Garbage Day Sunsets

The pattern took a while to notice.  Garbage day always brings the prettiest sunsets.  Looking through my file of sunset photos, there are the ever-present trash cans at the curb.  Lovely.  Perhaps I should spend a little more time familiarizing myself with the clone tool in Photoshop and reading the articles on how to remove unwanted images from a photo, but my eyes cross when the language turns technical!  In the meantime, I can still appreciate the view and just had to share.

For the Birds

The porker in the rear clearly can't read the bag which is distinctly marked as finch food.  It is not a finch.  It annoys me to no end that is parks its huge caboose in the middle of the bird food, intimidating many of the little twirpers I am trying to attract.  My yelling, "You are NOT a FINCH!" scares them off for a while (along with the finches, alas), but the porkers are back an hour later.  Wicked, wicked birds.

With the frequent extremes in weather changes, I've found myself spending whatever sunny time we get in the garden instead of the studio.  I maintain my rule as Queen Killer Thumb, evidently the worst gardener in the city limits.  The raised bed garden I had constructed last year has yielded a huge basil plant which is quickly being taken over by some sort of basil-killing disease or jungle rot or something.  The tarragon has about three pathetic leaves remaining, and the jalapeno pepper plant has a few anemic peppers and another three or four leaves.  Oh, the clover is growing like mad!  Sigh.  Two avocado trees sprouted in the middle of my irises in the other planting bed.  Good grief.  The raccoons are better gardeners.  Not one to give up entirely, I purchased a few packets of seeds to sow - purple tomatillas, cilantro, leeks and radishes.  If I can't grow radishes, I'm chopping up the frame of the garden for firewood!  Well, I'll at least say a few bad words and then hide the evidence of my likely failure.   I think I'm better off in the studio.

My poor husband is home, sick as can be.  Tomorrow will be a good day to spray him with disinfectant, run and hole up in the studio to whoop up some art. 

I think I Suck at Blogging

So many blogs that I read are so focused.  The writer knows what she or he is doing and posts a lot of photos.  I ramble, I rant, and I blabber a lot.  I certainly feel better afterward.  It's quite cathartic!  Maybe I need to stick closer to a formula.  OK, I don't really do that very well.  So I shall blabber a bit, ramble a bit and find a photo to post.

My primary focus these days has been weight loss because my caboose is just too big.  Seriously.  We took a family vacation to Vancouver, BC last year and when I got to the photo of me, my husband and son in front of the icicly thing from the Olympics (see how sophitisticated I am?!?), I just screeched and immediately opened up Photoshop to thinnify that beasty.  OMG!  I felt so good in that outfit and looked so awful in the photo.  I mentally kicked myself around for awhile, joined Weight Watchers and am now down 32.8 lbs. as of this morning.  Woohoo!  I'm spending a LOT of time working out these days on that horrible, horrible elliptical, but have no choice.  It's that, or another Miracle suit in Hawaii this summer and I wan't a swimsuit that isn't black or come with it's own shoe (or fanny) horn.

On the mom front, tomorrow is going to be fun.  For whatever reason the school district could come up, they have elected to close schools on Valentine's Day.   My son, the activities director for his high school German club, organized an event for which a "date" is mandatory at an ice skating rink.  Perhaps that's why there will be only four participants.  I'm not sure if the German teacher (coming sans the wifey) is one of the four.  I loved the look of horror on Kevin's face when I asked if he'd mind if I skated.  I don't want to be the stinkin' chauffeur, drive the 35 minutes there, drive home, turn around 2 hours later...I want to have fun too!   I promised to leave the, "I'm Kevin's mom!" t-shirt at home.  I didn't say anything about the light up hat.  Bahaha.  I don't really have one.  Oh wait, I do have the one from 2010 New Year's Eve!  That could really mess with those little weasels.

On the artist front, I'm working on a schedule of sewing lessons for my friend Liz and my teen buddy Jasmine.  This will be really fun.  The studio is small, but we'll crank the music, get the machine humming and have a good time.  I'm going to schedule time to get to work on a figurative piece now that I have no deadlines for one of them.  I'm also going to move ahead with my sister's idea for a swap, just the two of us, sending each other found objects and seeing what we come up with in terms of art projects.  That will get the creative juices flowing!

