The Take It Further February Challenge is up. I’m not officially on the list, but I decided to crash the party by joining the Flickr group and doing it anyway!

The color option can be found at the February challenge page. My, those colors look familiar! I can use my stash. That’s nice.

The concept option is “What are you old enough to remember?”

This is going to be a fun month.

In a Minute Ago (the mother ship)
Take It Further Challenge Blog
Take It Further Challenge Flickr Group

I swear, this was not my intention of what to do with my unhatched chickens from the guvmint. But I couldn’t help myself. I was sucked in by forces way beyond my control. I am hypnotised. My jaw has dropped, and I am drooling. I feel quite faint.

This is the danger of the combination of the Internet, a paid off credit card, and a long period of denial.

I’ve been bopping around some fantastic web sites lately. Quite frankly, the only reason I haven’t spent more time on the art internet is because I find it completely overwhelming, as if I am looking into infinity. One of my earliest toddler memories is a cup with a picture of a cow drinking from the same cup with a picture of a cow drinking from the same cup with a picture of a cow drinking from the same cup… This has brought that feeling back to me.

Yesterday, I was farting around with my Sitemeter referrals when I found a blog called Joyce Makes Art by way of a Google search page in Russian for images of “Squirt.” Turns out that Joyce also has a cat named Squirt, and it turns out that she is a multimedia collage and fiber artist. So I was looking through her site when I clicked on this button and fell down the rabbit hole:

It didn’t take much to convince me to register for Keith Lo Bue’s Precious Little: the Poetics of Found Object Jewelry two-day workshop. Then I meandered my way to his virtual gallery and web site.

Holy crap. I feel like a stray dog and someone has offered me a cheeseburger and a warm place to stay.

So that I don’t follow Keith home wagging my tail, I am taking Sandy with me and he’ll explore the nearby museums while I am in class all day Saturday and Sunday. We’ll stay in a very nice hotel and enjoy Friday and our two evenings together.

I’m going to learn how to use tools and make art out of all the junk I have trash-picked, picked up off the pavement, cut out of magazines, and stored in little jars and bowls all over the house, all in the anticipation that one day, this time would come.

Not only that, it’s already February 1 in Australia, and so the February Take It Further Challenge has begun. Next post.

(This project is following the instructions for a tapestry box or bag woven on a cardboard box, as written by the marvelous Sarah Swett in the Jan/Feb 08 edition of Handwoven magazine.)

The yarns sticking out are where I sewed the ends back in behind with the needle. I snip these tails off. It’s easier to pull the needle out through the fabric that to try to poke the weft ends down behind the tapestry.

I’ll start out this post with this message:

C’mon, Charlie, start a blog! start a blog! start a blog!

Believe me, if Charlie starts a blog, you gardening/local food/sustainable ag/permaculture folks will love it. I’ve volunteered to help him set it up with Wordpress. I set up his web site, and he always wanted to learn to manage the content, but it was too hard to teach him HTML and we were both very busy, so a blog would be perfect! Yesterday at lunch, he talked about writing a book and taking photographs. I’m trying to convince him ALSO to write a blog, to give people a taste of his grooviness and create a little book buzz.

Charlie is my muse. He is THE reason that there is a Back Forty, and he has inspired so many people to follow in his footsteps. He is also my friend, and I can’t tell you just how proud I am to be a friend of Charlie’s.

I’ve had a lot of reasons to be happy about my friends lately. The fabulous Zha K came by on Sunday, and we went to Deep Roots and Ed McKay’s (a used bookstore) together. She gave me an absolutely beautiful Buddha statue, one of the loveliest that I have ever seen. It is so wonderful that I’m having a hard time deciding where to place it. Maybe I should get it its own papoose and carry it with me everywhere, the way I used to fantasize doing with Squirt. It’s amazing how resilient and self-reliant Zha K is. I hope that when her broken wrist heals she will go back to blogging.

Then last night, a gift bag with a leaf shaped pottery soap dish and lemongrass soap appeared at the door. I’m guessing that this may have been from Cat.

K and I are co-workers, and she’s my boss, and she is a dear friend. I can’t get more lucky than that. Right now, work is very stressful and busy, but it has been made tolerable by the fact that we can say anything to each other and we are both willing to work as a team.

