Merry Christmas to all

and to all a good chewey.

I'll be back.

No pics

just a quick note. Gill and Mark are here and she is doing a fantastic job of looking at the city with new eyes. However, I HAVE designated December 1st as "get a grip" day and will be returning then or the next day, once I have collapsed in a heap for a little while. These two could walk your feet off!!!

seen at the dog park

I couldn't resist.. don't they look like they belong together?

Some of us got a present...

This box arrived the other day, it didn't get here looking like this, it looked like a perfectly good box with nice neat sides and corners.

The Princess Clementine loved the new shape, it was a comfy seat. However she found it already shaped to fit someone else when she sat down on it.

Are you accusing ME????????

Can I help it if my butt just happens to fit perfectly in the small indentation I have "discovered" in this lovely box?

Pears and my kitchen window

I have a continuing fascination with pears. I want to draw them, I make prints of them, I shoot photos of them whenever I find them. I do not, however, like eating them very much. Maybe I am just buying the wrong kinds or buying them for the wrong reason. I think I am buying them for their looks.

There is probably a message for living there somewhere.

letters and pictures

I found my father's letters from his sisters and brother and nephew in Germany. All are in German, and most are in a spidery old style handwriting that is unreadable by us moderns. I have no German, so the chance that I can decipher anything at all is too slim to mention.

I did have a friend who speaks German well look at some of them, and he struggled but got little out of them. I have resorted to creating a catalog and sorting by year and combining with pictures from the same year, but I guess that the content may well remain a mystery. It is sad in a way, especially since they were written to the US from Germany in the late 20's through the 60's and might have some interesting stories to tell.

That said, they may also be dull as dishwater, but they make for interesting photos..

the studio

The evening sunsets are also lighting up the Studio, which I still in my mind call "the NEW studio" though I did the big move in March-ish of this year. I still enjoy just walking in and looking at it. I still am not working in it as much as I hoped, but I am thinking that winter will help keep me inside. Right now the weather is too good for me to just look at it from the window.

Sol LeWitt rides the MTA

The MTA gave the riders of the A, B, C, D, 1, 2 and 3 trains a pressie this week in the form of the first part of a new mural which was designed by Sol LeWitt before he died. It is stunning in how B.R.I.G.H.T it is in the overall dingy subway station at 59th St. This station has been under construction/renovation forever, and all of a sudden the wraps came off the only piece of art in the station so far and it was pretty shocking.

I love it, but it just makes the rest of the place look worse.

How can dirty greige tile and even dirtier construction coverups compete with this!??

I understand there are two floor pieces, both compasses to come but they will be separate installations from this, and are also going to be in shades of grey.

42nd Street has a bright tile pattern and a shiny or at least clean floor. I guess we can only hope that the rest of the station is going to rise to match this shiny happy interloper.

Autumn sunsets are the best

The summer rain made for many grey and dull evenings, but now that Labor Day has passed and the unofficial end of Summer in the US is here, suddenly we have sunsets! Maybe I am back ... I was taking an unannounced break so now I am having an unannounced return...

I don't have a picture for this... or maybe I do ...

I am having a minor crisis and it seems to me that a lot of people are pondering a similar thing

HOARDING!

I mentioned the TV show about Hoarders that I was watching while salvaging little pieces of unused yarn. I heard one of the hoarders say... not an exact quote but close ... That yogurt may have expired in 1997 but what is going to happen to it? It will just get more sour as it ages.

Now, I have uttered words to that effect about yogurt. Not, mind you, yogurt that has been sitting around for 12 years, but yogurt that HAD been around for a bit like maybe a month. It didn't have mold on it or in it, I ate it and survived..... but I have the hoarder gene, I am absolutely sure of it.

Then there was this wonderful piece about scarcity ... or not.

there was this from the Voodoo Cafe about the Myth of Scarcity

and now Romilly is pondering similar issues...

