Haven’t really had any thoughts worthy of sharing just lately. Haven’t been enjoying them much myself, come to that! I’ve had a couple of really bad weeks with my back, the kind of thing that gets you to thinking about the future in a looming, not-so-positive way involving nursing homes and madness.
I think I’m coming out the other side. A refill of my Celebrex scrip can’t hurt since I ran out in the middle of the episode. Someone once explained my mother’s degenerative disc disease this way: The collapsing disc(s) pinch a nerve and the pain is excruciating until the nerve dies. Then you get some relief until the next nerve involvement. Sort of like, “I’m down to my last nerve and you’re getting on it” but I don’t think I’m out of material yet.
Ran across this on Neil Gaiman’s Journal this morning and agreed with him that it was important enough to share. I’ve printed out his template and will have a go at adapting it to my circumstances. I do have a will and a Power of Attorney for Health Care but this one takes into consideration ones artistic legacy which can get lost in the shuffle or (ab)used in ways one might not choose. I’m afraid I’m worth possibly less dead than alive (which I’ve always thought might not be such a bad strategy) but you never know. I may create something in extremis that will appreciate considerably the day the obit’s published. One can dream.
The house has suffered from more neglect than usual but I “caught up” with the upstairs yesterday. I don’t even want to go downstairs. The Ed’s installing a new shower in the downstairs bathroom which had required replacing a wall between bathroom and kitchen. The replacing part hasn’t happened yet, just the demolition part and that’s resulted in a room with a view to and from the main door to the house.
As if that weren’t enough, the water pipes in this very old house run under the floor in a crawl space, conveniently close to the new installation (what with the bathroom already having water) but accessible by a trap door in the kitchen floor. The first two attempts at connecting to the water supply yesterday resulted in leaks . . . into a dirt (clay) crawl space which is presently referred to as the “watery grave”. The Ed has this morning finally successfully made the connection, working in said grave, but has to go back down to hook up the drain. He was upstairs briefly to announce the successful connection. I would have been more excited if he hadn’t been coated head to toe in wet clay.
Meantime the cats are enjoying rare access to the underground world, generously contributing their shares to the layer of drying mud on the incompletely sealed parquet floor in the kitchen. Charley, the St. Bernard, looks worriedly at the holes in the floor, sure something is not right but unsure of just what that might be. Barney, the Yorkie, worries about his cat friends’ disappearances, not being quite big (or brave) enough to follow them. He may have a point; I’ll have to watch carefully to be sure the floor doesn’t get closed up over any of our admittedly frequently annoying felines.
I haven’t been entirely idle. My son’s wife’s expecting my second grandchild in July and I’ve been working on outfitting a washable, articulated baby doll for my two-year-old granddaughter. She’s a cutie, just turned two on St. Patrick’s Day.
I think she’s going to have a lot of fun with the dollhouse my daughter enjoyed at the same age as well as the little old “kitchenette” with newly supplied play food, dishes and pots and pans. There were lots of broad smiles but I wasn’t concentrating on photography.
Anyway I was inexplicably compelled to make a quilt for the doll’s crib using English paper-pieced hexagons for which compulsion the best I can say is it’s better than doing a queen sized quilt that way.
I originally intended to make it big enough to wrap the (14″) doll in but thought better of that, realizing it was taking far too much time and settling for a “bedspread” for the little wooden crib (that I will eevntually retrieve from the attic).
I finally started hand quilting the thing and ought to have it finished later today if no further disasters intervene.
I didn’t actually say I’d been doing anything useful!
Another project I seem to have taken on is a rather specialized doll for a friend’s upcoming production of Alice in Wonderland. No pictures yet. You wouldn’t believe it anyway.
For now, at 10:30 in the morning, I really must brave the downstairs in the interest of feeding myself and my Yorkie. Perhaps I could keep my eyes closed (and no doubt fall into the cellar . . . maybe not a good plan). Perhaps it’s late enough for a simple “brunch”, thereby postponing further ventures into the land of Mudd until almost suppertime.
http://www.neilgaiman.com/journal/2006/10/important-and-pass-it-on.html
I love making doll quilts! I can make such fabulous ones, and they get finished, and no one out grows them, and I just couldn’t be happier! Going bigger gets harder and harder, doesn’t it?
Your granddaughter is a cutie – it looks like she will properly appreciate all the things you are working on now.
I could definitely get carried away with this! I do things with doll house, too, though and that gets to be less fun. Maybe I’ll just get out all my playscale doll beds and make quilts for them all. I don’t get much else done anyway.
Hey there! Miss me? Your grandgirl is adorable!! Like the hexagon quilt you are doing. I have one stashed away in the Black Hole that I would like to get back to some day. Gee….I would like to be able to get INTO the Black Hole some day. And I just spent last weekend at a retreat with my sister, Skully, and a bunch of other fiber freaks. Yes, yarn was bought….from three different towns! But, two are already made up. Call me Fast-Fingered-Fiberotter!
Love and Hugs!!!
Yes, I miss you a lot and Skully, too. Tell her so! I keep hoping you’ll get back to ravelry one of these days. The place is downright dull without you. Everyone seems to have gone off and gotten a life or something! Sounds like yours isn’t too bad, either!
I’m in Sudbury, of all places, this evening for a funeral tomorrow – obviously an unplanned excursion. Young woman killed on the highway on Friday afternoon in an ugly accident on ice, wife of the SO’s nephew. Eight hours of (me) driving and then you’re in Sudbury, the only consolation being that it isn’t Timmins . . . this time. We were going to go on up to visit his sister in chronic care in Timmins but decided the extra eight hours driving plus two more nights in hotel plus the longer drive home were just too much this month so we’ll go home from here Friday.
Kyra’s a charmer, all right. Wish I saw more of her. My son’s hoping for another girl but they don’t know yet. I can’t get used to expecting to know!