Raphaella by Cayce Zavaglia...amazing embroidery on linen. 

little wooden blocks

Some of the paintings in that photo are still in progress. My idea for this show is to do 30 or 4o paintings on these small blocks of wood that I got at Creative Reuse, and sell them for super cheap. $10-20 each, and I'll get %70 of that. I thought they would look neat in a large grouping, and I also want to do some that tell a little narrative story.

I get so discouraged though, because I can't make them look the way I want them to. I'm pretty good at color, but I can't draw well.

I want to continue to develop the embroidery idea too. I want to make it a bit more complex, but keep it simple too.

Check out this embroidery by Cayce Zavaglia. It's the polar opposite of mine. Photorealistic, and so much work! Very cool.

Here is what I have done so far for the show at Moxie. I feel kind of unhappy with them, but I'll keep at it. 

terrible night

Damn it...sleep didn't work out for me last night. I fell asleep fine, at around 12:30, woke up around 2, thirsty. Fell back to sleep, and then I woke with a start at 3:45, the backyard security light was blazing. I didn't get back to sleep until after 6 a.m. !! And then when I did fall asleep, I had a dream that there were three people in the backyard, over by Sylvan's window, they had moved stuff around in the yard so that they could climb into his room. They had one window open and were reaching some kind of long pole in there. They were people that I kind of knew! And I yelled " What the hell are you doing?!!!?", and they started laughing.

And then they said, "We just wanted to scare you for a few weeks, but now we're going to kill you and your children!"

That was a really scary dream. And I woke up and heard a loud thunk inside the house. Double scary.

Luckily the kids slept in until 9:30. No school today, because Sylvan has a little health issue that needs to be taken care of.

I have so much to do today, and I feel like I'm going to be practically non functional because of tiredness. I guess that's what espresso is for.

sleeping again

I didn't mean to stay up so late again tonight. I think I'm trying to avoid going to bed until I'm so exhausted that I just collapse.

Scott stopped by for a cup of tea after his Free Mind meeting tonight, and that was a nice surprise. His little car actually made it up here and back without dying or getting him killed. He almost couldn't leave here, because the car wouldn't start and he tried removing this old hotwiring wire that the previous owner had put in, and giant scary sparks shot out and the car lurched forward and ran over Scott's foot and nearly crashed into the car parked in front of it.

Here's a link to a picture of the Swamp Thing . It's definitely a project, but it was free. Scott probably could make it really nice, but I do kind of worry about him driving around in something so...um...scarily crappy.

The thing that I think is funny is that people, mostly his coworkers and other guys talk to me like I should have an issue or problem with him having a project car. They say things like "You're not going to let him do that, are you?" Which, to me is a strange attitude. Why should I care if he likes fixing up old cars? He likes fixing things and working on mechanical stuff. He's good at it. I like that he has interests and projects and wants to take an old neglected moldy bmw 2002 and make it into a super swifty spy car. And even if I didn't like it, should I, because I'm his girlfriend be able to tell him he can't do whatever he wants with his time???

Weird.

Okay, bed now. At least no more writing, I can't do it well when I'm getting sleepy.

time?

Are there secrets to time management that I don't know about? Days seem to pass so quickly, and I can't get it all done. I fell asleep at around midnight last night, and was up at 7:30 to make breakfast and pack lunches and get the kids off to school. I had tea and no breakfast myself and drove the half hour to the kids' school. I stayed for a few minutes to help the kids with their math, and then went to coffee with my friend Thalia.

I was back home by 11, had breakfast and then did my quota of listings. I actually did 11, so that was good. But I had a ton of housework I needed to get to, and it didn't happen. I mailed my packages, and went to the Salvation Army and bought some hopefully great things to list tomorrow. I did some research on things I have to sell this week. I have a ton of housework to do, and I didn't get any done.

I left home at about 5 to pick up the kids, Thalia had taken them to her house after school. Then home, wash dishes, coook and serve dinner. Now there is an hour until we start bedtime procedures, (bath, stories, snack, and toothbrushing) and I somehow have to coerce the kids into doing their homework.

My days aren't difficult, I'm just not yet sure how to get everything done. I'm working on establishing more efficient routines, but I'm slow at that kind of thing. How is it going to work when I'm also in school full time this winter??

Better get moving, more here later...

ooh...money!

I'm beginning to see the tiny recycled fruits of my labor. I had a slew of auctions end today, and I made $158.00, which is a lot for me. And I only paid around $11.00 for all the things that I sold today, so the profit margin is really quite good. If I made that much every day, I would be so happy, and rich!

