Whew! It’s almost too hot to drink coffee this morning. Hot and muggy. This house has aluminum siding and I think that it makes it into a solar oven. It’s supposed to get near 90 today and the next few days, and it’s humid. Still, I hope that we can put off turning on the AC as long as possible.

I do turn on a small window unit in the studio. When it’s hot like this, it gives me even more incentive to go out there and play where it is comfortable. Last year we had it in our bedroom, but a certain somebody who was housesitting lost his key and broke into the house by removing it from the outside. I decided that I was not comfortable with that kind of vulnerability.

My husband can handle heat much better than I can. We lived together for 13 years without AC before I went peri-menopausal and decided that enough misery was enough. We installed two window units in that house. Now we have central AC in this house, but we use it as little as possible. Obviously last summer when the temps went into the 100s for days at a time it was running a lot.

We have ceiling fans in one half of the house, and the windows are placed in that half so that we can get a breeze moving from the front to the back. The other half of the house where the two bedrooms and the computer room are are harder to cool because there isn’t a way to get a cross-breeze going. Remember that if you are planning to build a green structure. Very important.

Anyway, I didn’t think that I’d be writing about heat this morning, but that’s what happens in these coffee pot posts. You never know where they will go as the caffeine hits your brain cells.

Yesterday, I got so excited about my art journey that I thought that my head would explode. I get like that - I tend to have panic attacks when I’m overwhelmed, whether it is with fear, anger, joy, or ideas. It’s one of those things that shuts me down artistically, for obvious reasons. But I have not had a panic attack this week, although my chest is a bit tight with anxiety. This is a very good thing. I can work with this.

What happens is that I get blocked for months, sometimes years (in the last case, quite a few), and then the dam breaks, and I am nearly manic with all the ideas and projects that I want to do. I am obsessed. It’s all I want to do, all I can think about. People talk to me about serious subjects, and I hear them, but in the back of my mind I’m thinking about what color thread I’m going to use to bind this particular book.

So I’m spending most of my spare time creating. The Back Forty is finally at a point where it is simply in the business of growing, and I have little to harvest other than cherries and turnips. This is what is great about my method of gardening - most of the work is done in the winter and early spring, then I slide through the hot summer months, if I do it right. There will be a sparse period right now because I didn’t plant enough early enough, but that’s fine.

My epiphany yesterday as I was sewing up the slits in the Elements tapestries, and I’m sure that all of this was just barely below the surface, was that I’d use them for the covers of a book. Then I knew what I’d do for the cover of Squirt and Mama Kitty’s book - a tapestry of the two of them. I pasted up a quick idea for the cartoon. The title might change. Remember the Ferrell Family from the Carol Burnett Show? That shows my age, but for some reason the Ferrell Family really cracked me up. That’s why I wanted to name Squirt “Daryl Feral,” but Sandy wouldn’t go for it.

So here’s when it hit me, and I don’t know why it seemed so earth-shaking when it was so obvious. Has anyone suddenly asked you what you would do if you could do anything? I would make books with tapestry covers and handmade paper from plants in my garden. Maybe other covers with natural found objects.

So that’s what I’m going to focus on. TA-DA!

Oh well, this was lovely, but I have to go pick up my chicken now. It will go into the crockpot so that I don’t have to mess with a hot stove.

The latest progress on “mindful presence” - this was started in Lisa Engelbreicht’s Fabric Art Collage class at Art and Soul at Hampton. I liked the right angles and the balance, but something about it still bothered me. So I began clipping corners, and then I decided to start swapping corners. I like the result a lot! I have this tacked onto a frame for quilting, but I now realize that these layers of canvas are going to be painful to quilt. So I’m going to glue on the rest of the elements and do a little beading, and it will be done!

That’s right, I never posted the first photo, did I? Silly me, here it is:

The prompt was, “From this moment on, I am…”

I received this article through the Slow Food DC email list, which is a terrific source of information about food and ag issues. The source is North Coast Journal, and while it seems to highlight Barack’s chili recipe, first it gives a very clear and concise summary of Obama’s plans and opinions about national food and ag policy. Here are a few Q & A’s from the article:

Chef Ari: You voted for the Farm Bill, despite the enormous subsidies it provides to wealthy farmers. Why?

