So, things are going fairly well. I sold three scarves, a few books, and a few prints at the gallery in the past two months. I’m going to renew my contract for May 2012-13 but rent a smaller space, since I really didn’t need three shelves of space this year. If my sales get a little better, I may even break even next year, but I’m not really doing this for the money anyway. I just want an outlet for my art and be a part of the art community in Greensboro.

The critters are doing better. Theo was acting weirder than usual (notice the “-er”) and I finally found a flea on Guido. Theo is super-sensitive to flea bites. Now they are all dosed up with Advantage and loratidine and everybody is happier. Lucy is still very congested and I bought a vaporizer for the bedroom where she sleeps and hangs out. They all play and fight and are fairly active for older cats. Sandy saw Guido dancing sideways up to Lucy like a kitten. He did cry a lot last night and now when he does that I worry more, now that I’ve seen the xrays showing several kidney stones. I figure that he may be trying to pass one. If one gets stuck in his urethra, we will have a very tough decision to make. He’s not crying today so it’s possible that he either passed it or he had the old kitteh blues. I’ll going to slip him a pain pill if he does it again tonight.

I’m doing better, although my hand is very sore. I was released from my hard splint on Thursday and I have to do physical therapy once a week for three weeks starting tomorrow. Not bad. The scar tissue in my palm is very hard and I am working on it with lotion and massage. I pushed it a little too hard yesterday cooking and doing things around the house and my hand went numb last night. Now I know why he prescribed a “compression garment” (i.e. glove) for me but I put it off since I know that I have one around here somewhere. Of course, I can’t find it so I guess that’ll be one more expense when I go in tomorrow.

The exciting news is that I signed up for this workshop with India Flint in August: In Search of the Blues. I’ve been entranced with India Flint’s work for over a year now, and despite the workshop comes at a time of year when I normally cannot take off work, I could not let the opportunity to learn from this amazing Australian artist go by. When I heard that Jude Hill was also going to take the workshop, that settled it. My two biggest inspirations in one place, playing with indigo in the New Hampshire summer? I had to do it. I only wish that I could take both workshops, but I am grateful for the chance to take the one.

I struggled with this decision because we are planning to go to Ireland for our 25th anniversary in May, and I have so many bills with my surgery and the cats’ vet bills and the house repairs now. I’m not bad off, but I am used to budgeting for these kind of things so that I save up beforehand and am still able to pay off my credit card each month. Now I have too much on my cards to pay off at once and a big home equity loan. I don’t mind our mortgage - Sandy pays that and it seems a necessary evil that I don’t think about. But I hate being in debt for other things. I have the money saved for my plane ticket, and Sandy has the money saved for his plane ticket. I don’t want to touch that, for fear that the trip plans might fall apart if I do.

Susanne and I played with dyes this past Monday and that was great fun. I dyed some of the cloths that I bought at a rummage sale for 10 cents each in blue in preparation for a boro cloth I am planning to sew, inspired by my online lessons with Jude. I overdyed a rayon scarf that I had originally dyed at the shibori workshop in Asheville, then decided to give it a dip in black walnut dye to tone down the green. I didn’t like the resulting olive shade, so I pleated and bound it and kept it waiting for a blue dyepot. The photo shows the results, which I am thrilled with. After a wash in hot water and a turn in the dryer on hot, it is muted and soft and lovely. There are a couple of small holes where I messed up in snipping away the shibori knots, but Kristina suggested sewing a smattering of beads across it to hide that - a good idea. I may simply do a little embroidery with silk thread, though.

“Anonymous” is a very scary bunch, and I’d hate to get on their bad side. And I’m not sure that I can endorse them. But this gave me a good chuckle first thing this morning. Anybody who screws with Monsatan is a hero in my book.

The word I said would be my guiding theme for 2011 was “play.” The real theme of 2011 turned out to be “get it done.” But I did get in some wonderful travel and art experiences anyway.

Much of the first part of it was miserable. I was in pain physically, mentally, and emotionally. It wasn’t due to turning 50 or officially hitting menopause. I welcomed those things. I have to be able to work with my hands, whether it is through art, cooking, or gardening. That creativity is what saves me from major depression, and I was not able to do any of that without paying for it in pain.

