New Email Signature

Normally I just use my contact information for my email signatures. I have always thought that adding some pithy signature was either pretentious or preachy or polly-anna-ish.

Last month I actually added one - "Please consider the environmental affect of unnecessary printing." that seemed to be enough to say, to remind people that they do not have to print everything. Yesterday I changed my email signature to:

Inspire rebellion to promote defiance to achieve social justice.

The inspiration for this was a lunchtime webinar that Abelisto and I attended at the university where we work. The webinar was produced by Magna Online Seminars and The Teaching Professor. It was an interview with Michael Newman, author of Teaching Defiance: Stories and Strategies for Activist Educators. On page 10 Newman challenges us with a mission - "Our job is... to teach people how to make up their own minds, and how to take control of their moment. It is to teach choice. It is to help ourselves and others break free from our pasts, plan for the futures we want and resist the futures we do not want. Our job is to teach defiance."

There was an explanation of what teaching defiance is made up of, how one teaches it. There was also a good discussion of critical thinking and the fact that the idea of critical thinking has been domesticated.

I wholeheartedly agree with Mr. Newman, we must make teaching defiance central to our work. The knowledge and skills we transfer to our students must be used in the name of defiance to create a more just and socially aware world. That is the path to salvation of the world and everyone in it.

Inspire rebellion to promote defiance to achieve social justice.
Amen brothers & sisters.

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American Craft Council Show

Abelisto & I went up to the Saint Paul on Friday to attend the American Craft Council show at the River Center. Another professor was teaching Abelisto's second class of the day so he was finished at 8:353a.m. I have vacation time that needs to be used up before May 31.

So I took the day off. We saw a lot of really interesting work - most of it way out of our price range. There was an ottoman made by Robert Harman that I loved. We spoke with Robert (I think it was Robert). His studio is in my hometown (Bloomington Indiana) and we promised to come by next time we go to visit family. His work is wonderful.

I made contact with a couple artists who are interested in having me do their websites. That might be a good thing, when everything is said and done.

Artwork

I have not written about my art practice in a long time. I do not want anyone to think I have stopped doing art. There have been times in my life when I have stopped doing art - times when I have not been in the frame of mind that is receptive to inspiration, times when life has been so overwhelming that doing more than just surviving has been impossible.

That is not what is going on right now. I have several projects in the works, but I have not felt like any of them are at a point where I can or should write about them. For the most part I am collecting objects and ideas and experiencing what Devora calls the fallow time - the time when the ideas are incubating somewhere inside my head, waiting for the spark to happen.

Some of the things I have collected:

old buttons
old photographs of weddings from the early 1900s
beads
bones
driftwood fragments
fossils
rocks
broken glass and mirror shards
interesting fabrics
copper wire (really thick copper wire)
a child's compass
a broken watch face (analog)
an old whistle
costume jewelry (some broken)
semi-precious rocks
plain river rocks
stamped metal letters
scrabble letters
fishing tackle
miscellaneous hardware

I am not sure what will come of all of this yet. I have hopes of doing something with a mixed-media quilted project. I also want to make body armor from fabric and found objects. I have been making sketches - unusual for me since I usually work freestyle rather than from diagrams or plans.

Daughter #3 wants to do a fashion show in the fall with me and one or two others. I have half-a-dozen or so garments in mind for it. I might make the body armor part of the show also.

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Anarchist

Abelisto & I have been talking about anarchy and anarchists. I believe I am an anarchist, but I have not figured out which type of anarchist I am.

I am not an advocate of chaos. That is not what anarchy really is.

I believe in local decision-making and locally based power. I believe that setting up permanent hierarchies, creating the opportunity for career politicians, leads to abuses of power and a strengthening of the systems that keep those in power in power.

I think that local decisions, local empowerment, local sustainability, is key to the health and well-being of our planet and ourselves. I think that only when issues and situations are too large for local efforts should the decisions be made at a regional or national level. And even then it should be a coalition of the local groups affected.

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Doing another redesign

I must be a bit crazy.
I am right in the middle of a nearly overwhelming web redesign at work - a huge project with the herculean task of condensing and redesigning a website that now has over 3000 pages.

I just redesigned the Sustain Winona website, and I am still playing with that a bit.

I am on the technology committee (chair no less!?!) for the Winona County DFL and have undertaken the redesign of that website.

I have promised to look at the Dakota Homecoming site and see about redesigning it.

And I have decided that I need to redo Abelisto & my website.

Last night I worked on Abelisto's part of our website.

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Wondering

I am wondering if we are entering a new Dark Ages... The Roman Empire really had no idea that it was about to fall. The fall took place over a long enough time period that there was no warning. There was just one long slow decline, accented by various events that we label as markers retrospectively.

I have to think about this.

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Wheat Sensitivity

I have discovered that I have a wheat sensitivity. I never knew how much wheat we eat until this past month.

I went to the doctor in February for a checkup and to ask about a few things. Mainly I wanted to know if I have arthritis in my hip (Lymes disease a few years back), and if there was anything I could do for my digestive disturbances.

The doctor gave me some meds - which I took for a few weeks and then kept forgetting to take. I am terrible with medications. I never remember to take them. I think that had I noticed a marked difference that I would have remembered them better. But during those weeks I did not notice any improvement at all. In fact, the symptoms seemed worse if anything.

I did some research and the most often item that popped up in my reading was wheat allergies and wheat intolerances. Many of the sympoms for wheat intolerance were really close to what I had. so I thought I would try not eating wheat for a while and see if it helped.
Read more (includes a recipe)...

Today marks the third week with no wheat. I have to say I feel much better. When I forgot and ate wheat one day I could tell the difference the next day.

It is hard to find pre-made food though - of any kind. And eating out consists mostly of salads and veggies. All good, but I sure miss chocolate cake and designer sandwiches and giant burritos at Chipotles. Maybe I will end up losing some weight without those things in my meals.

I love breads, and that is the hardest. I bought some of the wheat-gluten free breads, but they tend to taste weird and most of them have a disturbing texture. So I have started making my own baked goods.

The best is a cookie/scone-like concoction that I made up a recipe for:

1 cup butter (sorry, not organic - yet)
1 1/2 cups of homemade vanilla sugar (two vanilla beans in a 1/2 gallon jar filled with organic raw sugar and let sit for a couple weeks - more sugar added to replace what I take out)
2 large eggs (local and organic)
1/2 tsp of aluminum-free baking soda (Bob's Red Mill, I think)
1 1/2 organic oat flour, oat bran flour, brown rice flour or a combination of any of them
2 cups organic rolled oats (not quick ones)
1 cup organic coconut
1 cup organic chopped dates (or more if you like really chewy baked goods)
1 cup organic pecans, almonds or walnuts - chopped
1 1/2 cups organic chocolate chips

Do the usual when making cookies - cream the butter, add sugar, mix well, add the eggs. Sift the dry stuff (including all the goodies) and then mix them into the butter-sugar-egg mixture. This doug will be pretty stiff, so butter up your hands and make balls - I make mine about the size of a tangerine - and flatten them slightly on a baking stone or cookie sheet.

They take a long time to back (at 350 or 375), so do not rush them. But you need to also be sure not to over bake them.

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Making Sustainability Sustainable III: Personal Decisions, part 3

Making Sustainable Sustainable I
Making Sustainable Sustainable II: Issues & Dilemmas
Making Sustainability Sustainable III:Personal Decisions, part 1
Making Sustainability Sustainable III: Personal Decisions, part 2

Okay, I mentioned swapping out all the incandescent lights in the house for CFLs. What I did not mention was that it cost Abelisto & I around $225.00 to do so.

