I just finished figuring out how to make these. I am very very pleased with myself.

These two are for sale. I have more ideas coming.

I dip myself
  In seawater
Just like
  I dip fabric
Folded, stitched, bound
  In indigo
Over and over

things brought home home from a day at the beach: shells, sand in the car, poetry, a picture

Dream Song 14

By John Berryman

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.   
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,   
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy   
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored   
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no   
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.
Peoples bore me,
literature bores me, especially great literature,   
Henry bores me, with his plights & gripes   
as bad as achilles,

who loves people and valiant art, which bores me.   
And the tranquil hills, & gin, look like a drag   
and somehow a dog
has taken itself & its tail considerably away
into mountains or sea or sky, leaving            
behind: me, wag.

I had almost reached that point of embarrassment about not posting that I was contemplating shutting down the blog and staring over, but it seemed like an over-reaction to a medium absence composed of medical issues and holidays.

Hi! I’m back! I had a teratoma (it was a Mass!! It was a MONSTER MASS!) removed when it twisted some internal stuff and hurt a lot. That was the beginning of December. Then I recuperated on the couch, and then the holidays happened and I took the family and fled to the Florida Keys to be warm and together.

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We got back in time to have more winter weather happen. Last night friends came to see the perfectly timed evening fireworks (my little city is so civilized!) and come back to the house for dinner and foolishness.

Today I am catching up on the things I meant to do earlier, and thinking about what I want to accomplish this year.

I hope you are also entering the new year with hope and enthusiasm –

While I am fond of Halloween for costumes, candy and foolishness, my deep thinking about ghosts never seems to happen until November. Possibly I take the Day of the Dead too far in thinking of November as a month of memorials, or it could be that nature herself conspires to make me think of ghosts and endings.

I’ve been thinking about seeds that are distributed by the wind, especially since so many of them are in the air right now. The ones that leap to mind are, of course, milkweed and dandelions, but also thistles and sycamore and the humble cattail. Their combined insistence that November is about continuing on colors the way I see the leaves falling and the days getting shorter.

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I still have a few dreamboxes for sale. These are the things I make that are hardest to describe. They are perfect wooden boxes, filled with tiny evocative things that I have found, saved, collected or been given. Things that are interesting enough by themselves, but gain mystery? emphasis? when placed together into a small box. My friend Troy described them as dreamboxes and it has stuck.

If you don’t see one that speaks to you, I have made several with specific themes on request, mostly bees, but one with ravens But there are already two with small white bears – one with the north star, and one with an extra bear – you must know someone who needs one?

One reason I wanted access to a lasercutter was to cut things that are fiddly and annoying to cut by hand, and even to cut multiples of them. Things like finely cut tree silhouettes, window muntins, and frames for things are easy to cut from a variety of materials, once you have the line work ready to cut. These things are easy enough to draw as simple line work, but is a process to turn the lines into a thing.

• from here, I create a single outline from all that mess, using a command called Union

• The end result is an outline that goes around the outside of all the grouped line work. This can be used as a cutting line with the laser, or further manipulated (reversed, shrunk, enlarged, etc).

It works the same way for simpler shapes as well – below you can see a tree, a circle turned into small embroidery hoop, and a set of hexagons grouped into a honeycomb shape, already cut out.

I thought I wanted to celebrate turning 59, and look back on a decade of accomplishments. I invited friends to come via Facebook and email and face to face encounters. If anyone asked me if they could bring something, I told them cake, or something to drink.

My friends came through, big time! Above is the table full of different cakes, and the author of two of them. I had a tiny slice of each one – they were all so delicious, in so many different ways. Also we had a tent in case of rain but it was turned out to be a nice place to keep out of the sun, and Al decided a birthday is not an elaborately celebrated birthday without helium for balloons and liquid nitrogen for amusement value.

I talked myself hoarse. I visited with people I see regularly and people I hadn’t seen for a couple of years. I introduced friends to other friends; some introductions I’ve been thinking about for a while(!).

Today I am sitting still and reading birthday cards that are making me laugh, and also are making me grateful, and trying not to talk to anyone.

What did I do over the last decade?

• sheparded/supported two kids through high school graduation, college acceptance, college life and 1.75 graduations (Alice should graduate in the spring. I will still be 59. I’m just anticipating this a little.)
• Rode a first level dressage test, and got better than 50%
• built a boat, launched it, rowed it
• built a boat trailer, and am slowly learning how to back it up
• designed and printed a tarot deck, and sold 100 copies
• sold some artwork through a gallery
• designed and built a city from cardboard – a stage set, but still!
• worked for five different theater groups building things
• made new friends
• kept the old

I’m glad you could join me on this part of the journey, I’m all agog to see what comes next!