Beautiful Transfers 🍇

I have now spent three long days without the cold embrace of my computer. I will know tomorrow whether just my hard drive needs to be replaced or whether the whole machine is kaput. I hate to go out looking while my machine is ailing, but a rose-gold number has caught my eye, so we’ll just have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, I am spending my time actually sewing and virtually dying with stuff you have at home. This Thanksgiving I’m going to be saving onion skins and cranberry water for my experimentation. The photo comes from this website, if you’re interested in learning more.

WordPress to the Rescue

Still haven’t heard from the computer store, so I very reluctantly turn to the new typing experience of the iPad. It’s rough, but doable. I’ve been practicing on Facebook and Twitter, and it’s not pleasant at all. I wonder how many writers have abandoned their laptops for this newer, smaller device? I thought I would love it when it first came out, but I tried and failed to bond with it.

My threads,

 

Soon …

Only two days lost in the mire. I am now back in the Happy Hippy Hut, and here’s how I got here:

— oh, before we start. I am playing around with new names for Nero and Blase, and I’ve changed, for the moment, the project from Nero to Nora, just as a joke. It’s always been The Red Book, and it still is The Red Book.

Basically, I was down on my hands and knees with the vacuum cleaner, going in to clean behind the washing machine in the laundry closet. So Cinderella! And as I began I heard a small voice inside speak up: “What am I punishing myself for?”

I didn’t do anything wrong. It’s like taking your chicken and eggs tribute to the king in your little basket covered with a bright napkin. The king peeks inside. “Rejected!” He says. So it is. So be it.

And, it’s only taken two days out of my march to glory. My path. My mission. I was just at the beginning of Chapter 38. So, when you do read the finished book, I wonder if there will be a noticeable change in that chapter. Time will tell.

But, let it be known that I am determined, even though my feet be cold. I’m thinking 42 chapters, give or take. Just in time.

Almost Spent …

… and already we feel the month whizzing by. There are intimations on the air.

So, it’s a round of mowing, some going inside for inner growing. I work on the couch, a big green old leather with feathers in the cushions. The former owners asked us if they could please, please leave it, and I couldn’t believe my luck. They were bestowing upon us one of the things I most lusted after, ever since I saw the Lisa James Otto spread on the webs.

It was October through their windows. The yellow of a thousand suns coming from the maples outside the second-floor almost floor-to-ceiling window. Sold! Sold! A million-times sold!

They also left the table and chairs pictured here. But not the cushions. They come from Home Depot just this month, not too expensive, very Miami. And I planned that fine match between their colors and that of the mystery bush beside the boxwood.

All in good time. I will learn the name of the bush and re-invigorate my writing and send it out to the world. And this is what home base is looking like. La la la.

A Month of Mays …

… wonderful Mays. We dice our reality into words, and then the memories accrete and fill that container. The photo, above, is of our rhododendron array. It is from last May before a year of small hurricanes and a surprise October snowstorm killed them off.

So now, they are memories and I am hoping to get to a local store and buy some small ones to replace them. One large stump is all that is left, and it is springing up sturdy new shoots, and another May we might see them again. It’s what we expect from May, after all.

And what we expect is what we’ve accumulated and what we’ve saved from the daily windfall. A Tuesday in May: we all can fill in the blanks.

 

The good vibes continue …

… to vibrate in the zone of happiness that is this April day. Every day I go outside a little bit, and here in this photo you can see one of the reasons for my happy. Actually, two reasons for the happy: the pencil and the chiminea-to-be. Both are by local artists, to-be-named.

When it’s appropriate. I guess I should ask first.

But still, what a thrill to walk outside and play in this yard. I pick up stones, examine stuff coming up out of the ground unbidden, trip over stuck stones, and listen to the birdies. Sometimes I look way way up at the tops of the trees floating in the windy sea and I feel dizzy.

So happy. Can’t wait until the sun comes up again.

My life is such a miracle …

… right now. It seems as if everything I put my hand to turns out really well. The sedar dinner. The clean-up of the yard. The pillow. Less so, the pillow, but still.

Here I am, embarking on this new blog and taking a break to watch last night’s Mad Men, which has been carefully TIVOed. A person of my age is basically grading the production for accuracy, and I would know. I was a teenager then.

It’s coming into areas that I know, and it pulls the memory plug for those years. That time of my life. I was married. I was a teen war bride!

And then: Farrar Straus. A flood of memories … and I have my journal back, so I will uncork them here.

Outlining the task …

… and it’s a metaphor alert! Lots to do here in the old journal stomping ground. Also, I’ve been working outside, much to my own amazement.

Let’s see how this looks.

MacJournal, then and now …

… pros and cons. This is the focus mode. Hmmmm. Brings me right the heck back to the good old days of 1981, when I first got on the computer.

Talk about focus. This is easy on the eyeballs, and that has to count for something.

So, this journal automatically puts in the date. Does it also put in the time? Probably, if I want it to, will check into that.

See, I wanted this new/old program for myself. It used to be given away free free free and I used it for many years. I guess in the next bit of time — oh, I do wish this magazine were gone. Second best thing is to just do it so I can get to my next bit of organizing.

I’m moving toward the CDs and DVDs … will find old data that way, esp. journal entries. I could even go through old email — dates are suddenly very important. A personal scrapbook. And it’s not on Facebook. Oh, do I loathe Facebook. I wish I’d never joined.

You know, I could quit as a sort of zen thing of simplify. I won’t be failing at it if I’m not in it. Ditto LinkedIn, Google+, and what else? Stumble — that one I should learn.

I might just do that. Just get rid of my FB page and be free. I did play Farm on it for a while and when I found myself getting up in the middle of the night to turn over a field of digital strawberries before they cough rotted cough … well … that’s not really a good use of grown-up time.

I’m assuming this thing auto-saves. I already turned off the idiot spell-checker. It was in my face. I have words I sometimes search for and it prompts me in the wrong way. Plus, it’s better to go back and fix the error manually. I will always be a Luddite.

Poor pitiful pillow …

… I rest my case. I think the reason this particular artistic endeavor has failed so utterly and so miserably is because I embarked upon it for all the wrong reasons. I thought I would get some praise.

Criticism of it stings as if my own writing is being damned. It’s that personal, oddly. And I wanted to make a work of art; instead I have a misshapen sad egg of a thing. A deflated breast, oddly. It’s all very feminine.

Also, it totally changed when I added the puffed dimension. I had conceived it and worked it in the two-dimensional plane. I’ve never made a pillow before, obviously. Once stuffed, it gained an extra essence, and now it’s unwieldy.

To be continued …