Awesome Joolie

Well, this month of blogging has sure been a bust. It's not that I don't want to write, I don't think; it's that I've depleted the well of quotidian personal blogging several times over; after all, I've been doing this on and off and in one form or another for almost, oh, 20 years. And it's a fine format, and a fine thing to do, but at this point I think I want to write about ideas and things that interest me but aren't necessarily centered on myself. And I'm not sure what those are, exactly. And let's face it, it's a lot more fun to write for an audience, which I simply don't have anymore. So I will continue to pay to host this site and dip in when I have something to say. And maybe you'll dip in to see it; that would be nice.

A muggy, sullen day. I went into the office today and wandered around in the rain a bit, checking out the soon-to-be-opened Texas Mall.* It used to be a crummy, underused stub of North Congress Avenue that stretched from the Capitol to UT campus and wasn't used for much besides parking, but the state built a bunch of office buildings and sunk the parking underground--smart move; the parking garage canyon on San Jacinto Blvd. is so depressing and such a waste of space--and soon it will be a pedestrian mall. The landscaping wasn't as inspiring as I would have liked, but I hope it becomes a nice, welcoming space. I wish they could link it via land bridges over 15th Street to the north side of the Capitol grounds and over MLK Boulevard to connect the Bullock Museum with the Blanton, but that's probably a dream. Still, it'll be a nice amenity. Between that and the refurbished Waterloo Park and the newish medical school and hospital, that corner of downtown is getting pretty damn interesting. 

*Didn't realize until I read the site at this link that cars will still be able to cross at the numbered streets, albeit in a controlled fashion. Today I learned about speed tables! 

Typepad, the host of this blog, had an extended outage over the weekend. I didn't even notice because who cares about blogs anymore? Not me! But the company's repeated mea culpas eventually filtered through into my Twitter feed and caused me to think about this site for the first time in months.

At the very same time, what's-his-face bought Twitter, and even if he doesn't wreck the platform, the spectacle of his running it probably will. Right now my entire feed is consumed by him, each stupid little business decision he makes, and how colossally dumb he is for making each of those decisions, and he'll be broke within months, selling Tesla for scrap metal--unless he uses his new and awesome power to completely wreck the United States and turn us over to Saudi Arabia. Or something. It's a lot. 

I started tweeting about my irritation with all this but then I realized I was just giving more oxygen to the thing that's annoying me because it's taking up all the oxygen. You can't win, you know? So before I could finish the sentence I was typing I said, "Oh, shut up," to...myself? everyone else on Twitter? everyone in the world? and closed my laptop.

Anyway, I like Twitter. I rely on it for news; I like chatting on there and posting inconsequential things to a small group of family and friends. And I have always been a newshound, so I enjoy drinking from its overwhelming firehose, even when I start to suspect it might be eroding my mental health a skosh. 

But right now it's no fun on there; even clowning Elon Musk gets old pretty quick, it turns out, and I don't really want to add my content, inane as it is, to that asshole's site. Which is inconsistent of me because Mark Zuckerberg is also a democracy-destroying bozo, and I happily post on Instagram all the time. I'm not that principled.

I don't know, what I'm trying to say is that a number of things happened this weekend that made me think about posting on my own site that I pay for and (sort of) designed and own the content to, and not only that, I remembered that November is traditionally NaBloPoMo, the incredibly stupid abbreviation for "National Blog Posting Month," a spinoff of the equally terribly named "NaNoWriMo," which is short for National Novel Writing Month, during which masochists endeavor to write an entire novel in what is tied for the second-shortest month of the year. (Now that I've said that, I'm pretty sure I wrote this exact same sentence last year when I started this challenge, but I'm not going to go back to check until I publish this. I'll let you know!) 

Anyway, this is just shy of 2500 characters to say I'm back, for this month at least. Hi! I missed you. I have a new dog. He's weird but nice. See you tomorrow! 