Barack Obama: The Farm Bill has many positive provisions, in particular, an increase in federal funding for the development of renewable fuels, which will help reduce our nation’s dependence on foreign oil. The legislation provides an additional $10.3 billion for nutrition assistance programs, such as food stamps and school lunches.

Although the Farm Bill is far from perfect, I support the legislation because it recognizes the important role of America’s farmers and ranchers, and the need to develop our rural economy. It is regrettable that John McCain [who voted against it] does not agree.

While the Farm Bill does lower significantly the income limits of farmers eligible for subsidies, it doesn’t provide as much reform as I have advocated.

As president, how would you work to hogtie this piece of runaway pork?

In part, this is due to the disproportionate role that lobbyists play in the legislative process. As president, I would work with farm state legislators to pass additional reforms to reduce wasteful subsidies.

Small farms that market to local communities are vital components of healthy local food systems. What policy initiatives would you propose to strengthen local food systems?

As president, I would implement USDA policies that promote local and regional food systems, including assisting states to develop programs aimed at community supported farms. I also support a national farm-to-school program and am pleased that the Farm Bill provides more than $1 billion to expand healthy snacks in our schools.

See the article for the rest…

Sort of, anyway. I took most of Squirt and Mama Kitty’s fur to Susanne, who is adding it to a batch of pulp for our papermaking day June 14. She is going to show me how to make the paper and then let me go at it on my own all day.

I’ve made the stamp of Squirt and I’m going to make a stamp of Mama Kitty.

I think that I’ll include the “Our Cat Enters Heaven” story by Margaret Atwood that a kind reader sent to me, and my haiku for Squirt, and other writing and remembrances of mine about them.

I need to think about the covers. Now that Mama Kitty has joined Squirt, I may make the back-to-back style that I learned in Dan Essig’s class at Art and Soul. I think that I’d like to do fabric covered covers, but I need to mull all this over and think about the whole of it rather than the parts.

I’ve been carving some wonderful stamps of the “Black Adder” font, my favorite font that I don’t even know where I picked it up, but I use it frequently.

Susanne gave me a couple of big sheets of her paper; one with yak hair and one with buffalo hair and sage. I have a previous gift from her of a paper made with lavender from Spannocchia. Maybe I’ll make a small book with just these papers.

It rained last night, so I thought that it would be a good time to get some Back Forty shots. Unfortunately, it brought out the mosquitoes en masse.

Scratch, scratch.

This is the “gooseneck” garlic that my mother’s cousin Harry gave me. It’s a heirloom from my great-grandmother’s garden. It has twisted and turned several times over just the last couple of days. You may end up seeing this as my banner - it seems to have potential.

The first violetto artichoke! It isn’t violet, but it’s very pretty. This was planted last spring, started from seed.

White Nanking cherries on the bush. The pinkish one is ripe enough to eat, but can get a little riper.

For size reference

The red Nanking cherries on the bush. They can get a little bit darker red than this if you like them sweeter (I do). They’re a little smaller than the whites, but there are a LOT more of them.

Well, I’m home from work, but I think that I’ll wait a little while before sneaking through the Back Forty to the studio. When you overhear the NDN having a loud argument with Satan, it’s best to be prudent. She took the news of Mama Kitty’s death very well, though. I think from our recent conversation that she is overloaded on the irrationality of politics, which God only knows can drive the most stable of us nutty. That’s one reason that I gave up TV and most news in general. Besides, if Satan really is out there, I don’t want to run into him either.

It sounds like I’m making fun of her, and I guess that I am, a little. But it is more like dread in getting captured in a conversation about religion, in which the only way to extract myself finally is to be rude, which I don’t want to be either. I usually feel a lot of compassion for NDN, but she does get on my nerves sometimes. I’m a little afraid that I might end up just like her one day. Except that my craziness will probably manifest itself in hoarding and cats.

This summer, I’ll be preparing to go to the Slow Food National Congress in San Francisco as a delegate! Okay, it’s not a done deal yet, but I think that I have a good chance of going. With Alpha Anne, who should be a real fun travel companion.

I’m working on finishing that scarf, hopefully in the next day or two. And I’m making a bunch of very cool alphabet stamps, and working in an art journal for the first time. This morning I had painted a couple of pages with white gesso, and my husband walked into the studio and tossed the phone onto the wet paint. He might need to adjust to my new medium.