Organic, local butter costs nearly $7 per pound (the regular butter is between 1.85 and 2.05), Organic cotton socks are over $10 per pair, and a friggin' hybrid car is way more than I can spend on a vehicle right now.

A friend of mine said to me recently, "I can afford to buy organic and local, so it is my duty to do so. That is the only way it will ever become affordable for others. We need a critical mass of people buying green in order to make it viable and affordable."

I hope she is right. For now, we buy as much at the co-op as we can afford. I am still having trouble paying over three times more for butter.

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Making Sustainability Sustainable III: Personal Decisions, part 2

Making Sustainable Sustainable I
Making Sustainable Sustainable II: Issues & Dilemmas
Making Sustainability Sustainable III:Personal Decisions, part 1

So how do we know when something we purchase or something we do fits in a sustainable lifestyle? I went looking for a consumer report for green living. I found:
The International Forum on Globalization
Co-op America
Yes Magazine

Now I need to find the time to do the research. Until then I will be trusting the local co-operatives to give me the straight information when I ask - is this laundry product REALLY green?

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Turning our yard into Beelandia

Beelandia - with Top Bar Hive Metpropolis

Today we did some more fencing. With major help from #2 son, Abelisto & I all but finished the section of the yard we are planning to fully enclose for the bees. It is actually about a third of our yard in all. There is some yard in the front that is not fenced at all, and there will be about the same amount in the back as the fenced portion that will only have a dividing fence between our yard and the next house. We are waiting for people to remove a boat and RV and a dog kennel and a stack of firewood that has encroached into our property over the last couple years. The guy with the boat and RV did ask us, but the dog kennel guy did not and I have no idea whose firewood it is - it just appeared one day while we were at work...

We still have a bit more to do on this enclosure - one section in the front to put up (the post is set in concrete since it was next to the house - and it needs to set for a day or two before we hang a section of fence on it) and the rear gate (which would be immediately to my right as I took this photo). The section of the fence that will be the gate needs trimmed with the skilsaw in order to fit in the space allocated for the gate. We will do these two things one night this week.

Abelisto has already started the digging for the various plantings he has in mind. Once the fence is finished I want to remove the screening from the side porch and build steps from it down to the side walk. Then I want to get some nice chairs for the porch. Not a swing - those things give me motion sickness...

Next - the ROOF!!!

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Sustain Winona

Last week (or maybe it was the week before) I finished doing the Sustain Winona website. I am not in the Sustain Winona task force - I just wanted to redo the website since it was not what I thought it should/could be.

No one has given me any change or told me that they hated it, so I thought I would post a link here (and in my Blogroll) just to share the site.

Sustain Winona

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Making Sustainability Sustainable – III: Personal Decisions, part 1

Making Sustainable Sustainable I
Making Sustainable Sustainable II - Issues & Dilemmas

We (Abelisto & I) have been trying to pick one or two things at a time to do that will move us in a green direction.

First it was swap out the light bulbs in the house - out with incandescents, in with CFLs. I am not sure how much it helped us with the electric bill, but it felt like we were on our way. I can tell you, buying all CF lights for a 14-room house was expensive. We did it all at once, so the pain would be over quick - like jerking a bandaid off instead of easing it off. Mainly we did it in one-fell-swoop so that it would get done. At this point all the lights on the first and second floor of the house are CFLs, porch lights too. The basement still has four incandescent light bulbs. I keep forgetting to swap them out.

The other day one light broke (I think son #2 was practicing swordsmanship inside the house instead of going outside to do it). It did not shatter, but just cracked at the base. For some reason, as I was giving him the replacement bulb, I happened to read the back of the package and saw that there are special recommended disposal practices for fluorescent bulbs - never knew that, should have. EGAD - my wonderful CFLs, those energy saving beacons of light, contain Mercury. Just a small amount, true, but I do not want to be adding any Mercury to the water table here. Already you cannot safely eat the fish from the lakes and rivers. I stopped eating local fish in 1989.

I wondered how much Mercury my son was exposed to when he cracked that CFL. It is now inside a ziplock bag, waiting for a trip to the hazardous waste center.

NPR Story

EnergyStar (EPA program) Infosheet on CFLs & Mercury (pdf file) - a bit scary when you get to the part about cleaning up broken CFLs...

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Hot chicks - cold night

The person or persons that stole the chicks from the biology lab did a awful thing with them. They left them, on a night where the temperatures were just above freezing (yes we are still having night time temperatures in the low 30s) along side the road, in the rain. I can sort of understand rescuing chicks from experiments (although after asking those who would know, I found out that the experiments did no lasting damage to the chicks and were relatively pain-free). What pisses me off is that someone would take the chicks and then risk their lives by abandoning them aside the road at 10 p.m.

Anyway, someone saw them and called the police. The the police and a couple bystanders rounded them up and took them to the Humane Society. Abelisto & I wondered if the caller was the thief. If so the chicks were not really in a great deal of danger, as long as the caller made sure that the police came to get the chicks. However one chick died of exposure, and several lost toes. We also wondered if the bystanders mentioned in the story were in fact the perpetrators of the deed.

Winona Daily News Story (with video) - written before it was known the chicks were from our lab. Ecosheba - one of the comment posters - is daughter #3. She broke the story that the chicks came from the biology lab.

The Winona Post story

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Making Sustainability Sustainable – II: Issues & Dilemmas

One problem with talking about sustainability is that it is an overwhelming idea. There is such great inertia against changing our lives, especially if we think it means deprivation of any kind... even inconveniencing ourselves is sometimes just more than we can contemplate. I admit it - I have those days.

Another issue is the fact that it is so very difficult to know when we are hearing/reading valid information, and when what we are hearing/reading is just sales hype.

A third major problem with sustaining the sustainability movement is it is so DAMN expensive to go green - or at least it feels like it is. Products cost so much more when they stick the Green sticker on them

And the last issue (at least the last that I can think of right now) is that there is not much solidarity in the movement. So many people are doing so many different things. I know that there rarely is the unity in a social movement that people think there is. But I cannot help thinking that a bit more unity and common direction would help considerably.

I have to think about this incrementally or I will just give up on it. And giving up on it will feel worse than eating bad food when I know I should not, or not exercising when I know I should.

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Missing Chicks

Someone took some chicks from our biology labs over the weekend. The chicks were to be used in an experiment determining the effects of hormone injections. I am not certain what all the experiment entails, but I am sort of glad the chicks have escaped the experience.

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Making Sustainability Sustainable

Went to the Twin Cities this week with my boss for the meeting between our web team and the vendor that we are working with on the website redesign. It is a bit over two hours each way for us to go up there. We talk a lot. It is sort of nice to be able to do that. On the way up we talked about our tastes in music (I had taken my iPod and FM transmitter) and our families and what we were doing at various times growing up (we are close in age, but from different areas of the country) which got us started again on music. He asked if I could guess what artists were on his iPod (he has a really strange mix). We also talked about sustainable living, something which interests both of us.

On the way back we talked a great deal about sustainability - after we finished taking apart the meeting we had just been to and putting it back together again.

My boss gave me a charge - figure out how to make sustainability, the sustainable life movement, sustainable.

Now that is quite an assignment. Anyone have any IDEAS?

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More Bee Fence

Yesterday Abelisto and I, with help from #2 son, place a few more sections of fence in the side yard. Probably one more weekend and we will have the first section enclosed. There are a few places where the ground is uneven enough that we will have to put some paver bricks around the inside of the fence to fill in the low spots so the cats will not be able to squeeze out from under the fence panels. I expect them to eventually climb the fence (probably sooner than later) but I do not want to make it an easy saunter under the fence. If we get strays coming in I will need to run a charged line around the perimeter, maybe at a foot off of the ground. That will keep anything that might harm the beehives out and will have the added bonus of keeping the neighborhood dogs from peeing on the fence too (at least more than once). If I run a charged line on the outside to keep strays out I may run a couple on the inside to keep ours in.

