Theresa · Mather

I've entered the time of year where I paint all day long, with breaks to collect 101 eggs on Facebook (yes, I backed off of my no-more-social-networks stance, and like I suspected, Facebook is a time sinkhole.)breaks to fix and eat meals and a little time for some casual games. I keep up on the news via NPR on the radio as I work, so I'm not totally in a bubble.

I finished a new piece for prints yesterday, and hope to finish another today. I'll post them when I have several done.
The reception for the Braithwaite Gallery invitational show of regional artists is tomorrow, and I'll probably go.
We've been busy decorating my new canopy tent in anticipation of setting up at the local Ren Faire in early July. It's a very small Faire, but it's right here in town and we'll be home for it this year so I figured "why not?".

My backyard robin population has recovered after the temporary residence of a hawk, who ate a number of them. This year's crop of babies has fledged, and they are hopping all over the yard doing stupid things like pecking at various items to see if they are edible. I saw one peck a grasshopper and then jump back in total surprise when it leaped up into its face. No veteran robin would be shocked by a grasshopper hopping. Another naive new robin looked in to the kitchen from a cottonwood branch and then freaked out and fluttered to another branch when it saw me.It peeked cautiously from behind some leaves and watched me with apparent fascination and made alarm calls. Jaded veteran robins just boldly stare and sit there. I like robins, and I'm glad they're back. The antics of the babies are pretty funny.
I startled a deer again in the yard when I opened the curtains this morning. It had bedded down, and got up and panicked when it saw a person. I'm not sure why such totally skittish deer decide to live in town, but I think it's the succulent lawns that they're after. Still, they're terrified of even being seen.

I've noticed bats on my evening walks lately. They've been out earlier than I've seen before, so it's been light enough to watch their aeroBATics (snark). They really are amazing flyers, turning so quickly and catching bugs at such a furious rate.

It is such a luxury to have such quiet and uneventful days. It won't be long till I have to plunge back into travel and chaos.

First I want to mention that I'm grateful that my town has a Staples. It didn't when we moved here, which meant that many office and packing supplies had to be ordered online or purchased 60 miles away at the nearest town of any size.
Since we still make some purchases online and take advantage of rebates and specials, they send Barry and me ads via email. But at some point they separated the ads we got at our respective email addresses into what I can only describe as "girl ads" and "boy ads". The "boy ads" generally have a very straightforward offer- the most recent being 25% off a purchase of $100, which is typical of the ads Barry gets. The "girl ads" feature things like cheap gardening tools, floral stationary worth a few dollars or a plastic travel nail kit or the like, and it takes a much larger purchase, typically $150, to get it. So they are offering pretty shinies to tempt the girls into inferior deals...which I think is kinda weird. Needless to say, we always use the coupons Barry gets.

In other news, the day is lovely, I'm making shredded beef taco filling in the slow cooker, and Barry is somewhat less than thrilled that the Blue Reef Aquarium named their giant reef worm Barry!

My work for the day is done and I'm winding down with a Wyder's Dry Raspberry Cider. I didn't get as much done as I wanted to, but I did get the studio almost ready for transferring my supplies back out for the season. I even swept the deer crap from the walkway..it was very thoughtful of the deer to leave nice a nice big steaming pile behind so I would know that they had stopped by.
( Lots more, with pictures! (not of the deer crap) )

Time after time lately, a huge storm is in the forecast yet all we get is a dusting of snow. Right now, there are puffy snow clouds here and there but it's mostly sunny. We were supposed to get a good blanket of white stuff. Mind you, I'm not complaining! It's just kind of funny that every time we hunker down, the storm passes by. There is sunshine forecast for later this week. I suppose that's when we'll get a blizzard.

We didn't do much over the holiday weekend, other than go to an art fair at the Coyote Gulch Art Village in the Kayenta development in the St. George area. All the art was Southwestern in theme. There was some good stuff, but I didn't buy anything. We walked around Snow Canyon again for awhile.

I woke at 6 a.m and had coffee as the sun rose. I caught an episode of Home Movies I somehow managed to never see before as kitty made a pest of herself by getting in my face. I confess, winter broke my non-coffee drinking habit. There's just something wonderful about the smell of brewing coffee on a dark morning, and a warm mug in your hands. I'm drinking nowhere near the amount I used to, though.

In other exciting earthshattering news, I'm baking honey wheat bread. I've been working on the consistency of my loaves. Turns out that I was putting too much liquid in some of the dough, which led to crumbliness. Local birds have benefited from my errors- I have several types birds that come onto the upstairs porch for crumbs including jays, phoebes and spotted towhees.
The Chia herb garden I got for Christmas is growing nicely in the window, and I broke in my new wok.

I am so ready for spring.

