an hour late or a day late on a credit card bill I find that my APR has zoomed to 30% and now I can't afford it. How can they do that? (Insert fresh round of bitter tears here.)

I googled "What happens if I stop paying my credit cards" and got to "What happened if I s" before google typed the rest in for me. Obviously, I'm not alone. The debt is mine (and Kevin's, of course). I don't mind repaying it. But give me a break! I have pretty much lost my faith in this country, in the government, it's long-dead for the blood-sucking corporate beasts that run it. Fuck them! Can I get away with turning my back on it, starting over--damn the consequences--and running out to live on my farm in the way I've always wanted?

Obviously, I can't handle the bills anymore. I'm pissed at Kevin for not stepping in earlier, despite the many monthly outbursts he has witnessed. And he still hasn't called the big credit card, with the biggest balance, that is costing us over $600 a month in FINANCE CHARGES. I can't do anything because I'm not the primary on the account. But it's been over a month and he hasn't called. How much stress do I have to endure? And I need to get away but where the fuck can I go? If I get into my car, there is no place I can go to alleviate this feeling.

Friends

Friends. I've never had a whole bunch; never really needed a lot. And I almost hate to say the following because it sounds so modern and cheesy. So trendy. But Facebook has reminded me that I do have friends. I just have them in shifts.

One of the best things about getting older is having a lot of experience to look back on. As I find more and more of my friends through the Power of Social Networking, I'm finding that the friends I had at different points in my life impacted my life in sometimes subtle, and sometimes powerful ways, but always in a positive way.

There are songs, moments, scenes, and whole shifts in my outlook that have stuck with me for, well, decades now. The first time I heard Van Morrison's "Astral Weeks" was in Keith's attic bedroom in his home in Columbus. Keith knew, and still knows, so much about music, and he knew how to set the mood for listening to it. I laid on his floor, surrounded by all his interesting books and records, staring up at the Christmas lights he had strung along the top of his slanted attic wall. Big colored bulbs. And I listened to that amazing record, and to Leonard Cohen's "Suzanne", and I wish I was a writer so that I could better describe 'that it was great'. And it sticks with me to this day. A very nice imprint to have.

And Keith was an interesting, lonely, wonderfully intelligent man. And I am sure he still is. We chatted awhile ago on fb, and except for the catching up there was no time between us. Talking to him, albeit through a computer, seemed very normal. And I haven't seen him in 20 years.

Mark, too. I have many more memories of Mark because I spent way more time with him and did a lot more acid with him, too. I saw a picture of him with his wife, and he looks exactly the same. Still listens to the Butthole Surfers. I'm sitting out on the steps on another unseasonably cool July evening and the light from my computer is burning my eyes, so I'll save those stories for another post.

I wrote a post a long time ago remarking on my old boyfriends and how lucky I've been. The worst I've had is a broken heart, and I've gained so much more. It's the same with my friends. Some of them, like Ted, have been with me pretty much all my life; others through stages. It doesn't matter how long, though. The imprints are there, and they've they've made up this life of mine. I have struggled these days with a lack of gratitude. I say thank you quite a bit, but there's always this underlying nagging feeling. I am truly grateful for the experience of having these people in my life. The shared experience. And I am looking forward to continuing these connections.

You know what gets me?

Not being able to say, "Life can really suck!" without following it up with some tripe like "but I have to count my blessings". Ugh. That pisses me off.

Like tonight. I get home, fill the trough. The horses and cows are covered in sweat but they're too stupid to let me get near them with a stream of cool water from the hose. The humidity outside is unbearable. I come inside with one goal: clean up this filthy house. No matter that someone cleans it for me every Friday, within a day or two it's not only messy but crusty. Spilled milk, handfuls of grass trailing across the floor, and enough legos to build a small automobile. I've spent the last hour and a half just picking up.

In the background, Mark is on an emotional tear. He accidentally pooped his pants--the first time in months--and even though we were totally cool with it he decided that it was his excuse to have PMS for the remainder of the night. And, therefore, I get to have PMS for the rest of the night, even though I'm nowhere close to it.