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Fencing the yard

Yesterday Abelisto and I worked on the fence for the beeyard. I think it will end up being around 20' by 48' when it is finished. Of course the bees will wander afar. This is just to protect their home-ground from noisy neighbors, dogs, skunks, and the stray kid that wanders through. It will also give the cats an outside area to be in that is safe from dogs.

Speaking of the cats, Poppy (the lone female) was spayed this past week. It came down to telling daughter #3 that something HAD to be done. Poppy was marking her territory trying to attract a mate. Unfortunately her territory included places/things like my inkjet photo printer (which I finally threw out) and the rest of the computer desk area (both computer desks actually), the laundry room counter, and any plastic or vinyl bag that she found in the house - which meant that my studio had to be kept tightly closed because my new (and expensive) quilting sewing machine has a dust cover that is made of vinyl. She did pee on it once when I forgot to shut the door all the way. It took the chrome off of the presser foot knee-lift which was laying on the table in front of the machine... damn cat. Anyway, the hope is that once she no longer is constantly in heat she will no longer be advertising the fact by marking her territory. She came home on Friday, a bit groggy and out-of-sorts, and I have found no new pee marks. I am tentatively hopeful.

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On the Edge of Anger

Thought I would change the colors on the blog and see if it increased my motivation to blog. How strange it is to feel guilty over not blogging. Add one more thing to fret over. Messy house, bad eating habits, forgetting/avoiding exercise, browsing the net while at work (okay, this one is not a problem, I am supposed to look at websites now and then...), forgetting to check my bank balance before deciding to buy something, Now I can add not blogging to the list.

I am finding myself on the edge of anger more often nowadays. Mostly an unspecific anger which makes it hard to combat. I think it is a number of things:

the kids are being particularly aggravating these days;
the website redesign (at work) seems to be ending up as one giant hurry-up-and-wait project where things are becoming a jumbled mass of other people's agendas and not the team's;
and the fucking housing market fell apart just when we were reaching a point where we might sell this huge house.

I really do feel like it is nearly a sin (and I do not actually believe in sin, per se) to have 3 people living in a 3000 sq. ft. house. This house could house a community of 6 - 8 like-minded adults, or a family of 8, if there were families that big. I guess there are still families that size, but I do not know of any who would buy the house.

Having this much room has given me more studio room, and it is great for gatherings - last fall we had a party with 30 or so people attending and no one said it was too crowded.

Today Abelisto and I did our shopping on the bicycles (first time out on the bikes this spring - that's another thing, this winter seems to be hanging on tooth-and-nail up here in Minnesota, I am so sick of winter), and we saw a man working on the roof of a house near ours. I circled back around and asked him if he did roofs or if he was the homeowner. He said he did roofs on the side and we asked him to come look at ours. We told him about the bees, and the fact that we would only be doing sections of the roof, and he was fine with that. He said he would contact us in about a week to take a look at the roof and give us an estimate. I hope we can afford him, otherwise I will be doing the roof myself. I know I can do it, I just do not know if I want to tackle a job that big.

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Between teaching and the website redesign

I am now teaching part of Brother Roderick's Graphic Design II class. I am teaching the website design part of the class. the class meets three times per week for one hour and 15 minutes. I have one of those class sessions. It is not really enough - we need an entire class for web design. The university is a bit behind, make that a lot behind. However I have made myself a bit of a P.I.T.A. (pain-in-the-ass) to the VP of Academic Affairs (who so unfairly and incorrectly dismissed Abelisto's sabbatical proposal) and the best I could do would be to push the university to create the class and hire someone else to teach it. I may do this. Our students really need it. They are leaving here at a great, great disadvantage. I need to wait until near the end of the semester though. I do not want to get Roderick into any hot water about me team teaching his class. I am not getting paid for it, so they cannot bitch about that. I think that as long as the students feel they are getting information and skills they need they will be happy. Those two things should keep the administration off of Roderick's back.

This post started out being an explanation of why I have been so lax with this blog... Between learning the things that I need to learn in order to give the students the best I can give, and the craziness of the web redesign project, I am generally sick of computers by the time I get home. I do not believe I have mentioned it in this blog, but the university is in the midst of a total website redesign. Everything is on the table. As Director of Web Communication, a major part of the work is mine. I can tell you that when you are doing a redesign of a 3000+ page website, it is a bit grueling.

Anyway, once again I am trying to reconnect with this blog.

We will see.

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Lunar Eclipse

My attempt to photograph the lunar eclipse. It's not real crisp (but the night was) probably due to the fact that I was using the Subaru as a tripod (quadrapod?) and it was so cold it was hard not to shiver. Maybe I will try when it happens again in 3 years. Maybe it will not be 15 below zero at 2:00 AM on December 21st, 2010... hmmmm, better not count on that.

It was - however cold we got - a wondrous site. You can see how ancients would assign portentous omens to an event like this. Rightly so, I would say.

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Smells and Memory

NY Times article about the perfume market and the move away from artificial scents, scent fatigue and going scentless. An interesting article that made me think about how smells and scents can trigger memories.

Today is pretty damn cold, not like a couple weeks ago, but cold nevertheless. I woke up after a dream of walking down a hot road, smelling the heat rising off of the paved surface. Ringo Starr was at our house in the dream. Abelisto was discussing photography with him.

The smell of hot road tar takes me back to the summer that I was 10. My grandmother had a cabin at a resort at Dietz lake in Clay county in Indiana for a few summers and that year we spent almost the entire summer at the lake. At some point during the summer they tarred the gravel road that ran in front (and in back) of our cabin - I am guessing it was to keep the dust down, or something. Anyway, it meant that our cars got tar speckled, our bikes got gummed up with it, and our bare feet were black-bottomed since the southern Indiana summer heat kept the tar hovering in that magical state somewhere between a liquid and a solid.

Dietz Lake Resort, somewhere in Clay county, Indiana

I do not remember how many summers we owned the cabin. Before those summers we had usually rented a cabin, so all the years sort of run together. The years we rented we would just go for two or three weeks sometime during the summer. In July, I think. The years that we owned the cabin we would start going as soon as the nights became warm enough to sleep without heat. We would usually go to the cabin sometime in late March or early April to check out how well the cabin had faired over the winter. We would get the water turned back on and give the cabin a great scrub down. My mother would plant new annual flowers around the doorway and trim back the perennials. My father and I would clean the outdoor fire pit, cut back the weeds and trim the tree. Once my mother tried to pour gasoline on a smoldering fire in the pit and rather than igniting the trash and yarn trimmings in the pit, the flames followed the stream of gasoline up to the can in her hand. We were lucky. All she ended up with were minor burns and singed eyebrows and hair.

The spot where Grandma's cabin was inside the loop, just
below the large, dark-roofed cabin. It does not seem to
be there any longer - unless of course, my memories are wrong
and the large dark-roofed cabin is the one that was ours.

I think the cabin was maybe 24 x 30 feet in dimension. I cannot really remember. Next time I go to Indiana I need to see if any other photos exist in the family albums of the cabin or the lake.

I seem to remember (and the one photograph I have confirms this) that the cabin had windows all the way around the perimeter of the structure. I think it had a great room, a bedroom or two and a kitchen. It did not have bathing or toilet facilities. There was a central, permanent outhouse just down the road. The main beach house had showers, but who needed them when there was a gorgeous lake to swim in everyday.

Dad & Grandma Emy (his mom) at Grandma Johnston's Dietz Lake cabin.