I’m making new friends and developing deeper relationships with my Slow Food colleagues. LF, Deb and Randy, Pat and Brian, A-M…

And I credit all my Internet friends with helping me get through the past six months intact. You just don’t know how much you’ve helped.

And in case you don’t understand how momentous it is for me to start trusting people again, last night I was on the phone to my mother, crowing and cooing about lunch with Charlie, hanging out with Zha K, my developing friendship with Deb, Slow Food relationships in general, and the prospect of travelling in Italy with Susanne, and my mother said with a proud, sweet tone in her voice, “Well. You’re finally making friends, aren’t you?” She understands, because we have had many conversations about friends, and the loss of friends, and how hard it is for us to find new friends. And like all mothers, she doesn’t want her baby girl to be lonely.

I am a loner, for sure, but I sure ain’t lonely. Thank you.

Time to sweep the floor of my brain pan. I have a 4-cup coffeemaker and in these periodic posts I write as I think until the coffee pot is empty.

Most interesting news: The day after Sandy accepted the third shift position, his boss called back and offered him second shift, as had been originally discussed. What’s funny is that Sandy had been so busy talking up the positive aspects of working third shift to himself that I think that it was actually a bit of a letdown! Really, attitude is everything. I know that he’ll be happier on second shift. He’s too much of a people person to work 9 hours straight by himself.

So we’ll get to have lunch together and the weekends won’t be so hard. On weeknights I’ll get some solitude, which is just about perfect.

We talked a lot at dinner Friday night about things that we want to do around the house. We haven’t done much to the house since we bought it in December 2001, except work on the crawlspace and joists and adding a shower ring to the bathtub. Sandy has been itching to paint and I hate to paint. I feel like we painted so much at the house next door (our former home)! Besides, we can never agree on colors and furniture, so decorating is one of those subjects that is frustrating for us.

Sandy was inspired by the earth tones at the restaurant and at first, painting the bedroom an olive green seemed just dandy to me. Once I sobered up I didn’t want a green bedroom. We finally settled on a teal/sand combination, and we’ll paint the adjoining room an olive/sand combination. I hope that the bedroom will have the atmosphere of sea and shore. I just hope that this will not be a repeat of the Peptobismol pink living room fiasco of years ago.

Before we went to Lowe’s to buy the paint, we stopped for cat food, and against my better judgement looked at the cats for adoption. My heart nearly stopped when I saw a cat who looked exactly like Squirt - not just color, but markings and face. He was a little bigger. His name is AJ and he is 2 1/2 years old, picked up by animal control as a stray. He seemed to have the Buddha Kitty personality and was calm and friendly. Please, won’t someone adopt this beautiful sweet boy? He was at Petsmart on Lawndale Drive yesterday. If we had not promised each other to wait until our cat population is down to one to adopt another cat, he would be coming home with me.

When we came home, we moved the bed into the second bedroom, the one that I have been using alternately as a quiet room, Squirt’s room, and winter studio. I cleaned it up, put the futon against one wall, and our bed fits in there just fine, although with not much room to spare. And I love the way that the room looks - as if it has a real purpose instead of being a repository for my junk. Now I think that I will leave it in there and buy a new bed for our bedroom. It makes more sense - that mattress is okay enough for a spare bed but we’ve had it for a long time. We’d eventually need a new mattress anyway.

I’ll get the bedroom windows replaced with wooden energy efficient ones with good locks. I sort of hate to replace these windows because they are different from modern ones and the design of the windows is one of the things I love most about the house, but they need to be replaced for several reasons. It won’t look so weird on the back of the house, though, and the plan eventually will be that a screened porch will be on the other side of them. I’ll have to think carefully when it comes to replacing the others.

Then I spent the rest of the evening weaving on my tapestry box and watching a chick flick on the Netflix “watch instantly” list. I finished the first season of 30 Rock. Tonight, we have Talk to Me on tap.

I’m still listening to Anne of Green Gables. Now that I hear the words, the parts of it that resonated with me as a child stand out. I loved walking in the woods and building lean-tos and places of my own, bringing home wonderful things that my mother considered junk, playing in a pasture with our neighbor’s horses and ponies and catching tadpoles and minnows in their pond. I played so much in our next door neighbor’s yard that I wonder if she was totally exasperated with me. She had a tree shaded, very small dug-out pond of only a few feet deep and a few feet in diameter, surrounded by azaleas. It was a beautiful place and I’m sure that its practical purpose was to relieve flooding, since every huge rain would cover her lawn with shallow grassy pools of water. I don’t remember now what I named the “pond,” but I do remember being very influenced by Anne’s penchant for naming beautiful places with romantic names such as the Violet Vale and Idlewild. As soon as I heard those words again, I was taken back to the “pond” and my explorations of the woods around our house. Sadly, almost all of these woods are gone now, and the “pond” was filled in long ago.

