no explanation needed

Go read this poem by James Tate over on The Writer’s Almanac.

Just to Feel Human

A single apple grew on our tree, which
was some kind of miracle because it was a
pear tree. We walked around it scratching
our heads. “You want to eat it?” I asked …

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Things that you have to laugh about

  • Once I’ve started “quilting the hell out of” my current quilt, as Naomi is wont to say, there is no turning back. A lot of quilting begets a lot of quilting. It’s harder and harder to keep things even and relatively straight. You cannot go too far in one direction without causing a lot of trouble everywhere else. Sort of like being chased by a lot of thread – you can’t go wandering down every alley that you come across. Keep to the main path and get to the alley eventually.*
  • That whole persistence/perseverance thing. Grrrr. It’s painfully obvious that the carrot that dangles out on the horizon is the stack of different fabric, new plans, new ideas. There’s the nearer carrot of seeing how this piece turns out. While in the middle of un-quilting stuff gone wrong, that particular near-carrot seems like a big parsnip instead. A raw parsnip at that.
  • I mentioned that I was re-reading The War of Art. The author makes clear all the things that create “resistance” – things that keep you from doing what you are meant to do or want to do. He left out reading books about getting rid of artist blocks.

See what I mean? Written down, all of these are pretty darn funny and all self-inflicted woes.

And the raison d’etre for this post was:

  • Receiving a string of emails – not one but three of them so far – reminding me about an upcoming deadline… It’s a good month away…

This must be seriously laughed at lest it causes serious freak out. Serious.

* The apparent easy answer to this is to go around the center in a few passes so that the quilting pulls in evenly in all directions. Just saying that’s my theory and I’m sticking to it.

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Happy #100!

According to the counter in the sidebar, this is blog #100 for 2010 – surely a cause for celebration. Whatever else is going on or not going on in my life for the past 9 years, this has been my window onto the blogosphere. I share some of the mundane stuff, some of the creative process, day to day minutia and odd photos of what’s going on.

Yesterday after a sketchy day at work, I came home and took a bunch of photos of my neighbor Elaine – she needed some new pics for things like business cards. As I said elsewhere – I normally shoot either big flat things hanging calmly from rods or green stuff near the edges of roads. Occasionally shots of furry beings. Which is a long way to say that taking purposeful photos of people isn’t my area of expertise. But hey, digital film is cheap!

I went prepared to shoot outdoors, to have lovely out of focus green backgrounds via the Nikon’s lens. No – we stayed inside and figured out ways to get enough light. In the end I came home with a smallish bunch of pictures. Some hit the trash can right away due to blurriness or whatever. Some were quite nice. The first one I took I really liked but it was very dark and very soft. I found a way to brighten it and applied a Photoshop filter or two and think it will be quite useable. All in all an interesting exercise.

Today I’m off work – did some mundane stuff like dishes, will throw in some wash in a bit. Got back to work on my quilting. Next bobbin got put into the machine. I thought that was a good moment to break for dinner. Which brings me to the real purpose of my 100th post:

COLE SLAW!

Oh my. I have to thank Peter Reinhart for his primo, five-star, best in the world version of cole slaw. I think it is so easy and so extremely delicious that every time I have it I think I should eat it every day.

The corn on the cob in the store was ick and was gladly left behind. Cabbage was 49 cents a pound and from it I made the nectar of the kitchen gods. Or maybe, the salad of the kitchen gods.

I keep thinking it’s going to rain and wish it would. We need the rain and could use to shed the humidity. C’mon rain!

I’ve added a few new links to the “Other Sites” page above. If you have any favorite blogs about making stuff, I’m glad to look at some new stuff. My main goal in adding new links was to get me to delete some of the older, non-updating sites.

Finally, I’m reading two books: upstairs I’ve got The War of Art going while downstairs I’m on book two of the Teachings of Don Juan books. Good times!

OK, thus endeth post #100 of the year 2010. Covered a lot of the big topics and now you, dear reader, will just have to wait and see what happens next.

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Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Last night, Dino, Rich, Holly and I went to see The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Faithful readers know that going to the movies is a rare event for me and I was glad that the movie was so good last night. Skillfully brought magic into the modern age by blending sorcery and science and made everything plausible. Characters were nicely done, special effects weren’t stupid or superfluous, there was no gratuitous violence or sex. What’s not to like? Actually the storyline was short and sweet, the visuals and effects were beautiful and believable, the setting was NYC and it felt like it. The movie was 2 hours long and it felt shorter.

Go enjoy a time of magic.

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Things to ponder department:

Courtesy of The Writer’s Almanac on the anniversary of the first atomic bomb testing:

J. Robert Oppenheimer was the physicist who led the Manhattan Project, which created the atomic weapon. Years later, he said that what came to his mind as he witnessed the explosion were these words from the sacred Hindu text The Bhagavad Gita:

If the radiance of a thousand suns
Were to burst into the sky
That would be like
The splendor of the Mighty One …
I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds.

But there at the desert on that day he murmured only the words “It worked.”

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