In my area, you can get a permit to take a tree from federally owned forest land to take home to use as a Christmas tree. Even though the areas you can get permits for need to be thinned anyway, I would find it kind of depressing to go rip a tree that was innocently minding its own business away from the cool alpine world of chirping birds and cavorting squirrels to cover it with cheesy decorations and slowly watch it die until it became a hazard enough that I felt compelled to throw it away. I guess I should explain that the short days and long nights of winter usually already leave me with a touch of cabin fever and a case of the blues, so adding the slow spectacle of a dying tree just doesn't seem like a happy addition to my usually already black holiday mood. I could buy a live tree, but I have a parade of previous years' live trees left by previous owners of my house growing in my yard. With 60+ trees on a half acre, I'm already confronted with the fact that at some point I'm going to have to remove some of them to give others room. My blue spruce former Christmas trees may be 5, 7, 15 and 25 feet high respectively but eventually they could get 60 feet high, and I have lots of other types of pines that may or may not have been Christmas trees (or maybe left over Christmas trees on sale judging from the number of them) so I ruled out a live tree.

Instead, my Christmas tree is a garish fiber optic obviously fake thing with a plastic faux antique base and 10 color wheels so I can change its light show from seizure inducing strobe to shifting rainbow colors when the mood takes me. It may not have the comforting smell of pine (although I bet some sort of accessory scent pack is available since it already comes with so many "special" features) but I'm a believer that to properly celebrate the "holidays" (to use a term offensive enough in Utah to incite an attempt at legislation by crazy state senator Chris Buttars) one must revel in tackiness. After all, tis' the season for meaningless mass consumption and compulsory annual elevation of vapid consumerism and self indulgent excess to the level of a religious rite. So why fight it...I just go with it.
Last night we decked our plastic multi-thousand fiber optic lighted "tree". In addition to the plastic fashion-model posed cross-eyed Disney princesses with mouths frozen in catatonic Barbie smiles of surprise as they unwrap gifts or feed glazed-eyed apparently drugged docile songbirds, I placed and elegantly rendered porcelain Alice the Goon, leering gritted-teeth Brutus, and a smug looking Jughead from Archie looking every bit like he's stealing the bag of gifts he's carrying. Amid the blown glass balls of various colors, Batman and Superman hang in action poses- I intended that they should be fighting but instead it looks like they've finally found true love and are happily doing an energetic disco dance with one another to express their feelings. Bugs Bunny dressed as Carmen Miranda complete with Tutti Frutti Hat flirts coyly from a crinkly plastic bough. Wimpy offers a shiny porcelain burger on a platter in a selfless act of Christmas generosity. Grim from Mother Goose and Grim scratches his fleas as his Christmas light bedecked sombrero reads "Fleas Navidad". Most of these ornaments have some memory attached to them. Not all of them fit on the tree at once so not everyone gets a chance at appearing every year. I still haven't found my collection of Eeyores- I always related to Eeyore more than any other Pooh character, though I have some psycho Tiggers and fat Pooh bears. I can't leave Eeyore drooping unseen in his boxes, it's just too sad, so I'll keep stuffing ornaments on the tree until I find him. Finally, I'll top my tree of tackiness with the most garish tree topper I could find in all of Walmart. I looked at the Ace hardware/quilt shop/gun store and although they had many a cheese-ball thing and a super special for Christmas on Glocks, the Walmart one was cheesier. It is a tall glitter covered plastic extravaganza from exotic India.
I have to hang a few more stockings (which will probably merit coal at best this year) and some ornaments that I used to make when I had time to make crafty items. Overall, I feel much more in the spirit now. All I need is to download Stephen Colbert's Christmas :The Greatest Gift of All cd and I think I'm ready to get into this Holiday mood thing.

We went to see "Moonlight and Magnolias" at a theater at the University last night courtesy of someone who kindly gave us free tickets. The play is a slapstick look at what might have happened when David O. Selznick, Beh Hecht and Victor Fleming rewrote the script for "Gone With The Wind" in five days. Slapfights, Selznick's rendition of Scarlett O'Hara and flying banana peels ensue. I don't think I've ever seen a stage left quite so messy before, except maybe at a GWAR! concert. It was presented as part of the fall lineup for the annual Utah Shakespearean Festival, which includes a variety of other plays besides Shakespeare. I would like to also see "Gaslight" which is also being presented.
I have only five...countem', five pieces to finish before my work for 2008 is officially over. That's a record for me. I used to be overnighting everything by this time each year just to get it to the conventions in time. Being so far ahead is especially surprising since I was away from home for a total of over 2 months this year.
On the bread baking front, I am using starters now...containers of fermenting flour and yeast that "live" in the fridge until I need them. These are essential for making crusty French and Italian breads. I haven't bought bread of any kind in many weeks now. I even make hamburger buns. I may be ready to start playing around with sourdough!
On the political front, I'm rather surprised that so few seem to understand the difference between Joe the Plumber's gross business income and his taxable net. The assertions that personal taxes are payed off the gross is absurd. The fact that this seemed to confuse the candidates was...well...weird. And Joe has no business being in business at all if he doesn't even understand basic accounting. Just a thought.