I got some incredible old handbags and dishes to sell when I went thrifting this afternoon. I finished 11 listings, and shipped stuff.

Ebay is really a pretty good job, if you actually do it.

better all the time

Getting to sleep here by myself is still a little bit hard. I'm beginning to resent all the cats around here for setting off the security lights and increasing my jumpiness. It's way better than it was even 4 or 5 days ago.

I'm trying it tonight without S., hopefully it will all be fine.

We had a fun weekend together, going to his friend's beautiful wedding on Saturday, and then doing various errands and chores on Sunday. It was kind of like playing house, and I liked it a lot. We got a lot done, although not everything we needed to. He got sick for part of the day and had to nap it off, and so he didn't get his reading done for school. I finished about 6 paintings for the show at Moxie.

Think I'll go use up the last of this month's book credits at audible now.

small talk

"I haven't decided if I'll take the teaching fellowship at Harvard, or at Berkeley, because frankly the psych. department at Harvard is sub-par"

"I'm shooting a documentary on the Conquistadors for the History channel, travelling a lot" "LA is alright, I guess, it's LA, my girlfriend and I are living together, so that's nice"

"Oh yes, I'm still a wine expert...and I have a band on the side"

"After my graduate degree I..."

"And what do you do?"

"Umm....I'm a mom."

oh and also...

two paintings completed for moxie...only 20 or 30 more to go!

again

Okay, I'm going to write about this yet again. I'm more tired than a person should be at 8:20 pm. I'm exhausted, and yet I am feeling my nighttime anxiety spike and I'm already dreading going to bed.

It makes me feel so horribly vulnerable.

crap.

vacancy 

yes I think it's true

I would probably rather sit in my comfy bed making lists of all the things that I need to do, than actually do all of those things. And that is more wack than anything in El Sobrante.

Okay, I'm getting up now to clean stuff.

yesterday and today

I'm progressing nicely with my goal this week. Yay for me. I finished my ten ebay listings today, yesterday I didn't do any, because I had a wretched headache the whole time the kids were in school, so I just curled up in bed and watched "Mean Girls". Nothing like a teen movie when you're feeling bad. I drove down to Petaluma to meet S. at 4:45, and we went to El Sobrante to get some cheap parts for his currently non-running BMW 2002.

Driving through El Sobrante he said "These homes are wack", which I thought was super funny, and I want to do a little suburban photo zine with that for a title. Traffic was horrid on the way home, we amused ourselves while standing still on the big bridge, by shooting photos of lights and cars and things with the shutter open for 2.5 seconds. That and complaining about how hungry and exhausted we were, and making bad jokes. We ate dinner at like 8pm at Whole Foods in Marin, and drove back to Petaluma like zombies.

Now I suppose I should work on my house or my paintings for Moxie.

My girly lost a tooth! 

House of No Sleep

As a mom, I am soft hearted probably to a fault.

This morning, for instance. I got out of bed at 7:45, put on the tea kettle and made the school lunches, and at 8 I went to wake up the kids, so they'll be ready to leave for school by 8:30. Sylvan was hard to wake and when he opened his little eye, it was bloodshot and he whimpered "I only got one hour of sleep!". Aww. I do remember waking in the night and seeing him maneuver his skinny little body through the crack in the bathroom door into my room without opening it, and then he slipped away when he saw me move. His sister kept him up late into the night.

She was awake until at least 10:30, which is typical. I mean, I can make them go to bed, but you really can't make someone sleep.

I started bedtime proceedings at 8:30. Read a few chapters of Pippi Longstocking, gave them a snack, supervised tooth brushing and face washing, tucked them in to their beds, and put on their book on tape. With Zelia I made some extra effort last night so that she would go to sleep better. I laid down in her bed with her and sang her some songs. None of that worked though and she was still up bouncing around.

When I tried to wake her up this morning, it was not good. She yelled, and refused to open her eyes.

My natural inclination is just to let them stay home and sleep. Is that un-mom-ish of me? The school they go to is flexible and part time, they can legally attend only 2.5 days per week. So I suppose I will just send them tomorrow.

I will have them do their homework, and eat their already packed lunches if they get hungry, and I will studiously neglect them while I work. Also I will make them clean their rooms and go to bed early tonight.

I don't know what the point of this is, but there you go.

