Family Memorial July 26, 2011

My family had a memorial for my parents, who both died last year. It was held at my grandma's house in Orange, MA. How strange to be there without them. They had both been cremated, so the day after the memorial, we went to the cemetary for the burial. Got there, no hole. How could the cemetary people forget something like that? Actually, I think my dad would have found it pretty funny. So while we are waiting for a time when my siblings and I can reschedule the burial, my parents are biding their time on the mantel. They look pretty swell in the boxes I made, with the male and female cardinals facing each other. I imagine them being happy together.

Words of the Day

chaffered

ecclectic

hard-boiled

penchant

Little book with Champagne tops.

A funny little tunnel book. It took me way too much time becausee I fussed over everything too much. I am determined to be more spontaneous.

This book started as a christmas present for my niece's daughter. I thought I could finish it in a few hours, since it is only a few pages, but indeed it took forever. It was a lot of fun to make a soft book, and I enjoyed the freeform sewing, although my vintage machine circa 1973 gave me some technical challenges. I would do several things differently next time, including making sure the images matched up at the center of the pages.
I still need to put in a credit for the words by George Harrison. It has given me and my husband quite a chuckle during these trying dark days, when I announce that I need to read my book.
This might be the first installment of my "Songs for Spontaneous Singing" series.

For Christmas I made Jay a small book about his collection of Marimekko shirts. He has 10 of them, all different color combinations. I painted the fabric covers to look like the hand screened shirt fabric.

The inside pages are a double accordian with reversed cutouts. The images are hand drawn and painted with gouache. I need to make a slipcase for it, and then I will enter it into a show on miniature books. It is slightly too large, being 5 1/4" high, a little above the 5" speicifications, but I hope it will slip by.

This was a fun project- a knitted chain link necklace. Now this has potential, and is super easy to make! Thanks to antelopebaby for the pattern.

Michael deMeng Workshop, the secret keeper.
A terrific workshop, just the right size. My surprise and pleasure to reconnect with a friend from the past, Lisa, and to connect with a new friend, Elizabeth.
Having taken so many workshops, I went without expectations of creating a masterpiece, but with the desire to try every technique. Amazing to see what everyone came up with. I learned techniques for attaching with adhesives, wire, and clay, texturizing with molding material (dap), and layering paint with acrylic washes to achieve color depth. I was awake in the night processing it all and transforming projects in my mind. I hope I will get to it in real life.

The black cloud on my mind has finally disolved, leaving me with sun and energy. How did it happen? I don't know, it's that time of life ( which for me could be any time). My life lately has been filled with long trips and long stays away from home, stressful working situations, stressful family situations, and no time to process any of it. I had signed up a while ago for a workshop called the Amazing Dremel, and although I was dying to know how to use it, I could not have been more challenged to make myself spend my only free weekend in 2 months at a 2 day workshop. But in fact, it was just what I needed.
One thing I loved about the workshop was the individuality of it. Although 12 of us were sitting around a large table, I felt totally absorbed and separate in what I was doing. Wearing safety glasses, a breathing mask, and ear plugs may have had a small part in that. But there was plenty of together time and sharing, during the informative demos, the sunny lunch on the steps, and Jill's sharing of her beautiful books.
Jill took the mystery out of the assorted strange looking bits in our box, giving us clear tips for their use, but also giving us permission to try all of them in any way we wanted. I definitely came away with a desire to use my dremel again. Right now I'm looking at those ugly plain switch plates on my walls, and wondering which bits will work best on them.
Top to bottom: mirror, wood, ceramic tile, metal, glass

My obsession with woodpiles spawned this handmade book. I was trying to capture the rise and fall of the pile with the seasons. I will submit it for the bookarts show in May.

barn and wood

barn and wood
Originally uploaded by pizza on earth

A sunny day in winter is a good day to load wood.
I enjoy stacking wood in the summer and fall, and I don't mind loading it into the carts and bringing it to the pizza hut and the house when it is a day like today, sunny and mild. Unfortunately, we also need to load wood when it is below zero and the wind is fierce. That is the hard reality of wood management.

Musque de Provence

Musque de Provence, originally uploaded by pizza on earth.

The beautiful specimen pumpkin.

