the last day of vacation...

The last few moments of vacation, those final hours before everything has to go back to normal, those are always the best. There's something frantic and calm about them simultaneously. Don't get me wrong, I could sit at home and do nothing infinitely, because well, I have a lot of stuff and enjoy such infinite pursuits as art and writing and watching tv...

Today was a better morning than yesterday. I went for a bike ride, and while I was winded by the time I had completed the second lap — I wasn't winded nor had I significantly slowed down on the first lap. I wasn't thinking that maybe it was the prescription or the weather or messing with my sleep or that the tires needed air... nope, everything was just fine. So, fine that I decided to do the second lap using the route with the hill. The hill always kicks my ass. That's what it's there for.

Aside from cleaning the house, I just took a vacation of nothingness. My largest excursion was to drive to Adrian, mostly to put gas in the car and buy cleaning supplies for my impending house cleaning bender. Yes, we now have bathroom Lysol. Exciting, I know. Oh, and mostly everything is clean. 

We don't have a cat or a dog or any other furry house pet (this is a fish-only household), so, really, it was just dust and however crumbs get behind canisters that haven't moved in years, and the occasional cobweb. Everyone has spiders... and considering that they eat most undesirable bugs, other than destroying their less than ideally placed webs, there's really no point in hating them. Although, spiders, please beware that your life may depend on when you decide to suddenly appear in my vicinity. There are times when I am less apt to go get a cup and a sheet of paper and generously liberate you to the great outdoors (I know you really love that in the snowy winter)... I am not edible, and I am sometimes unapproachable, so be careful...

And really, spiders, if you see me turning the shower on, you have up to 2 minutes to vamoose! I'm waiting for the water to heat up, and when I am wet I do not perform animal relocations. You will find yourself in a rapid flow of water being directed at the drain... I love you for eating other bugs and all, but not when I'm naked.

So, yeah, the place is clean. And my vacation is almost over. And other than finally watching the last 4 episodes of Fringe — BTW, that time travel episode? Meh, — I can't really say that I did anything. Except that sometimes doing nothing is doing the most... in which case I declare myself the victor and champion of "not doing anything." Ironically, the level of nothingness is so high that there is no crown or medal or blue ribbon... victory is really just not doing anything.

Besides, I did stuff last week:

Yeah, it was father's day. So, not only did I have to come up with a gift (yes, I drew that), but I also spent 4 hours sifting through the hundreds of photos on my iphoto to make an album so that we had something to fill the time between sitting down at the table at Big Boy, half of us ordering the breakfast bar and then waiting for the food of the non-breakfast bar members of the party to arrive... Oh, look, pictures of flowers and leaves and the occasional insect or bird!

There's a collective sample of a couple of pages...

Anyway, I'm going to have some more chips and salsa and maybe some ice cream or orange sherbet (I have both: decisions, decisions...) and then call it a day and go to bed and get up and go back to work.

Play time is over.

Have a fun weekend : )

sometimes...

Sometimes it feels like there is a dark cloud that follows me around... yeah, sorry, that's the best analogy I have.

I imagine that people visit this blog for something light or whimsical or pretty or entertaining or because it happened to pop up in your reading list or something. And right now I just don't have any of that in me.

Truth be told, it's been kind of a dark week. The kind of week where I'd just like to crawl into bed and not have to bother to get up or put on presentable clothes or go to work or run errands or do housework. Ironically, every time I go to bed, I wake up after 5-6 hours, and then I'm wide awake - in that I'm a bit of a zombie on less than 8 hours of sleep. I finally broke out the sominex a week ago, and let's just say I woke up feeling like zombie to the power of zombie... but I did sleep for like 8 hours uninterrupted. You know, and then woke up in a fog.

The bluebird babies died last week.

That was hard. They shouldn't have died, but those fucking invasive european house sparrows were in the yard - and they took over the nest and killed the babies.

I knew something wasn't right when I stood at the window and peered into the backyard with the binoculars and neither the male or female bluebird were going in and out of the nest box... and sure enough, the baby birds were dead...

So, since the sparrows thought they were going to use the other nest box after killing the bluebird babies, I destroyed their nest.

The bluebirds have left, and for days the male sparrow has sat out there in the yard calling and calling for a female.

European house sparrows have the most annoying call of any bird short of robins or starlings. And even though the weather is in the seventies and eighties - I can't bear to sit in the house and listen to the god damned bird that murdered my baby bluebirds sitting out there in the yard calling out for a mate...

So, the trap went up in the box. I hope to cease to hear that noise soon.