In February I celebrated 50 in Los Gatos, California, at An Artful Journey, painting papers for three days under the guidance of Albie Smith and pondering the direction my life would take. That was a wonderful experience! It is so exhilarating to be able to travel by myself across the country to take advantage of these teachers - ten years ago I would never have predicted this possibility.

Susanne Martin and I also traveled to the Focus on Book Arts conference in Forest Grove, Oregon, where we met up with my book artist friend Judy Strom. We both fell in love with the area and enjoyed our one night in Portland, although we got to see very little of it. It definitely gave us both a yearning to go back, and Susanne was able to get her Lakota book into a gallery in Portland. Maybe she will get to teach at the next one in 2013, in which case there is no doubt that I will tag along.

In July our family rented an oceanfront cottage at Sunset Beach and played with my aunt and cousin and cousin-in-law from Denver. That was a fantastic week.

Over Labor Day weekend, Sandy and I went to Asheville where I took a one-day shibori workshop at Cloth Fiber Workshop and Sandy indulged his newly discovered fascination with painting by wandering around the galleries. Asheville. God, I love Asheville.

I took out a home equity loan and we replaced our entire HVAC system - both the furnace and the AC were on their last legs (or dead) and our ductwork was total crap. This also meant that I had to get asbestos removal specialists to remove all the ductwork. My plan for the rest of the money was to remove the deck so that we could get to our basement, a situation I won’t go into, but it was nearly impossible to do and was flooding frequently. I wanted to rebuild a simple small, screened porch to replace it and bolster a joist beneath the house that somebody before us inexplicably sawed in two, but then was told that our three 1922 vintage chimneys were letting water into the house, so the rest of the money went to deck removal and chimney repair, and a small platform off the back door for safety’s sake, and we just have a tarp thrown over the basement entrance. So it was “get it done” year for the house, and the next thing will probably have to be rebuilding the bathroom floor over that joist. All of this will have to wait, because I am not putting off travel in order to do it.

I skipped Journalfest because of the house repairs and the other trips, telling myself that I needed to show some restraint and frugality and that I could always go in 2012. Except that after Journalfest was over, Teesha announced that she was not doing Journalfest any more, which broke my heart. Man, I loved that event, that place, those people. It still makes tears well up in my eyes to think about it. But as I will soon tell you, 2012 will have delights in store for me anyway!

I did all the proper 50 year old medical tests and procedures - I officially hit menopause, had my yearly mammogram, had a good dermatologist check me out thoroughly and pronounce my skin cancer-free, and my second colonoscopy. also polyp-free (family history made me begin at 40). I spent a lot of time in physical therapy for my de Quervain’s tendinitis at the beginning of the year, which didn’t help, then tried injections a couple of times, which did help but the doctor would not do more than 2-3 max per year, and they didn’t last but 3 months. So I had surgery for de Quervain’s and this Dupuytren’s nodule in my left hand just before Christmas. Which is why I’m posting this wrap-up a week after I began it - it takes a while to type one-handed, although I’m very good at it. Dr. Weingold thinks that the surgery was successful - he said that my tendons were pretty tightly bundled up in there. The surgery expanded the hole that they pass through. The nodule removal was more preventative - it could have eventually drawn my fingers down and surgery now is much less recovery time than later, so I decided to do both. “GET IT DONE.”

My mother really suffered this year with sciatica and that was a huge concern. Thank God she is much better now after several epidural injections. She also had her cataracts removed. All this means that she ended the year still able to live on her own and drive around and do all her Mama thangs - not bad for 88 years old.

The big bucket list item was joining an artists’ co-op - Elements Gallery - this year. My sales were pretty decent for Christmas so I guess I will renew my contract in April, although for a smaller amount of space.

Since May I have been taking online classes from Jude Hill (Spirit Cloth), and although I have not been able to stitch nearly as much as I wanted to, it has been a mind and heart opening process.

We lost Miss Jazz in April. That was heart-breaking. Our little girl was with us for 17 years, and her spirit was amazing and strong until the end when her twisted little body just couldn’t carry on any more. Miss Lucy scared us this summer with asthma so bad it confused everyone and put her in the ICU for a few days. We thought we might lose her too. Then Guido got cancer and kidney stones and spent time in ICU in December, but it seems to be benign, thank God. Two days after Guido got sick, Theo apparently ate some chicken bones from the garbage and HE had to spend time in the ICU. So we really ended up with major bills this fall, and almost lost our other fur-babies.