Musque de Provence

pumpkin innards 2, originally uploaded by pizza on earth.

We had some spectacular pumpkins last summer that grew along the edge of our stone wall terrace. At first, the plants just kind of trailed along the top of the wall, but by the end of the summer, the vines had completely taken over, spilling over the wall and trailing into the yard below. Some of them were 20 feet long by the time we ripped them out in the fall. The beautiful pumpkin, Musque de Provence, are deeply ribbed, with huge lobes of dark green skin. We've kept them in the hallway, and now they have turned a beautiful russet color. Time to open them up! For our first meal, J made pumpkin risotto and cubed up the rest for the freezer. Of course that was just a quarter of one of the 25 pound babies. The other quarters have been given away to other lucky foodie friends. And the largest one is still the conversation piece of the hallway.

I've never really made any resolutions- I think it's silly. But because my life has changed so drastically in the last month, I want to make some daily changes. First, I need to post more often. And I need to attach stuff to my posts, like sketches. I need to draw every day, and keep a sketchbook. I need to explore and resolve the crazy feelings I have towards family, friends, and loved ones. I think that's it.
Guilt, resentment, expectations, judgement. These are the opportunities I have chosen for the exploration.
I'll get started tomorrow...

Today is our first snow of the season. November turned out to be a glorious month, warm and sunny most days. We've been walking up Mount Philo almost every day for weeks, and it gives J and I a time to talk without other distractions. Before Thanksgiving, we talked about the upcoming meal. Now we talk about our planned dinner parties, and soon, it will be all about the Christmas dinner meal. I can't be excited about everything I put in my mouth but I'm trying to be interested. I go back and forth between being excited about the holidays and finding some new interest, and being totally vacant, browsing blogs that only make me feel worse about how little i'm accomplishing.
The other day, I decided to put together a new resume with my most recent work on it. I started looking at sports bras on the web, and found that an amazing number of my designs are not only still available, but have been named top sellers at retail. I opened Lucky magazine, and two of my designs are featured in a full page ad for my former employer. Even more funny, yesterday while shopping at Gap body in a huge mall, I came across two of my designs now being sold through that former employer to the Gap. Crazy, I say, but it made me proud.
Even with that boot up, I'm still having trouble getting out of bed. Maybe tomorrow will be better.

Jay and I just came back from the field up the street where Dave now farms, with a nice head of cauliflower and a bunch of turnips. I am feeling blue, frozen by the loss of my sweet work contract. The mud sticks to my sneakers, reminding me that I have totally forgotten how to dress for the field. Tonight we will have curried cauliflower with lamb shanks, and tomorrow turnip something or other.
It's been several years since we've farmed. This year we planted a few things in Grampy's garden, where our first little greenhouse used to be. Because of the weather and blight, we ended up with some lame kale, but great cilantro and parsley. But today, walking out in the field, I felt a loss greater than my own. We've lost a huge part of our lives, on the pretense of being too busy and/ or too old. Although we've filled it with other food related obsessions, the authenticity of harvesting field to table cannot be replaced.
I've often thought of what a crazy life I've been leading, spending hours at the airport and on a plane every other week, and how unreal and unpleasant it had become. But what I will miss is the brain excersize, and the pleasant warm feeling of a final design that works. Satisfaction, I think that is called. Where will it come from now?

I could not remember my password after 2 years, but easily remedied. I'm glad to have a new one, and a new farm life to write about, since this is my second day of "retirement". But I must respond to the tag:

4 jobs I've had:
1. sports bra designer
2. children's apparel patternmaker
3. dude ranch waitress
4. fabric store clerk

4 movies I could watch over and over
1. The Red Violin
2. Every Christmas movie ever made
3. French Kiss
4. Les Visiteurs

4 TV shows I love
1. Biggest Loser ( I don't know why)
2. Rocky and Bullwinkle
3. The Avengers
4. All in the Family
( I have only watched the food network for the last 10 years)

4 Places I've vacationed
1. Dordogne
2. Burgundy
3. Alsace
4. Florida

4 of my favorite dishes
1. mushroom cappuccino
2. eggs any way
3. sushi
4. whatever Jay cooked last night

4 sites I visit daily
1. Chocolate and Zucchini
2. the barn to feed the chickens
3. the mailbox ( that would be the metal one on the street)
4. the supermarket

4 places I would rather be right now
1. France
2. Hawaii ( never been)
3. Amsterdam
4. Italy

I don't know any bloggers except those who have already been tagged.