In North America — European house sparrows are an alien invasive species. They were brought here by morons, and once here - they never leave. They don't migrate, they just kill off our natural species. I despise european house sparrows.

The nest in the early stages... before the hatchlings were killed.

Anyway, I'd like to open the windows and let in some fresh air. And hopefully that time will come again soon.

In the mean time, the house wren has taken up residence in the nest box in the front yard.

House wrens are notoriously chatty little birds. So, all day the male and female are out there singing up a storm (it sounds like this). Wrens are a little better at fighting back against nest predation than the bluebirds, firstly because they build their nest out of sticks instead of grasses. When I go out and check the nest boxes and I find them filled with sticks — I know there's a wren in the area. Wrens are also smaller - so while they can easily maneuver through their mess of sticks, nest box predators cannot.

So, I guess, at least I still have the wrens... the wiley crazy chatty wrens. Well, that and there seems to be a cardinal nesting in the yard as well.

The ruby-throated hummingbirds have also returned, at least I've seen a male around the yard. I went out to get the mail last week and happened to look up at the defunct tv antenna, and yes, high up there that little bird was perched - surveying the yard, and probably waiting for me to go back indoors. Of course, I promptly made up a batch of what I will refer to sardonically as bird kool-aid. Hummingbird food is 1 cup of water to 1/4 cup of sugar. Boil the water, dissolve the sugar, let it cook and put it out in a feeder.

Of course, so I rush outside with the feeder - but my hummingbird is more interested in some annuals, the coral bells, and the weigela bush.

Of course, eventually, the backyard should be filled with the sound of tiny hummingbird cries as they return North in order to fight over the ample amount of food in the feeder on the back porch...

Birds... what territorial little creatures.

Anyway, hopefully my metaphorical dark cloud lifts soon... I'm tired of this funk.

Tomorrow's Gonna Be a Brighter Day — Jim Croce

the dream about the house...

Often times I awake from sleep via my beeping alarm clock. Yes, I am a Luddite, and I actually do have an alarm clock.

 (And yes, I buy lotto tickets...)

I hear that nowadays the kids use their cell phones for everything. I don't have one, so, yeah, I have an actual alarm clock. And yes, that blue piece of plastic often dictates the end of happy fun sleepy time.

Anyway, often times I awake from my slumber and have utterly no recollection of what I dreamt.  Today was not one of those days. Today I had the dream about the house.

The "dream about the house" is fairly mundane. It always takes place in what was formerly my mother's bedroom in her childhood home (a.k.a. Grandma Duda's house).  From what I recall, my Grandfather built / refurbished the upstairs of the house (in the nineteen sixties). So, it had these acrylic tiles on the floor that sort of looked like wood and plastic at the same time, and square acoustical tiles on the ceiling.  And because it was a converted upstairs - some of the walls were slanted (like this) to match the shape of the roof. Plus, the extraneous area around the sides was the attic, so there were these door panels in the walls that led to these little storage areas.

Frankly, as a child, those attic doors scared me shitless. I was glad that the bed in my mother's old room was pushed up against the door there. Because I had been in the little attic area next to it, and irrationally as a child - there was a garden gnome statue somewhere in that house and I was convinced that it was evil or possessed or something and was going to come and get me in my sleep via that attic door. Obviously, I would hear the sound of the bed sliding across the floor tiles and at least be able to wake and scream like a banshee before the gnome got me!

*giggles*

You know, I slept through thunderstorms, but that gnome I would hear. Logic and children's fears have very little to do with each other. ; )

Anyway: the dream about the house.  It involves that back bedroom, except instead of it being the back bedroom it always turns into this giant open space via that attic door - like the ball room from "The Shining." Except it isn't a ballroom it's usually a giant restaurant (like an Olive Garden) but it's always decorated in this eighties style with very square yellow table tops and red and turquoise colored accents... and it's always filled with people, including my dead grandparents, specifically Grandma and Grandpa Duda (except they're very much alive). I have no idea why they're always there, I mean, I suppose technically, it is their house...

So, yes, I had the dream about the house. Except this time it was different. It was Grandma Duda's house, but someone had redecorated it, and I couldn't find the staircase leading upstairs. The staircase in their actual home was accessible via a doorway in the dining room. Well, I thought I finally found the doorway, but when I opened the door there was just another door that opened from the opposite side, and when I opened that door there was simply another door, and each door was smaller than the previous door, and I continued to open them even though I was thinking "this is completely pointless because by the time one of these actually opens to something besides another door - the hole is going to be so small that only a Barbie Doll would fit through here..."

