Process

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Mary Beth Frezon

I am trying to distract myself a little tonight, and decided to check out some of the folks on my page of links. Bloggers go on hiatus, go do something else for awhile, I go do something else for awhile… so it’s nice to pull up a chair and visit someone’s blog and catch up with what they’ve been doing. That’s how I ended up looking and Dan Gregory’s site and checking out some recent entries including this one entitled “Vinnie’s balls“.

It’s solidly in the “why you should just get over it and do the work” camp but with lots of good insight. Dan really tells just how looking at these works close up made an impact on him personally. Great stuff.

I hope to do it better in time. I myself am very far from satisfied with this but, well, getting better must come through doing it and through trying. – Vincent van Gogh

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Despite it all

Posted on January 26, 2014 by Mary Beth Frezon

If I have a houseplant, I tend to stick it out in the front garden for the summer and hope for the best. I try to remember to water it if needed and mostly try to remember to bring it in when frost returns. I stuck this little christmas cactus in the front sewing room and watered it when I remembered. It’s cold in there.

So, despite it all:

touch christmas cactus christmas cactus

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Happy 30th, Mac!

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Mary Beth Frezon

Last night there were so many news stories and articles about the 30th anniversary of the Macintosh computer, with some additional talk about the historic 1984 Mac Superbowl ad (why 1984 won’t be like “1984”)

(I’ll confess I watched Dead Poets Society the other night after loving the new Mac ad which uses part of Robin William’s quoting Whitman from the movie –

This morning I woke up to even more stories about Apple and the anniversary. I felt good listening to it all and got a little weepy over the mention of the Bosendorfer piano for some reason, or maybe it was the Schumann that was played…

And 30 years ago, as a final reward for the folks who created the Mac, Steve Jobs bought the team a beautiful black Bosendorfer grand piano. That piano is still at Apple – a reminder that a technically brilliant instrument could also be beautiful – and a pleasure to touch and play.

Anyway, as I got dressed for work I wondered how to celebrate the day and the only thing I could come up with were these:

rainbow leggings

Heard another story or two on the radio on the way in to work and as I walked toward our store I thought – wouldn’t it have been nice if they used those fancy new LED lights in the window to do something for the anniversary?

and lo and behold, that’s just what was there in the window!

30th Anniversary Window

Amazing. There were a few new signs up in the store, we had new BLACK tshirts with a special 30th anniversary logo and lanyards which have the old mac script “hello” on them.

One of the guys brought a special visitor:

As it happened, I worked with a string of customers in the morning who were considering switching from Windows to Mac and it was just a pleasure working with them. I told all my customers about the anniversary and, as I’ve been telling people lately, how this store was the tenth in the whole world to open. Just like that, it felt like the beginning all over again.

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.
– T.S. Eliot

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Words learned along the way

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Mary Beth Frezon

In our sonnet-session last night we talked about The Windhover by Gerard Manley Hopkins and the word sillion came up.

No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.
– from The Windhover, by Gerard Manley Hopkins

Our teacher told us it meant the shine of new plowed fields and when I remembered to google it (it not being found in my iphone oxford):

Sillion: Coined by Gerard Manley Hopkins in his 1877 (published posthumously in 1918) poem The Windhover?; perhaps from French sillon (“furrow”).

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Night three, Shall I compare thee to a sonnet?

Posted on January 24, 2014 by Mary Beth Frezon

Tonight was the last night of our conversation about sonnets. Shakespeare, Shelley, Yeats, Keats, Frost. Sigh.

I was going to ask about the whole rhyming thing and was still trying to figure out what my question was and our leader allows that Frost says “rhyme is everything”. Mind blown basically because it’s true, and even when he writes in blank verse there’s often some internal close-rhyming going on… darn.

I was pondering about all this stuff and the poems we talked about and how one learns to write in meter and rhyme, I got distracted reading about Gerard Manley Hopkins and that was all I wrote and didn’t write last night. Will try to do better today.

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