On Holiday

a new era.

Honest to gosh, I'm on vacation this week. I'm actually taking a class here at the Penland School of Crafts: Jana Pullman's week-long box-making class. It's just our second full day, and I am so damn happy. If Penland is Disneyland, (which it is) this is like getting to ride the Matterhorn after selling mouse-ears on Main Street for two years.

I have plenty of bookbinding knowledge and experience, and have made different sorts of boxes over the years, but never this kind. My notes are cryptic drawings of boxes, and increasingly complex box-making equations.

I am properly on vacation:

I went swimming on Sunday in the river, diving all the way in under the very cold water.

I did a cartwheel yesterday evening.

My ol' friend Amanda Outcalt is also here taking a class this week, and we have been catching up and enjoying a bit of red wine in the evenings.

I heard an owl in a tree by the painting studio last night.

I am observing the first few early autumn leaves on the ground, red and yellow and spotty.

And I have new penny-loafers. I have been wearing  the same pair of Eastland penny-loafers since high school, and they had become almost embarrassingly worn and beautifully molded to the shape of my foot. As my pal Mark Boyd said, they have seen a few things.

So I finally found and purchased a new pair, stuck a couple of wheat-pennies in the slots, and they have set off on their adventure, which hopefully will last as long and be as interesting as my first pair...which I will totally keep for sentimental reasons.

old friends.

Nancy Drew and the Tin-Foil Creeper.

Yes, I'm already thinking a bit about Halloween, and I think this may be the year I go as Nancy Drew. Besides a titian-blonde wig and a magnifying glass, I'm pretty sure I can piece together a pretty good ensemble. I kind of wonder if I don't always dress nancy drew-ish in the autumn. Hmm.

In my preliminary research, I ran across this actual Nancy Drew book cover, which has me thinking a card-board-box robot is a good alternative costume option. Right?

So let it out and let it in.

Look, I'm blogging again.

Summer has gone quickly and has been full, busy, wet, and difficult. And suddenly it is almost over. Wasn't I just saying how spring was almost turning into summer?

Remember how in the winter during my residency I said how I'd never seen so much  snow in my life? Well, this summer in the mountains of North Carolina I have seen the most RAIN in all my life. It rained all of July. Days, weeks of rain. Moldy shoes. Moldy everything.

Boring. Here, let's look at pictures:

Bad picture of really interesting little things.

Same again.

Tiny bundles.

My god-daughter met her first cat friend,
and Alfred met his first little girl friend.

And by the end of the week they were best buddies. 

There were heart-shaped puddles.

Against all odds, I did grow tomatoes this year.

Several kinds of tomato. (and squash, too.) 

I went to California for like 10 minutes. And I ate all the fish.

And I took photos of things I've always known by heart.

And then I came home and I ate all these peas.

The best day of summer was a sunny one, August 3. I went tubing with friends, ate a cheeseburger and chocolate shake from Bonnie and Clyde's, took a two hour nap with Star Trek: the Motion Picture on (a GREAT movie to nap to) and then went up for delayed fourth-of-july fireworks and astronomy at Penland. I saw Saturn through a telescope and the international space station swing by. It was lovely.

Mostly there's been work and numbers and spiders and rain. But things are better now, and getting better and better. The Benefit Auction is past, and I'm gladly taking a class the last week of summer. I am moving into a better place soon, (BETTER!) and yes, that's three moves in two years for those keeping count at home.

'Til next time.