My favorite of the photos I took on a recent picture taking expedition with S. This was a nasty nasty bathroom. I think I'll write an entry about it later. 

old friend

I think I may have found my old best friend from high school on myspace. I sent her a message, we'll see if she sends one back. It's gotta be her, how many Bathsheba's can there be in Chicago??

How exciting. Her profile says she's married. The last time I saw her, was in 1993, I was pregnant with Sylvan, and we went to a Breeder's concert in Detroit. Yes, I said Breeders.

blah blah blah

I got some work done this week, thank goodness. I need to be able to pay rent and feed the kids, not just one of those things. I hope I hear from the college soon about my financial aid so I can start taking classes.

Anyway, I set a goal of 10 ebay listings per day, and I've done 14 today. I may do more this evening while the kids and I are watching Princess Bride.

I started laying down backgrounds on a whole slew of tiny paintings yesterday for my show at Moxie. I did 32 of them! I figured I would do lots of small ones and sell them for cheap, since I think people go there looking for bargains. Whatever is left will go on ebay I suppose, or on my future imaginary website.

I need to find a focus for my entrepeneurial energies. I think I will go check out the Small Business Development Center, and see what they have to offer.

Time to go pick up the kids, they went to a friend's house after school.

first rain

Mmmm, it smells so good, and I've been craving this. Summers here are long and hot and we've had no rain since May. It's really raining.

Maybe this is why everyone felt funny yesterday. After weeks of temperatures around 100 and blazing sun, it was cool, there was wind, and some rain was brewing. Only we didn't know about the rain.

I can see my neighbor out walking in the park with her dogs and her adopted daughters. I can hear little Lily squawking loudly because this is her first rain.

oh boy, new favorite!!!!

Look at this, it's a comic called Slow Wave
It's about dreams, well it actually is dreams, illustrated by Jesse Reklaw. I bought his little zine called "Applicant" today at the book fair, and I love it. In the back it had a link to this comic, and it's so good! There's a big archive, so it can keep you entertained for a long time. Yay. I find people's dreams so fascinating, and I love the way these are illustrated.

profile photo 

Sonoma County Whine Festival

Took the kids down to the book fair this morning. I wanted to see what the Free Mind people had, and I wanted to see the zines and comics that Trevor and his friends were selling. We went early to avoid the heat. Zelia rode her little bike, and Sylvan rode his scooter. We saw Xenia and Ava and Dani and Ben and Desiree and Scott. That was nice, and I got to spend some time walking around with Ava holding my hand. Xenia and Sylvan ran around together playing chase.

I am very broke right now, but I brought a few dollars and some quarters so that I could buy some zines and a food not bombs sticker for Sylvan's scooter. I figured I could buy each kid a used book at the friends of the library booth, but Zelia wanted a shiny new book from some other place and started a whiny baby talk chant of "booky booky booky"(she is six and a half, so she shouldn't be talking like that!) and I had to take her and sit down on the curb with her until she could stop. I had to try to reason with her and show her that $7.00 was all I had, for real, that's it and no more, so we could either buy a used book for $1.50 or a neat hand made comic for $1-$3, or alternately if she couldn't stop the incessant whining, we could go home with nothing.

The ride home was no fun either, it was cold-ish and windy and she was sooooooo tiiiiiirrrred, that she couldn't really cope. Her bike tipped over and she crashed into the ivy near the Sears store. We were all hungry and I had a no coffee yet today headache. Ugh. They both ate huge lunches.

Now I am going to lie down with my new comics and possibly take a little nap.

Coming home from book fair "I hate this stupid stupid bike....I'm never riding it again...NEVER!!!" 

my cat is a bastard

The kids and I had just finished reading Pippi Longstocking, snuggled up in my big bed, when I heard a crash in the living room, and went out to investigate. It was Jack, our cat who just jumped in the living room window and knocked over a basket of toys. He went tearing into my room, and I went to the kitchen to get the bed time glasses of water.

Then there was screaming from my room, and Sylvan came running in saying "I can't look!!!! I can't look!!!!" "Jack's got a BIRD!!!!!" Sure enough, tiny feathers all over my floor, and Jack has a bird in his mouth and under his paws, and then he lets it go flop and fly around and then he gets it again. We're all yelling, and I'm smacking at the dumb cat, trying to get him away from the bird, while the bird still seems to have a chance to live. They are wanting to call the animal hospital. Finally we get Jack shut out of my room, but we can't find the bird.