So what will be my theme for 2012? I don’t know yet. I think that it will be a much better year. Maybe my theme for the first half of the year will be “patience” and then I’ll adopt another for the second half.

I’m recovering from wrist/hand surgery. I spent most of last night awake trying to breathe through my blocked nose because my throat hurts. Sandy is at work from 8 a.m to 8 p.m. I’m curled up in bed with my fur children, listening to Hearts of Space, watching movies and TV on my laptop, and reading “The Paris Wife” on my Kindle. Playing Angry Birds for the first time - yeah, fun! I’m amazed at how happy and blessed I feel today. I am so lucky. Merry Christmas to you all!

A very special Christmas - Santa came early and brought me Left Hand 2.0!

I really feel good about this surgery. The last time I had surgery it was on my right wrist and I had to have a surprise cartilage graft which took a long time to heal and put me out of work for weeks. Now I am seriously thinking about scheduling surgery on my right hand this summer and getting my mojo back for good. I aint skeered no more.

The doc said that I may be able to get by with naproxen or ibuprofen for pain, but Sandy got my oxycodone scrip filled anyway and it was a blessing yesterday, although technically I could have “gotten by” but why deal with pain if you don’t have to? Now I see why people get addicted to this stuff - it is very, very nice, much better than hydrocodone. I slept well. My biggest complaint is this lingering nasty sinus crap.

Years of hand pain have honed my one-handed typing skills.

I am one lucky duck. I worried that my sinus congestion was going to stop my surgery, since I was under general anesthesia, but that was fine. What really almost derailed it was that I developed a rash on my left wrist a few days ago and scratched enough to break the skin. Thank God it was far enough away from the incision site that it was okay, preventing me from having to beg and offer to sign all my rights away because damn it, I was determined that this was going to happen yesterday.

I am enjoying my Kindle. I can read in the dark! I am reading a very satirical apocalyptic novel titled Mercury Falling that is very funny. I wasn’t sure about it at first because I generally don’t care for mocking religious beliefs. I got over that, and the book is one I “borrowed” from the Kindle lending library. Next on my list is “The Paris Wife,” and Susanne lent me a paperback by Charles de Lint named “Someplace to be Flying.” It will be a nice change to read some fantasy, and I’ve never read anything by him.

Other entertainment - “The Tudors” and catching up on Glee and House on Hulu.

Sandy is up and rarin’ to go somewhere for brunch so I guess I’m going to get out of the house for a little while. I packed up a big box of books to sell at the used bookstore and that money will go into the travel fund for next year.

Today my magic hands cloth, which has been magically making itself, told me what it was. It says that it is a flag. It says that it is MY flag. The flag of me.

I wondered for a long time what it was.

I pinned together what may possibly be the rest of the design. I still have a lot of stitching but the fabric pieces have been placed. Unless my flag changes its mind, of course, and tells me to change it.

This is such an odd project for me, and so personal. I debated whether to even share it here, and my decision was, eh, why not?

My hands have been doing too well lately so I decided that I must stitch the next couple of days to remind myself of why I need this surgery.

If I forget to post again before Christmas, please have a merry one. And HAPPY FESTIVUS - my surgery is on FESTIVUS! How will I be able to defend myself when the contenders come at me to pin the head of the household? Tonight is the winter solstice, so happy solstice to my friends who celebrate that. Happy Hanukkah too, however you spell it. I’m going to my first ever Hanukkah party tomorrow night.

I just bought a wonderful book by Jill Berry titled Personal Geographies. I have always been fascinated with maps, as long as I can remember, really. The World Book Encyclopedia was my playground, and the maps were my very favorite parts. I made up different map games to amuse myself. I pick up maps everywhere I go today.