I signed up for a couple of three-hour multimedia workshops at the Center for Creative Arts downtown the next two Saturdays. I hope that they get enough students, because yesterday’s class in papermaking was cancelled. The next two are on artist trading cards and artist journals. I would like to sit down with someone who is experienced in multimedia to learn some different techniques. Once I get started with a bit of confidence, I’m sure that I’ll fly with this, because I’m so fascinated with the idea. Right now I’m totally entranced with tapestry, though, so if they don’t make, I won’t be that disappointed.

All in all, things certainly seem to be on the upswing!

Sandy and I had promised each other to go out for a scrumptious meal to celebrate when he was gainfully employ again. (One of the phrases stuck in my head from Burma Jones, one of the best fictional characters ever in one of the best comic novels ever.) We were struggling to decide where to go, when I remembered these articles from Yes Weekly and the News and Record. The local Slow Foodies have been buzzing about this place since it opened in December, but given our circumstances, we hadn’t had a chance to check it out.

The short scoop is this: Sweet Basil’s focuses on buying local food at the Piedmont Triad Farmer’s Market first, and whatever they cannot find locally, they buy organic. EXACTLY my food philosophy. The service is excellent. They are located in the beautiful house that Cafe d’Arte used to occupy.

First, we decided to order a bottle of organic wine. Bonterra Merlot from California - very good! I can’t drink red wine that is not organic without getting a headache, and you usually can’t find organic selections at restaurants.

Their menu has three categories: Salads, Small Plates, and Big Plates.

Sandy went for broke, ordering the most expensive dish on the menu: organic beef tenderloin topped with a huge sea scallop, with horseradish mashed potatoes and roasted vegetables.

I decided to have a salad and one of the small plates.

The salad was simply the best I have ever had. It was tossed with duck confit, blue cheese chunks, sliced almonds, and a light honey-based dressing, and was accompanied by a port poached pear. Say that three times fast.

At first, we were seated in an area upstairs where we were alone. Then a very elegant, older couple was seated nearby. They took notice of my mmmms and ohhhhs. The beautiful woman ordered a raspberry vodka martini. Suddenly, the owner (manager, chef? not sure) rushed upstairs and began to apologize profusely for the couple having been seated upstairs. I tried not to pay attention but it definitely aroused my curiosity. Who were these people, what was the story? They seemed to not be bothered one whit about their seating.

A few minutes later, the gentlemen walked over to our table, apologized for being rude, and asked me about my salad. “That’s okay, she loves talking about food,” Sandy exclaimed. Later, as we were leaving, he told me that it was the best salad he had ever eaten as well.

The grilled ostrich is from Hilltop Farm, a sustainable local farm that sells ostrich at the Piedmont Triad Farmer’s Market. Ordered medium rare, it was incredibly tender and the flavor had infused the spinach greens it sat upon, making them almost as delicious as the meat. It was topped with a cranberry sauce.

Here comes the point where my moans of pleasure rivaled Meg Ryan in “When Harry Met Sally.” We decided to go all out and have a dessert each. My dessert shot to the top of my list of the BEST THINGS I EVER TASTED. I wish that I had used the flash but at this point I had drawn a lot of attention and was trying to be a bit more low-key.

Chocolate ganache topped with a white chocolate mousse and sambuca. The garnish was a sprig of peppermint and coffee beans.

By this time, another table of diners had asked about what I was eating. I do hope that they ordered it.

Sandy had the white chocolate cheesecake, but I was so distracted by the wondrous piece of heaven in front of me that I didn’t get a photo of it. But this sums it all up.

The suggestions that we have for them is to arrange for some kind of extra parking with one of the nearby businesses. We had a warning note on our windshield when we went back to our car in the parking lot at the shopping center across the street. Also, get a web site and post your menus. I would have loved to have had your own descriptions of some of the food to post here. Update: They are working on a web site, but in the meantime click here for menus and more information. They are open for lunch too!

