the scent of water

The woodpile

This is my woodpile.  I took a photo of it.  I think the woodpile is kind of pretty.

Not as pretty as the fake peony sitting on top of my television,

but prettier than these crazy peeps.  Whoever they may be.

Work in Progress

I wanted to wait until I had finished this blanket before I showed you, but apparently not enough to actually wait. This is another cot sized blanket for a wee girl named Gracie. Next time (and despite my protesting tendons there will be a next time), I'm doing a ripple.  I'm only a few years behind the trend. One shouldn't rush one's crocheting decisions.

Daydream believer

For a few short months I have time to daydream. I got sick, again, and this time a course of antibiotics and a week in bed wasn't enough to fix anything. Months later, and an hour spent in the grocery store is a big accomplishment for my day.  Three hours in a museum is like running a marathon.  It's okay. Things are getting better. It's kind of a gift, actually.

A gift because out of these daydreams has come the desire to draw (I am up to drawing a parrot - you start with a circle for the eye), the interest in trying new things for no other reason than to try them, a long lost affinity for the ridiculous that I half believed I would never see again. It's given me time to look at the underbelly of doubt I have been hiding about what I am doing and why I am doing it. 

In a couple of months I return to my Master's degree, if I don't run off to art school before then. It's a temptation. But if I do go back, I go back as someone who will take what she is doing very seriously, and not seriously at all.  I don't know how to explain it better than that.  I hope to keep my capacity for daydreaming and, rather than see it as an indulgence, to see it as as a source of the imagination, a place (to paraphrase John Updike) for the spirit to rest. Life's hard enough without willfully leaving out the best parts.

To put all that another way: I have enough. I happen to be alive. End of discussion. - Maira Kalman

Reason #47 why I should have paid attention in Maths class.

He who refuses to do arithmetic is doomed to talk nonsense. ~ John McCarthy

Somebody has a new labeller, not enough to do, and a rather vocal inner 8 year old. 

After I went through all non-human items in my house (do you know how difficult it is to label a blow-fly?), I tried labelling my children, but they were against it. Teenagers. Pfft.

 

Giving it a go.

When my son was a small boy and out shopping with his Grandma, he asked her to buy him a particularly bright and shiny toy he had seen on the shelves. His Grandma replied that she didn't have enough money for it, to which he responded that, perhaps not, but she did have a card. She could use that. Grandma tried to explain that the card didn't have enough money either, but an exasperated Nathan just shrugged his shoulders and said, "Give it a go, Gran. Just give it a go."

I do love to make things, but I've always thought that the people who design the patterns I make things from were the really clever ones. I've been signed up to Knitty's contributor emails for a couple of years in the vague hope that one day I would wake up with enough clevers to be able to design something from scratch myself. As patient as I have been, this has yet to happen. I know.  I can't believe it either.

So, my almost-half-year resolution is to make up something, anything, for their next winter issue. A small thing. Gloves, or a hat, perhaps a scarf.  A Christmas gift. Maybe.  I have no idea.

Because, the thing is, the older we get, the more stuck in our ways we become, the less able we are to see alternate points of view. Or alternate anythings. It's not that I have any grand plan on morphing into a knitwear designer, it's that new things are good for our brain, our soul, our mojo. And my mojo needs all the help it can get. 

 

Landscape

The Auckland Harbour Bridge, on a light traffic day. I am so used to taking short depth of field close-up photos, that I sometimes forget there is a broader view.

Do you ever lose sight of yourself that way sometimes?  Too busy zooming in on the details of this mistake or that failure, the thing you should have said or maybe shouldn't have, the character flaw, the physical flaw, the thousand daily ways we reveal ourselves to be less than perfect, to take a step back and look at the wide shot? Or, conversely, focussing on the one angle that looks okay and blurring the messy background that might reveal a more honest story?

When I look at my life in landscape, I have a great deal more compassion for myself.  I fall down. I take wrong turns. I look at the short view instead of the longer journey. Day to day, it can seem like I mess up a lot, but I keep trying. As many circles as I turn, one or other of these feet keeps lifting itself up and putting itself back down in front of the other.

Bet yours does too. High five, comrade.

Just because

To love beauty is to see light. ~ Victor Hugo

White Chocolate Raspberry Mud Cake

I found the camera downloading thingy, in a place I had looked at least three times previously.  This is the evidence I needed to prove that a gremlin is messing with my head.

So, two weeks after the event, here are pictures of Iona's birthday cake. She is 12. That would be my youngest child. Insert favourite exclamation of shock and disbelief here. She didn't get the five different flavours she had previously refused to choose between, but managed to narrow it down to a white chocolate rasberry mud cake from Divine Cupcakes.  It's probably my favourite baking book.

The birthday girl also specified white icing with yellow roses.  A fine choice.

It didn't matter if you wanted a small piece or a gigantic piece, the only pieces allowed were exactly the size to accommodate one rose.  Don't ask me why. She insisted.

It was very good, incredibly rich, enamel strippingly sweet. And now I must go on a diet for the rest of my natural life.

Learning to draw

First drawing lesson complete. A straight copying exercise to determine at which level I should complete lessons for the rest of the book.  I sailed straight through to level 3, which came close to impressing me until I remembered that this is an instruction guide for children and all it means is that I can copy better than your average 5 year old. 

I figure if I practise regularly, it'll only be a decade or two until I can create the kind of art that lives inside my head. The kind of art that makes me feel like I feel when I look at this Brian Kershisnik painting (Women Carrying Houses). Ever since I was very young I have painted things in the privacy of my imagination, one of those automatic things you do and never stop to wonder if it maybe means something. If maybe not everyone does that.

I don't know if they do or if they don't, but I do know that for me it does mean something. For starters, that I have a hell of a lot of learning to do.

 

Finished: redux

I admit defeat. Without my camera downloader thingy, I can't get a good shot of this blanket. Lord knows, I tried.

I did put a border around it though. Which, cleverly, you can't see in the photo. It does make the whole thing look better and it only took me four goes to get it looking half okay. There is probably something wrong with someone who's only area of persistence in life is handcraft. Irrelevant Obsession Disorder.

And to quote something I read on Facebook this morning: What matters most in life isn't how much money you have, it's about quotes and stuff that tell you what life is really about. And here is a cat.