So I reappropriated this altered geography book with painted pages for my personal geography journal, and I’m going to do the exercises in her book. I spent yesterday (between headaches - Sandy and I are both sick with colds) reorganizing and cleaning out my hoard in the bedroom studio and lo and behold, there is actually a space on my worktable on which I can see the table surface, a big enough one that I can use! This time I hauled out everything, sorted it into piles, made labels to put on the drawers of my art chest, and I am going to try really hard to put things in their places now, and not toss everything in the “Misc. Craft Supply” drawer, although, you know, I am human.

This nice thing about this book structure, which I learned from both LK Ludwig and Dan Essig, is that it lies open flat. I hope that quality will make it possible for me to play in it during the week after Christmas when I’ll be home recovering from the surgery on my left hand.

The great thing about cleaning out all my studio stuff is that I found things that I was desperately looking for several weeks ago, and I found a design for a mini-tapestry that I had forgotten about that I love. I found lots of things that I had forgotten about. It was fun. Now my outside studio is a mess again, where I keep my loom and yarns. But I’m going to let that go for a while, at least when it is too cold to work out there without the heater on.

December 23 is slipping up on me so quickly, and my anxiety is rising. The nurse who called me last Thursday said that I am listed for general anesthesia, and I expected to be under conscious sedation, like when I had surgery on my right hand 24 years ago. That scares me and I’m not sure why it makes that much of a difference. It will be a big relief to me when all this hand stuff is over with. I’m not even hurting that bad right now but both my hands have been going to sleep at night again since I drove to Mama’s this week. I worry more about my right hand not being able to compensate for my left hand during that recovery than anything, and that makes me hesitate to do any art that will put stress on either hand. So I feel like I’m going a little bit crazy here.

Critter update: Of course, Theo is more spoiled than ever now that the gastrointestinal disaster seems to be over. He is still on antibiotics, but he is pretty easy to handle, thank God. Guido gets his sutures out on Tuesday afternoon. He seems to be doing well, although he did have one evening when he yowled. I wonder if he passed a kidney stone. Poor thing is all skin and bones, but the really wonderful thing is that NEITHER of them have thrown up since they have been on medication. I am hopeful that if Guido survives this physical storm he will gain enough weight to better sustain him. If I had only known the wonders of famotidine before… I am a bit worried about Lucy now. She has a lot of chest congestion again. I put her back on a regular dose of loratidine (just like Mama) and the vet suggested that I steam up the bathroom and let her sit in there, but so far this is not at all what Lucy wants to do and she gets highly stressed if I force her to stay in there. So there it is. She seems a little better this weekend.

For some reason I’ve been addicted to Christmas song YouTube DJ’ing all day - if you only knew how much I have complained in the past about others behaving like this.

Going down to Marietta to be with Mama post-cataract surgery for the next two days. I was going to leave tonight, but I found that I am not comfortable at all with driving a long distance at night through the country during deer season. So her boyfriend is going to take her to the hospital and I’m going to leave at daybreak tomorrow morning and meet her there. If it is like the last time I will be there in plenty of time. And this time I will have my Kindle Fire to play with while I wait.

I know, I can hear you. You bought a Kindle? You, a dedicated bookie, a maker of books, a former bookseller? Yep, I did. It was cheap ($199 with free shipping and no tax) and my laptop crashes on a regular basis, and I have a hard time holding a book these days so I thought why not? I can access email and the Internet on it and it will be much lighter to travel with. So as much as anything, I was looking at it as a replacement for my crappy laptop. Well, I found that it is not a good replacement, but I have no familiarity with such devices, and it is good enough for the price. I saw in the NYT today that Amazon is getting a lot of negative feedback about it. Sounds like it is mostly from people who are used to touch screen devices. I was glad to see one complaint was that you need fingers “the size of a toothpick” to click some of the links on the screen. That certainly is true. I’m scaling down my expectations rapidly. I can use the typepad on it, but I will not unless it is really necessary. There won’t be many of those times, but at least I’ll have that capability. And I can read in the dark now. How cool is that!!!

I hate texting with a passion, and I even have texting blocked on our phones. (We kept getting lots of texts for the former owner of the phone number.) When I first went to my hand surgeon about my tendinitis, the first thing he asked was if I did a lot of texting, because this kind of tendinitis tends to crop up with texters. So keep that in mind if you are obsessed with texting. Believe me, you don’t want deQuervain’s tendinitis. It is quite painful. So I am serious about not typing on it.