Yes, I said all that stuff to get to that point, which isn't so much a point and yet it is. There are people who very much believe that dreams are symbolic or metaphoric or the human mind solving problems in an inexplicable way... When I have the dream about the house - I always remember being in the fantasy restaurant room, but I never have any recollection of what went on there with all those people. I just remember 'being there.'

So, I woke up from a recurring dream that failed to follow the script of all its previous incarnations, and I was struck by that difference. Metaphorically, I have no idea what the restaurant room really means, but tonight, I couldn't even go upstairs... I'm sure there's a metaphor in there somewhere.

Anyway, in real life - I've been working on a project for a while. I realized some time ago that I had stopped drawing people. I drew birds and trees and flowers and clotheslines and the occasional insect and more birds and trees and flowers... but not people. And that isn't to say that I stopped drawing people entirely. In fact, I have a couple sketchbooks just of drawings of figures or girls. It wasn't that I didn't draw people - I just never turned those drawings into illustrations.

I think that's because there's something 'safe' about animals and trees and flowers (and even clotheslines). No one really looks at an illustration of a bird and asks "who is that?" It might be some specific kind of bird, but it's not like I had to personally know the bird to justify drawing a picture of it, or then explain the bird's "story."

People are different. People are somehow more specific and have names and favorite things and likes and dislikes and stories... People - particularly when they're not someone you know in real life - are characters.

And I've been working on my sketchbooks with the drawings of people... although I don't really think that's why I had the dream about the house with the alternate ending. Yes, sometimes logical and metaphorical connections are tenuous and inexact.

Just in case anyone wondered what I was blathering on about - that's one of my sketches.  The yet undecided part of the project is how I'm going to convert the sketch to an illustration. Do I want to go through the process of scans and blue pages and inking and filling? Or do I want to do something different? And what's the rest of the picture? Sketches are a staring point, but the actual finished illustration is a journey and a destination...

As for that dream? Grandpa Duda did appear and he was remodeling the house (in spite of the fact that he died in 2004). And I finally found the door to the staircase that goes upstairs, but the dream ended before I got around to wandering up there... and it wasn't via my alarm clock. I simply woke up, as today was my day off so there was no reason to set an alarm.

Oh, and those are some more sketches... every time the work weeks ends and my days off occur I think to myself about all the sketching and drawing and illustrating I could be doing. And then usually very little of it gets done. Sketching always seems to happen when it is least planned...

Anyway, sweet dreams, and have a pleasant weekend, and hopefully if the architect in your dreams moves your metaphorical staircase - you figure out the solution to whatever the problem was.

; )

long rambling post

I wonder sometimes why I bother to write blog entries. Is there really a point to it?

Not to insult whoever it is that comments on my blog, and wow, yes, those are sparse, but is anyone really reading this because they want to?

I mean, I assume someone from HR scrolls through this thing every once in a while to suffer the disappointment that while I occasionally mention that I have a full time job and it is relatively far from my house — otherwise nothing is ever said about who I work for or what I do; much less any sort of juicy gossip or comments or opinions or whatever. 

Like I imagine the HR person thinking: yeah, the blog is a slightly different shade of purple and has more pictures of flowers or trees or some painting of nothing or whatever, but is otherwise about nothing salacious and lacks anything interesting like drunken photos of partying at a bar or treasonous diatribes. Next!

Don't worry, I fucking hate captchas, so, you could actually comment, anonymously, I might add, even if you're secretly from human resources...

But anyway, back to the thought I was having: why am I doing this? I wonder that most of the time when I sit here in front of the computer and try to think of something to write.  I've wasted a goodly amount of time writing things that have never seen the light of day, because for a long time I tried to practice the ideology of "would grandma approve?"

You know, like would I say "fuck" in front of my grandmother? Possibly, accidentally. But my grandmother doesn't have a computer or a smart phone or a tablet or the internet.  And my other grandmother is dead... plus she grew up on a farm in the mountains of PA, so, really, was there anything that I ever would have said that some much more colorful local yolkel hadn't already blistered through? Besides, I was / am fond of all 4 of my grandparents.  And everyone talks out-of-turn (as it were) about other people at some point.

Anyway, I assume my one remaining grandparent isn't reading this. Of course, you're never supposed to assume anything. But really, I do assume that when someone loads this blog and they see a giant block of text they probably make some face and then simply click away... because I do assume that a lot of you are drinking lattes or fancy flavored coffee while sitting in front of your computer (on looking at your phone or tablet) with the thought that some stranger on the internet is going to provide some level of entertainment... and since we're 6 paragraphs in, I assume very few people are actually reading this, because who the hell am I other than some faceless (avatar aside) stranger on the internet.