What's up with that, Doc? are we all pulling similar issues from our past at the same time? I have more yarn than I could knit up if I knit non-stop from now til Hell freezes over. I have buttons and buckles and odd bits of flattened metal that were run over by several trucks in the street. The important thing is that I can find all of them. My justification is that if I WERE a Hoarder I would know I had them but I wouldn't be able to find them.

In an attempt to reduce the boxes that contained unknown items, I pulled down a box that said "STUFF from mom and dad, to go through" on the label (see, labeled, NOT hoarder).

I had only a few days to go through the apartment where my parents had lived ... and saved everything plastic that they touched ... for over 40 years, so only a limited amount came home with me. It was touch and go in any case, in among the Christmas Cards received in the 1950's I found my father's naturalization papers from the 1930's when he became a citizen. The ORIGINALS, not copies, so I had to sift and hope I was getting everything important. Chiefly I saved that big box and some photo albums.

What I did get, I found the other night, was 30 years of handwritten letters in German, in spidery handwriting on aeropostal paper from the family I know next to nothing about who used to live in Berlin. The letters date from 1920 and continue up to the 50's. I have them separated by decade and am hooking them up with pictures from the same decade so I can get an idea of who is who. I will eventually find someone to try reading them, just to see if they are interesting, but for now they are all terra incognita.

My father was a hoarder, my mother was a destroyer, so how these survived is a mystery. A journal of my mother's survived also and after looking through it I did a mad thing. I gathered up all my old morning pages journals and got rid of them. I had them for years and years and what I found on skimming through them was that I was pondering the same verse, not quite like the first over and over. I decided that maybe just chucking them and starting anew would move the verse a bit further along.

So this is a pondering of saving and spending, and there is a lot of similar pondering going around it seems, not just here above the G.W.B. I think my son was a little appalled that I had trashed the journals, but I feel a little lighter for having done it. Of course he might have been happier if I had gotten rid of that box of smashed metal pieces from the streets of New York.

Somehow there is a lot of mystery revolving around old letters in German in Gothic script and not much mystery about me pondering my weight or how hard I am working and at what. Maybe I should just leave the letters untranslated and pretend I know what is in them.

What are you saving? What are you spending?

Senator Edward Kennedy

"The cause endures,

the hope still lives,

and the dream shall never die."

Do you see the guilt in her eyes?

I love Sienna, you all know that, but can you see the guilt in her eyes here? I ask you, would you believe anything she said wth that look on her face? I have seen less guilt on a 3 year old standing in a puddle of spilled cake batter. I KNOW what I am talking about.

Sienna has been sleeping on my bed lately. That is fine, but she likes to get up about an hour ahead of me, and I keep reminding her where she is supposed to be, but she seems to spend some time wandering around the house doing inventory.

People, she is FIVE years old this December. She is not some innocent puppy. Today, when I walked into the living room, I discovered the look you see above and the item you see below.

This was once the remote control for my Air Conditioner. Needless to say, it doesn't work any more and since the internet has failed to reveal a replacement, I guess I am going to be getting up to change the temp. Meanwhile, I am considering making her do it with her nose.

Some organizational thoughts

There is a new show on TV called Hoarders, and the first show documented a young couple whose house had gotten the better of them since she shopped obsessively and he "stored" everything that came into the house, and another segment looked at a woman who had food dating back to 1996.

I am a bit of a hoarder myself, I excuse it by saying that all mixed media artist types are hoarders. When I stop to pick up a bit of metal that has been run over and flattened by a truck to an interesting shape, I use that reasoning to carry it home and put it in the box with an assortment of similar items.

I rationalize that the difference is in degree. All my things are in boxes that are labeled and I can move unimpeded from room to room. I am the queen of creative storage, so my aquisitions don't prevent me from walking about in the dark and I don't have to worry that I might step on a year old banana or a rotted pumpkin.

HOWEVER....... while I was watching this show I was knotting together little bits of leftover sock yarn so I could use food coloring to overdye it into a similar tone so I could use it to knit something I had an idea about. Sounds rational until you reember that I also have storage tubs labeled A through H that contain unused yarn that is already dyed by someone else in pleasant shades and doesn't have a knot every 40 inches or so...