So here's my blog photo.  Kevin wants a dog, so I got him a dog.  It looks like it's got a trach tube, but it doesn't bark or leave little doggy bombs in the lawn.  I laughed all the way through the grocery store today with this in the kiddy seat section of my cart.

I Hate Cooking. Still.

Cooking is just part of life when one is a stay-at-home mom.  I hate to cook.  My husband loves to cook, but he works very long days, so I'm stuck with the task Monday through Friday.  As I've said many times, I only cook so the family doesn't die.  I CAN cook, but it's a lot of work that results in a huge mess that makes another big batch of work to clean up.   I try to channel his spirit during the week, a task at which I fail daily.

I recall enjoying a wonderful meal at a family member's home that he seemed to enjoy making.  I asked him for the recipe which, it turns out, was a Tyler Florence masterpiece.  It was chicken enchiladas.  My mom made enchiladas.  How hard could it be?  According to Tyler Florence, it should have taken about an hour to make.  That, of course, appears to be the case if you live on Jupiter and have a kitchen full of sous chefs.  Here on Earth, it took quite a bit longer.  After almost two hours I was a mess, the kitchen was a mess, and the meal was just OK.    I figured cookbooks from Barnes & Noble were directed to the home cook, not students or graduates of Le Cordon Bleu. The cookbooks should have a sticker like those parental warning lables on CDs for bad language.  These should have a liar alert label with respect to the time issue and complexity of the prep.  If I have to Google an ingredient, it should have a warning label.  If it requires ingredients I can only get by ordering online from Zimbabwe, it should have a warning label.  If freakin' Martha Stewart can't do it in the predicted and declared-as-fact time frame, it should come with a bottle of wine to soothe the savage home cook.  Harrumph.

This is all prompted by my husband calling to announce his departure from his office and ask if I'm making anything fabulous for dinner tonight.  Is he kidding?  It's never fabulous.  Sometimes it's very good (Italian is my specialty, but that doesn't fly when one is on Weight Watchers and getting beaten up for snarking carbs).  I'd say it's time for a very generous glass of wine, after which I won't mind cooking so much and certainly won't mind if they don't love it.   Give him a glass of wine and he'll find the meal fabulous.

It was just a thought.

Part 1 finished!

I finished piecing the quilt top that I've been working on for a few weeks.  It's small, but time intensive.  It's wrinkled because I have a cat.  Sheesh.  Now I've got to get the proper material for the middle layer and put this pup together.

Today I did a bit of email box clean up and found myself distracted, going through the myriad of email I receive trying to entice me into buying more magazines or instructional DVDs.  There are so many things I want to try, but I don't want to overwhelm myself as I did last year.  It's time to review my cyber mentor's good advice and keep the fun level up, the stress level low.

Shopping Challenges

Sigh.  I was so excited to buy fabric and a new pattern at the quilt show yesterday in addition to a few bits to add to the stash.  I opened the bundled collection today to read the instruction packet for the quilt, but it's for the wrong quilt design!  The shop doesn't have a web site or email address, so I've got to call and try to weasel the right pattern out of them over the phone.  I should wait a day or so.  I imagine anyone I might catch today might not have had much sleep after having to pack up from the quilt show yesterday and be in the mood for such a call.  I should have this ironed out by the time I finish the current project.

Quilt Show Inspiration

After juggling weekend plans, we made it to the Road to California quilt show on it's final day.  Our timing was perfect as we discovered that the crowd yesterday was unmanageable and everyone, vendors and visitors alike, were pretty darned cranky. 

 The display was spectacular.  There were so many quilts were just jaw-dropping amazing.  The wonderful white-gloved volunteers were there to show us the back of many of the quilts, providing even more inspiration to be creative.  I loved the fact that so many quilt artists include materials and techniques that the layperson might not expect to find in a quilt like photographs, beads and paint.  I enjoyed talking to the artists and vendors, pawing through the most enormous stash of materials and taking photos (only with permission!).  This kind of outing gets me excited about playing in the studio.  These are some of my favourites...