I’ve had this song stuck in my head, so I thought I’d pass it along to your head too.

Thanksgiving Eve

It�s so easy to dream of the days gone by
It’s a hard thing to think of the times to come
But the grace to accept every moment as a gift
Is a gift that is given to some.

What can you do with your days but work and hope?
Let your dreams bind your work to your play.
What can you do with each moment of your life
but love til you�ve loved it away
Love til you�ve loved it away.

There�s sorrow enough for the whole world�s end
There are no guarantees but the grave.
And the life that I live & the time I have spent
are a treasure too precious to save.

What can you do with your days but work and hope?
Let your dreams bind your work to your play.
What can you do with each moment of your life
but love til you�ve loved it away?
Love til you�ve loved it away.

— Bob Franke

OK, so while rummaging around I found out that some people title this song “The Thanksgiving Song”. Just the folk process in action folks. But even more interesting, I found out that Bob Franke wrote this other song, “The Great Storm is Over” which I thought to be much older. The chorus to that song:

Alleluia, the great storm is over, lift up your wings and fly!

really makes you think you could lift up your wings and fly

Learn more about Bob Frank here. To hear or get Thanksgiving Eve, go here.

Sweet Rewards of Summer

Ah, the rewards of summer. My treat after mowing the back yard was a generous handful of wild raspberries. Nothing like them: nature’s combination of sun-warm and shadow-cold, sweet wash with tart kicker.

And you know they’re just for you because they fall into your open palm with no coaxing. Take me. This is for you, because you got here before the birds or the deer or the bear. Good for you. Have some more. It’s summer and someone has to eat these.

Hey, you’re thinking, where the heck is Mary Beth? Well I’m here, sweltering along with the rest of upstate NY. Laying low. Being glad I don’t have a little fur coat to wear 24/7. One night I spent the whole night sweating, both literally and figuratively, over my two entry forms for the IQA show in Houston. Who knew I could lay my hands on my IQA membership card at 2 AM?

I was really pleased with how the slides came out and as an extra bonus, I get to enjoy the one quilt until I take down the whole photo set up. I figured, why take it down until I was sure I wouldn’t need it again in a hurry?

I worked on a couple blocks as a possible future idea but decided I was severely uninterested in making a lot more of them. Ooops!

Last night I was a total slug and watched a lot of Julia Child and friends after Fortune put me on to the videos available of past shows. There’s a lot to be said for watching someone handle dough rather than trying to figure it out from the printed word.

I got to thinking about a couple other quilts which haven’t had a chance to travel anywhere. That’s just sad isn’t it? I thought I might enter them in the IQF/Houston show but first – need slides.

Fueled by my recent success, I set everything up and hung and de-fuzzed those quilts and did my best to act in a rational manner behind the camera. I’ll drop them off tomorrow morning and time will tell how it all turns out.

Life is good and it’s good sometimes not to need a whole lot of sleep!

In other news, I sold a first-ever computer to an older man who had come by a few times and chatted with me. Last time in he told me he was a retired librarian and he wanted to do some writing and some research. Sounds about right for a librarian!

What I wasn’t expecting was to see his driver’s license and discover he was 87 years young! Whoa. I think he’ll do fine with his new computer and I expect he’ll be stopping by regularly for awhile with questions. I’ve known some pretty awesome oldsters in my time and they sure are inspiring!

Doing the little happy dance tonight because my quilt “Daughters of Daughters” was accepted as part of the third and final year of the “I Remember Mama” exhibit which will debut at the International Quilt Festival in Houston later this year. I was anxiously awaiting any news, and I’m quite pleased with both the quilt and the news.

Go here and read Steve Jobs’ commencement address at Stanford. I was especially tickled by this:

Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts.

Wow. I myself lucked into a wonderful calligraphy teacher at SUNY Albany when I returned to the Albany area, not long out of college, and wondering what I’d do next. I learned so much about design and perserverence and the importance of practice and hard work. I learned about the shape of letters and how the shape of the spaces around and inside the letters are as important as the shapes of the strokes that make them. The connection between the practices and traditions of the past and the work done today. The importance of appropriateness and usability. And like Steve would say, the supremacy of user interface. Readability/usability rules!