There are certainly times when I wish I could come home to a clean, empty, quiet home. This is one of those nights. I'm overworked, underpaid, overweight, deep in debt, and I need more time to read. To hell with blessings.

Rest In Peace.

The chamber secretary (and mom, grandma, friend, sister) died Friday night. It was going to happen, but no one was thinking that it would happen this quickly.

Leave of Absence

My secretary is gone now. We put her on a one-month, paid leave-of-absence with the full blessing of her family. She really went downhill mentally and was unable to complete even one task correctly. She could, however, get herself up, dressed, and to work. I guess when you do something for 25 years....

It all went down on Monday when her son told her the news. We had chamber backup ready to go, but we all thought it was best for her family to tell her instead of having board members show up at the chamber and ask her to go home. She did not take it well. Yesterday she got up and was fully planning on coming into work until her daughter, son, and son-in-law conspired to keep her at home. She got so pissed. Then she started slurring her words, her blood pressure zoomed, and she ended up in the hospital overnight. There is some kind of swelling happening and it's affecting her brain. Cancer, as my dear mother says, sucks.

Her doctor saw her and told her that she had no business being at work. That calmed her down considerably. But it looks like she won't be coming back.

So where does that leave me? Relieved that I can move forward. Sad that it had to happen like this. Overwhelmed with the sheer volume of tasks that need tackled. One of these days it's all going to be running smooth. We have new software and everything! But I haven't had a chance to take the 1-hour online how-to course let alone manipulate it. For now, I'm dealing with my own mess and someone else's monumental one.

I worked on the monthly newsletter today. Another 12-hour day, and the newsletter--with frequent interruptions from calls and visitors--took all of it. It's done, though! So I can tell you what I did at work today. That's good.

Tomorrow I'm off to the airport to decorate it. That's right. You know those big pictures of tourist attractions that grace the halls of airports everywhere? There's going to be one (or more) of Hometown in the nearby regional airport. At least I think. We'll see tomorrow, won't we?

Working for the weekend. Back to Hot Waffles to put in a gravel path (complete with log terrace steps), chop down a walnut tree that's about to fall over, mow, and contemplate the space for the outhouse.

Facebook killed the blogspot star.

I have to admit it--my time on Facebook is taking time from Blogspot. In particular, I spend a lot of time playing Farm Town. Farm Town is awesome! (If you play, won't you be my neighbor? Also, I like trees.)

I went to real farm town yesterday. We all spent the day at Hot Waffles. I cleaned the cabin the whole time--about 6 hours. Kevin weedwhacked and raked around the cabin and burned the offal.

The folks who opened up the ice cream parlor in town came down to visit and seemed to like it! They have lived in a large, brown, Southwestern city most of their lives and are growing used to all things green and lush and humid. They deemed the place a good place to hang out, shoot guns, and BBQ. And that it is. (I hate guns, but I can abide.)

We quickly made plans for an impromptu steak-eating, gun-shooting, tree-felling party today, Memorial Day. And isn't that just the most American party you could ever have?

The thing I like about the ice cream folks is their enthusiasm. Sure! They'll drive out to see your place, on their way to a movie in the opposite direction! Sure! They'll do this, do that, and relish it all. Kevin and I aren't like that, really. We need to be pushed to get out of the door. We need people like that around. Lots of energy!

So, anyway, the cabin is looking great. We even brought a generator so we could shopvac all the dead wasps. It's raining like all heck this morning, but it's supposed to clear up and be much cooler than yesterday. The plan is to clear a bunch of cedar trees from the wooded area (deemed "Butter Patch" by Stevie--the kid has a knack for names!), start a big ol' fire, shoot some guns, and BBQ some great steak and local chicken, asparagus, sweet potatoes, and veggie kabobs. The bread is about to go into the oven. Kevin is out getting Skintastic (downside: ticks), tools, and the lawnmower--we'll at least mow a path.

Kevin said that yesterday was the best day he'd had in a long time. And he spent the whole day weedwhacking and raking. So what does that tell you?

It should tell you that our commitment to fix up the land has kicked in, and yesterday felt like the first day in a long countdown to living out there permanently. It will be a haul. But visible progress can be made each time we go out and work, and that's satisfying.

I think you might be able to guess why I like Farm Town so much.