wonderland5

another one bites the dust...

First it was Home Companion losing it's publisher and now this!  Craft has published it's last issue!  It will still be online but no longer in print in your hand.  Sad news.  I've really been trying to rock it recession style but these casualties bum me out.  Can I just get in bed and stay there until it is all over?? 

since we last talked: final wrap-up

alright already girl.  enough with drawing out the re-cap right?  I hear you.  No one is more sick of looking at pictures from the holidays than me.

however, the archivist in me just can't let the planned pics languish unrecorded.  Goddess forbid that my grandchildren look back some day and not know that their father was also once a whirling dervish of christmas fervor.

so this is it, the past month in one post.  Those with no interest, please move on.  I'll be back with creations and fresh news later this week.

 

Cookies were made...

 

and frosted.

 

Favorite decorations were arranged in new ways.  Sock monkey loves his minions!

 

I put my virgin of guadalupe collection out for the first time this year.  (everything else is put away now--except this shelf.  Somehow I can't stand to scatter all these goddesses again.)

Solstice was a welcome quiet moment, as always.

 

The stockings were hung with care and our hopes of St. Nicholas were indeed realized.

 

No such luck on my hopes of non-conspicuous consumption, however.

 

On New Year's Eve, Jack turned 3.  Terrible twos are over!  Terrible threes just beginning?

 

Four days later, Anna turned 1.  My sweet baby girl. this year has gone by SO FAST.

 

Today, we watched the television for hours.  At noon, we captured this photo for the kids to share with their grandchildren.  I had goosebumps.

whew.  all caught up.  I'm all about the present and the future now.

random coolness, part 1

Sheet music cover, maybe from the 20s?

I got it from the Dover Sampler email: get yours here.

whew!

Yes, I am still here!  I just checked out how long it had been since I last posted and I was shocked to see it has been almost *two weeks*.  Wow, where does the time go?  It's gone so fast and yet these have been two of the longest seeming weeks of my life.  Not that anything extraordinary happened, just the opposite.  It's been two long weeks of feeding the babe every three hours, laundry, loading the dishwasher, answering "what's that?" 20 times, unloading the dishwasher, changing diapers diapers and more diapers, loading the dishwasher again, feeding the baby again, bathing everyone, doing more laundry.  What they don't tell you about parenthood is how relentless and repetitive it is. 

The good news?  Everyone is finally over their colds--the doc said 2 weeks and she wasn't kidding: this was a nasty one, folks.  It's really going around I guess and those who have avoided it seem to have gotten the awful stomach bug instead.  This bit of knowledge has propelled me into such a fit of handwashing and sanitizer using that Maria Montessori must have been thinking of me when she said "all this hygiene has made the world neurotic."

Also good: Anna slept a six hour stretch the other night, which is promising.  Of course it was immediately followed by a night of restlessness and fussing but hey, at least we know she *can* do it.  Her reflux has really improved and her personality has started to emerge: she looks to be the calmest one in the family.  She is very mellow and happy, which is great. 

So, all is well.  I have been doing a bit of sewing and have lots of home improvement pics to show but those will have to wait a day or two.  For now, let me leave you with this image of "tiny elmo" and his giant t-bone:

Oh yeah, I know it's weird and totally un-PC (monsters eat steak?  They can't live on cookies alone, you know) but it is a lot better than the pic I had of dirty dishes and empty press pots of coffee all piled in the sink.

August seems the longest month...

I listened to the podcast of this Slate article this afternoon whilst tucked away in my air-conditioned sewing room.  It details all the downsides of this, the seemingly longest month -- August.  Summer is not my favorite season ( I am an Autumn girl, through and through) but I do enjoy warm weather and carefree living, to a point.  By this time of the year though, I am sick of it all.  I am tired of the havoc that air conditioning wreaks on my sinuses, tired of the heat.  I long for the cooling airs of September, the energy that starts to flow through me as fall begins.

I do have to beg to differ with one of the author's points though (paraphrasing: even those born in August are boring and mediocre.) Many of our family birthdays are in August, including my own, which was this week.  Thirty-five.  yikes.  I can still remember when eighteen seemed *really old*. 

These are not my birthday cupcakes.  These were in celebration of our nephew's eleventh b-day, a few days before mine.  I am not having a cake this year as this bizarro second pregnancy has completely deprived me of my usual heart-felt enjoyment of sweets and chocolate.  Odd, I know.  Hopefully, it will go away after the baby is born.  Luckily Jack felt up to picking up my slack and was given an entire cupcake while my back was turned.  sly babe.

Coming up in birthdays this month are the anniversaries of the births of my husband and my father.  On the same day no less.  Yes, I have realized that I will someday have to explore this topic in psychotherapy.  They usually share a cake, which means that Jack has only one more opportunity to slather himself in icing this summer.  Then it will be blessed fall.

In other, more exciting news, M gave me a new camera for my birthday--yay!!  It is a Panasonic with lots of features but much smaller and more portable than our current camera.  I have been learning to use it and am pleased with the results so far.  Hopefully this blog will benefit from the practice!

I have been thinking

…about this blog. 

I started blogging over at Live Journal almost four years ago.  At the time, I was intending to try and promote myself as an artist and crafter.  I wanted to meet like-minded people on the web and create connections for myself and my fledgling little business.  I was still doing extensive personal journaling on my own—just like I had been doing since I was 13.