Can it be over a year? I'm hoping that my dedicated reader(s)( Judy)haven't just crossed me off. I have stored up lots of trash to rehash, and I plan to do it right here at farm day.
A friend of mine died recently from cancer. I didn't realize how very bad off she was until she entered a respite house. Her oldest son used to be Jordan's best friend, but since they don't play much any more, I hadn't really kept in touch with her. At her memorial service, I was impressed with how happy she had always made everyone feel. It made me double my efforts to keep life in perspective and to be a positive force at all times. The other thing that struck me at the memorial service was how bad the minister was at this sort of thing, and that like all other things in life, you still have to spend some time choosing your representation, even if you're dead. Then again, at that point I suppose it doesn't matter.
My effort to be positve at all times has been thwarted, as you can see. And my effort to keep things in perspective has also been messed up by goings on at work. It's true that you know when you've hit bottom, when the only light you can see is way up beyond your reach.

Halloween. Along with Meg, I was also thinking of my favorite costume, and I came up with 2 favs from long ago- first was the japanese woman costume that my Dad made for me on the ancient old sewing machine, before I could even sew myself. The fabric was black with huge gold polka dots, and the kimono had giant wide sleeves. I don't remember anything else about it but I'm sure it was cool. The second costume I remember from childhood was the soda bottle costume. My friend and I were bottles of Sprite. This was when they had those funny flip top lids that looked like baseball caps, so we wore green baseball caps, and I believe we wore them backwards. Could we have started the trend? That was 1966 or 67, I think.
When I first came to work here, 10 years ago, we used to have a contest between departments for the best costume. Of course, R&D won most often until we got a little too intellectual. The year we lost, our theme was "women in art". We blew up prints of famous paintings with women in them and cut out the faces to be replaced with our own. I of course was the dour woman in American Gothic. My friend Margaret was perfect as Andy's Marilyn. One of our crew was the curator and guided the visitors through the gallery, but alas, the building maintenance crew showed us up by dressing as a country band with Mike dressed as Dolly Parton. You can only imagine how much more interesting that was. The performance aspect of the costume contest was the most fun for everyone I think, and another alas, the contest hasn't been the same for several years. Our last R&D performance was as pieces of cake, where we all ran in, formed a giant layer cake and lit a center candle (Al) while singing Happy Anniversary. That year coincided with the 20th anniversary of the company. Tomorrow is the last day of work for more than 100 employees here in Vermont. It will be a very sad day.

The Friday after the terrorist attack, the company asked us all to spend a moment of silence and remembrance together in the parking lot. It was a warm, sunny day. We straggled out of the building very quietly and waited for a leader. I remember looking around at the faces of a lot of people that I don't really know, but feeling warmly connected just because we worked in the same building. I thought how at their last moments, the WTC victims depended on each other, reached out to each other, and hopefully found some comfort in being together, not alone. I read now the intensely personal stories of survivors, and how they forged relationships with their coworkers and strangers. It gives me chills.

TV time. Last week, we frantically searched for a TV that could get any kind of reception, since our work TV's are really only for video use. Finally, just as the 2nd tower disolved into itself, someone found a wire coat hanger (you'd think in a place that's all about clothes that we would have a coat hanger!) and we were able to get a local station. The images were fuzzy and black and white, but just as terrible as the scene played back when I got home. The TV was moved into the common break room, which was packed with people all day Tuesday and off and on Wednesday. By Thursday, there were just 8 or 9 people gathered around the screen on their break time. On Monday, the TV was on when I came in in the morning, but no one was watching. At 1:00 when I came back from the gym, the soap operas were on. This morning, the screen was dark. At home, I still can't help but watch the images, and I am still filled with disbelief. I don't want to think about retaliation. There is no way that punishment could be exacted.
I really love the "quilt"idea that Meg wrote about. I think though that a lot of people who lost people would need to have help setting up their square.