As soon as school ended for the year we would pack up our summer clothes, fishing gear, bicycles, the two dogs, the cat and a whole bunch of food and stuffed it all in the VW van and head off to Dietz Lake. It always seemed like it took hours to get there, but I think it was really not all that far from our home.

We would spend the summer fishing and swimming and riding our bicycles around the lake. There does not seem to be one now, but there was a pedestrian bridge over the stream at the north end of the lake when we went there. You could ride all the way around the lake if you wanted to. It took about an hour and a half to make the circuit.

Sometimes it was just my immediate family that stayed there - minus of course my dad, he had to work and would come there on the weekends to be with us - but most often it was my grandmother, my family and my aunt Rosie's family. That made for 3 adults and 6 kids between the ages of 6 months and 12 years old.

We caught fish, well, we fed hooked worms to fish. Our parents would not let us use barbed hooks for fear that we would hook each other in the eye... I suppose that could possibly have happened without the ban on barbed hooks, given the fact that someone hooked my cousin Edward in the back one day, which caused a big enough row that two of us ended up knocking each other off of the dock and into the water, which was slimy and nasty anywhere in the lake where they had not laid out a sand bottom... After that we could not have barbed hooks and the fish usually got a free dinner from us from that point on. The only exception was my cousin Greg, who was twelve and already a master fisherman. He was allowed to use barbed hooks if he was fishing alone since there was little chance of him hooking himself. He would get up at the crack of dawn and head down to the dock we were granted with the cabin.

The rest of us were more interested in swimming anyway. The beach opened at 10 am or so, I think. It would be open until noon when it shut down for two hours - one for eating and one for digesting, no cramps for us. That was what the adults all told us - swimming without waiting an hour would lead to "cramps" which would make you sink to the bottom of the lake and drown.

There used to be a foot bridge across the stream that fed the lake. It was connected to the main park road on either side of the lake by a gravel path. That meant we could ride all the way around the lake. The round trip took about 2 hours I think. I do not think the lake was all that big - I am sure that a good part of those hours were spent in the general store at the beach.

The store was a bit spooky and a bit interesting.

more later...

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First time caucuser

On Tuesday night I attended my very first political caucus. I totally understand the fever downriver in Iowa. It was a blast.

As in caucuses across Minnesota, it was a record turnout at our caucus. We (Abelisto, daughter #4, and I) walked the 8 blocks from our house to the high school where the DFL (democratic, farm, labor party) caucus for our area of town was held. It was a pleasant walk, the temperature was in the 20s and the wind was mild to non-existent. The only difficulty was that there had been a day or so above freezing earlier in the week followed by a day of light snow, so the footing was a bit precarious. I ended up down on the sidewalk after stepping on some snow-covered ice. Since I was holding Abelisto's hand at the time he also ended up going down. Oh, well, finding yourself laid out flat on the ice is part of life as a Minnesotan.

When we got to the school the parking lot was full and people were parking in the driveway and roads surrounding the building. Once inside we studied the map of the city to see which ward and precinct we lived in. None of us had done this before. We vote in elections, but up until now I have never lived in a state where people went to caucuses instead of primaries.

TheWard 2 Precinct 2 group was meeting in the outer room of the media center (library computer area). There were probably 35 attendees. The very first thing we did is sign in and cast our ballots for the presidential contest.

Daughter #4 asked some very good questions about some of the resolutions and I got up and spoke against one of them. It did not pass, so I must have been somewhat convincing. Three or four people spoke for it and myself and one other against. I volunteered to be a delegate at the next level. I will go to the county caucus here in Winona in March and vote and debate the issues. I probably won't go any farther than that since this is my first year. After the county caucus there is the regional and then the state. Both would be about a 2 hour drive from here. At the state caucus in early June, the delegates are chosen to go to the national convention. I think that would be fun, but you have to pay for everything yourself and that can get expensive. One of the women at work has gone to the national convention - when Jimmy Carter was nominated.

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Today has been rough

It has been five months since my dad died. I was not certain. I had to count on my fingers to figure it out.

Sometimes it feels like such a long time. Sometimes it feels like it just happened.

Cancer can be so hard on everyone. Both my parents had a brush with it. My father had colon cancer 14 years ago, and survived, miraculously considering the growth in his colon was the size of a large grapefruit. No one expected him to make it. My mother at that time had just lost her sister to pancreatic cancer and a good friend to ovarian cancer, and when she heard the doctor say that my dad had cancer she just sort of shut down. I had just moved back into their household with my five kids (ages 5 - 15), and was working full-time and going to school full-time too. I ended up at times being the primary caretaker for my dad since my mother had such a problem with it all. She had to disconnect a bit in order to get through it all. She knew it but could not help it. It was okay, after all. It was a way to get past it and go on.

About 7 years ago my mother was diagnosed with breast cancer (which did not show up adequately enough for a diagnosis on a mammogram until she'd had it for around two years). This time she was as solid as a rock about it all. I do not know if it was because it was her and not someone she loved that was facing it or what the reason was for the stoic and peaceful approach to the diagnosis and treatments. Perhaps it was because my father had survived his cancer... Maybe inside she was just as upset and simply did not feel she should burden us with that. I was not there much. I do not know.

Anyway she is healthy right now and has been for years now.

However, my father, during a routine checkup at the veteran’s hospital this past June, was told he had some "suspicious" spots in his right lung and something strange on one of his ribs. Next step, bone scans and more tests. In late July the diagnosis came back: Small Cell Lung Cancer - Stage IV, metastasized to left thigh, ribs, spine, left hip and skull, inoperable, 9 months maximum life expectancy. This time my mother took care of everything. Things that no one wants to do. I could not be there this time. I could not help very much at all.

I currently live 600 miles from my parents. It takes between 10 & 11 hours to get there by automobile. My father died on August 31^st at 8:45pm. I was somewhere in the middle of central Illinois, trying like mad to get there. I pulled into their driveway just before midnight. They had already taken my father’s body away. My mother fought with them trying to get them to wait for me. But the law required the hospice workers to remove his body from the home immediately.

For me, one of the hardest things about his death was that I waited until noon, because of some stupid meeting at work, to leave Minnesota and drive down to Indiana.

My daily battle is against the tendency to let that fact swamp me and take precedence over the fact that my family went to visit him as many weekends as we could during June, July and August and had wonderful visits, full of stories, tears and laughter each and every time. I did have some time to be with him with full knowledge that his days were limited and I would not be able to be with him any more.

The days that I can remember that go well.

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More Bird Art

WoodBird, 2008, encaustic on driftwood, 6" x 2" x 30"

Another piece working with bird imagery - albeit in a very abstract manner. Although it is not very apparent in the photograph, the lines for the bird follow the grain patterns (head and body) and cracks (legs and feet) in the wood. You can sort of see this in the abstract feet of the bird. On the actual piece of driftwood the grain is very noticeable - with some of the grain swollen by the long submersion in the Mississippi River, and some parts eaten away by that submersion. In the photograph the dark circles are knots in the wood.

Some of the colors here are from my own paints. The colors that I have been making have mostly been from pre-ground purchased pigments that I have mixed with melted beeswax and damar resin.

When Abelisto's hives get established I will try using our own beeswax and propolis instead of damar resin. Propolis is a substance created by bees that is made up of resins found around the blossoms and buds on trees and at sites of wounds on trees. The bees change it chemically a bit, and use it as "glue" for sealing gaps in the hive and covering foreign objects. They use it to weatherproof the hive. Propolis is what gives beeswax its color and odor. Abelisto thinks that early encaustic painters probably did not add tree resins to their paints, but that they incorporated propolis into the mixture. It could have been purposely added, but most likely it was just part of what would have been considered wax, which would normally happen in a wild or unframed hive. If an analysis of the paints in early encaustic paintings was done, the scientists may have mistakenly thought the resins in the paints had been added - especially if the research was done by someone who did not know that much about bees. If a person was using purified beeswax you would need to add resins. The resins keep the wax from "blooming" when subjected to temperature changes (think refrigerated chocolate bar).