We search and search and finally find it huddled behind a box in my office. I gently scoop it into a small box and carry it out to the rose hedge, where all the little birdies live, figuring that even if it can't fly, it can hop up into the branches and be safe there. I tenderly put the box down under the dark hedge, and took the lid off. Not even one second later, that cat jumped out from where he was hiding (which turned out to be right there under the rose bush), grabbed the bird in his mouth and took off across the street to the park.

I chased him, but he went under the chain link fence around the new construction, and resumed killing the bird.

I couldn't belive it. I saved the bird, and then practically fed it to Jack. Damn.

behind

I have a lot of catching up to do. I haven't done much work this month, and so I won't have much money. I didn't do auctions the first week of September because of Labor Day, and getting the kids back to school and all of that. I didn't do many auctions the second week of September because I was so preoccupied by the backyard prowler incident. Now I'm ready to. I have 12 auctions going, I need to do 28 more by Tuesday to meet my weekly goal.

The little ones are going swimming with friends today from 2 until 4, so I'll have two uninterrupted hours to work on stuff. My office is a disastrous mess.

oh, kids need me....more later...

I'm going to need so much tea

Last night was harder than I expected. I was so tired from being sick and staying up late the night before that I thought sleeping would be easy. It took me a long time to fall asleep, the backyard floodlights kept coming on, probably because of cats, or the vines blowing on the house walls. And I would tell myself that, but also wonder if I should look out of the window, if that man was back there again. When I did fall asleep, my dreams were intense and strange. Some of them had Prince in them. Some were scary. One very intense one was about Lacey and Achilles. They were young teenagers and lived in a weird underground place.

I woke up at 3:30, and couldn't really get back to sleep. I messed around with the computer, wrote a journal entry on myspace and watched an episode of Love Hina on internet tv. Eventually I did fall asleep, listening to A Short History of Nearly Everything. My daughter was next to me in the bed

I had a funny dream about Scott. He lived in a huge loft type place, and it was neat and had corrugated metal and a big lab like in those Sherlock Holmes movies he watches. It was kind of chaotic there, with lots of kids, and we were trying to sneak off to be alone together. I was excited because I found him some tea bread that was named with a Sherlock Holmes reference. There was more, but now I don't remember

I can't wait to sink into the pillows at his house tonight.

One of My Favorite Embroidery Pieces 

Art Show Jitters

The picture below this post is of one of the embroidery pieces that is currently in a group show at Roshambo Gallery . When I made these things, I loved them. The two that were chosen were actually not my favorite. Now I'm slightly embarrassed by them. The show has been hanging for 4 days already, and I haven't gone to see it. You'd think I would, since this is my first gallery show. They're running it like an auction, so they are having a closing party and live auction in November, rather than an opening party. Of course I have fears that my stuff will be the only work that doesn't sell.

I have another show in October at Moxie. I'm going to show paintings there, I'll have an entire wall, and I still don't have them all done. I'm excited about that one, it's going to be mixed media paintings on wood blocks that I got at Creative Reuse. I'm hoping to have some of my crafty stuff for sale there at that time too. Handbags and little zippered pouches and stuff like that.

One of my pieces in the show at Roshambo Gallery. 

First Entry

Geez, writing the first entry is hard, and probably almost every blog starts with some variation on this sentence. Do you write about who you are, and why you are doing this? Or do you just jump in with where you are in your life currently? I think I'll start with where I am currently.

I am sick with a cold. I'm standing in my kitchen with my laptop on the newly cleaned counter. I am typing in between bites of the Trader Joes' Sweetened Corn Puffs cereal and soy milk that is my dinner tonight. It's been too hot, and I've been too sick to eat.

Tonight I'll be sleeping alone in the house for the first time since the prowler incident last week. I'm kind of nervous, but I think I can handle it. I have motion sensor security lights all around the house, I have crunchy loud branches laid down in front of the fence where the guy got in before. I've cut down the huge shrubs that made the house dark and secret at night. I have pepper spray, a cell phone and a big ass mag light that could crack heads. I've told all my neighbors and have a neighborhood watch in the works. I have wonderful neighbors who would be over here in a second.

I'll be fine.

Yep, fine. A week of fear and needing company at night is about all that I'm willing to tolerate. I have to admit that it was lovely spending all those nights with Scott. Would have been better without the little panic attacks that came with every sound in the yard, but it was still nice.

Okay, that ought to do for now....more later if I'm lying awake and freaking out