December 31

December 30

Mountains

December 29

Missing Indiana but mostly cats

December 28

December 27

December 26

December 25

I don't mean to be a humbug but...

Xmas can bite me. No really. Hundreds of tv shows and holiday specials my whole life have been trying to tell us there is a "real" meaning of Xmas. But. I was almost run over twice walking up to a store. I am now waiting in a line that extends to the back of the store to pay. The woman behind me keeps touching my ass because she is standing too close. I can tell most of these folks are buying more than they can afford in a tanking economy. Remember when it was only about the food?

Sent from my iPhone

December 24

It's like I am cheating on my own cats

December 23

December 22

December 21

December 20

Colden state

Weather is very odd. In fact, it seems to be going crazy. Raining ice in Indiana after days of unseasonably warm weather. California gets two straight days of rain. And my mom convinced me to go to the mountains with her, where my step father and I spent three hours shoveling three feet of snow out of the driveway, and five feet if ice from snow mobiles. The work of it made me warm, despite the dropping temperatures (24 last we knew), so we pushed on in thin sweatshirts and gloves.

By the end, my clothes were wet to the skin. My skin itself was red like a sunburn and icy to the touch. I still can't warm those areas up.

Sent from my iPhone

December 19

December 18

December 17

Women at the new airport are fashion forward

White noise

It falls like gravel, like rain. It falls like pancake batter into the pan (the non-stick kind). It stabs; it clumps; it coats. It is powder, mist, ranch dressing. It is repulsive-- I want to hide from it, burn it, sweep it away. But I also want to touch it, lick it, roll around in it.

For today, I will fly in it.

Sent from my iPhone

December 16

December 15

Bloggering

I used to write my thoughts in sketchbooks. Not everyday, but often. I liked using sketchbooks because if I suddenly found my thoughts could best be expressed in a picture, the media was already in my hands. Not so when the sketching goes online. True, my phone puts the writing and posting of photos in my constantly twitching fingers, but suddenly my little sketches have fallen by the wayside. I wonder if I have forgotten how to draw completely. Even my words have lost their spontaneity as I struggle to type out letters and compose for a possibly instant audience. (I know this sounded better when I was brushing my teeth.) There is also the oppressive need (when typing) to both spell correctly and to finish sentences.
I bring this up as I pack a lifetime of sketchbooks to move into yet another home. I delight to look through them. The drawings, doodles, pasted in extras enchant me still. I am not 30 when I read them over. I can't even look at them as a teacher ("how do these pictures function? What kind of composition is this?") but in the head of the woman I was then.
I was always buying new books too-- whether I forgot to bring one when needed or I found a beautiful new one. Hence, they are not in chronological order, and I shudder to think what a mess I will leave when I am gone.
This has a point. It did when I was brushing my teeth. I miss writing, brainstorming images. But it feels so childish now. (Do I have to let that go too?)

Sent from my iPhone

December 14

December 13

December 12

December 11

Holidays

A few weeks ago, I was so tired, so homesick, so plain-old-sick, that I bought my plane ticket to California much earlier in my schedule than I should have. I depart in a mere six days, with projects to grade, boxes to pack, pets to arrange for sitting, shows to dismantle... Home is such an alluring concept, as is the romanticized notion of it being a place you can return to, rather than you take with you (whether you like it or not).

Ice has been forming on the windows. It makes straight lines, like the frozen tracks of winter foot-racers. It glistens on the blue mornings, the ones when I love it here. Last weekend, we woke three days in a row to fresh, perfect blankets of clean, white snow, gently covering everything I could see from my hallway window (including the apartment I will soon move into). I could see it from the bed, and before I looked, I knew from the laughter the neighbor's children had already made a snowman in the yard. (Have I found a Norman Rockwell winter?) As quickly as it came, one warm evening and rain storm later, it was gone, the sky was back to gray, the ground muddy and cold.

We have made many fires in the wood stove (while we still can), but moving and leaving for most of the holiday leaves me glum... my favorite thing to do this time of year, whether for only a week or a month, is to open the boxes of Christmas decorations and fling their contents around the house, marvel at the toys for adults, their bright colors and optimistic outlooks, and only put them away when their kitsch has worn thin. I think I will have to have a special equinox festival this coming year, so I will not miss out on my favorite time. Christmas in March it is!

P.S. I finally added more images to Flickr. Enjoy!