Just thinking about it I realized that since I am mixing my paints using unpurified beeswax I may not need to be adding damar crystals anyway. The ratio of wax to damar crystals should be between 8:1 and 10:1 by weight.

Of course I could be totally wrong about this. I will have to experiment with it. One thing is for certain; any paintings I do will certainly be subjected to pretty substantial temperature changes. Right now the house is hovering around 60 degrees (on purpose, that is what we set the thermostat at - outside is below zero, for the 13th day in a row), and during the summer it sometimes gets above 90 inside (we do not use air conditioning). So if my paints are going to be prone to blooming I am certain to see it.

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Bird Art

Heron, 2008, encaustic on driftwood, 12" x 4" x 28", views of both sides of sculpture

The Flock, 2008, encaustic on paper, approx 17 x 22", mostly handmade encaustic paints. Work-in-process.

Don't have much time for posting right now. I am teaching an advanced graphic design class in a few minutes. Just wanted to get these two images up of the most recent work I have been doing.

The Flock is a painting I have been trying to actualize for months. I wanted to speak to diversity in community and this image (out of all the images inside my head) seemed to keep coming to the front of the stack...

Heron was a more spontaneous creation. Months ago - before the world here was covered in ice and snow - Abelisto and I went beach combing at a park along the Mississippi River. I picked up one particularly gnarly piece of driftwood (probably a root section) thinking that some creature was present in the wood. After months of laying around in my studio it finally decided to let me know what it was and that I was holding it upside down when I would pick it up. Initially I thought the thicker part was the head/top part and the long skinny part was the tail... shows you how wrong you can be when you make unsupported assumptions...

more later

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Made more paint

Last night and tonight I worked on making some paint for a painting I want to do. The painting is of some exotic birds - unreal birds. I needed some intense colors as well as some additional beak and bill colors. I am trying not to use the toxic, heavy metal-based paints. These encaustic paints are all colored with simple earths and/or synthetic, opalescent dry pigments.

I melted and mixed 10 parts well filtered beeswax, 1 part damar crystals (sticky, messy stuff, that...) and 1-3 parts pigments. You can see the small stainless steel bowls (around 2.5 inches diameter at the top) sitting on an electric griddle. It takes about 3 hours to get the mixture melted and mixed well enough to keep the pigments suspended in the wax/resin medium. I try to heat it very slowly on barely enough heat to get it flowing. Too much heat can release harmful volatile gases into the atmosphere (and my lungs). Not a good thing.

If the bird painting comes out decently I will share it here. I think it was almost as much fun to make the paints as painting the picture will be...

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Bindi the jungle girl

Okay, I admit it. I was (am) a fan of Steve Irwin the Crocodile Hunter. I know he was a geek, but he was such an entertaining geek. I spent several New Year's Eves watching the 24-hour Crocodile Hunter marathons. Animal Planet and Discovery channel (and maybe the History channel) are the only things I miss about television. Although I thought Project Runway was sort of interesting when I watched it in Las Vegas at my daughter's house.

Anyway, I do not know where Steve Irwin fell on the scale of actually doing good things for the sake of the planet, but he had lots of passion that I do not think was only geared towards making money. I think he was truly moved to work for the welfare of the world and everything in it, particularly animals that most people want to exterminate.

Maybe I am naive, but I liked watching him blunder about in his all-out, wild disdain-for-pain frenzy, finding one more "gorgeous" animal for us to see...

Today I read about his daughter, Bindi. I do not know exactly what I think about her stepping up to the plate in her father's name. I think it is hard for me to disengage the loss of a father with how I react to this story. Thinking about losing a father at such a young age makes me a bit shaky and weepy anyway. It is hard enough when you are 50...

If it is true, as her mother states, that Bindi loves doing this and that if Bindi decided one day that it was not fun any more she would stop doing it, then I think it is okay. Maybe.

Child stars usually make me uncomfortable - or rather the making of child stars makes me uncomfortable. I worry that they do not get the chance to just be kids. Not knowing what goes into all the filming for Bindi's or any other child star's performances, I cannot even begin to evaluate her mother's claims that Bindi is fine, loves what she's doing and all will be well.

The strangest complaint in the NY Times story is the one that people are making about being weirded out by Steve Irwin clips interspersed throughout the show. That does not bother me at all. If my father had left me a legacy, and if I were stepping in to continue it, and if there were film clips of him doing it, you can bet your ass that I would show the clips too.

Do people hold it against the local merchant when they proudly display photographs of the three generations of family who have owned and operated the hardware store? Or use home movies in the television advertisements for those businesses?

Then again, I may just still be enamored of out-and-out audacity of Steve Irwin. Crikey!

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My father met my mother 52 years ago yesterday

Called my mother last night right before we went to the party. Wanted to wish her happy new year and to let her know that I found out it would be better/easier/quicker if she transfered the title to the truck into her name in Indiana rather than trying to transfer it out of her and his name and into mine here in Minnesota. So tomorrow I am mailing the title back to her.

While we were on the phone she told me what/how everyone in Indiana is doing. Then she told me the story about how she met my father 52 years ago. I never knew how they met.

She said...

"You know, it was 52 years ago tonight that I met your dad. I'm a bit sad tonight, thought I might go do something special, but I'm sitting here with the dog, just watching tv.

"Anyway, Rosie (my aunt) and I were wondering what we were going to do for New Year's eve. I was 19, Rosie was 18. We were walking down 4th street, trying to decide. Your father was driving by and he pulled over to talk to us.

"It wasn't that he was pulling over to talk to two strange girls, he wasn't like that you know. He knew Rosie. She was dating his cousin Harry, and they had met a while back. Anyway, he knew Rosie, and I guess he knew of me, but we had never met.

"He smiled at us and after a few minutes of chatting, asked what we were doing for the evening. We told him we were still trying to decide. He asked us if we would like to go to a movie. So we did.

"He took both of us to the movie. Your father was like that - he was always very good to your aunt Rosie. We had a good time that night."

*************

Sometime later, 4 or 5 months later I think, he wrote her a sweet, sweet note

"Liz,
I love you very much and want to marry you.
Keith"

They were married in June, 1955.

She still has the note. I've seen it.

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New year's eve

Actually it is new year's day, but I have not gone to bed yet.

Abelisto and I went to a progressive party. I had never heard of progressive parties (other than the green party) before I lived up here in Minnesota.

We started at 6:30 at one colleague's home where all sorts of hors d' oeurves were served - mostly cheese and crackers and some sort of Greek savory cheesecake - at least I think it was Greek - whatever it was, it was excellent. The house was a large and lovely house, but it was a bit off-putting that a single man lived in a house that would cheerfully contain a large family. It made me ever so more mindful of the fact that if the kids ever move out (sigh) we really need to either do some serious searches for house-mates, sell the house, or donate it to the local Catholic Worker house. It was clear the colleague was in the chemistry department, not the environmental studies department...