I was on vacation this week, and other than driving 17 miles to the doctor's office (and that is asinine, considering how many practices exist between my home on the one approved of by my health insurance — if you're American, then I implore you to vote for Democrats).  I probably should have made the appointment 3 months ago, but well, I didn't. I mean, I should have scheduled a teeth cleaning in February, but I didn't get around to that until the end of April... I should also probably floss more, but otherwise the electric toothbrush seems to be working out.

Anyway, skipping over the details, I have been physically ill. It isn't typhoid or lockjaw or shingles or whatever, so, it was just like one of those background nagging kinds of things (and yes, one person's version of nagging may vary wildly from someone else's; most of you probably would have made the appointment a lot sooner). But I work midnights and the doctor is far away — and those are my excuses, besides, maybe it'll just run its course, and I won't need to. Unless you're devoid of hope — I think we all consider that last one as a possibility.

Well, it didn't, and it wasn't going to just run its course... plus, it had started to wake me from my sleep. If you've never worked midnights — sleeping during the day is a chore, and as soon as you lay down there is always some moron vacuuming out their car or operating a leaf blower or a chainsaw or mowing their lawn or acting like poor white trash and doing doughnuts with their truck in the field out behind your house. You know what? That one day in the spring when it rained and you got your truck stuck in the mud? I laughed, a lot, particularly since it happened right behind my house. What would be really funny is if you went out there and your truck was swallowed up into a giant sinkhole. I would probably actually put down the binoculars and walk all the way out to the edge of the back yard and laugh and point and heckle...

Anyway, I don't thrive on less than 8 hours of sleep. I have a co-worker who thinks that like 2 or 3 is acceptable... it isn't. Of course, whenever you talk about sleep with people, the first thing that seems to happen is that they can prove that they need very little sleep and that you're a total pussy for wanting the full 8 hours. You know, shit, even my children sleep less than that. 

Well, congratulations, they're probably going to grow up to be spree killers or axe murderers; their prefrontal cortexes shrinking a bit more with each lost hour of sleep. People need sleep. I prefer mine in 8 hour+ increments, uninterrupted. So, waking up hours before the alarm clock was scheduled to go off was not rocking it. And it's not like I was waking up full of vigor and sprightliness. No, it was more like if "ugh" could encompass a state of being.

I would look at the alarm clock, blearily, and in my head would just let out a loud moaning "Nooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo!" Because even if I curled up in a ball and shut my eyes and thought about nothing, I was awake, and the remainder of my planned sleep was gone.

I have slept through thunderstorms, tornado warning sirens, more thunderstorms... but all of a sudden I couldn't sleep for more than 5 hours, and when I was awake — I was a freaking zombie. 

So, I just spent 5 days on vacation, and the furthest I went was to the doctor, ironically, not for sleeping pills, but for that thing that I presume kept waking me, otherwise, I guess we have ghost with an irritable personality...

I feel no more rested and relaxed today than I did on day 1 of my vacation. But I did watch a lot of tv and sleep for however long I wanted whenever I wanted, and I got some drawing done, so I guess it wasn't a total zero sum. It wasn't exactly like I had some calculated plan for the five days or something, aside from finally making that doctor's appointment.

I do feel like less of a zombie, but come tonight - the grind just starts again, and I suppose goes on until I finally just drop dead, although mortality isn't one of those things that I spend an awful lot of time thinking about. It's probably why I was never a goth, plus, I like colorful stuff, albeit not necessarily as part of my wardrobe.

 

travelogue

I mean, technically, this is me, although, thematically, this is not me. Traveling just ain't my bag. Although I do have an old blue suitcase. Plus, really, if that was me, that plain black t-shirt needs some Pink Floyd graphics smacked on the front of it...

I guess I'm dark and sardonic and maybe a little antisocial, and that isn't fun whimsical light fare for morning coffee... and maybe I had to inadvertently become a sleep deprived zombie to realize that I don't get any joy or delight or simply relish the idea of trying to play against type in order to offend the least amount of people. And my grandmother (living or dead) isn't reading this anyway.

I talk about myself on here (or if you know me online, wherever we are - I talk about myself mostly there too) and I lead a fairly mundane life — aside from making things that look like earthworms in dirt in my spare time...

 

worm assemblage plaque

C'mon, admit it, it's at least nominally humorous, even if it does take some sarcasm to appreciate.  Plus I photographed it outside on the rabbit hutch (which is the closest thing I have to the etsy canard of barnwood).