I’m going to call Susanne and see if she’ll give me a few lessons in papermaking. I know it’s easy. But I’m the type of person who needs a little instruction to kickstart me into a new direction. I want to make books, but I want to make the paper too.

UPDATE: Woo hoo! Susanne and I have a paper making date for June 14. A whole day of it. Sometimes you just gotta ask for what you need.

I carved this stamp of Squirtley Dirtley today. Mama Kitty’s will be along soon. I think it will look good with dark brown ink on gold paper. Today I was playing with Lumiere metallic gold paint, the alphabet stamps that Rice gave me, and some stamps that I carved.

I’m right pleased with this stamp.

I was wrong about the white Nanking cherries. They are ripening and they are good! They’re a bit larger than the red Nanking cherries, and have a pink blush when ripe. And I also discovered that I was picking the red Nankings a bit too early. Last year the birds swooped in and finished them off before they fully ripened. This year, for some reason, they haven’t, and they are very sweet now that they’re totally red.

Yesterday when I went to the curb market, the mulberries beside the bridge over the creek were still full of huge ripe berries. A man was using a cane to hook down a branch for people to pick them and try them. Most people had no clue what they were. After I finished my grocery shopping, I got a plastic grocery bag out of the car and walked down the creek until I found another mulberry tree with huge ripe berries hanging right at eye level, easy pickings! They are extremely juicy and turned my hands bright purple. Late that afternoon, I ate them over vanilla ice cream.

Like most people nowadays, I didn’t know what mulberries were or that they were so sweet and delicious for most of my life. I only knew that if you parked your car under a mulberry tree in May, you’d regret it. Also that the bird bombs were pretty bad this time of year. I lived in a house once that had a mulberry tree and a very old apple tree and I never took advantage of either, even though I knew that the apples were very good. It was a tough time in my life and my focus was not on food, but I didn’t appreciate good food at the time anyway.

Once I knew that they were edible, I found it frustrating to remove the stems. Then I had a mulberry parfait at a Slow Food event at a swanky restaurant, and they didn’t remove the stems. That removed my last inhibition for eating mulberries - I don’t even notice those pesky stems anymore.

I couldn’t find any recipes for preserving mulberries in my cookbook collection, except one reference in Stocking Up that said to treat them as a soft berry. (No kidding - they are really delicate!) I did a search online and the first hit gave me pretty much all I need to know about preserving and cooking with mulberries. I might make some syrup but I’ll probably just eat them raw!

I won’t have enough cherries to preserve, and the fruits are so small that I don’t want to bother with pitting them anyway. But they will make great snacks for a while. Shoot, I feel like I’m on my way to become a raw foodist these days. It won’t happen, but I’ve enjoyed being able to not cook much lately.

And away we go!

This is my sort of weekly post where I write whatever comes to mind until the coffee pot runs out.

I just arranged my first ever ATC trade. Whoop! I’m trading this one for one that she has not posted yet, or this one, but ANY of her needlefelted ATCs would be a treasure. I definitely think that I’m getting the best end of the deal here, but she initiated the trade!

Let’s see, the tomatoes that survived the initial planting seem to be doing well now. Especially the Romas, which were the most important to me, since I’d like to have enough paste tomatoes to can this summer. I’ve had wonderful garden dinners every evening for the past two weeks or so, many times standing next to the pea vines, shelling and eating raw peas on the spot. I never knew how good this was. I may never cook a pea again.

Also the red Nanking cherries finally ripened, and I’ve actually beat the birds to most of them, I think. I took a bag of raw shelled peas and cherries to snack on at work. My co-workers thought that it was pretty strange. I guess it was. The white Nankings have yet to ripen, but there are cherries on that bush for the first time this year. One of my blueberry bushes is loaded with berries. I hope that I can get some, because the bird netting is out. Sandy was furious that the birds kept getting caught in it - I was not happy about it either, but he was really upset. The fig tree looks beautiful, but as I reported a while back, the figs disappeared. It is getting really big.

On my way to work there is a large mulberry tree in a small parking lot. I love to pick the ripe mulberries off the lower branches to munch on. I see branches filled with the little lovelies high above my head. I really need to buy a stepladder.

