Hello...

Okay, so I am going to try a new blog. I've had this blogger account since February 2005, apparently and totally forgot about it. I deleted the original blog Twirlie mostly because all the photo links were dead. The posts all had to do with art stuff I had done recently, primarily rubber stamping. I haven't done any of that in a over a year, sadly. I get on kicks and then my attention wanders.

It is a nice sunny day today. It has finally felt like winter for the past week or so. We actually got some snow the night before last. Just enough to be pleasant but not enough to inconvenience. Not really enough to play in though.

I'm listening to my iTunes library and Sufjan Stevens is playing. His stuff feels very appropriate for the height of winter. Melancholic.

Listen

Sufjan Stevens--John Wayne Gacey Jr.

I should be doing anything but sitting here on the computer. As usual, there is plenty of cleaning to do. I never catch up. Lately, I feel like my control over important things in my life are slipping from my already tenuous grasp at an alarming rate.

I was listening to On Point this morning. The show was about the American transcendentalists. I am very much in the state of mind to be influenced by writers like Thoreau. I tried to read Thoreau last year but the edition I checked out of the library was filled with very distracting annotations. I should just find a cheap paperback edition. I really didn't listen that carefully since I was in the car at first and then tried to finish listening to the streaming broadcast on the computer. I had missed a bit by then. But I did feel inspired to give some of those folks a read, or re-read in the case of Little Women and The Scarlett Letter. Truthfully, I really disliked the latter when I read it in high school. I think I may have also read it in junior high or even elementary school. I had seen the PBS movie in the 70's (with Meg Foster) and had been fascinated by the story. I was only about 11 at the time.

Now Tilly and the Wall is playing. I discovered them through a mix CD club I joined through NPR. They were part of a mix that started off really promising and then turned bad---almost as if a different person had finished it. My turn is in March and I have been putting a lot of thought into what I will include. So far, everyone has included at least one (and usually a lot more) non-English songs and as much as I would love to include Caetano Veloso or Os Mutantes, I want to break that chain. I also want to avoid creating a mix that tries to hard to prove how obscure my tastes are. I do want to represent, so I will likely include some local stuff. My husband pointed out that I could include Caetano Veloso by using London, London or his cover of Hendrix' Wait Until Tomorrow.


Listen
Tilly and the Wall---Nights of the Living Dead
Tilly and the Wall-- You and I Misbehaving

I think the overall anxiety I'm feeling about my life at the moment stems mostly from my mom
jobs. One daughter is about 10 days away from her first trip on an airplane. It is also her first time traveling alone and she will be gone 10 days---the longest she has been away from home. My son has surgery in March. It is to remove a cyst which is almost certainly benign...but still. My other daughter is in the process of applying to art school and I am supposed to be photographing her portfolio. Thus far, I've only photographed four things. Part of the problem is she is still working on it and she isn't sure what she wants to include. She applied to RISD last year and was put in the last group of the waiting list. That was the only school she applied to last year and it was kind of done last minute. That is sort of what is happening now. This time it is Parsons she is racing the clock for. If she had simply gone to RIC for this year she could have transferred to RISD. They as much as said they would except her as a transfer, no problem. She was only luke-warm on the prospect of RISD but now she says she is reconsidering it. It isn't as if she has been wasting her time this year. She has been working quite a bit with Big Nazo and she has had a few commissioned pieces she has made for some film and theater people. She is now a paid member of Nazo which, while it isn't steady, it does make for satisfying work.