Anyway, I talk about myself mostly, because it's easy and it's the least argumentative thing.  In many respects I am a character, but I'm an obscure character and who really has strong feelings about me one way or the other? It's not like I'm some anti-women's-lib homophobe like Rick Santorum or something. Seriously, republicans, why do you hate gay marriage and universal healthcare? 

See, when we were just talking about me you could just roll your eyes and yawn, and since you're many many miles away, I'd never notice. But when we talk about stuff — that's when people start to get pissy and annoyed. So, for everyone who had ever taken the time to take a pot-shot or make some glib off-hand remark referencing just how much of me I tend to talk about — that's why. Aside from issues of quantity - me talking about me rarely offended you, and as it turns out - I live a fairly creative carefree life that mostly revolves around such inert things as watching tv, listening to music, occasionally being outraged by brazenly stupid shit, taking photos of flowers and trees and naturey stuff, and mostly making a lot of art that is neither political or offensive; and the rest of the time I'm sleeping or at work.

My pre-vacation illness-induced sleep deprivation zombie experience was the deal breaker. For reasons that were mostly unintentional or accidental or simply the path of circumstances — I realized I was someone that I didn't want to be.  It didn't really take five days of vacation to arrive at that conclusion, nor did I have to travel far to get there.  It simply is what it is.

I'm not a person of absolutes. There are things in life that are constant, and there are far more things in life that are variables.  And probably, mostly, I have tried reasonably hard to succeed at whatever happened to be in front of me... until I tried so hard to get a certain result that I failed to notice that in doing so I was no longer really me — and that's a thought that applies to a number of things.

I am not always a grandma-approved conversationalist, and I'm not an apologist. And the amount of time I've spent trying to offend the least amount of people hasn't really made me happy.

Against my better judgement, I wandered into town in the early morning a couple days ago with my camera to photograph whatever... but I wasn't really in the mood to do it, and my back hurt, and I wasn't feeling stellar, and it was hot out... and really, I just needed to go buy groceries, which I don't like to do when everyone else is out doing it — because working midnights you tend to be buying groceries at 7am when everyone else is asleep or eating breakfast — so the store is like a ghost town... anyway, I took 70 photos, and most of them were crap...

Except this one:

nosy gnome

I'm not big into gnomes, nor do I own one... but there was something about this particular random moment in time that amused me.  It's the trite, silly, and downright absurd that generally provides the memorable moments. Plus, it's just about time for me to put on 'people clothes' to go out and buy groceries for the coming work week...

Have a good week and pursue some happiness just because it's something to do.

ubiquity and tidings of Valentines

This song has no title, just words and a tune... well, okay, actually, it's an Elton John song from "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road." My Mom had that record. It was a double LP, those were a big deal back in the day. "This Song Has No Tittle" is one of my favorites from that album along with "Grey Seal" and "The Ballad of Danny Bailey." Anyway, I like that song and when I thought about presenting another blog entry - it popped into my head.

I'm not a religious person, and I've never taken much stock in the adage that everything happens for a reason. I think there is the explicable and the inexplicable, and someday what was once inexplicable will one day be explained. Time marches on, time stands still... Yeah, I'm one of those people who likes Warren Zevon. We can't all be the same, you know.

Anyway, I tend to come from the camp of thinking that often (but not always) things are relative, and discordant threads can be connected. So, let's give it a whirl, shall we?

I just spent 20 minutes re-working my banner for my etsy shop. If I was a different person, then I might plan to do this stuff and have everything coordinated and whatnot. But that's not me. I looked at the stuff I was working on, I looked at the way stuff was organized in my shop... and I thought it's time for a new banner... since I think I had the current one for like 3 whole weeks. I hear that's like centuries in internet time.

I like internal rhyme, alliteration, assonance, consonance - that kind of stuff. So, after I'd been on etsy for what felt like a century I looked at my one shop and thought "well, this thing needs a name, I guess." I mean, if you go on the etsy forums — a whole gaggle of people will tell you that your shop name is really important or some such thing... but they'll tell you a lot of things.

My shop is actually sarahknight, but I can slap whatever text I want (within the bounds of reason) on the banner. So, I was bored for 10 minutes or whatever, and I thought up "technicolor emporium." It's rhymey & Latinate-ish, the latter part redundantly indicating it's former...

I seem to have dropped the name. It was, after all, just some thing in my banner; some thing that rhymed. But it was there for about a year, and well, the earth didn't stop rotating around the sun, so, well, it is what it is.

I had this idea that I would do the basic design and then just rotate a segment of a painting or a photo in or out for the background. That was the simplest design... and that lasted for about a year. At least it did until I re-formatted the design early this morning. It's the same difference, just without the idea of a name.

