Here and now...

Things have been a little rough lately. I'm job hunting, again. This time I'm holding out until I can find something that I really want to do. Difficult since I put off my own work experience over myriad moves (5 times in 11 years) and hence my resume doesn't look so consistent. In the meantime I'm keeping busy and working one day a week at my co-op as cashier. There's no glory there, but it is an excellent way to meet like minded people.

The view from here? The Cedar Waxwings came back today. We counted over one hundred. Perfect timing as this weekend is the Great Backyard Bird Count.



Micaela had a birthday party to go to this afternoon. I made this messenger bag for the birthday girl. Started it last night and finished it a half an hour before the party started.



We got lucky in a way with this move. Juan's cousin and family moved here the same week we did. Ali and the kids came over this afternoon and I gifted her with this Everest Vest I finished this week (from Interweave Knits). It fit her perfectly.



Tomorrow we're going to see Bridge to Terabithia. I read it to the kids this week and cried just as hard as I did when I first read it in fourth grade. I had the honor of interviewing the author, Katherine Paterson, while in elementary school. Some friends and I started a school paper and she generously agreed to let me interview her by phone so I could print it in our fledgling paper. I still remember how she treated me like a true journalist and not just some kid.

Around the dinner table last night talk turned to death and what happens to people's bodies. Morbid dinner conversation, true, but I am glad to have death out there in the open as it is part of life and too often, in my opinion, glossed over in our society. I think that Paterson's book, published in 1977, helped bring topics previously considered not kid friendly into children's literature and that is a good thing.

A day of art

Micaela and I got out of the house today and went to the Museum of Printing History and then to the MFAH where we saw an amazing exhibition of French painting from the Met 1800-1920.

I always feel a mixture of sadness and exhiliration when I see the female models especially knowing they were the rebel women of their times and most of them only live on anonymously, captured by the brush. I try to imagine what it might have been like to be a woman outside of the mainstream at that time; more difficult I imagine than now. I can't look at paintings and the texture in them without imagining it placed in its time and environment; some dusty studio, the smell of oil paint and an itchy nose that couldn't be scratched. That painting in front of me was part of a life that is now gone...makes me feel small, but inspired!

I'm not a huge fan of impressionism, but the organization of the paintings from early in the 19th century into the beginnings of the 20th gave a real feeling of how painting evolved over that time, including, of course, the impressionists.

Around here

I'm becoming a bagaholic...