Category: family life

new hamster

January 16, 2008

I am beat from working outside in the outrageous windy cold, lifting water buckets (I still love electric water buckets) and spending hours on homey trivia. I realized I’d been in the car nearly two hours for a grand total of 20 miles, dropping off, stopping, picking up, etc.

We got a new hamster. Bringing the total in the house to two, and there it shall stay. The new one is piebald dark gray and white, and we are in the process of naming him. They can’t live together, so we have a second tank and water bottle and wheel. He is fairly calm, although he bit me in the store and Alice before bed. We’ll have him about as tame as Pumpkin eventually.

I made nothing today. I’ll do it tomorrow.

week 2 leaves tucked in

January 13, 2008


week 2 leaves tucked in
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I have  a lot of fabrics that have TIF Challenge colors all over them trying to get the colors etter, or seeing how hard and long to press, or just to see what the next one looks like. So I used some of these to make this weeks object. I realized I like it better in this orientation – I made it horizontally. I was thinking about this postcard from last year:


May 26
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Alice finished a hat for a doll.


dolly hat

I made the doll before she was born, but couldn’t find hair I liked. Alice carried her around a lot when she was one and two years old, and has revisited her since. She persuaded me to put some tibetan lamb on her head for hair, and captured her back to her room. Later that week, Alice insisted on learning to sew doll clothes, so I set her up with some stretchy stuff and she made leggings/pants and shirts, stole some socks from another doll, and started on this hat last week.

Note the band of purling as decoration, the pointy top, the i-cord finish and tassel. oop – I have to take another picture to properly show off all the details.

grumpy socks, joyful socks, soldering lessons

January 6, 2008

STR first sock as far as I got
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

The Other Kate told me to pack up these bad puppies and send them to
her. So I did. They are gone. I feel much lighter and happier, at
least in the knitting department, and I have been roaring along on these, which are making me happy. The yarn is a silk/merino single ply which is fabulously smooth but has no spring and is kind of splitty. The pattern is one I made up, and continue to make up as I go along. They are toe up even though I prefer top down because I have one more skein of yarn and I will need 1/2 for each sock, and I want to Use it All Up.


joyful socks
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Raising kids, you never know exactly what milestone is going to be big. Alice has been growing smarter and stronger pretty fast over the last couple months, and she has taken up knitting, teaching herself how to go back and forth, and learning how to use dpns to go around in circles, figuring out decreases… That was big, but she kind of snuck it past me.

The one that flattened me today was soldering lessons. She and Al, sharing the same great thought, each bought a robot kit for the other for Christmas, to share. So there are two different purple robot kits ready to go. They started one yesterday and realized there was a fair amount of soldering involved, and we decided to call in Dr Bill. Because Al is the ugliest solderer ever. Ever, and still have the object work, and sometimes it doesn’t, on account of bad soldering. So Bill came over this afternoon with family in tow, and he carefully showed Alice and Aerin how to do it properly, and they did nicely, and then floated off to play with their virtual cousin. Bill tried to help Al too, but it didn’t take.
So both girls can solder now, and put together robot kits. Alice still needs help and oversight, but Aerin can start working on the backlog we have lying around the house. After she finishes her T-Rex automaton.

We have good lives.

2007 intentions; the scorecard

December 31, 2007

At the beginning of last year I wrote a short list of things I intended to do over the year. It wasn’t the usual list of lose weight, stop spending money, eat right, but instead a list of things I thought would make me a happier and better person if I managed to keep them in mind. I gave up on resolutions a while ago, and tend to examine my life in Feb to see if anything’s changed.

It came out to a list of six things:

  1. make a fabric postcard every day
  2. talk to friends more, every couple of days
  3. knit all the socks from the Blue Moon Sock Club, when they come in
  4. call my mother more, at least every other day
  5. ride the new bike when the weather is above 45 degrees
  6. ride horses whenever the opportunity presents itself, no sloping
    off after cleaning stalls just because you can’t face a particular
    horse or don’t quite feel like it


So:

postcards? check. I learned a lot about exercising my creativity, and why exactly I’ve been buying all that
cool stuff that is cluttering up my workroom and all kinds of things. I am thinking of a more detailed report on the postcards later.