Anyway, I am reading “Cutting for Stone” on it now, which I highly recommend, and I downloaded about a dozen freebies - classics that are in public domain and cookbooks. Found a free version of Canfield Solitaire that I’ve been looking for. You get a free month of Amazon Prime, which gets you free 2-day shipping and the ability to borrow from a fairly mediocre list of books once a month. You also get their Instant Video service, which is not as good as Netflix or Hulu, but the quality on the device is pretty impressive. $79 a year, which is cheaper than Netflix. I’m trying to decide if this is worth it to me. I’m really not sure that it is worth it.

I found that most e-books are really expensive, so this will not get rid of my printed book habit. Fortunately there are a lot of classics that I want to read and Project Gutenberg is a free treasure trove of old books in e-format. I understand that many public libraries will let you borrow Kindle books online. I have yet to try this because my library card is so ancient that I doubt the number is still valid. I have decided to rein in my book buying and hoarding and visit the UNCG library much more often.

It runs apps for Android.

So there you have it from a newbie point of view. I’ve been playing with it for about three weeks, and I’m still learning how to use it.

Well, it has been piled on this week. I had noticed some spots of blood here and there around about since Saturday night, but couldn’t find which cat it was coming from. It didn’t seem to be enough to get really concerned about. Then after the cats ate breakfast, Guido laid down on the floor in a kind of odd way and I thought his fur looked weird. On closer inspection he had a quarter-sized hard lesion on his side with blood oozing out of the middle. I immediately thought spider bite and took him to the vet.

The vet found that he had a huge dark bruise about the size of a softball around the lesion and was concerned about blood inflammation. She thought that it was either a brown recluse bite or a tumor. I brought him home after he’d been on an IV all day and he looked scary - she had taken biopsies and sutured his wound, and it was still oozing. Plus she showed me x-rays that showed several kidney stones, one of which had just entered his urethra and there is a possibility that it might block it. She said that it was delicate surgery if that happened and a specialist would need to do it.

Then she called me Tuesday night and said that it was definitely cancer, and that it likely was aggressive and in the bloodstream. She would know more when the biopsies came back.

So Guido got a lot of attention on Wednesday, but he was trotting around and eating as if there was nothing wrong with him.

In the middle of the night on Wednesday, Theo started throwing up, but that is not too unusual for him. I tossed him off the bed and didn’t worry about it. I woke up with a wicked headache and noticed that Theo wasn’t bugging me to get up. He didn’t show up for breakfast. He didn’t come when I shook the cat treat bag. I couldn’t find him. I was trying very hard not to panic because Theo has never missed a meal. Then I went to the litterbox to scoop it out, and there was blood all over it. I had a meltdown. I didn’t know if the blood was from Guido or Theo. He finally came out of hiding and he was smacking his lips and throwing up white foam. I tried to give him a cat treat with famotidine in it and he wouldn’t eat it. I tried to force it on him and that didn’t go well. So I had to wait an hour for him to calm down and I took him to the vet.

He spent the day at the vet getting x-rays and tests and IV fluids and barium. The blood was definitely from him. We finally assumed that it was from this weekend when one of the cats managed to get into the cabinet and drag some chicken bones out of the garbage can. That $6.99 rotisserie chicken cost me $818 today.

He is laying beside me now with a catheter in his leg and a cone collar on his neck. This is not a happy kitty. He is very out of it. I’ll take him back in in the morning. I hope that he will eat something tonight because he will start to feel better with a little something on his stomach, and there are some probiotics that I need to sprinkle on his food. I don’t want to freak him out any more - he seems almost catatonic.

I did get some good - well, better, anyway - news about Guido. The biopsies did not show any malignancy or metastasis. It doesn’t mean that there is none, but the tumor is probably benign and the doctor can excise the main part of it on Dec. 20 when I was to take him back to get his stitches out. Before she had said that if it was cancer she would have to take out a much larger area and if that had been the case we were looking at euthanasia instead.

As it is, euthanasia is not out. But it is much less likely than it was.

Whew. I am worn from all this stress, but I’m not in a panic now.

Update: Theo spent another day at the vet, but he is doing much better today (three days later).

Theo and Lucy on Friday night

An old photo (pre-2001) photo of Guido