visitor

The owls like me. I once had a screech owl in my house, and we’ve had a great horned owl in our woods for the last couple of years. This afternoon, this guy decided to come and pay us a visit, perching in the woods just on the other side of the patio, maybe 30 feet away from where we were sitting. He’s a barred owl. I’ve been hearing him for a few weeks now, but this is the first time I’ve seen him. He sat there for about 10 minutes, upsetting a robin who must have a nest nearby. He flew off soon after the robin dove-bombed his head.

Obsession

I’ve spent the last couple of months experimenting with torch-fired enamels, and my enamel work is finally ready for prime time. I love the simplicity of the iridescent stamped copper cups along the bottom, but I’m beyond thrilled with the way the stacked pieces along the top came out.

These pieces will have their public debut tomorrow night at the Velvet Box open studio and trunk show (details in the sidebar).

Rocky River Fall Arts Festival

Today is a bit of a rush getting everything ready for the Rocky River Fall Arts Festival tomorrow. It was a great show for me last year, so I’m looking forward to doing it again.

I have a number of new etched copper pieces and stamped sterling silver pieces to bring with me, and I’m hoping to get a chance to finish up a few other pieces this afternoon.

This show will be the last hurrah for a number of older styles of chunky bracelets, too. They’ll be $10 off tomorrow, and anything left over will be taken apart and reworked into new pieces in the future.

If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll stop by and say hello. My tent will be close to Stino da Napoli again (and I’m hoping this time I’ll be bright enough to remember to order some takeout as I’m breaking down).

This Song Has No Title

There is a song titled such on Elton John’s Goodbye Yellow Brick Road. I love that song, as I do most little ditties that clock in just over 2:00 on my favorite artists’ albums (hello, “Nightingale Song”), songs that say something interesting but aren’t full-fledged anthems and yet were fun enough to include on the album.

Titles stump me, more so than writing itself. The big blank space before all that other blank space. The hardest thing in J-school for me was coming up with something to write about. If someone gave me an assignment, no problem, but sniffing out the story just wasn’t my thing. So I’ve been working on trying to ignore that space at the beginning, to leave it there to breathe a little and just start in on the guts, to let it flow and see what happens.

I haven’t been doing that here much — waah-waah, bad posting habits, self-flagellationcakes, zzzzzzz — it seems like everything has been flowing better on paper lately, in those few spare moments there have been to focus on mental output rather than input. And it’s been all about developing projects and classes and brainstorming for the next book, nothing yet share-worthy.

It’s been a busy summer. Despite my vow to schedule myself lightly this summer and not let another pass by without fully embracing it, I found myself in June with a mountain of projects on my desk and a major event to coordinate and a case full of nothing new for my summer shows. I haven’t really taken much of a break since spring, and even back then it wasn’t enough. So, hello, August, with your leisurely pace and minimal must-dos and very few standing obligations.

Last weekend was the Avon Lake Summer Market, always my best show of the year, but especially so this year. It was the first time they did a two-day show, Friday night and Saturday, and it was lovely. It seemed a little busier on Friday than on Saturday, but it was steady throughout, and I was able to move out much of the older stock I’ve been carrying around and am sick of looking at. The rest is getting disassembled and some of it reworked into new pieces.

And speaking of reworking, it’s time to get up to the studio, to clean up and put away the detritus from last weekend, to knock out a few special orders, and to start work on some new things that have been lolling about in the back of my head.

whither summer?

Target has shrunk their summer things down to one pathetic little aisle and have had the back-to-school stuff out for a couple of weeks now. The lady at Lowe’s told me the citronella oil lanterns just inside the entrance were all they had left and that they’d be going on clearance soon.

It’s July.

This constant pushing ahead, pretending it’s two months later than it really is, drives me up a wall. What do you do when a hose springs a leak and you need to replace it in August? When your bathing suit tears? When a tree branch levels your patio table? You’re SOL, because you’re not going to find replacements in the stores.

Why do we have this urge to live in the future instead of enjoying the present? To push and push and push, until Christmas ornaments are out before Halloween, swimsuits hit the stores in February, and annuals appear at the home stores weeks before they can survive in this climate.

Don’t get me wrong. Project management is one of my things, and I understand needing to plan ahead and all that, but it’s getting ridiculous.

I want to live in the here and now, to not mourn summer before its time, to enjoy every last sunshiny breeze and juicy downpour.

Tetris

I’m a puzzle girl. I like putting my brain through its paces, figuring out how something goes together, knowing that there is a solution and if I’m patient enough, it will eventually reveal itself.

Even though I have a Kindle subscription to the Plain Dealer, I still subscribe to the hardcopy Sunday paper so I can get at the two giant crosswords and the sudoku. (Yes, I know you can get those online, too, but it’s just not nearly as satisfying to me to work those online as it is to sit with pen in hand and cat in lap.)