Everyone left that house just around 8:45 and went to the next colleague's home - he teaches modern languages (French & Spanish) and his wife is Argentinian. It was a much more modest home, but it was definitely more homey and interesting. The previous home felt rather antiseptic and sterile... Anyway at the second home the food was tacos/burritos. Having been forewarned by our second hostess during the hors d' oeuvres part of the night that they had not prepared anything for vegetarians, I ate as much of the hors d' oeuvres as I felt I needed for the evening. Turns out I could have made a very nice veggie burrito at the second home, but since I had eaten so much I refrained. I did have some arroz con leche, just to see what Mexican rice pudding was like. The television was tuned to the Music Choice of the 70's station - not having television, it amazed me that you could get what essentially was radio on the television. Anyway, a few of us ended up dancing for the last 45 minutes or so at that colleague's home. His wife was so thrilled that people actually danced in her home.

At around 11ish we went to the third and final home of the evening where dessert was served. Those of us that were dancing in the previous home promptly changed the television from the sports channel to the Party Favorites music channel and kept dancing. We danced until nearly 2 am, stopping briefly at midnight to hug and smooch everyone in the room. Occasionally we stopped to listen and participate in the discussions that were going on - but I get tired of talking about work and the university and the palace intrigue there - even obnoxious 80's music is more interesting than talking about the bitch in this department or the moron in that department or the bozos in administration. There was one interesting discussion at the first house about religion, Christ and social justice between the feminist French teacher and the Bible scholar and his wife. I am not very knowledgeable of the Bible - certainly not well-versed enough to discuss it with a Bible scholar - so I just listened. Besides, it was not a discussion for an agnostic like me.

Anyway, it is way past the time for going to bed. Happy New Year y'all.

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Starting again

Okay. I've been busy, or maybe just lazy. At least lazy with this blog. Time to get back into then habit of writing here.

Now for a quick synopsis of what the last month has brought.

Currently I am putting together my CV, so that I can send out some applications to a few universities. I would like to be able to teach for real, rather than just being an unofficial faculty member. Right now other faculty members ask me to help teach their courses, but the university will not consider hiring me as faculty. I am fed up with it.

Abelisto is also fed up with the university too. His sabbatical was turned down, and not for a good reason. Read here, and here, and here. We need to find a school that needs a sociologist and an artist.

The website redesign at work is just now getting started. This past week my fellow team members and I filled out a fairly detailed questionnaire for the discovery phase. We meet with the Atomic Playpen team on the 3rd.

Daughter-2 has gone back to Las Vegas, enrolled in UNLV and hopes to get the 7 credits necessary to finish her BA there. The registrar at our university was wonderful when daughter-2 went to speak with her about the options.

Daughter-2 was due to fly out of La Crosse on Christmas day - at 6:30 pm on the last flight heading to Minneapolis/St. Paul. I love flying out of the La Crosse airport - it's 25 minutes from our house (unless we get stuck on the wrong side of the railroad tracks). All flights go out of gate 2... I don't think there is a gate 1. I know there's not gate 3... It's great - they actually have an area where you can wait with your loved ones up until maybe 20 or 25 minutes before their flight leaves. Then they go through a short and quick security check and get on the plane. No more driving two and a half hours, dropping someone off and giving them a quick hug on the street, trying not to get hit by the crazy drivers or yelled at by security.

Anyway, when we got to the airport around 5:30 on Christmas day, we stood outside for a little while (it was not very cold, compared to the previous few days) while daughter-2 and daughter-3 shared a last cigarette together and then wheeled, dragged, carried the luggage into the airport. They ended up coming back out, dragging the luggage with them. Turns out the flight to Minneapolis/St. Paul was canceled, not due to weather - which was our first assumption - but due to a mechanical problem with the plane. Since it was to be the last flight out that day, the best we could do was come back at 4 am for the first flight of the next day. Daughter-2 was not happy at all, and actually I did not relish getting up at 3 am to make the trip all over again. The clerk, seeing our faces, said "what a shame, the only ticket left on that flight is in first class..." Daughter-2 promptly stated that she would take it. So she got to fly not only between La Crosse and Minneapolis/St. Paul, but all the way to Vegas in a first class seat.

Since she left I have been a bit sad. I really did not get to spend much time with her while she was here. All her old friends kept her quite busy. I had forgotten (and I think she had too) how many firends she has here and what a social creature she was (is). I am hoping that everything works out in LV school-wise. She really wants to finish her BA.

I have a few projects in process right now

• a 4 yard swath of linen/rayon/cotton fabric that I am weaving. It will end up being a garment of some sort. I have about 2 feet of it woven as of tonight.
  
  
• two encaustic projects - one on driftwood and one on heavy watercolor papers
  
  
• a quilted vest for Abelisto. We keep our house between 60 and 62 degrees and sometimes a sweater, sweatshirt or jacket is too much, but a turtleneck is not enough.
  

I think there is something else, but right now it escapes me...

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Been a while

The last two weeks have been tough in many ways.

Over Thanksgiving we went to Indiana. My brothers and I went through my father's garage and parceled out the items that each of us wanted, sorted and organized the things we felt my mother needed to keep around, and bagged/boxed/stacked the things that should be given away or hauled away to be recycled or trashed.

Abelisto and I made the 600 mile drive home on the Monday after Thanksgiving. We were in the middle of Illinois when we got a phone call from daughter #2. She was crashing emotionally and the end result was that at 5 am on Wednesday (just 36 hours after we got back from Indiana) I flew out to Las Vegas. Once there I helped her pack some things up and we flew back to Minnesota yesterday. She is here at least for the month, and perhaps for the spring semester so that she can finish her BA. She needs 7 credits or an internship to finish it up.

The temperature difference between Nevada and Minnesota was amazing - we both spent the evening shivering. Today she begins making some concrete plans for what's next in her interesting life.

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Liberal Economist?

I have found an economist I kinda like...

Paul Krugman writes about the politics and economics of inequality in America and other topics.

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I would do this work

Danielle - if you are reading this - this is the work I want to do... But no one in Winona would pay anyone to do it.

Just kidding - or at least partially. I would like to do something like this, maybe not as a career, but as performance art or community/collaborative art. But I think I would have to develop a style first - or at least a style that someone would admire.

Not gonna happen anytime soon is my guess.

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Taking a break from fiction

There is nothing wrong with reading fiction. There have been books - novels - that have changed my life, made me stronger and more determined and less apt to be taken advantage of, more willing to risk giving voice to my own ideas and opinions.

There have been novels that have saved my sanity during times when reality was just too damn awful to deal with, times when an hour or two (or ten) stolen now and then from what everyone else expected me to do and be, spent reading about some alternate world, some faraway place or time, kept me from ending my life...

So, you see, I love fiction, good fiction, of any kind, except maybe romance novels - not saying that they do not have their worth, just that I could never get into them much. Perhaps that had to do with being afraid to be caught reading one, more than any actual romance novel itself. I think my ex would have considered it disrespectful to his manliness if I needed to read a romance novel - after all, wasn't he the be all and end all in regard to what a woman would want?
ugh...

Well, what I meant to write about this evening, instead of my love for good fiction, was my intent to do some more academic reading.

I am starting with Ethics and Visual Art, edited by Elaine King and Gail Levin, published by Allworth Press (New York, 2006). It contains 19 essays on various ethical concerns with art, art collection, authenticity, cultural appropriation and artifact repatriation, censorship, ownership and copyright, and more that I cannot remember right this moment.

It will be like reading short stories. I like short stories because they are short - I can read them at the end of the day and have a definite ending place (so that I do not read half the night, or more).

I may not read all 19 essays in this book, but I am hoping that a few of them will serve as jumping-off points for additional research.

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Pepin Wisconsin

This weekend Abelisto and I went beachcombing. We like to go up and down the Mississippi and gather interesting debris (natural and man-made) for art, and for just collecting.

We ended up stopping at several gravely beaches. Abelisto found the best agate that I have ever seen come out of the Mississippi. It was over an inch in diameter and this translucent deep red color.

