It’s been an embarrassingly long time since I’ve sat down to write anything here, for which I apologize. Of course, the longer the gap the greater the barrier to restarting. So this meta commentary is to serve as the restart. Go!
During the interregnum I’ve been busy with life. We took a weekend (plus a couple of evenings) and painted the bedroom, a nice warm beige that makes you feel like you’re going to sleep and waking up in a cappuccino. We then (finally) painted the upstairs bathroom, a nice soft blue that makes you feel like you’re brushing your teeth in…a room that’s blue. The blue is pretty mellow, partly out of deference to my partner’s desire not to live in A Fun House ™ but also because we’re trying out low-VOC paints and the color spectrum is much more limited. Apparently it’s the nasty chemicals that make you high as your brain cells keel over that give wall paints their lovely bright vibrant colors. Sad but true.
In addition to knocking those two interior jobs off our my seemingly endless list of home improvements, we’re mostly just planning planning planning. We need to install some exhaust fans, replace some light fixtures, make the basement improvements, and replace the second pump on the boiler which bit the dust last month (we’ve been using a space heater in the family room, which is the only area affected). And then, of course, I have big plans for the garden! Number one: make it seem like an actual garden! I suppose all the other plans are just sub-plans, really. With the gardening season comes the food-growing season, which now means the food-stockpiling season, so I’m kind of already looking forward to that. Even though we are still working our way through last year’s frozen and canned stockpile. Which is fine, because even though it seems like the bounty is just around the corner it’s actually a few months away. So there’s plenty of time to use the frozen cherries, squash, and blueberries and use up the jars of apple jelly, right? Right.
On the art front, my workspace has been disrupted by the water problems in the basement, so I’m switching gears while that gets completed. I’ve started a quilt, for which I am (a) using a pattern and (b) following generally accepted principles of quilting with regard to measuring and ironing seams and the like. I say this because ten 12 years ago I made a quilt, knowing absolutely nothing except how to use a sewing machine and pretty much entirely winging it, and I am therefore duly chastised by my partner whenever I refer to this new quilt as my first quilt. The use of modifiers like ‘proper’ or ‘real’ does nothing to help the situation.
So there you have it. Since I seem to be mired in domestic concerns, I am attempting to bring the art in where I can and just roll with it.