Talk to friends? mixed. I can always visit with people I like more, I think I improved it some but there’s room for more talking,

knit Blue Moon Sock of the Month? failed, almost utterly. I started the first pair and they made me grumpy and unhappy and I’ve turned the heel and failed the cabling exercise on the cuff and now I have to frog them and do it better and at the moment I hate them. Then I kept from starting any of the subsequent ones because I was holding the first over my own head in a "finish your vegetables first" kind of way. (yeesh – mixed metaphors and all, that is an UGLY sentence!) So even though I kind of want to knit the last two, I haven’t started them yet. And I stopped knitting until I stepped away from the Blue Moon fibers entirely and got something that spoke to me and knit my own pattern the way I like. I finished them just before Christmas but haven’t managed to post them yet. My conclusion? I am not a knit along kind of soul.  I am OK with patterns in books but better with a recipe I can pull out of my head and follow.

call your mother? needs improvement. say no more.

ride your bike? I could do a lot more of this. Whenever I do ride, it makes me happy. I don’t ride around town for errands because I hate dealing with the traffic at three intersections that I have to go through. I keep thinking there have to be better ways, but I’ve ridden all over town and it is just easier to walk for most of the errands in the middle. I could try to use the bike for grocery shopping. Maybe that could make an intention for next year.

Ride horses?  did great while I had a barn with an indoor ring and horses I liked. When I got busted back to a horse that made me ache, I stopped. Stopped over the summer. Restarted at two barns in the fall but chose the one with no sheltered riding for the winter, which makes the whole ride all year thing kind of difficult. I may need to think about how intent I am on riding, and what exactly I want to get out of it.

On the whole? one rousing success, one abject failure (with introspection) and 4 mixed, with some excuses.  I can either add them onto the list for next year, or go for a new list from scratch. I think my hope for the intentions is that new habits would become an integral part of what I do, so I could think about adding other things to the list in the future. Although some were just tests, to see if the thing itself was fun (a sock of the month club – apparently not fun for me) or uplifting or energizing. Or spreading joy. Whatever.   

I’ll work on the set of intentions for 2008, and post them when the year has changed.

happy feet?

December 18, 2007


Dec 18
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I’ve been catching myself dancing in the kitchen. Al looked at me and asked if I was happy. I didn’t think I was, but apparently my body is happy. It jumps and spins and shuffles through the kitchen, doing plies and demi-kicks and little leaps. I couldn’t begin to tell you what this is about.

This postcard is more of my muse’s tiny strips, this time with a big white block in it. The part to the left of the block is vertical strips with the ragged edges showing, but it is hard to see in the photo.

I had a great visit with two women after yoga today.  One is new to me, one I found again after losing track of her for six months. It was very nice – tea, laughter, life stories… exactly what I wanted.

Circus is daunting. I can climb, but I get worried about being too high and having my arms give out. I can do ugly straddles and splits, and a foot lock, but my strength to weight ratio is still not so good. I am working on both halves of that – decreasing weight, increasing strength – with what feels like limited success. And yet, I can do what I couldn’t six months ago. Probably I need to take a longer view.

Alice had the end Holiday Solstice concert for her school. The Montessori school is mostly a pre-school, with two smallish class rooms of grades 1-3 and 4-6. The concert had a range of songs mostly sung and shouted by tiny adorable children torn between waving to their parents and staring at all the rest of the strange adults in the room. They sang. They signed Twinkle. They brought down the house.

The Upper El class sat primly at the back, taller than anyone else, with Alice in the middle singing where she knew the words, smiling gamely at the songs many kids had been singing for years. I was proud of her. Al and Aerin came and cheered her on too, just as I promised. That is what families do. When someone is competing or performing, the rest go along to cheer them on. It is part of the deal. Alice hadn’t experienced this end of the deal much – I think she liked it.

snow day

December 3, 2007


Dec 3
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

While there are many snowflake images out on the web, most are copyrighted. This is a real electron micrograph of a snowflake in false color, courtesy of the US Department of Agriculture and therefor in the public domain. I printed it out onto silk and stuck it to a patchy white background. It is a weather report for the day. Snow, freezing rain, more snow on top, and panic in the streets. The first snow day of the year. Really they give us the first snow storm off just to ease the freak-out factor, I think, because after this their standards for canceling get stricter.

