I’ve been playing around on my new website a bit. Still have a bunch to learn about wordpress when it’s not on wordpress.com but I am enjoying setting this up. Well, here is a report with pictures of our last walk in the woods:
September at Alpine Pond on Skyline Ridge – The Reluctant Hiker.
I am now six weeks out from my hernia surgery and things are healing nicely. There isn’t anymore physical pain and I’ve been adding more of my normal activities back to my schedule. The only slight problem is energy or rather the lack of. It’s a bit frustrating at times as I get started on something with good intentions but just end up fatigued far before I normally do.
The surgeon did warn me that it could take two to three months to get back to where I was before the operation. So far it looks like it will take every minute of the three months to recover.
This last year my life has been a constant tension between set backs and recovery. It feels like just about the time I’ve recovered from something – wham-o something new sets me back. My hope is that my health will stabilize and I’ll have a chance to move on with my projects without worrying about my body for a while.
Yeah, who knows how that will work out.
Even with my lower energy level I have moved ahead on a few projects but not far enough to really report much. I’ve read more in Mary Orr’s book on intertextuality, am about half way through the book, “Forgive for Good”; and built a panel cutting jig so I can cut the tray bottoms for my serving trays.
And I did buy the parts to build the rain gutter for the house, but time hasn’t let me get to that little project.
Time is that elusive thing that I never can get a firm hold of – it just slips away and I wake up wondering why I didn’t get anything done. This week was just another example of that. Monday night I worked on material for our hiking web site but didn’t have enough time to polish well enough to post. Tuesday night was finance night and I spent the evening doing bookkeeping. Thursday we went to a dinner party with a couple we know and a bunch of people we didn’t know. Saturday I helped a friend at church troubleshoot a network cable.
The highlight of my week was Saturday afternoon when Heather and I went to the Pacific International Quilt Festival. We just love to see the quilts – these are not your simple bed quilts but rather works of art. There are traditional quilts, landscapes, portraits, abstracts and just amazing works of art. I find the art inspiring and just love to wander around being amazed how people can make those amazing works with fabric and thread.
There are also the required number of vendor booths so we picked up a few things for Heather’s quilting. As a side note, I want you to know that Heather does some amazing fabric artwork too – I’ll post a picture of her latest project soon.
I love the patterns, lines, textures and colors in quilting. These components all l come together to form a picture, image or convey a feeling. This might sound strange but I find analyzing the quilts help with my marquetry. Both fabric and wood can be used to form a work of art. I’ve often thought that the two artistic methods have a lot in common when it comes to design – even though one is done with bits of fabric and one is done with bits of wood. In both cases, the medium can be use to take a picture or a feeling and abstract it into a visual expression.
One project that I’d like to take on is to take a single picture or design and execute it in both a quilt and in marquetry. Then I’d hang both side by side so you could compare the differences inherent in the materials and see how that difference changes how a picture feels.
I’ve been on the look out for such a picture or pattern. I think I’ve found one – a marquetry design that Heather has made from an old picture of her father. More about that when the concept matures.
There are basic differences between the materials that make the project interesting: Marquetry is flat while a quilt has a surface texture brought out by the stitching. In wood colors are limited to shades of brown, some whites, a couple of blacks and a few colors of dyed woods while in fabric the full range of color is available. The methods of fabrication vary greatly – saw, knife, wood veneers and glue for marquetry while quilting it is sewing machine, scissors, fabric and thread.
And that’s the thing I really like about going to the quilt show – it stimulates my creativity and gets my artistic mind running. It doesn’t matter what medium I work in after the show what matters is how seeing those works of art energizes me and makes me want to create something.
It is about finding a way to get my energy levels back. It’s about finding my way back from the lows that have taken hold of my life recently.
There are a million things running through my mind today. Some I’d like to write about and other best forgotten. The problem is focus. I am still working on a number of projects but none has reached a stage where they are complete enough to write at any length about.
If you think that means I’ll have a short post this week – you’ve not been reading my blog for very long…
First let me get the newsy stuff out of the way. Last weekend Heather and I enjoyed a very nice get away in Pacific Grove for our anniversary. Physically I wish I could have done more but still we enjoyed ourselves. I managed a walk from the inn to the beach, around the shops, art galleries and restaurants before I had to retreat to comfort of a chair. Each day I am a little stronger but still not 100% recovered. I’ve spent some time in my workshop, helped a little bit on the 2,000 piece puzzle in the living room and even helped put a few dishes away the other day but I’ve not really finished anything much.