Here’s the funny thing - I am not really a big fruit fan. Like green beans, I’m more fascinated with growing fruit than eating or cooking it. I picked the kinds that I like the most, and blueberries have a special place in my heart since growing them as a hobby was my father’s passion. The other push that I’ve made for small fruit trees and bushes is that I’m trying to plan for the future, when times might be hard and I will really appreciate that jar of pear preserves or blueberry jam. There are a couple of permaculture principles that I’m trying to put into play here. One is different levels of food producing plants. Another is that I’m trying to devote a good chunk of my space to perennials, hence the artichokes, cardoons, and asparagus.

Well, this turned into a Back Forty Update, didn’t it? S’all righta. Remember the Spanish comedian with the painted talking hand? Oh never mind.

Here’s one last thing - I nearly tumbled completely out of bed last night. You see, I was riding my bike with a friend, and we stopped at a gas station for a soda. I had an argument with the proprietor because his drinks were warm and I insisted that he bring me a cold Diet Pepsi. He brought me a Coke, at which we left and were about to ride away, ridiculing him for not knowing that there are Coke people and Pepsi people and never the twain shall meet. But before we could leave the parking lot, a crook got out of his car at the gas pumps with a pistol! I say “crook” because he was the kind of smarmy guy with Brylcreemed hair that always gave Barney Fife trouble on the Andy Griffith Show. Well. One male customer ran away, and the crook turned his attention to me. So I decided to lay down and close my eyes and maybe he would pass me by. This never worked as a toddler so I don’t know why I thought it would work now. But anyway, he pressed the big fat black pistol to my arm and demanded that I pick up a hunting bow and arrow and shoot the gas station proprietor! I was having none of that karma, so I did a karate move to knock the pistol out of his hand, except it didn’t work, so I tried to roll to my feet to run, and that’s when I knocked most of the stuff off the bedside table and ended up halfway on the floor.

Nighttime almost always brings adventure for me. No wonder TV bores me these days. I’d rather go to sleep.

I spent a good few hours in the studio tonight, so I feel like I’m back on track. Especially because I began my artist’s journal - FINALLY. This is a smallish spiral-bound handbook that came from work and is now out-of-date, so instead of sending it to the landfill (I try not to say “throw away” anymore), I’m reusing it as a journal. I paint over the pages with gesso as I go. Because it is nothing special, I’m not tempted to hang on to it for that “perfect” time to use it. And I’m not showing it to anybody, so I’m free to screw up and experiment all I want without fear. In fact, I’m going to TRY to screw up.

Because I’ve discovered something - artist’s block is fear, plain and simple. And there’s one more thing - you’re an artist too. That’s right, YOU. You may have had the desire or the courage for art criticized out of you, but you could make art. You really could. And here’s the last thing that I’ll say on the subject today - don’t limit art. That’s how you kill it. I believe that gardening and painting and cooking and weaving and decorating and ceramics and dancing and knitting and music and raising children and writing is art. As well as anything else that requires you to put some of your soul into it.

I also wove about a foot on the fabulously ugly scarf III, but I found that my upper back hurt after about 10 minutes of weaving. So it was fortunate that I’ve got so many projects and ideas in motion. This was part of my strategy. Since I tend to have a lot of little aches and pains, if one thing bothers me, I can switch off to another.

Also this week, other than carving stamps, I finished backing and photographing the ATCs. I took a heavy watercolor sketchpad that I wasn’t using and made signatures for a 48 page book, cutting the heavy cardboard back in two pieces to use for covers. When I showed it to my co-worker who is getting married in August, musing over what I might make out of it, she said that she needed a guest book. So I’ll do a test run on this one, since it’s my first book not made from a kit, and then I’ll take her to a local art supply store that has some wonderful handmade papers and I’ll make her a nice wedding present. I’m thrilled about this. It’s good to have a focus. For me, anyway!

The only real problem that I’m having at the moment with my art is that I’m fantasizing a little too much about if only I could attend this school or make art full time or go to this retreat or conference. I’m much happier in the present moment, but not having much to do at work right time is a blessing and a curse sometimes.

Oh yeah - there will be much of this kind of talk this summer. Apparently I can’t cook and do housework and garden and do art at the same time. So the cooking and housework obviously have to go.