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.