I have teh Internets! Yay!

When I fly to cons, I like traveling a day early in case of delays.
The first leg of the trip went smoothly- I can get to the local small airport 5 minutes from my house 20 minutes before my flight and still have time to sit around. I'm enjoying the last of that, though 'cause the loony locals blackballed the current airline in favor of the "locally owned" (guess the true meaning of that phrase in Utah, heh heh) SkyWest which feeds exclusively into Delta in Salt Lake City- meaning insane 6 stop connections to get anywhere. Cedar City to Boston via Delta in 2004 was Cedar to Salt Lake to San Fransisco or Los Angeles (or both on one "flight choice") to Chicago (add Philadelphia on some "choices") to Boston. So when SkyWest takes over again and stops the flights to the nearest large city- Vegas, we'll probably be driving to Vegas to get the cheaper direct flights. I'm gonna miss the Vegas flights and being able to check in at our tiny podunk airport so I savored this last time. Of course if the government subsidies end, no airline will be flying out of Cedar anymore. Red staters love to gorge like fat pigs at the tax trough as much as anyone- don't ever let them tell ya otherwise! :P
At any rate, the Cedar to Vegas prop plane flight is amazing, with views of Zion, parts of the Grand Canyon, the Virgin River Gorge and the stark Nevada desert. You get great views of the Vegas strip as well. They send flights out of Las Vegas like they're loaded on a slingshot- one after the other with hardly any space between.

The fallout from all the storms and the fact that it's a holiday weekend was causing all sorts of mayhem for all sorts of people yesterday. My flight from Las Vegas to San Fransisco was delayed several hours, but compared to the epic tales of woe some could tell, I got off easy and was thankful. Take the couple on my plane that had set out to take a direct flight from the east coast on Tuesday night and was waiting on the (delayed) fifth improvised leg of the journey on the third airline on Thursday at noon. They had been "stuck on the tarmac" for lengthy periods during two of those flights, been stuck in ticket lines for 4 hours at a time and were sans sleep for 36 hours. So when a perky stewardess bounced off the late plane we were waiting for and quipped "gee, why is everyone so grouchy today?" all she got were exhausted glares. A man at the hotel where I'm at now had spent 10 hours in a ticket line and had finally been told to come back in several days and they'd get him home eventually.
As I waited I bought a book at the Las Vegas airport "It's Not News, It's FARK-How Mass Media Tries To Pass Off CRAP as News" by Drew Curtis. It's pretty good so far- with chapter titles like "Media Fear Mongering" and "Equal Time For Nutjobs" it has to be! I had a leisurely lunch, and finally got into San Francisco. There was construction going on so no one knew how to find out what luggage was going to be on what carousel, plus there were mountains and mountains of piled luggage from people who had not made it with the flights it corresponded to. There were marker-on-notepaper signs which said what airport the piles were from but not which flights. So...it was mayhem.
I painted dayglo happy faces on our luggage awhile back, forgoing the dignity and coolness of black for ease of finding my stuff. "Oh, the shocking pink happy face with three eyes...that's mine!" I must say I have endured sneers and questioning from sheeple before, but all I can say is I'm not the one still standing at the carousel looking at the tags of every identical black bag that circles around. :P
The airlines need to kick the shareholders out of the process and get back to serving customers, not investors. I'm sick of being treated like cattle in a process where corporations are focusing on providing as little service for as much money as possible to give my money to a third party that benefits me in no way. I can hear the pitches in my imagination.."but if we anestethize the units...er...passengers, we could stack them six high and increase profits x%- we can call it RelaxFly(tm) or DreamVoyage(tm)"

So, the hotel for Westercon is very nice- I'm in a nice suite with a feathery poofy bed that I sank into and slept nearly 12 hours. I faded off watching an awesome History International show about the construction of Chartres Cathedral. Amazing stained glass and wild flying butresses...didn't dream though. Wait, now that I think of it I did...there was a plumbing related flood going on..it was an expansive rural property with trees and buildings, it wasn't mine but the person who owned it was gone so I was trying to stop the flood. The owner was disorganized so I couldn't find the valve in the main building that would shut it off behind all their junk. Someone was stopping me asking for art lessons while I was moving plastic chairs trying to find the source of the flood. Now where the hell did THAT come from?

So I'm all recharged and ready for the con! :) I'll be sure to keep you updated.