The week past and the one coming, however, are ruled by real-life Tetris. Tetris of the calendar + to-do list kind. On my plate right now are:

I know I can make this happen and still maintain my sanity. But well-wishes are still gratefully accepted.

the only constant is change

I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about change lately, trying to make peace with the idea that it’s the state of change that is normal, that nothing stays the same, and that it’s good that it is so. See, I tend to travel within the ruts I wore into my path long ago. While I almost always have a lovely time and some fun surprises when I’m jolted out of those ruts, I (usually) feel comfortable there, and I don’t always take the time to reexamine them, to see if they are still working for me and if I still want to go where they are taking me. I think most people work that way.

So, I’m trying to pay more attention to my habits and to shift those that need shifting to reflect the way my life is now, not the way it was 10 or 20 or 30 years ago. And I’m working hard at acknowledging where I came from while letting those former mes have a nice little tea party in the past, where they belong.

storms!

Crazy, loud, crash-after-crash-of-lightning storms in the middle of the night last night. I woke up just long enough to notice and to remember that I had indeed unplugged my computer before I went to bed, then just rolled over and went back to mostly asleep with the occasional “oh yeah, there’s another lightning strike close by” tick in my brain. Yesterday I woke up in the middle of the night and couldn’t get back to sleep, and despite going back to bed in the middle of the morning and getting another couple of hours, I was soooooo tired last night. The acres of Mexican food on my plate at dinner with a friend probably didn’t help in that department. But I was able to get some fabulous, wonderful sleep last night with the windows cracked open, storms or no storms, and this morning feels like luxury for it.

The one good thing about being up so early yesterday morning is that I was able to finish up a project and get it ready to ship out even before my normal wake-up time, so I was able to spend the rest of the day cleaning up a few nagging loose ends and getting ahead on one of my other projects (the one that will continue to eat this afternoon, despite my being a little ahead of schedule on it now).

I’ve got two weeks of constant motion and progress and plans in front of me, but I don’t mind. I’ve been working a lot this past year on the concept of flow, and working with my projects and obligations and such to swim through them gracefully, rather than treating them as objects that have to be hurdled or bullied or broken down into submission, and it’s made a huge difference in my work and how I feel about it.

Ah, Friday!

Friday for me is usually a light day, a kind of limbo-y go-with-the-flow and deal-with-miscellaneous-stuff day. I work hard so that I don’t normally have a ton of editing work to do on Friday, and if there is any, I try to make it the kind that doesn’t require a lot of super concentration (formatting references, applying style codes, prepping manuscripts). Friday is my day for marathon errand running (Costco, Heinen’s, Trader Joes, libraries, Target, recycling, Lowe’s — whatever needs to be done). But I try to leave it a little loose, too, so that if the whim hits I can check out a new shop or walk on the beach or take myself out to lunch or whatever strikes my fancy as a special little treat. Especially when the weather is nice, as it is today, it’s good to be out and about in the big world where you run into other people instead of playing hermit in my office.

the beauty of spring

Spring, finally. Real spring, not simply calendar spring (the advent of which is usually followed by at least one snowfall). Spring for me is the day the daffodils pop open, this year coinciding with the day the “Nana plants” start to bloom. (“Nana plants” because Nana had a lot of them, and some of those offshoots have made it through a number of years and a number of gardens to my own garden, and I can’t ever remember the real name of this pretty, spready plant with the cool leaves and pretty white flowers.)

Nana would have been 104 this week. Papa would have been 103 last week. We buried Aunt Vera, Papa’s sister, earlier this week, at age 93, the last of her generation that I’ve had the pleasure of knowing. My family tends to live good, long lives, full of adventures and opinions and guts and general good health. I hope I’m as lucky.

Love of the garden runs in the family, too. When I was a kid, a visit to a family member’s house also meant a walk around the garden to see what was blooming and what was thriving and what was next up — and it is still so. We pass around cuttings and divisions and help fill in each other’s gardens with the bounty and overgrowth from our own. Our garages harbor rafts of extra pots and trays to throw in the trunk of the car to capture a cousin’s unruly hosta or an aunt’s choking iris.

I was thrilled with the progress I had made on my little gardens at my little house; here in the bigger house there are more gardens to fill, in worse condition to start with. There’s so much to do that it can be overwhelming, so this year I’m focusing on only three smallish areas: digging out the rest of the invasive vine from the little hill next to the driveway (started last year); the garden around the back patio; and the little garden right outside my office window, which is the one I see for most of the day most every day. That latter is actually part of my plan for my office. Since I spend so much time looking out those windows during my workday, I think that garden should be particularly nice.

And because today is such a lovely day for work in the garden, I think it’s time to get to it.