Step 2 - stitched the outline of the design, stitched the layers down with random stitches, and whipped stitch around the edges.

This time my place of work closed for the entire day and announced it before we all left for work. I woke up earlier than usual, though. Any other day I’d be lolling in bed, groaning about leaving my warm cocoon. We’re getting a slick coating of ice over this snow now. Bad winter weather in North Carolina usually means freezing rain. We don’t get snow as often as ice. Today we’re getting both.

I’m not especially happy, although I don’t mind having a day off. It’s that I’m bored, and that I’d like to go to the farmers’ market tomorrow morning, and even if it is open this crappy freezing rain is supposed to last through tomorrow. And there’s an artist talk and opening reception at Weatherspoon Art Museum tonight that I’d like to attend. It’s just walking distance around the corner from me, but if the roads are dangerous I’m afraid that they will cancel and the artist will go home. His name is Leonardo Drew and he uses paper and found objects in sculpture and assemblage. It is not often that I am actually interested in an artist at Weatherspoon, but I saw an installation going up on Wednesday and it looks fascinating.

Sandy left for work about thirty minutes ago and I hope that his journey is safe there and back tonight at 7 pm. At least he doesn’t work second shift any more.

I think that I’ll have my own art retreat day right here. I’ll polish off the leftovers from this week for meals, and let the cooking and housecleaning go. Play my new Lyle Lovett CD, listen to podcasts, This American Life, and Anne of Avonlea. Take a long hot bath and inhale some steam. During and in between, I’ll be stitching and painting and maybe bookbinding. I started this project this morning. I’ll be playing with this one, really trying to let myself go wild. The first step is to stitch the outline of the cardoon flower over these layers of painted fabric and cheesecloth, then I’ll tear this water-soluable paper away and add fabric pieces, stitching, and beads.

Finally finished! Now the trick is to get it mounted and framed and displayed. I’m good at making stuff and then I lose the motivation to do anything with it once it’s made.

This design came from a photograph that I took of a centerpiece at Spannocchia, near Siena, Italy.

Almost, but not quite, funny enough to make me subscribe to a Twitter feed.

Unhappy Hipsters

Coffee pot posts are the posts where I write anything that comes to mind until my little coffee pot is empty.

Today will be soup day, since I didn’t get around to that yesterday. I will be using the last of my onions and only one last clove of garlic. Why, oh why, did I not make a list when I did my grocery shopping earlier this week? Fortunately, I do have some delicious dried seasonings and rubs from Cornerstone Garlic Farm from the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market. Natalie says that she will have green garlic at the market this coming weekend. In a pinch, I could dig through the snow to my own green garlic. A day without fresh garlic is like a week without sunshine.

The sun is sparkling off the snow and casting lumpy shadows. The pair of doves were sitting in the fig tree, and one looks heavy with eggs. The rabbit is back. S/he is over in NDN’s yard this morning. A very small cardinal is darting crimson, singing its little heart out.

Gah, and they are already predicting a chance of rain and snow for NEXT weekend. I don’t wish to complain, but…how about during the week for a change, Ma Nature?

I don’t have to feel a pinch of regret for choosing home over church this morning, since services were called off. And my “church” services are way more fun than the church of my childhood ever was, so it is more of a regret than you might realize, considering that I am not a religious person. At least as far as any rules and dogma goes.

I’ve decided to go off birth control pills for the first time in thirty years. At 49, I think that I’d like to see how my natural cycles run for a while. If I go crazy or drive everybody else crazy, then I’ll see what my options are.

I’m excited that I was able to add a class taught by Albie Smith to my lineup of classes at Art & Soul in Hampton, Virginia in May. I really wanted a class by her but they filled up right away. The plan had been to stay there from Wednesday to Friday nights. Now I will stay through Saturday night and drive home Sunday evening after her class. I have a roommate to share the room. The hotel is quite expensive but has a really great free breakfast in which I can fill up and then squirrel away some fruit and yogurt for lunch. I tend to keep going through lunch at these workshops because I never want to stop in the middle of the day. Since I am driving I can bring a cooler of food for dinner too. Then in the evening there are free drinks. So far I have not scheduled anything for Saturday, so I might drive down to the little state park beach nearby, then come back and soak in the whirlpool. I have the money saved in my fun fund to cover this. Now I have to start on saving for Prince Edward Island.

Oh my, just saw on Facebook that Natalie lost her father and Cat lost her grandmother yesterday. The end of January is proving to be a rough time for many.

Yes, I wore my Danskos out in the snow. Nice things are wasted on me.

Miss Jazz is hanging out on Sandy’s lap as usual…

Theo and I are playing with the camera. I have not changed out of my pajamas or brushed my hair today.

I made my bread dough in the bread machine and let it rise, shaped it, and baked it in the oven. I’ll make cauliflower carrot cheese soup (Moosewood recipe) and lasagna a little later.

Hope to finish up this embroidery this weekend. I have begun the design for the next one.

I am not a fan of pink. But these comfy slippers were given to me by a dear friend and have been nearly worn out with love.

That would be “Save College Hill.”

Probably about six inches - it’s sleeting now.

Treat me like a fool, treat me mean and cruel, but love me…

My mind in on art retreats again. Actually, my mind is seldom NOT on art retreats, but I won’t go into the subject of obsession today.

