change for the good

In 1979 we invested in half a house full of This End Up furniture. It has proven to be enduringly practical and ugly. This little footstool has been a plant stand for years. With nowhere to go, I brought it into the studio gave it sliding feet and a new cushion covered with a hand-dyed, mid-thirties Italian linen towel. Cloth, get to work!

The blending of the two southern branches of the Lacativa tribe is underway.  Going forward, our schedules - work and school - will make us mostly ships passing in the night. The rearrangement of things has been revelatory. The expression "death cleaning" is apt. Death of Sloth in my case. 

I threw away 4/5ths of my so-called wardrobe. Those who know me also know that I wear clothes until they are dead. Very little of what I gave up was fit for Goodwill where much of it came from in the first place.  It's time for some new duds come summer.

 

And Summer was delivered, as promised. All the colors of the sun plus a wisp of dusk.

 

This demon found refuge in my personal stash of cloth, He's annoyed because today I removed all the good stuff from the tub and replaced it with a worn old blanket. He knows.

It's nine days since I tested positive. The lingering cough I put down to moving years worth of dust and cobwebs from every possible surface. I really should have worn a mask Taste and scent still elude me. Sleep is spotty and dreams are wonderfully cinematic.  Not working until the wee hours every night may have everything to do with that. 

Rock and roll never forgets.

 

Well, well. And I didn't have to google any directions. Just convincing a king flat sheet that it's a perfect pillow case for a twin mattress. 

inventory

 

While I was gathering and relocating my dyeing supplies I took a minute and did an inventory.

Guess which color I'm missing most?

Summer.

I'll be paying Prochem and Dharma visits in the near future.

There WILL be miles of thread and an acre or two of cloth. 

Give me Strength...updated

 My Mom used to growl that at us and we knew that she was asking God to give her the strength to not bash our collective heads together and whatever fuckery we had been up to had better cease forthwith.

My mission to bring House Lacativa up to welcoming guest mode has been slightly derailed by testing positive for covid.

Midday Tuesday I was minding my business catching a breather in the stitching chair when my face started to warm as if I'd been out basking in the sun. It was pleasant and I just sat and felt it for a while.

By evening, the inevitable was obvious. 

more tomorrow as I am fresh out.

My new living/working space. The light is everything!

Pardon the ongoing clutter. Marie Kondo would be proud. We hired a 15-yard dumpster and really should have gotten a 30. 

I've found it strange to have the east sun coming over my left shoulder so this is not the last arrangement thanks to those little furniture sliders.

I may just turn the chair to face the window for my old friend Sweetie. She's getting on in years and needs help getting up and down the stairs. 

We finally undecorated the very crispy Christmas tree and she found a kittenish exuberance for this ornament I made years ago.

the never blank slate

I took a break from the domestic push the other night. On Dee's recommendation, I watched "Being the Ricardos" on Netflix. Originally, I was dread-set against watching it. 

"I Love Lucy" was on the air from the time I was two until I was in third grade and I hated it. The smarmy fakery and the evil snarkery of all parties. Always trying to one-up one another in the meanest pettiest ways. My parents, at least my mother, loved it.

I gave in grudgingly when Dee reminded me it was written by Aaron Sorkin, king of dialogue. When I found out Javier Bardem was playing Ricky I prepared myself for a glorious train wreck. Turned out to be pretty compelling although it could have used a deep trim.  Who knew what went on behind those scenes?  Kidman and Bardem were masterful, but Bardem was too old, and Kidman was weirdly ghost-like under strange makeup effects so I listened while I composed with cloth. 

No pins, straight to basting even though my hands hurt from all the cleaning clutching I've been doing. Nothing else may come of this at all, but it unwound me through the evening. A comfort.

In all the years I've been reporting from this space, have you ever seen it so sterile? My rug arrives tonight and tomorrow I will attempt to unroll it and levitate the furniture into position very incrementally and if I can't, I wait for help. Those sliding feet things are pretty cool. Those wire racks are going. I still don't know what will go where. 

 

Love

                        Words fail.

missing hands on

 

 Imiss making. Everything is packed away, boxed, and closeted. Mostly I miss it because the immediate task at hand is unmaking. Taking apart my life and Frankensteining into an as-yet unimagined new design, like one of those little plastic number puzzles where you slide the numbers around to make order.

Going through piles of stuff and not being moved to save it from the trash bag is giving me soul callouses.

I hate interior decorating. For the first time in memory, I have to decide what goes where and I'm spending way too much time staring inwardly at a blank canvas. There is no spatial imagination.

 It's going to be a long winter.

Addendum!   Page of Pentacles. It's time to hit the KDP books. 

Nuts & bolts time. Feng Shui, anyone?

The sweetest chaos

 New year, new adventures.

Soon, this will be my main place. The best room in the house with all the light. Half of what's here now will be gone to make way for a bed. I have SO much extraneous stuff there have been zero pangs around shoving things into black plastic garbage bags. 

We are shifting our comfort zones to circle the wagons and welcome Jake, Missy & Charlie here while they hunt for a place of their own which, I'm glad they discovered, is not something to do under any kind of rush.

There's nothing like company coming to make me dig in and try to undo the years of sloth I've permitted.  We are still a few steps above Gray Gardens.  Long put-off renovations are underway. A 15-yard dumpster will be plopped in the driveway sometime next week. I think we should have gotten a bigger one. 

And to add to the circus, the little one was rescued by the big one from the airport runway. Too small to tell if it's male or female, it's just Kitteh for the time being. Don't tell the others!

It will be something to have him around full time, if only for a few months,

 

on the Eve

I love watching it cycle through the color phases. Made it very hard to choose a representative picture, but it's been a kind of blue Christmas. They all are, lo these many years.

But I'm mindful that it's a kids' holiday at its best.

Last year I consolidated all my ornaments down to one sturdy box about a foot square. I also trashed all the decrepit glass balls and half-failed strings of lights.

Colin found strings of led lights that run on just a few batteries that would last forever if I could locate the controls.

Charlie has an eye for spacing out the pretties for good coverage.

Young Jedi in training with what appears to be the ghost of his grandfather looking on. Really, a blurry shot of his uncle, Colin.

So much of Christmas is about nostalgia. We all have our own perspectives on the same moment. My sisters both look like they would have been better off sleeping in. I was already deep into chapter one of "King of the Wind" by Marguerite Henry. I still have it but it's in rough shape.

And my all-time favorite Christmas memory was finding a plastic turtle with a diamond ring tied around its neck with a little piece of ribbon in the bottom of my Christmas stocking. Not understanding the significance until he put it on my finger and asked me for forever. Much later that same morning we told my parents. Somehow we look like we had already seen deep into the future and found it to be as good as it gets.

Scribblers blues

 A weeklong struggle to come up with what  self-published marketers call a "reader magnet" ended in a stalemate. 

testing solar Christmas lights...today

An RM is a freebie designed to get readers to sign up on your email list which hopefully will lead to some of them actually buying your books. I am not playing the game well.

Oh, I strapped up and went after the words alright. Got down a 5K kernel that turned out to be the many roomed ground floor of the next volume of Prophets Tango. No way any of it is throwaway. I just can't work like that. 

What is going to happen is like the steel spine of one of the more formidable modern rollercoasters; beginning, the myriad middle twists and rolls, to the kind of end where the riders get off and toss back a cold one as they run to line up for another ride. 

How it will happen?  Story will run riot round that framework organically. I'm letting Life take my players through the paces of change as wild as Kudzu;  growth, bloom, wither, die and be reborn.

 

Our five dollar Charlie Brown balsam fir! Way to wait, House Lacativa