I am Sarah Knight, and the items in the shop are what I make. In real life, as opposed to the internet where this isn't surveillance footage, I make a lot of things. But in addition to sleeping, eating, showering, and leaving the house to go to work or the post office or to buy necessities — I make a lot of stuff. I draw, I paint, I take photographs, I make jewelry, I play with sculpey or clay on occasion... and for whatever reason I have a lot of glitter. I did some cleaning recently, and it's always funny to find stuff that you stashed away in some bag or box somewhere... and virtually every time, for whatever reason, there was a tube of glitter. You'd think I'd have something with glitter in the shop... but I don't.

So, I'm back to having an etsy shop with no title. It's just me — sarahknight. Not that anything has changed, really, because I have the same items. I just have a new banner. As I type this it's the second one from the bottom in that graphic. The previous one was the picture of sprinkles. It's a fun picture, but I never formatted it for the shop, and well... I dunno, it's getting on Valentine's Day, so I guess I should act more Valentines-ish.

I like chocolate and chocolates, I think you might have to be suffering from a medical disorder to not like chocolate or candy or sweet things... that's just not normal. But, I'm not a big Valentine's person. So, every year it rolls around, and I'm like, "oh, yeah, that."

This year I decided to make some Valentine's for people like myself slightly less committed to the conventions of Valentine's Day. I wanted to do something with collage, but I got halfway through that project and just kind of stalled into "meh" territory. It sits in a pile next to the paper cutter. Instead, I was cleaning and I have all these old books hanging around, and well, on etsy everyone prints stuff on old book pages. So, I decided to engage my inner hipster and I too would print stuff on old book pages and make Valentines...

As it turns out - my old book was a psychology text book, and the first page I ripped out - almost at random, since my criteria for a page was something with no pictures and mostly text - was about drugs and the brain. It felt ironically humorous, since I was printing the shape of a heart filled with a selection of one of my photos. Hallucinogen Hydrangea was actually the first one I printed. It seemed adroit. It still makes me chuckle. And well, I am that kind of person, I guess. We couldn't all be Martha Stewart or someone's wonderful mother.
People less committed to 19th century poets and Victorian era decor need Valentines too...

So, while watching "The Finder" I glued my hearts to some poster-board that I cut to size and scored and folded, and then added a coat of varnish... and well, they're done. At least I can cross that off the "things I never got around to doing" list.

So, what does that have to do with my banner? Well, that red-winged blackbird photo is on one of my Valentines, since in order to make them I took a little trip down memory lane and sifted through my photos... the rest of it? Maybe not so much.

I changed up the font. I like Century Gothic. I like Coke, I like the color Violet. Pink Floyd is my favorite band, and I wear a lot of black concert t-shirts. Some things are just ubiquitous. But every once in a while you gotta change something up, or everything just turns into background noise.

So, I nixed Technicolor Emporium and picked a new font. I wanted something in a handwriting style. My go-to font is usually Bickley - because it's just a pretty font. But it wasn't fitting the mood... so I picked something different. Font geeks probably know what that's called. Basically, it's fancy, but it's not too pretty or too uniform. Looks a little less like script and a little more like handwriting - the fancy kind.

I'm totally guilty of being a casual devotee of fancy penmanship. For whatever reason I found making letters in certain shapes or styles to be entertaining way back when we were doing primers in elementary school. I'm quite fond of my own handwriting... you can see me being neat and uniform with my penmanship on my name on my business cards:

And you can see my unyielding fondness for Century Gothic. I like Century Gothic mostly for the circle shape of the "o" and the "e" but also for the "a." You see, my name is Sarah, and no one writes an "a" with that goofy little glyph thing on it (except maybe Lisa Bellamy in fifth grade). It's a relic, is really what I'm saying, and I'm not hipster enough to think it's cool.
Anyway, sometimes people being snarky confuse Century Gothic with Helvetica... if you're having one of those moments — look at the "a" and you'll know which it is.

You probably know me as this face... well, also in my shiny new banner - yeah, those are my eyes. Yes, I do have green eyes. No, I'm not Irish, or descended from Irish people. I've eaten too much goulash to hold onto any such inclinations. Mom had green eyes, and so did Grandma Duda (nee Hajos)... of course, it also has something to do with the bey2 gene and the gey gene... Dad had brown eyes, and Grandma Knight has blue eyes. Yes, go make a punnet square now ; )

Anyway, the photo is one of the product shots I took for the lizard barrettes. Yeah, I'm a weird rock'n'roll kind of girl like that.
In the event that you ever wondered...