We found bones, river glass, and interesting rocks. I do not know exactly what I will do with it all, but something will come from it, I am sure.

We found some interesting driftwood too. That I will likely use in my encaustic work. I recently attended a show at SMU of an encaustic painter that works on weathered boards which was inspiring. She did not work on driftwood, though. I think that the wood we found will make interesting foundations for a different sort of painting than I have been doing.

We ended up driving up river on the Minnesota side of the river, and back down on the Wisconsin side. It always seems strange to me to be able to look across the river and say with certainty, "That is another state, right there, those hills that I see..." Usually borders like that are much too arbitrary to say those kinds of things. Even at the Grand Canyon, I could not be certain what state claimed the territory I was seeing across the gorge, since the Grand Canyon twists and turns back on itself so much. Not so the Mississippi. I know which state those bluffs I see are.

Anyway, we went across the river at Red Wing Minnesota and headed back downstream. We stopped in Pepin Wisconsin (near the birth place of Laura Ingels Wilder, if you were curious). We found a very interesting and vibrant arts community in Pepin. They were all so friendly and interested in us - we were, of course, driving the art car. We ended up being invited to join their fledgling arts association, urged to dine at the local eatery before it closes for the season, and to attend a music performance next Saturday.

I think we will do all three...

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It feels like I should be studying

Spent the weekend unable to log on to the internet. Since we had the party on Saturday night and the benefit on Sunday there was not a block of time that I could sit down and debug it.

I think I am missing having studying to do, or something. I went straight from 10 years of part-time study (while working full-time) to get my BA, to 5 semesters of full-time study (while working full-time) on my MFA to getting ready for a big art show in the gallery to dealing with my father's failing health and death.

Now I feel like I am in some sort of limbo. I need something to study and write on. Something challenging. Some ideas I have been tossing around are:

sustainability - which might go along with Abelisto's beekeeping project
identity & garment - this would be an extension of my thesis/portfolio
using art to promote peace & justice
art & activism
ancient textile techniques - art or handicraft
symbolic language - from textiles to rock art (could involve some primary research eventually, there are petroglyphs just outside of vegas)
authenticity - who has the right to express what

I think I need to stay in practice for doing research and academic writing. Maybe I will submit an article to a journal on something. It is either that or find a way to do a Ph.D.

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Too many files

I have spent a couple days now, on and off, looking for a file. The problem is I have three computers (maybe four - I cannot remember when I made the file, so I have no idea which computer it might be on...) as well as three network folders and three portable hard drives to search...

Time for some serious file management work. I need to start with the 500gig portable hard drive and get it organized. Then I could work through the others, looking to see where the newer versions of documents are and which should be saved/deleted. Then I could move the files to the portable hard drive and wipe and restore one or two of the computers, and reload only the files that need to go back on them. Then I could burn DVDs of the remaining data for archival purposes, and return to using the 500gig drive as a standard backup of all four computers (just the documents and software settings - not the software itself) and the other portable hard drives.

Sounds like too much work though - I bet it would take a month to look at each & every file - so I guess I will just muddle through the mess.

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A Reading

Last Thursday I had a reading of some of my stories at the local arts center. I was asked to read for 30 - 45 minutes, but brought enough materials for just over an hour and a half - not know what the mix of people in the audience would be. That turned out to be a good decision because the small group of people present encouraged me to read more of my work. I ended up reading for just over 80 minutes.

Much of what I read was material/stories from my MFA thesis/portfolio. I have not written much lately - just mostly about my father. It seems that other than the meanderings in this blog, when I write it is about him.

I think I will see if I can string together my previous stories and the new stories about my father and put together a couple hours of readings to perform. Maybe the Blue Heron would have an evening that I could take.

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Yesterday & Today's Efforts

This weekend has been fairly productive. Not with art, but with all the other crap that one has to do to keep things going.

Made it to the farmer's market to get some soup veggies for the party next weekend (we are having home-made soups and breads from Panera). Talked to the bee guy, finally remembered to take some encaustic paintings to show him. We gave him an encaustic artist trading card.

We did every scrap of laundry. Except now there is more to do...

We cleaned the downstairs bathroom. And our bedroom.

Abelisto did some grading and prep for Monday's classes. I did not have any grading to do. My students are working on papers right now. Next weekend I will have grading to do.

We bought mice for the snake to eat - frozen ones, not live ones. Mice-On-Ice, they are called.

We bought groceries. We only do that every other week. Well, we only go to La Crosse and do the big grocery shopping every other week. We get perishables locally from a couple stores in town and the farmer's market.

We picked up the built-in cabinet doors from the glass replacement company and put them back on the built-in cabinets. They had been sitting in the hall for about a year before we took them to have the broken glass replaced last week.

We took a short ride on the bicycles, stopped by the bike shop to ask about trainers (the device you set a regular bike on to make it into a stationary bike for exercising in the winter.

We cleaned up my studio - it was not too bad, so that was easy.

We cleaned up the front room. And the dining room. And the foyer. And the back porch. We paid the bills.

We replaced the front door. The replacement door had been sitting in the foyer for about three weeks. We bought it and one for the back door on sale at Menards at the beginning of the month and managed to get the back door replaced the next day. Not so the front door.

Eventually we want to give up this big house. We have talked about donating it to the local Catholic Worker house. They could use a bigger house for their women and children's homeless shelter. We have also talked about selling the house.

I just want something smaller and simpler and more energy efficient. I would think about building something, but past experience kind of makes me shudder.

Eventually I would like something about half the size of this place. I figure 1500 sq ft would be ideal. That would be big enough that people could visit, but not live with us. I would like to be on the edge of town - close enough to ride bicycles into town, but far enough out that Abelisto could have as many beehives as he would like. I want a big garage that I can convert into a studio.

Some days we talk about finding one or two like-minded adults who would like to live in community. If we could find them, we would consider keeping the house after the kids leave. But I go back and forth in my head on this. Having lived in community I know how hard it is to make it work. Still, with the right people... But that is the trick, finding the right people.

Anyway, the house, or at least the first floor, is clean (except for the kitchen which I am going to tackle right after I finish this posting) and ready for the soiree next weekend. We will need to give it a touch up, and mop the floors, on Friday or Saturday morning. But for the most part, none of us will be mortified about the house when people come Saturday night.

I was going to make some curtains, but I think I will just leave the slightly cat-damaged mini-blinds up for now. I will just pull them up high enough that the damage does not show. Instead of all that sewing work, I am going to start a weaving project. It will be nice to weave something. I have not done any weaving for a couple years. Between grad school and work and the divorce, weaving got shoved to the bottom of the list.

We did do one art related thing today. We went to the opening of the next show in the SMU gallery.

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A Father Story - Transcendence

My father and I sat in the van, in the pre-dawn twilight at the edge of the ocean, on Daytona Beach. We had driven all of the previous day and most of the night to get there. It was the last family vacation we took together – I was nineteen and had already moved out of the house (not on the best of terms), within a year I would be living in the commune, and all communication between us would cease until my first child was born.

I get motion sickness in a vehicle – car, bus, airplane – it doesn’t matter. If I am not the driver, I am ill. When my father is in the car he always drives. Always. On the trip from Indiana to Florida I decided to take medicine to keep from being carsick. I slept through three states and woke up somewhere in Georgia. Everyone else was asleep and my father was alone as he drove through the darkening evening. I crawled out of the pile of bodies and up into the passenger seat and watched as the roadside scenery flew past, briefly in and out of the illumination of the van’s headlights.

