weeknotes 5 (media, snow, sewing)
Baltimore is sitting under the most snow the city has had in a decade, and I was out of work for the past week (other than some "virtual learning" with my kids, and my fifth graders got to see my leopard gecko which was very popular).
I was also still alone for most of the week with my spouse on a work trip. I am not a big tv/movie person, but the conditions (freezing 24/7, mostly alone, unable to go to work) were prime for even me stream some things.
I watched:
- The Godfather
- The Godfather Part II
- Very Important People: the Spencer episode (free on YT and so wonderfully weird)
- Peep Show: S1 episodes 1 & 2 (I originally watched it in 2010, it's still as weird and painful)
- The Sopranos: S2 episode 9 (watching through for the first time)
- He's Just Not That Into You - started it because it was based in Baltimore, finished because the cast gave me nostalgia for People magazines at the doctor's office.
- Loudquietloud: A Film About the Pixies: a documentary about their 2004 reunion
I started sewing! I got this cute purple sewing machine for Christmas and it's great - I wanted the Ez-bake Oven of sewing machines and this Janome delivers. I had some free quilt books with patterns from the Baltimore Book Thing and I just started in on a very simple quilt of 12x12" blocks. Most fabric was in a pile from friends, supplemented with some from the local fabric store around the corner.
I went sledding for the first time at a friend's farm, after another buddy scooped me up in his 4x4 truck this past Monday when the city was frozen solid. Nine hours of freezing rain left a very hard layer of almost-ice over snow that's too dry and powdery to even make a snowman or a snowball - it's the weirdest stuff. (I went down on a regular plastic sled, my buddy's two year old had this incredible wooden one).
All the downtime has really had me containerizing my life, for lack of a better term. I have pretty poor executive functioning when I don't have the guardrails of a workday schedule. The more off-track I get, the more granular my spreads are - and this weekend I made a spread just to get through two days of remembering to stay off the dark-to-me parts of the internet. I am going to try tracking my four habits (exercise, eat healthy, journal, and good web use) up all of next month, so I have a whole month's worth of habit tracking in one spread. We will see.
I am excited to have this quilt in my life - it feels like research for my letterpress projects. The doodling and journaling and playing around with markers and colors and work that only I will see feels important, too. It feels weird to come off a hard-won solo show, take a full-time teaching job for the first time, and not have any new prints coming out until my studio warms up, but I am letting ideas bubble through in new ways.