The Days of Day

Working full time again is better than I thought -- which actually says a lot -- and worse, too.  The beautiful outcome, either way, is that my amazing family and I keep finding ways to show our love for each other.  The love is rarely buried by  piles of things to do, the laughter is rarely delayed by papers to grade, the hugs are rarely put off by errands.  In fact, one morning, this was what I found on my dashboard... a surprise left there by my sweet Tom (husband).  At this moment, weeks later, the flower is wilted and covered in dust, but the card is still there, as is the flower husk. This  photo shows Jackson's creative viewing and Tom's attentive photography.  We see each other.  We recognize each other. And this is a photo of a pillow I made this summer, a gift to the family for the remodeled guest room/boys' room/closet space upstairs in the peak of our sweet little Cape in Falls Church.  I make stuff, my boys share stories and idea...

One night I had a dream where I made a new friend named Johnny Port Aransas.  I woke up laughing because he was such a friendly fellow with such a fabulous name and he came from my imagination... while I was SLEEPING!  So, that day my family and I went to the garden store and purchased a beautiful seven-year old October Glory Maple tree to plant in our front yard.  We decided to name him Johnny Port Aransas, of course.  The art that follows is in honor of that dream and all dreams brought to us by our imaginations that so want to show us all the emotions we have available to us, in this case humor and awe.  It's also in honor of that day spent tromping through the garden store with three of my best people.

 So much of the art I make has been about endurance and legacy, usefulness and cleanability.  I've carved wood so the words don't wear away, I've varnished indoor pieces with outdoor polyurethane so they can be washed often, I've considered the quotes that are worthy of sticking around. And then... I had this idea to make a summer blouse out of an old pillowcase.  When I say old I mean antique... someone embroidered on this dainty thing.  And when I bought it at the Citywide Garage sale in Austin last summer it smelled like LOTS of bleach. I spent several hours making this blouse.  I first realized my hips are actually wider in reality than they are in my mind, so I had to cut triangles out of that cool green fabric and add it to the sides to make the hip area bigger.  Then, I had to figure out how I wanted to actually keep it on my body.  After a little scrounging around in the fabric drawers I found a couple of antique tea napkins. They worked GR...

  This is Ruby blue.  She and I helped create each other a few months back.  The voice of inSpiration was loud in my ears as I cut and sewed and stuffed, so really there were three of us there: me, Ruby, and the Spirit that feeds all our souls.   So, for several months, she's hung on the walls of our house suspiciously not collecting any dust!  Even when we replaced our hard-wood floors she stayed fresh.  So, I had to ask myself, how could that BE?  Is someone wiping her down?  It isn't me and it's not likely that someone else is doing it considering that in our happily busy house cereal milk often stays on the table until it's hard and shiny.  The answer is clear, she's sneaking out at night to go for a fly.  Only cool, night wind could keep her hair so fluffy and her dress so polished.  Only adventures could make her eyes sparkle that much! But, the realization that Ruby is sneaking out to fly brings me some serious responsibil...

Sometimes the breath of inSpiration comes in the form of the most improbable and simply silly scenes. This time it was a singing/dancing sequence from the Meryl Streep Mamma Mia! movie. My husband and I started the movie the other night after several days of working hard at keeping all the balls in the air and rotating gracefully. We plopped down on the sofa with very serious faces and sat through the first fifteen minutes convinced that the movie was the most ridiculous thing we'd ever seen. The singing was off track with the lips, the energy from the actors was this constant high buzz that never dropped to allow us time to engage, and the background was, at one point, the cheesy background of a movie playing behind a moving car. Exhaustion, more than anything else, kept us tied to the screen, both of us entirely too tired to make a different decision. At one point we each looked at each other silently questioning if it was too early to just go to bed. And then came the ...

Before you listen to the podcast, scroll down and turn off the music first! This is an experiment to learn how to embed podcasts from one blog host site into THIS blog! This podcast is about technology in education... maybe not of interest to anyone who reads this. Podcast Powered By Podbean

I teach English 9 honors class in a room where each student has a computer on his or her desk.  This experience has caused a fascinating change in thinking for me.  In fact, if I prioritize my time differently I could write a thousand blog entries all about going back into the classroom.  But for today I want to write about how I see technology differently than my students. There is always a generational divide.  For some generations the divide was best defined by music and mores.  Now, there's another divide. Imagine that the world of technology is like a backyard.  My generation has gotten to know that yard as each individual blade of grass popped up.  My first encounter with a computer was this dark screen that I typed commands into and eventually made the screen go from black to flashing colored letters that spelled my name in a very blocky way.  Years later I got to know WordPerfect and dot-matrix printers.  Then a dial-up internet t...

2011 is off to a running start in my very zippetydodah studio. InSpiration nabbed me without asking for a ransom over the Christmas holidays.  I saw a woman's very tidy creation of a stationery caddy and it got my brain whirling with the possibilities.  I've been doodling and reading and jotting down notes ever since. The whirlwind of the holidays -- the beautiful company, the bitter sweet passing of a well-loved and good-at-loving dog, the meals, the gift-wrap, the bags and bags of packaging to recycle -- has me thinking of tidy and tiny art that captures the joy of giving generously without the mall runs and amazon hunts.  I'm dreaming of gifts that keep on giving, blessings that keep on blessing... you know... it only takes a spark... So, the groovy angel friends that hang on walls have  downsized, minimized, flattenized (yep, new word). And then, they are getting colorized and stickified and stamped. Art with a capital A?  Maybe not so much.  Bu...

One of my new favorite blogs is called The Improvised Life and today's posting offered as a spiritual gift a benediction from a man named Neil Gaiman.  Here's part of it: "I hope that you make something that didn't exist before you made it." I love that. Yesterday I had a wonderful day teaching, a day where everything I believe to be true about myself as a teacher was affirmed and appreciated. I was ON.  I moved around the room pointing at kids who enthusiastically shared their thoughts.  We all laughed together and got serious together.  Brains opened up.  The days aren't all like that.  But this one was a sacred day of tapping into potential and energy all at the same time. And I came home jazzed.  I played.  I helped with homework.  I made a delicious dinner. And then, after being up and on for fourteen hours, I collapsed in a frazzled heap of depleted muscle fibers. Ordinarily, that feeling would call for a long lounge on...

Well, the Winter break has plummeted to a close.  I finally gave my Dad his Henry (see photos) and so now I can introduce him to the world.  Henry, World.  World, Henry. This morning the kids went back to school and Tom went back to work.  I go back tomorrow.  In the meantime, there are pound cake crumbs on the floor, tired Christmas decorations on nearly every surface, sploobs of dried mud on the floor, and a mommy who wants nothing more than to go downstairs and play video games for a while.  Again, Good Girl Day urges me to put on the yellow plastic gloves and tackle the cakey, sticky blue toothpaste on the side of the bathroom sink.  Good Girl Day urgently points out that tomorrow I go back to work and tonight is wrestling practice.  That vegetable soup isn't going to make itself.  Company comes on Friday afternoon!  The curtain rods need hanging in our bedroom since the old ones ripped holes out of the wall on Christmas morning! ...