I did start the new website and made a start at editing a video for it but haven’t finished – I learned a lot and hope that counts for something. I’ve started watching a series of videos on how to use WordPress and Drupal to build websites. I read a fellow blogger’s post over at YAPCaB (Fight or Accept) about the difference between fighting and accepting cancer – one of those posts that has made an impression on my mind that I can’t quite explain yet but know you should read what he said.
I even started reading a new book, “Intertextuality, Debates and Contexts,” by Mary Orr but have only gotten through the first part on defining what intertextuality is (or isn’t depending on how you read the text). I’d go into great detail on this literary criticism method but I suspect that the rest of the book is likely to greatly changed my thinking on how to use this “lens” to derive meaning from a text. So far it’s greatly change my thinking on what a “text” is along with a number of other things I thought I understood.
What I have finished in the last couple of weeks has been my re-reading of “Earth Abides” by George R. Stewart. This time through I set out to mark every place in the book where there was a quote or scene that I felt had either been an influence on my life, where the character Ish’s behavior paralleled my own, or where Stewart used a four-dimensional description (ie, described a scene in detail and how the scene changes over time).
I placed a lot of book marks. Here is a picture of the book after I finished:
Earth Abides is the one with all the blue markers.
The stack of books on my night table include just about everything I am currently reading – A book on forgiveness on my Kindle, Stewart, Orr and a wood working magazine. I tend to read a bunch of things at one time. Someday I might learn to focus.
But that’s not who I am – I shift from one thing to another. Sometimes quickly but most likely in my normally slow ponderous way.
That’s the way it’s been with “Earth Abides.” I am sure that there is something in there that I need to learn or need to articulate but I can’t focus my mind on the problem for long. Either because of my health, because more important things come up, because I haven’t reached clarity on what it is I want/need to say or I find I need to look something up and get lost on the way back.
As I’ve read and re-read “Earth Abides” three clear subject lines come to mind:
My current reason to delay writing about any of the above might seem a bit weak but it goes like this:
This re-reading project started out as an exercise in intertextual reading and as I looked at the problem I decided that I didn’t understand the tool of intertextuality enough to use it to read Stewart’s text so I bought a book on intertextuality to better understand the tool. While reading Orr’s book on intertextuality I see that she constantly refers to other texts (essays, books, lectures, etc) on the subject and it is coming clear that I’ll need to read those texts to understand what Orr is saying on a number of points, both major and minor and particularly around the notions of semiotics, which is likely outmoded by more post-modern thinkers but still of interest to me.
See! That’s what happens to my brain. I find one thread leads to another and another and another and then the whole thing folds back on itself and a complex weaving builds buried in a mass of incomplete thoughts.
It is so hard for me to say, “enough, I won’t follow that thread” or “I don’t need to know that to do the job at hand. Looking back at my list for “Earth Abides,” I know in part of my mind that I don’t need to know anything about semiotics to write a coherent essay or series of blog posts on any of the three points but the fear of leaving something incomplete bothers my intellect and blocks me from even starting some projects.
Which of course is a strange juxtaposition with other parts of my life where I am perfectly happy leaving things undone – like the dishes or the deck out back.
And speaking of the deck, I’ve got to build a rain gutter on part of the roof which got Heather and I talking about rain barrels.
Focus, focus…
This weekend is our anniversary weekend so I am not really here doing my normal Sunday writing – I wrote this on Friday and set it to post at my usual time. I just wanted to give a quick newsy sort of update.
I did work all week and managed to get through it. The worst day was Monday – I felt weak all day and it was a stressful day as I returned to find I had a new manager. By the end of the week things settled down and I am actually feeling better today than I did at the start of the week.
Last Thursday was the four-week mark and the doctor says I no longer have any lifting restrictions. I won’t be pouring any concrete anytime soon but it will be nice to get back to normal things like being able to lift a bag of groceries. There are still a few weird pains and twinges. The doc said it takes 2-3 months before it feels completely normal again.
Last week I mentioned holding myself accountable to getting out and hiking more. Well, in the name of accountability I’ve been spending time on setting up the hiking web site and we’ve set a date for our next big hike.
Here is the link to what I’ve got so far: The Reluctant Hiker It’s just a shell of a website for now but it’s got the basics in place. Heather took the picture in the header. She did another one but we liked the symbology of this one. Let me know what you think.
Well that it’s for for this week. Heather and I are packing up and heading out for a nice weekend away.
See you all next week.