That blog limped along for a couple of years, going silent at times.  I discovered that just like personal journaling, blogging is hard and requires discipline.  Once you get off that horse it is hard to get back on: the best thing is to just hang on to those reins if you can, no matter that the horse is neck deep in a swiftly flowing river with the opposite bank only a sliver of green on the horizon.  “Hang in there baby…” as the kitten/tree branch poster proclaims.  Hang in there, indeed.

That the payoff of blogging was different from that of personal journaling was another discovery during that time.  My personal journals just accumulate in a stack, no one reads them, no one looks at the artwork I have produced in them.  I have gone back and looked through them at times, of course, with mixed feelings and results.  Sometimes I come away with chagrin and a “what the f**k was I thinking” mindset.  Other times, I have reacted with sympathy to my former self or surprise at the quality of the work or the ideas that I was producing.  Regardless of my response, however, the whole experience, creation to reaction, was taking place within myself exclusively.  With blogging, anyone could come along and say anything or say nothing.  People could comment on my work, my writing, my life choices.  Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t.  More often, they didn’t. 

My blogs, this one and that one, have never been the popular, trend-setting blogs that some others maintain.  Some of the reasons for this are known to me—not posting enough for one thing and taking terrible photos and posting them for another—and some reasons are just X factors, guessed at but never to be revealed. Even though I guess I could say that I am to blame for the silence here, I have, at times, felt absurdly hurt by it.  Shades of junior high school rejections, no doubt, but when I post something here I am looking for something from someone else.  Some reaction, praise, support, something. There have always been a few people reading and commenting, and to those people I am sincerely grateful.   But I have felt this nagging need to look further into this thin-skinnedness lately.  And what I have discovered has dismayed me a bit.

My personal journals have transformed more into a sketchbook format the past few years as my leisure time has diminished.  I still reach for that familiar black book when something intensely personal is bothering me, but I don’t record the day to day things, the small joys and funny moments there the way I used to.  It seems that now the time that I would have spent doing that is spent, instead, preparing pics for the blog or writing posts.  This has become the place where I record the little things, the things I have made and done, the places I have gone.  And yet, this is the place in my life where I feel the least like myself.  I am always thinking of how to package myself to appeal to others.  And if there is one thing I have learned in my 35 years it is that trying to form yourself to what you imagine someone else’s idea of you might be—in my experience, that never ends well.  Not to mention that the process hurts like hell.

So, now we have come to the meat of it, the why behind this wordy post:  I have decided, rather than giving up the blog, to try and turn off the comments for awhile.   I don’t know if that will help me feel freer to speak my mind and be myself here, but I hope it will.  This time in my life is going by so fast and though we have approximately 10,000 pictures of the last nineteen months, I am in about ten of them.   I want to catch it all if I can—those moments that are likely to be forgotten, I want to have them later to treasure and reflect on and yes, even to wonder “wtf?” about.  I need this place for that activity.  And if I am always wondering whether someone will come along and question me, praise me, flame me or whatever, I will be too frozen to catch those moments.

This is my 100^th post on this blog and I have resolved to try this new format until at least post 125. That should give me plenty of time to see whether I can get comfortable here.  I hope I can. 

BTW, anyone truly needing to contact me can do so at the email listed in the sidebar.  I am not cutting myself off completely here people, just retreating a bit.

That bugs!

I spent almost an hour this morning writing a post about Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows--and when I tried to post it it disappeared!!!   GRRRRR.  Not my day.  Try again tomorrow.

so glad to be home

We are back from the beach...whew!  A week of family togetherness can be exhausting.  My siblings and nieces and parents were all there in full force.  It was great to be all together but we were surely glad to get home to our little house and some relative peace and quiet.

Jack really dug the beach this year, playing in the tidal pools and sitting on Daddy's boogie board.  We managed to keep his Casper the friendly ghost like skin properly slathered in sunscreen so no sunburn, which is great.  He has never had one and I am making it my personal mission to try and make sure that he never does--I have such awful memories of being sunburnt as a kid, ugh.

I feel like summer is properly launched now that we are back.  I have lots of projects in different stages but my yard is crying out for attention.  I wish I liked yardwork more--it is just always so hot and buggy and I keep imagining moles leaping from holes to attack me.  Jack is a wild card in the yard so I can't work on it when he is awake and there is always something more interesting to do at naptime.  Ah well, I don't think the budget will stretch to include a gardener this decade so I had best get to work.

I'll be following my summer blogging schedule for the next few months: one or two posts a week.  Next up--pics of the amazing fabric that I got in Charleston. 

insert clever title here...

Life has just been rolling along here in wonderland.  Jack has been covering a lot of territory lately, wearing down his stride-rites at an ever-quickening rate.  His transformation into a quick limbed mini man has alarmed the cats to no end.

Here's BunBun now!  You can tell he is debating whether he wants to come into the house *that* badly--not sure he trusts that new doorman at all.  no siree.

I have been working really hard on some projects for a few new books and for the first time, I have had to take pictures of my process for the illustrator to work from.

I have to say it is tough to get good shots of this stuff.  It gives me even more appreciation for all the great tutorials out there.  It takes a lot of thought and work and effort to put that stuff together.

In other news, I have finally gotten through the denial and anger stages of my grief over the cancelling of The Gilmore Girls.  I have moved into the acceptance phase, abetted by the purchase of all six DVD seasons (on super sale at Best Buy--hurry and get your own!!)  We have decided to start with season one and just move through all 153 episodes at our own pace.  The news from TV guide this week is that there may be a made-for-TV movie in the works for GGs but I'm not holding my breath.

That's about it from here, hope all is well there.