Yesterday was so peaceful. I painted lovely mindless color-washed pages for blank journals – a page for just about any mood, including a few stormy ones. But now I’m ready to make some book covers and it just ain’t happening. I started doing it anyway yesterday and hopefully something good will pop out. Sometimes you just gotta do da work. Now is the time to go to my photo collection for inspiration – maybe the texture photos? Hmmmm.
Susanne and I are riding out to Goat Lady Dairy this afternoon to pick up iris leaves for papermaking. I should have some cotton and abaca pulp thawed out by this afternoon so if the storms let up I might get some papermaking in. I have a lot of colored papers from the office that I save for recycled sheets. I find that the recycled pulp is much stronger when added to cotton or abaca. I like to use shredded transcripts and blue book covers in these papers – I call it “graduate student sweat paper.”
If this sounds like my hands are much better, I’m afraid that is not the case. However, my doctor assures me that I will be better and he can give me a couple of injections in my thumb if I continue to have problems. My physical therapist shakes her head at me and tells me to only stitch for fifteen minutes at a time – which I usually do anyway – but sometimes time falls away when I’m doing these things, which I guess is why I do them in the first place. I am left wondering just why the hell I had this surgery to begin with, but I am trying to have faith that time is the answer, and I don’t do as much as I would ordinarily in the spring, so I’m being as good as I can be. I’m trying not to complain but it has been depressing. I was trying to get off my anti-depressants but I started them back up on a regular basis and I do feel better now. I gave up beer for Lent, which was major, and I’ve fallen off the wagon twice. So considering how crazy-making work has been, I think that I’m doing rather well, actually. Art and good books and thinking about Ireland have all been part of that mood enhancement.
I haven’t done much gardening other than clean-up from last year and pruning back the fig tree rather viciously. I planted a lettuce mix and Danvers carrots from High Mowing Seeds in the beds that don’t get as much sun. The violets are taking over again and they are so pretty this time of year I can’t say that I really mind it.
Theo had to go back to the vet – he really has the worst allergies that I have ever seen in a cat. How did they ever survive in the wild? He wouldn’t last six months as a feral cat. So the vet thinks that if I get him a steroid shot every six months, keep him on daily antihistamines, and vigilant flea medication, that should work for him.
Meanwhile, Guido goes to the vet every six weeks for the same shot, except this one controls his cancer. He freaks out worse that any animal I’ve ever taken to the vet. I dreaded taking him yesterday because Sandy said that when he took him in early February he nearly had a heart attack and he’d never seen him so stressed out. So I gave him a pain pill before we went, popped him into the cat carrier, and he pooped all over it and himself before I even got him to the car. Ugh. It was a major mess. The good news is that he finally gained weight, .6 lb since the last time, and he behaved reasonably well enough for them to get him mostly cleaned up. There was concern about inflamed teeth (he doesn’t have hardly any left) the last time and Dr. Hunt did not see that problem this time. The steroid shot made him super hyper and he ran around and cried most of the night. This morning he seems better.
Lucy’s asthma and coughing is finally much better. I put a vaporizer in our bedroom near where she sleeps and I think it helped all of us.
Hopefully I will have some photos to show of the Magic Hands flag soon. I am not rushing it at all. I’ve also been working on a denim blanket constructed mostly of woven cloth strip squares on the sewing machine. I am way behind on Jude’s online class because I find it frustrating to have all that inspiration and the competing admonition of my brain saying, “Slow down. Slow down.”
I’ll leave you with a couple of photos of one of my favorite hangouts – M’Coul’s Pub in downtown Greensboro, NC.
slowly she turned 