oh man

I didn't know it was so late. But PHOTOPOST.

Today was awesomely productive. Here's a sneak peek at the project I hope will occupy (but not consume) my time.



Magical sink of joyful happiness and blissful dish-washing



Isabelle and the workstation in my room.



Blurry Moxie on my bed. I make it every day. She's why.



And a blurry Reagan on a very windy day before he left.

(Catching Up) Washing Dishes

(A post from yesterday that was delayed by an evening of unexpected socializing)

Each full day I've been here, I've paid a bit of my "rent" by doing the dishes. It's strange, but I kinda like it.

There's no dishwasher here, so everything has to be done by hand. It's a blessing and a curse that A+H have few dishes; there is never more than a small sinkful and things don't get a chance to encrust, but they need to be done every day. But, as I said, I don't mind.

The first day I did dishes, I set my mp3 player to shuffle and attacked the chore full tilt. I can't even remember what I was listening to, but it made things go quickly as I lived in my ears while scrubbing dishes, tidying up counters, and wiping the stove clean.

The second day, the house was empty (except for dogs) and I didn't take my mp3 player. Instead I chased myself through circles in my mind and enjoyed the view out the window into the cold and sunny backyard. Dipping my hands in the hot water was a nice change from the nippiness of the weather here. (To be honest, it's often below freezing and I didn't come quite prepared for being outside in these conditions.)

The third day I did dishes Hannah was in the room working on book binding, but I had my headphones on. After I finished, I apologized for the (mild) racket (dishes colliding as I dropped them, or forced them into the tiny drying rack) as I left the room. Hannah just laughed, saying that a clean kitchen is worth any racket.

Although that first day I ran into the problem of not wanting to cook in a dirty kitchen because it's more enjoyable to work in a clean space... but once the effort has been made to clean the kitchen, I don't want to cook because doing so would cause things to be messy again.


Overall I feel like I'm integrating well into life here... at least as well as can be said for only being on the fourth day of my trip. (Donut of Misery says I am 5% done with my stay, and 4% done with my time away from Reagan.)

Integrating may be a strange word for the situation, but I'm somewhere between guest and tenant. I have autonomy (no obligation for them to keep me entertained or for me to always be hanging out), and yet I am invited along for errands, calling on friends, and to break bread. It's very comfortable for me, although not similar to any situation in my past.

I want (and try) to be a good house-citizen. Besides doing the dishes gladly, I want to be on good, easy terms with the people and dogs and avoid anything like the "stucco tower" feeling I had in Upland. Keeping the door to my room open and spending time in other parts of the house goes a long way to help this cause.

But tonight will have temperatures in the single digits (Fahrenheit), and the room I'm staying in is the warmest in the house. Selfishly (perhaps), I'm spending a lot of the cold days in my room with the door closed to preserve warmth.

Luckily most of my painting will be done on the flat, open, well-lit surface of the kitchen table.

Hilarious, am I right?

Reagan and I use "Coyote" and "Jackal" as affectionate nicknames for each other. In some doodles, especially my mini-world compositions, I throw in these angular stick-coyotes and -jackals. When they're not colored (ie: most of the time), the best way to tell if a given canine is a coyote or a jackal is to see if it has whiskers on its nose. If there are whiskers, that's the yote.



((If you find jokes funniest before they've been explained, here's the link at the bottom of the post. You can skip the rest. ))

I hate most pickled things. Eggs might be the only exception. But I definitely hate pickled cucumbers. It's a waste of a perfectly good fregetable.

A couple days ago Reagan was standing near me, holding a sandwich that had a pickle on it. We exchanged whatever words needed to be exchanged, I made a gross-out face in regards to the pickle, then he left to go to his computer. A second later the pickle smell hit me and I made another grossed-out face and comment.

Reagan says to me, "If I need to hide something from you, I'll just put a pickle on it."

Then I drew the above doodle. It makes me laugh like crazy.

Speaking of coyote-related things that make me hapy, I love The Daily Coyote to pieces. It makes me think of my husband. :)

Monday Overnight, for example

Pre-post shout-out to Katie Cook. It's her birthday! Besides being an amazing artist, she's a wonderfully sweet and nerdy gal.

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After an early morning scare of "can he go tomorrow?"*, I spent the day blissfully escaping into tv, drawing, and Bradbury's quirky prose.

(*the answer was "no, there are still obligations to be concluded)

Yes, I'm 24, a fan of sci-fi and literature, and I've never read Fahrenheit 451 before. If it's any defense, I have read Something Wicked This Way Comes.

As I was taking care of some chores downstairs I was bemoaning (to myself) the fact that I don't have as much time to devote to poetry as I would like. After reading a few of the entries in the Daily Routines blog, I fussed about being keen to master both writing and art, but whenever I devote hours to the former, the back of my mind tells me I could be spending them on the latter. I was specifically thinking about poetry, and how it's been quite a while since I've been inspired enough to have a new poem flow out of me.

Then I made sandwiches, tidied up the kitchen, then came upstairs and fluidly wrote a couple dozen lines. Oh, the gifts of irony.

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Obligatory paragraph pondering my social relationships. Today is one of the days I feel like an alien when thinking about my friends.

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For some odd reason I really like the idea of titling poems with days of the week, months of the year, and times of day. Maybe it ties into my tendency to use poetry as a form of diary, but with mood, emotion, events, and details, I like placing them in a chronological context, even if it doesn't tie into an ongoing timeline.

I think it might be similar to this phenomenon: Recently I read or heard someone talking about going to visit a foreign country. (It kills me that I can't remember the source of this anecdote.) Upon their return, friends asked "What is Country X like?" and the traveler would reply "I don't know", as he could only speak to his own experiences in the country, which could not offer a reliable picture of what Country X is like.

The connection is that by titling a poem "Early November" when nothing in the poem explicitly implies early November, I'm casting the contents of the poem in an early-November sort of light. I'm not saying what "early November" is, just my experiences there. Then.

Even though I don't have a deeply personal relationship with seasons, or week-patterns, or even day-patterns, I like using those markers. Mentally, I'm perhaps one step and one leap from developing a concise plan and description for a (chapbook?) project using only hours, days, and months for tiles.

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I am enamored with the lines inside my tea mug. While they do indicate that it's time for my ceramic chalice to be washed, they're also clues to my drinking habits: evenly spaced rings marking the resting water level between each round of sips. The stains are darker near the top; more heat and resting time when the tea-level is high. When I'm down to the last third, sometimes the tea isn't even lukewarm, and I lose interest.

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Dammit. Long post. I guess I'm back to normal? Unfortunately the net is not being normal. *is afraid to attempt posting*

Daily poem and art to come in a separate post so I can close firefox to play with digital paints.