That's me.

Mind you, it's a blurry shot, and since I'm trying to smile-ish for the photo I have sort of a dumb look on my face. I do not have glamorous teeth; thanks, Mom. So, yeah, I don't go for the toothy grin or the idea of spending $30,000.00 on dental work. And yes, I am wearing a Pink Floyd t-shirt, and my favorite violet colored shirt with the little red flowers on it from the Gap which I bought at a thrift store like more than 10 years ago. Slackers represent.

Anyway, I spent the last couple of hours sifting through photos... it might not have been the most productive night, since other than a new banner and a new potential banner I didn't make anything per se. But well, it's January, and yesterday we had the coldest day so far this winter. Yes, it was a balmy 9˚F here in Michigan. Obviously that's why I scheduled my appointment to get the oil change yesterday. Brrrrrr.

Anyway, I look forward to April or May when it's warm enough to leave the house, because I'll probably go back to the marsh where I took that photo of the red-winged blackbird...

the long rambling post...

I am a lot of things, many of which can be described with the use of adjectives, but all things are not constant all of the time. I mean, I'm female, I'm a certain height, I'm Caucasian (really, spell check, it's a proper noun?), and I'm alive. But beyond that, everything else is relative. And when I'm dead it doesn't really matter.

I was ill. It wasn't a cold or a stomach virus (nor was it like VD or something). It's just one of those things you kinda don't share with the entire world. I'm not entirely sure I'm fine, but well, one can only defer life for so long.

I'm tired, and I'm tired of being tired... so I suppose I want things to change and have to figure out how to make that happen. I want to stop coming home from work and spending hours in front of the computer and in the end having a feeling like I wonder where the last 3 hours went and wondering why I didn't get anything done.

I want a feeling of accomplishment. I want to feel like I don't have to bite my tongue or not say things because I might offend someone. I want to feel like being me is fine. And for a long time now I haven't felt that way.

I was never someone who wanted to be the center of attention, and I'm still not. I just want to be happy making the things I make, and if people happen to like those things - then that's cool... and for a long time I didn't have an outlet for that, and then a few years ago someone told me about Etsy.

And wouldn't that be neat - to just list things and sell them? Cool, right?
Without being specific, because it's kind of pointless, etsy is the thing that seems to eat up 3 hours of my day every morning with very little return.
I can list things, I can tweet about it, I could tumblr, I could get off my lazy ass and waste copious amounts of time with random strangers "liking" things on facebook, I could theoretically join teams, I could make treasuries... I could do that stuff in every waking non-working hour... and it still wouldn't amount to anything.

So, I guess I'm just going to be me because I'm tired of being philosophically paralyzed by the notion that I shouldn't say things because I should talk to everyone like they're my grandma. And which one, btw, I had 2 of them. They were very different people.

I'm 32, and the life that I have is not the one that I want. I'm not who I want to be. Somewhere, within me there is someone who is happy and content and comes home from work every day and doesn't wonder what the hell happened to that 3 hours since I walked in the door, and I have to find a way to remove the notion that that is buried in the depths of me.

I recently took down some decorations that had been hanging around for 10 years... they were mostly clippings from magazines, pictures of famous people and rock stars. They were brittle with age in most cases, and the masking tape with which they had been attached to the wall or the door was also that yellow-orange-brown shade and brittle. It was amusing in a way to pick off a layer of old ideas and notions. And why on earth did I have a picture of Robert Smith on the back of the door? I'm really not that fond of the Cure... oh, wait, yeah, magazines aren't really rife with shots of Geddy Lee. The Beatles were definitely over-represented. I'm not a big Beatles fan, but it's always easy to find Beatles pictures or post cards.

The hardest thing to take off the back of the door was the newspaper clipping with the picture of some college-age neo-hippie named Shanti Stark lighting a candle in front of a Frank Zappa album. I think that one made it into the keep pile along with all the Beatles post cards.

I've never had heroes or role models or suffered from the notion that I would want to pattern my life after some one, but from an early age Frank Zappa was always interesting to me. He made weird music, and I probably first heard him on Dr. Demento, which I used to stay up and listen to on Sunday nights because the show was played on WIQB (back when that was still a decent station). Anyway, I either wrote my book reports about Frank Zappa or Pink Floyd. Zappa died when I was 14 years old, and that newspaper clipping was an announcement of his passing. It was on the back of my bedroom door, right by the door handle.

It's purely sentimental, I suppose. But it was the last thing to come down.

I decided it was time to redecorate the bedroom, which quite literally just means I'm going to hang different pictures on the wall because everything has pretty much been the same for 10 years, except for the things that fell down from the humidity and just never made it back up...