So, I am planning to go spend a week in mid-June on Prince Edward Island, rent a little oceanfront cottage on the Northumberland Strait, hopefully sharing the rent with some nice papermakers, and spend at least half of those days making paper and attending workshops. The agenda has not been totally settled yet, but so far it sounds like a gathering to make paper with local materials and perhaps workshops including making kites, pulp painting, and printmaking on our handmade papers. I’m mainly interested in the retreat aspect - just getting away and focusing on art - but I’d do a couple of workshops. I also plan to rent a car and explore the island, including the Lucy Maud Montgomery sites. I’ll have to reread the rest of the Anne of Green Gables series or listen to them on audiobook. And beachcombing. Lots of beachcombing.

What is distressing is that the price of a round trip plane ticket to Charlottetown almost doubled since I checked it a week or so ago, and I have no clue why. That adds about $400 to the trip, and I already felt pushed about it. So I checked the prices for my trip to Port Townsend in October, and tickets to Seattle are still the same. I am not a seasoned air traveler, and I wonder if I should go ahead and buy my tickets now or wait. I have enough points on my miles card to pay for the Seattle trip, but I won’t if it jumps up in price.

I have already paid to go to Art & Soul in Hampton, Virginia in late May, and will just need to pay my roommate for my part of the hotel room. I definitely want to go back to Journalfest in Port Townsend, and that should definitely be doable by late October. The question is Prince Edward Island. I could save $500 by flying into Bangor, Maine and driving 6.5 hours, probably alone, through New Brunswick to Prince Edward Island. I’m not sure what to do, but I’m leaning toward going there one way or another.

They’re starting to look like oranges, aren’t they? Ha! That’s cool, I don’t care. I’m learning as I go. The bottom lemon on the left was the first one I finished, and I learned that I should created bigger blocks of color instead of sprinkling a dozen different colors in order to get the effect I want. The middle bottom one reflects that. I thought that doing all these French knots would make me a little crazy by now but instead I find it very meditative. I think about stars and galaxies when I do this.

I wonder if anybody in this country is happy with our government right now. It seems to me that the Republicans have the ethics of hyenas and the Democrats have the ethics of jellyfish. I have finally gotten so fed up with politics that I am finally doing what I have threatened to do for years - I have filled out the form to change my party to “unaffiliated” and it will go into the mail today. It may not seem like much, but I am a firm believer that small actions do matter, especially if taken up by many. Landslides are made up from many individual rocks, you know.

I’m sick of Obama’s lip service to change and his appointments of Big Ag and Monsanto shills to important positions in government. I’m sick of the Democrats’ groveling and whining and I’m sick of the Republicans’ hatred and bullying. I’m sick of hearing about the magic filibuster-proof number and the partisanship. I’m sick of people expecting Obama to fix eight years of the GOP’s economic destruction in one freaking year in office. I’m sick of people who are not only unwilling to do the right thing, but who don’t even have the human compassion to know what the right thing is. I’m sick of corporations being in charge of this country. This country is not a republic, it is an oligarchy. The only politicians I like right now are Al Franken, Dennis Kucinich, Pricey Harrison, and Don Vaughan. I’m ready to emigrate to Canada.

Rant over. I’ll still write letters, emails, and sign petitions. I’ll still vote in all elections and primaries. But I’m done with the political parties in this country. Done.

I’ve been using a neti pot twice a day for the last week, the last resort in trying to clear out this sinus infection. Man, do I HATE getting water in my nose. It took a long time for me to learn to swim because I hated it so much. As much as I hate it, it does seem to make me feel better. This infection is persistent but not severe. It has been going up and down in intensity since September, when I took two courses of antibiotics. So I think that antibiotics may not be the answer. The main problem is that after this long, I am very run down, although I take a good multivitamin and fish oil every day. I missed some work this week and I spent a lot of time asleep or watching Hulu or reading.

Speaking of which, I finally finished Special Topics in Calamity Physics, which turned out to be very good, despite a slow start. I thought that it could have been edited back in size by about a quarter, but once I got about a third of the way in I was hooked. Now I am reading The Book of Salt by Monique Truong. I have so many good books to read now, all either gleaned from the free shelf at Ed McKays or given to me by a retiring professor.

And on Hulu, I highly recommend a one-season show from 2007 called Journeyman. Yes, that’s Owen from Grey’s Anatomy. Why is it that so many well written shows are cancelled after one season? I was sorry to see the last episode because there were so many directions where it could have headed. At first I thought that this is just a knock off of Quantum Leap, but it was richer than that because it dealt with his family and present life as well.

Other than that, I’ve been working on my lemon embroidery and I’ve been cooking more. Today I’m making a pot of beans with onions and garlic and tomatoes and Tuscan kale and chicken curry sausage that I bought from Meadow Farms at the Greensboro Farmers Curb Market last weekend. We ate some of this sausage with scrambled eggs (wonderful double yolks from another farmer at the market) earlier this week. It is so good and lean. The dried beans are from Deep Roots. I soaked them all day yesterday and cooked them with chicken broth that I make a couple of times a year with the bags of frozen collected vegetable scraps and the bones and broth from a whole chicken in a slow cooker. The tomatoes are frozen stewed tomatoes from the garden and I just picked the Tuscan kale fresh. Tomorrow I’ll make some beef stew from Rocking F beef in the slow cooker to eat over the week ahead. The potatoes and onions will be from Faucette Farms and the carrots and herbs will come from my garden.

And yes, I did get the new plumbing fixtures put in the bathroom and kitchen. This has made me so happy that I wonder why I waited SO LONG to do it. Sometimes it is the little things that make a difference.