Along towards morning we arrived at our first destination – Daytona Beach. In 1977 you could drive out on the beach, right down to the ocean’s edge. We pulled up to the high-tide mark and turned off the engine. I closed my eyes and leaned back, deciding to try to sleep until daylight. Almost immediately my father nudged my shoulder, pointing out over the ocean. The band of sky just above the dark water line had turned from the black of night to a vivid, iridescent, dark turquoise. You could tell that the sun would soon be up.

Except for the gentle lapping of the waves, it was totally silent on the beach. As far as I could tell, there were no other people on the strip of sand stretching out into the darkness on either side of us. I watched as my father lit his pipe, tobacco glowing brightly as he inhaled, inhaled, inhaled – he always takes three deep puffs to light his pipe. When my night vision returned and I could see out into the darkness again, I saw a strange orange glow far out in the water, looking for all the world just like the glowing tobacco embers in my father’s pipe. I rubbed my eyes and blinked several times, unable to figure out what I was seeing. As we watched it became apparent that we were seeing the sun, seeing it shining through the water. We were seeing the sun before it rose, seeing it through the ocean, visible to us because of the curvature of the earth and the clarity of the water. For a few fleeting minutes it seemed like the ocean was aflame. Then the sun crested the horizon and the day was upon us.

At nineteen I was still far too self-absorbed to notice very many things beyond my immediate wants or needs, but sitting there on that beach it became evident to me that I was observing something outside of my normal daily experience. It felt like something that had been happening for millions of years, something that happened for the first time at that very moment, something that happens again each time I think of it.


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Transcendence

The opening sentence of my artist statement states: I am an interdisciplinary artist examining the transcendent in the light of the connection between the ancient and the contemporary.

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So, how does one examine the space between the ancient and the contemporary in the light of the transcendent?

Transcendent, fancy word, complicated idea... The Oxford English Dictionary defines it as going beyond the limits of “normal or physical human experience.” I’m still working on my definition – some days I think I’m almost there, other days, well…

Why is it that people try to isolate the transcendent from the ordinary? It seems to me that they are two parts of a whole. Doesn’t separating them destroy both of them? Render them weak and unremarkable?

I think that life is, by its very nature, transcendent. I think it happens aljavascript:void(0)
Publish Postl around us but we often don’t realize it in our fragmented existences. To be present in your own life is to connect with the self – the I AM. From that place, from that self-awareness, comes the ability to recognize the transcendent. I don’t mean self-centeredness; I am referring to self-knowledge. When we do not know ourselves we become ineffective, insecure and fearful, easily swayed, easily manipulated. Because we do not know what we are truly capable of, all tasks seem impossible, all obstacles, insurmountable and our awareness is trapped in the normal, everyday physical life. I think most of us get glimpses of transcendence now and then, usually when we least expect it, during moments of peaceful acceptance or hard-found resignation.


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Identity

The process of self-discovery is fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose ourselves, moment-to-moment, like the fleeting recognizable shapes seen in the clouds. The process of discovering our godhood is likewise fluid, elusive and capricious. We find and lose our divinity constantly. This is our mystery.

It seems to me that identity is a made thing, like art, like music, like a spinach soufflé. It’s part performance, done for an audience, often involving improvisation – even plagiarism – and part self-discovery, a continual self-recreation.

I cannot speak to how everyone does it, but I pick and choose between all the possible choices I can imagine and sculpt an identity for myself. Actually I have several identities – the work identity, the home identity, the mom identity, the lover/partner identity, the artist identity. These days all my identities are more similar to each other than they have ever been in my life. I think I am achieving balance.

Finally.

Postmodern society allows for each of us to keep a closet full of identities which we pull out and try on, wearing when and as we see fit. It seems to me that this is both a personal choice and a tendency based on cultural norms. Sociologist Victoria Alexander, in Sociology of the Arts, seems to agree, stating “…because people are more geographically mobile and can choose among a wide variety of consumer items, their identities have become fragmented and based on their consuming choices and lifestyles” (13). Did my grandmother have more than one identity? Perhaps she did, living with an unstable man, balancing a work life and home life, walking carefully on whatever eggshells the moment laid before her. Perhaps the need for multiple identities – or multifaceted identities – comes from having large numbers of people to interact with. Could it be that we need to be one person with that group, another person in this situation, and still another when we’re all alone?

In The Power of Feminist Art, editors Norma Broud and Mary Garrard, discussed identity with Judy Chicago. Chicago stated that, "Identity is multiple… when I started looking at Jewish experience people would say ‘Oh, you’ve stopped being a feminist?’ It’s because they had a very narrow concept of identity… one can be both a woman and a person of color, an American and of African descent, as well as a person of a particular class. One’s identity is larger than singular (72)."

My identity is indeed multiple. I self-identify as a member of a number of overlapping groups. In regards to ethnicity I see myself as predominantly western European (Irish, Scottish); class – this one is a bit fluid – I consider myself upper-middle class because I feel I am very fortunate in life, but I’m not sure if that’s how I’d be placed based on income. I place myself as an artist, a mother, a partnered individual, and a reluctant and somewhat anarchistic American. I have a work identity that oozes capability and responsibility, but I’d really like to chuck it all and be more bohemian, taking up an eclectic gypsy persona as my primary identity.

The clothes would be so much more fun.


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Interstices - Part 5

Took the show down on Saturday. Now all the art is back in our house. I found wall space for all the paintings and photographs, and I filled the corners of the front room with sculptures. Some items (like Glimpses in Time) will have to be rolled or folded up and put away. Even if I had room to hang a 5' x 8' x 8' sculpture in the house, the cats would destroy it... not on purpose, they just love fabrics and hanging fabric is their favorite.

They are pretty tough on window blinds too. They have made cat-sized holes in the blinds on a couple windows. They simply walk through the ends of the blinds (bending the individual plastic strips out of their way) to get to the window sill, and after enough bending and folding even the toughest plastic will crack and break off. I have some 14 ounce canvas that I plan to use to make some roman shades. I figure that it is tough enough to stand up to five cats - it is the same fabric that is used to make commercial tents and awnings (minus the plastic coating that makes it weatherproof).

Anyway, the art show was fun and frustrating. The fun part was that I got to speak to so so many people about art in general, about my art, and about art education. The frustrating part was (and is) that I do not have the wherewithal to just do art, or even do the kind of art I would really love to do. I would love to do really large sculpture work and/or public art. I want to cast Communion Circle in ductile iron or soft steel and set it outside to rust. I want to do some work with oxyacetylene welding. And I would love to create some large clay sculptures.

I sure get tired of saying to myself, "Well, someday..."

However, I really should not complain. After all, I did not even step onto this road until just a couple years ago. You would think that by this time I would have learned patience. Perhaps I am just feeling mortal these days.

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I miss my dad

It is very hard to remember that my father is gone. I keep thinking about things I need to tell him or show him. It is sort of funny, well not really, but I think about telling him things more often now than when he was alive. Used to be, I would go days, if not weeks, without actively thinking about him. Now I think about him all the time.

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Making Paint

Tonight I made my own encaustic paints. I melted some beeswax, ground up some damar resin, and mixed it and the various pigmenting agents in the beeswax.

I ended up with six or seven very interesting colors and a couple not-so-interesting ones. I will use the ones that are not so interesting as base/background colors.

I used commercially prepared ground pigments. I am looking to move away from the paints that have heavy metals in them - even though those colors are the most intense. I do not like working with them because they are so toxic. I may end up working with a totally different color range in order to be more health and ecology focused with my practice.

I eventually want to grind my own pigments. But that will have to wait for a while. I need to figure out if I can grind the pigments without using a binding agent. I think most binding agents would not mix well with the beeswax.

Maybe I will make some more handmade paper and see how these handmade paints work on it...

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