December 10

December 9

Aerial Photography

December 8

December 7

December 6

Chicago with the guys

December 5

December 4

December 3

Everything changes that quick

December 2

December 1

November 31

Naive longing

Bound to happen sooner or later

November 30

Fall weekend

November 29

November 28

Thankgiving

My first college course, my first fall away from home (eleven long years ago), was a writing intensive "California culture" course. We had very vague writing prompts, that may have been followed by something like "or write whatever you feel like writing." I think we were supposed to be writing persuasive essays, or thoughtful analyses on the nature of culture. I ended up writing about my personal observations of my immediate culture, then comparing them to the ideas posed by our readings. The professor loved it and I earned a very high "A" in the course.

One of the essays I always remember was talking about Thanksgiving. I wrote something like how it was all this work and all these family members I mostly didn't know, the awkwardness, the good food, etc. When I found the essay years later, I was surprised by how much negative sarcasm it was riddled with. I am a sarcastic person-- it is my style of humor-- but mostly I was recounting these activities in such a negative light.

I bring this up because I really did feel those things at that time. Thanksgiving was a stressful, frustrating ritual filled with food catching fire, smelly old folks swapping pills, pomp and circumstance and uncomfortable shoes. As far as I was concerned, it was an interesting experience I would skip if I could and would not participate in as an adult (other than going to relatives' homes and letting them do it).

There was a trend on t.v. shows of friends in their 20s getting together and having a Thanksgiving of their own, sans family. I tried that once for a person I was living with. I cooked all day and prepped for two. We sat down at the meal, and it was over in fifteen minutes. "Well," I thought, "I tried, but it still seems pretty stupid."

Last summer, I read a memoir, "Animal, Vegetable, Miracle." The details aren't important, but she pointed out a detail I had never thought about. The idea of this meal replicating a celebration made by religious zealots (who were dumb and planned poorly), in honor of actually overcoming their racism and hence, not starving to death, always seemed a little lame. As I was reading more about food culture, about how (before trade) you only ate what was in season, or what could store over winter, the idea of the pumpkin pie and squash soup was appealing for the first time. Having never been a fan of pumpkin pie, this was quite a discovery. The sweet, fruity, squashiness was delicious as it had never been. The memoir went on to talk about all the traditional Thanksgiving staples as being native and inherent to the North American continent, hence, a truly American meal (turkey, cornbread, pumpkin pie, etc.).

This year, I made the decision not to go home for Thanksgiving, in leu of going home for the winter break. I kept saying I would 'probably' make a meal, but kept secretly hoping to be invited to someone else's. J came back for the week, and mostly we have been hanging around, killing time (I hate killing time). I kept saying, "you don't mind if I don't do Thanksgiving dinner, right?" and he kept saying, "not at all." But I was feeling guilty about it. Top it off with a whole week of hanging around town or the city (i.e. not making art or applying to jobs, i.e. killing time), I felt this was a truly wrong decision. Last night, around 9PM, I said, "J, I don't have a plan. I don't have recipes picked out, but I am making a shopping list and we are having Thanksgiving dinner tomorrow."

Thus began the ritual of cooking a meal, preparing a bird (we had a free-range, local-farm chicken instead of a giant turkey), preparing sidedishes (the one time of year I make multiple sides of veggies), gravy (I don't even like gravy), and taking a stab at an heirloom stuffing receipe and a pumpkin pie (why didn't I just buy one?). I couldn't believe how gross and fascinating it was to separate the skin of an animal from its muscles, to thrush my fingers in that new space, pushing in tiny cubes of butter, cloves of garlic, and twigs of rosemary. J looked at me like I was crazy as I revealed the secret ingredient to my home-prepped sun-dried tomatoes.

It took all day.

I utilized every culinary technique I have learned in my life. J went out and bought a meat thermometer for me (nope, didn't have one). My step-mother's stuffing (recipe retrieved from an internet site which copied it out of sunset magazine). I marveled at the beautiful smells of the fresh herbs-- from the food and the tips of my fingers. I remember when it was first published, her outrage at the maazine's inclussion of the phrase "can be substituted for dried herbs." At least the internet copy removed that phrase from the receipe. Chopped onions in everything (the finer the better, but what a chore). Cornbread for the stuffing (did I leave my skillet in the last rental?). Potatoes, tomatoes, sweet potatoes, bacon-greese gravy. Cranberry sauce. Zuchinni and yellow squash. Country-style biscuits.

The point is, I made it, it took hours, and it was delicious. The onions tasted of butter and rosemary. I never noticed flavors transfer that way. The gravy still tasted like bacon, ergo, I loved it.

November 27

November 26

November 25

Battle wounds and the Return