I don't spend a lot of time in the bedroom (not sleeping), but I guess maybe I'd like to. And I suppose changing some things out might be appropriate.

I have a lot of paintings that end up in the keep pile, and well, that's kind of a shame, because although I may be the only person who ever goes in that room - I probably ought to stop keeping my work in a pile on the desk or the floor and get it on the wall...

I've been thinking about this for a while now, and while my first few attempts at finding the right size frame may have ended in defeat (what the hell, Hobby Lobby - no love for the 9X12 unless I like the look of aged barn wood?). Well, I did find myself in a Michael's 10 minutes before the store closed on a rainy Wednesday night, and now that I've spray painted them a brownish shade of metallic silver which I believe was called "sesame" I have 4 9X12 frames and just need to figure out how to configure them on the wall... oh, plus like the other 10 picture frames I bought. I'm female, there was a half off sale in the framing department. I thought about Christmas and Birthdays and mentally said "fuck it" and there I was standing at the register with a heavy pile of frames.
Yes, relatives, it's artwork again as gifts, how could you expect anything different?

So, yeah, I have to go get those off the patio, where they are airing out, in the morning. I'd like to assume that in the span of time since I painted them and when I retrieve them that no birds have pooped on them or small animals have gnawed on them...

The one thing that I did take pause to notice while thinking about the whole bedroom decor thing was that my work has gotten progressively abstract. I don't paint pictures of things, I paint with color and shapes or lines or movement may happen to occur, but the intent is not an image of an object. I'm sure, in the realm of possibilities, that someone could draw a quick conclusion about that... or relate it to the fact that I keep sitting down with my sketchbook with the intent to draw and keep putting down a blank page, but presently I'm not so much in the moment that I think there's a meaningful conclusion to be drawn from that... just that it's an amusing observation.

I like stuff

Wikipedia could probably tell you all about the history of Valentines Day... and Google probably could point you in the direction. Admittedly, I'm not really a history buff. That doesn't mean that I hate facts, I'm just indifferent to some things.

Valentine's Day is about that heart shaped box of chocolates, and seeing pink and red and white and hearts everywhere. It's trying to remember expressions of love... it's not quite as much of an "invented" holiday as "Sweetest Day," but it's about consumerism nonetheless.

I'm a participating consumer; otherwise I'm indifferent to the concept of consumerism, because it's just not something I spend a lot of time thinking about. I buy groceries, I buy stuff, hell, I even like stuff. I distinctly remember my seventh grade English teacher telling us that "stuff" is a dead word. But well, *eyeroll,* that hasn't ever stopped me from using it.

I like stuff. Yes, I said it: I like stuff. I mean, you know, if you've looked at any of my previous entries then you may have noticed that I happen to make stuff. So, it's not out of the question that I like stuff. Plus this is a blog, so I need to write about stuff or post some pictures or something... and it's Valentine's Day time, so I guess it's time to talk about love or stuff like it.

I'm not terribly obsessed with Valentine's Day. I buy a heart-shaped box of chocolates, I get a box of heart-shaped chocolates, and if I'm feeling frisky, then maybe I remember to make a couple of greeting cards. BTW, I like eating chocolate.

So, this is a post about stuff I like. Particularly some stuff that I like that happens to be in my "office."

I enjoy knick knacks, or inappropriately appropriating objects as knick knacks. Many of my knick knacks are toys or things that are apparently supposed to be left out in your garden (where presumably the birds would do their business on them and the insects would crawl all over them). I have an infinite collection of lizards, turtles, and frogs (and the occasional bird). A few of them are legitimate knick knacks, the rest were apparently intended for the garden. The more realistic the replica animal - the better. So, these are some shots of my menagerie.

I like books by Hunter S. Thompson.
I like the music of Warren Zevon, Pink Floyd, Cat Stevens, Joni Mitchell, Everclear, John Denver, Rush, Jethro Tull, Bob Dylan...
I like listening to music I like.
I like watching tv.
I like doing nothing and imagining stories (which I believe they call day dreaming).
I like the color violet, and buying violet-colored things.
I like irises.
I like Coca Cola; regular Coke & Cherry Coke.
I like Mary Janes and striped socks.
I like those ridiculous and often gaudy patterned sheets from the seventies.
I like chocolate, particularly those Lindor bars.
I like coconut.
I like pleasantly warm weather.

I like a lot of things, as I imagine we all do, so listing them might get a little frivolous, but this was my "Valentines" theme post, so, I hope you take a moment to think about the stuff you like, and maybe remember why.