So the girls had the day off, and Aerin even forgave me for looking at the only tv station that utterly failed to post any cancellations and waking her up and shoving her out the door to catch a bus that was not going to come. Alice made a gingerbread house with the next door neighbor, another neighbor came over for costuming and stayed for lunch, gingerbread house eating and sledding, Aerin went out and found some people sledding and joined them until her jeans were sopping wet and her legs were blue and it was dark out. It was a pretty gratifying day.

unfinished?

November 28, 2007


Nov 28
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

I started to trim the threads off this in between the small bright circles and the bigger darker circles, and I decided to leave them. I like that I can see the order I made the circles, and follow my own train of thought.  There are two different brown velvets. I like the way they play off each other, and show off the patchiness of the background.

In the old Threads magazines I read a piece from a woman who was chastised for putting a patch on a patch, on her jeans. A subsequent letter writer quoted her grandmother saying "patch by patch is neighborly, patch on patch is beggarly." The only reason I mention this is because I added two new patches to the knees of Alice’s jeans over the weekend.

Right_2Left_2

There were two patches on each knee, and I added a Laurel Burch cat on each knee to hold down the older patches. Alice is delighted. She still fits the jeans (from two years ago – this child grows verrry slowly) and she was missing them. I think I am feeling defensive about it. The jeans are fine, except for the places her knobby knees have rent the fabric. I have made them work for her, to her delight, for another couple months. The knees will blow out again before she outgrows them, I’m sure… unless she has a sudden growth spurt. Isn’t patch on patch just careful? reusing? good for the earth? decorative even? just asking.

I’ve been working steadily on the new machine for the last couple days, and I owe Al some gratitude cake, or a pan full of brownies. It works like a champ, the applications are the ones I recognize and have the right reactions for, the sound works, the screen is big and lovely, and the keyboard is so cute I can hardly stand it. I might get smitten with mac-love later, but really at the moment I am happy to be able to do what I want and need. Like writing this, posting pictures and checking on email. While listening to Laurie Anderson sing. The house smells of brownies for the bake sale tomorrow. I am well fed. I have finally warmed up. I rode a new horse today. My life is very very good.

leaves that were green

November 6, 2007


Nov 6
Originally uploaded by Dancing Crow.

Like I said before, I think of fall containing leaves with bright colors, while brown is for later, or trees that aren’t really trying. But, once the leaves drop, they turn brown, frequently a nice color and with a lovely crunch and smell. I can’t quite quilt the smell, or the crunch, but I think I did get the color.

Alice is working on turning a lump of rock into a bear shaped lump of rock. This entails a fair amount of sanding and rasping and results in a pretty good pile of dust.


amorphous bear

I think she’s been imbibing Andy Goldsworthy as well, because this is what showed up on the camera:


Alice’s spirals

In family circus, Al and I both managed a (painful and not really graceful, but a milestone) move called a Hip Key in fabric. We have documentation:

Al_hip_key_1
I_can_hip_key

Al was so cute: he kept his toes pointed through the whole thing…

gratitude cake gratitude

October 16, 2007

I don’t say much about Al.

He’s a fixture, a key part of life, always there when I need him…

He’s also my sysadmin. When the computer went blooie yesterday, he spent all night working on it, and restored it to health. In this family, we pay debts of gratitude with cake. Al does the taxes, I make a cake. Al clears the driveway after a particularly heavy snowfall, I bake a cake. Al gives others financial advice, they make him a cake.

This is gratitude cake:
Gratitude_cake_1

A Lazy Daisy cake with lots (and lots and lots) of whipped cream.

Which must make this Cake Gratitude:
Gratitude_1

Thank you dear.