This was one of the very best meals of my life. Sweet Basil’s, on Muir’s Chapel Road, Greensboro, across the street from Quaker Village shopping center. Go there for your next special dinner. Make a reservation, because it won’t be long before this is a well-known restaurant.

OH MY GOD. I have a new favorite restaurant. I just tasted the best thing that I have ever put in my mouth. The whole meal was awesome, and local and organic. And expensive, but we decided to blow it out tonight in celebration of Sandy’s being gainfully employ again.

I’ll post tomorrow when this half bottle of organic Merlot wears off.

So, what are you going to use your guvmint check for?

I’ll probably spend mine in Italy, which is not what I think that they had in mind!

I can think of a lot of things that I could justify spending money on right now, especially now that Sandy is employed again. (Yes, he accepted the third shift job!) A newer, more fuel efficient, less polluting car will probably have to go to the top of the list. I’d like to replace at least some of our windows in the house with energy-efficient ones. (And with good locks, since Sandy says he is worried about leaving me alone at night. Isn’t that sweet? Unless, he is afraid that I’ll get a boyfriend? Being alone at night was actually a plus for me!)

Replacing windows will be more expensive since I live in a historic district and so I have to get approval. I’d also like to install ceiling fans in several rooms, including the studio. The studio would get new windows with screens, and a screen door. So, my brain is focusing on steps that will save energy, for the most part.

I don’t think that $600 is going to cover all this, though.

Progress up the sides of the box. This is the FUN part! I am having a blast, and it is hard to tear myself away from it.

About the yarns: most of these yarns were given to me by a weaving teacher. Apparently what happened was that a student had wound the warp for a large rug, and then had abandoned the project. Once a warp is measured off, you can’t really wind it up again because it will become a terrible tangle. Since she knew that I weave tapestry and can use cut lengths of yarn, she gave it to me. I cut off the ends and wound the lengths into balls. I can’t remember how long this took, but I must’ve had the patience of Jesus to do it. The wool is very coarse and must have been hand dyed, because there are undyed or lightly dyed places where the ties on the yarn were too tight. This wool would probably have been thrown out had I not taken it.

One of the yarns is leftover from an old tapestry that I wove many years ago. I remember that I dyed it on the porch at Lake Waccamaw, during a week when I was at the lake without a car, phone, or TV, with only the company of our dog, Janet Planet. It rained buckets non-stop for days, to the point that the rainwater rose up through the kitchen floor, the house having been built directly on top of a cement slab. It was one of the best weeks of my life.

This is an example of Slow Cloth, which I’ve been thinking about a lot, and will eventually post about. I’m thrilled that fiber artists are extending the philosophy from the Slow Movement to cloth. Of course, many of us always have, but I never thought of it in those words. How perfect!

Sigh. Another day at home. Actually, I wouldn’t mind going to work at all, because my body aches from sitting and laying around on this futon. And Guido’s incessant yowling and scratching at the door is making me contemplate the positive aspects of his mortality. But, I should walk my talk and not spread the creeping crud any further around the workplace if I can. I’m quarantining myself in this room because Sandy says that he cannot get sick right now. Which reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Anne Lamott: “If you want to make God laugh, tell her your plans.”

Sandy has been offered the job, except on third shift. I don’t think that he has accepted it yet, but he probably will. This is an entirely different kettle of fish. He has worked third shift before, and neither of us liked it. You would think that third shift would be perfect for him, since he stays up all night when given the opportunity anyway. It seems to be a totally different thing when he HAS to do it. In the summer, people have lawn mowers and edgers and weedwhackers going during the day. In the fall, leaf blowers. All year, roof nailers, jackhammers, saws, and drills. The last time he worked third shift, we were living in his mother’s condo, so it could be different in this neighborhood.

Then, on the weekends, the only real time I’d get to spend time with him, his schedule will be adjusted to sleeping during the day. I am NOT a night owl, and my body is strictly regulated to fall asleep at 10:30 p.m. When he worked third shift before, he was usually too awake to go to sleep in the morning after work, so he’d be sleeping in the evening too. And the good thing about second shift, as we discussed, was that he’d be able to take classes at the local community college in the morning. Then he’d definitely sleep in the evening.

Which might be a little too much solitude for me. Which reminds me of another saying: “Be careful what you pray for.”