I don't think I am about to slip over the edge ................ yet.

I've got friends in high places

Suches, Georgia and Atlanta, Georgia to be specific. Up here in the great northern metroplex we are suffering a blight. A kindred of the potato blight that resulted in the potato famine in Ireland only it is attacking tomato plants. Although we are not likely to die from the lack of good tomato sandwiches, we are really missing those tomatoes.

Enter my friends in high places and warm places. When I complained about how much I was missing tomatoes, J. and A. packed up 10 HUGE Cherokee Rose tomatoes from the Suches garden. Packed them in those bubble packs from Amazon and newspapers mind you, and mailed them to me.

and they got here in 4 DAYS in PERFECT SHAPE!!

What do you think the odds of that happening are?

SO, for those of you in tomato deprived areas of the Northeast US, here they are. Feast your eyes on real live huge gorgeous tomatoes.

and yes, that is the bottom of a cat paw in the upper left of that last picture. You don't think that Clem was going to let these pass by uninspected, did you?

There are things blocking everywhere

This is Ishbel from Ysolda, and I did play with the pattern. Made it with sock yarn because I loved the color and once I got to the last lace pattern I just kept going til I had barely enough yarn left to bind off. It is a large scarf or a VERY small shawl. I will know better once I get it off the wires, but it sure did come out pretty...LOVE that color.

And then there is this which is another one of my subway scarves, I played with blocks, different sizes of squares with some spacing rows of yarn overs. This one is another one of the leftovers from the Mason Dixon dishcloth on steroids. A pale cream color. This is the aromatic cotton from Colourmart.com.

Color is not right in either picture, but ..it is going to rain yet AGAIN!! When did they move New York to England or Thailand or Seattle, and why didn't they tell me before it happened?

Someone got another haircut

Don't her eyes look HUGE?? Who says a haircut can't change your outlook on life?

Ok, I am bragging...

I got the mirror hung on the medicine chest .. with help from Blogless Nicki ... and I think it looks great, so here are some shots of what my bathroom looks like now. The light is not the best, because it is, as usual, going to rain any minute, but you can get the gist of it all

The stained glass in the window is "real". I found it, and another one, in Atlanta years ago and have been carrying them around since then. I have never had them in a window before this apartment. The other one is in the kitchen, but that is for another day. Today we are celebrating the bathroom.

better photo of the whole top of the mirror

I never took a picture

of my bathroom mirror, I have been hunting through all my Picassa files trying to find one and I guess there is just not one to find. In any case, this is the story of my bathroom mirror. First, it is not the original that came with the medicine chest. The previous owners added a bigger mirror with a not-my-choice-ever silver wooden frame. In addition to that, the mirror had a lot of places along the bottom that had de-silvered (or whatever the technical term for black ugly spots is).

Since I am short, those black spots were right in my eye level view, although the top of the mirror is just fine. So one day I drummed up some paint, took the mirror down and painted the frame the same green that I had painted the frames of the three pictures that hang in the bathroom. BIG improvement. Then, while I had it off the wall, I turned it upside down in the frame so the black spots were up at the top. Blogless Nicki came by and we managed to re-hang the mirror and it was a lot better, but those damned spots still bothered me and the hinges that were on it were loose and I couldn't get them any tighter.

NOW!!! I got some Pebo Vitrine glass paint, drew some circles, drew some lines, slung some pait and my mirror, which I can't hang back up by myself and is sitting here waiting for 4 hands, has a new "stained glass ish" top and the black spots are INVISIBLE!!

I was so proud of it that I had to show you even though the fan is visible in the picture and it needs to be rehung in the bathroom, which I will do when I find an unsuspecting stranger with some time on their hands who wants to spend that time in my bathroom .... hmmmmmmmmmmmmmm

Above is the full top of the mirror. The design is about 3 inches by about 15.5 inches. Those brown things are the bedroom ceiling fan blades reflected in the mirror.

closeup of part one.

part 2

part 3... there is more, but it is not quite in focus. More later when I find the extra set of hands.