UPDATE: Yes! I may not be consistent in my willingness to help further enrich evil billionaires by posting on their websites, but I am quite consistent in my disdain for the NaBloPoMo portmanteau. (NaBloPoMonteau?) (Oh, shut up.) 

My beloved ocotillo died in the stupid freeze last winter, so this year I had to put our little strings of solar-powered Christmas lights on a Texas sotol instead. That bloom stalk came up a year ago and is now completely spent, so when it comes time to take the lights down we can probably chop it down and pull the lights off that way.

I think the sotol will be happier when the stalk is gone, too. They don't die after they bloom like century plants, but it has been looking noticeably grumpy lately. (I don't think I'm projecting here.)

Here's the ocotillo in better days. I knew that planting one in Austin was a risk, since they're from a warmer, drier climate than ours, but I had to try. Eric and I took our honeymoon in West Texas and they were blooming like crazy that spring. On the last day of our trip I opened the back door to our hotel room and gasped because the back fence was made of ocotillo stalks--they were all blooming and it looked a little like the fence was on fire, and I was like, god damn! So cool. When I got home my friend Katherine and I built a drainage mound to compensate for the heavier rainfall here in Central Texas and plunked one in, and all was well for years until a week of ice and snow and single-digit temperatures did it in.

It never did bloom for me, though; I think it has to go through some serious drought cycles or something to produce flowers. Still, it was a very striking plant. Someday I might plant another one, or I might go all in on the native-and-adapted thing for the front yard instead of hosting a plant that doesn't really want to live here.  

All that is a very roundabout way of saying we put up some Christmas lights this afternoon. I also finished the mermaid mosaic this morning--the demo a couple weeks ago was fun and went well, though it was lightly attended--and I'm happy with how it turned out. I have a Christmas commission to do for a friend and then I want to start experimenting, getting a little weird. I'm not even sure what that means yet, exactly, but I think I'm technically adept enough now to start playing around.

I kind of crapped out on this daily writing project, didn't I? The truth is I have had a nice couple of weeks lately, full of friends, family, weekend trips, and the appreciation and generation of art. This is a welcome streak after what has otherwise been a frightening, dull, and trying year; I feel like I passed a test I didn't know I was taking at the time, and now my reward is to appreciate things again. 

I have no doubt the pandemic and climate change and the political landscape and my own middle age and and and will bring horrors anew, but for now I will absolutely take joy where I can, even if it distracts me from the important work of fulfilling an arbitrary challenge on an obsolete platform. 

I got Pfizer shot three on Sunday and felt chilly and achy and feverish all day yesterday. I don't think I've ever had a fever without some sort of respiratory or gastrointestinal unpleasantness to accompany it, so that was a novel sensation. Once work was done for the day and I was settled on the couch with a blanket that I could draw around me or toss off according to whim, it wasn't too bad.

Then I see today the hospitalization numbers in Texas are starting to edge up again and I...don't care? No, that's not accurate, I do care, quite a bit, but like most people I'm weary of this stupid show and would like to change the channel, please. 

I remember feeling at the beginning of the pandemic that people who insisted on gathering despite the restrictions and the warnings were selfish assholes, and ok, they kinda were, but I've also come to realize that being around the people we love, who give us connection and energy and belonging, is not a luxury. We need each other. And so I desperately want the transmission numbers to stay low, so I can keep seeing the people I care about, and so those who are more vulnerable than most can go to work and school and meet their friends without too much anxiety. I would even like to go back to the office part time, although I have to say by now that the thought of getting dressed, driving downtown, and spending all day in an office building whether I'm needed there or not for five days a week now seems ludicrous. 

I know I'm lucky. Like everyone, I've lost some things, mostly opportunities, to the pandemic, but I haven't lost anyone, and that is something to be grateful for. And in a lot of ways I'm able to participate in the things I like and care about again, and that is also something I am careful not to take for granted.

But limping along in this uncertain, not-yet-fully-formed new normal--man, it's exhausting, and I don't see an end to it any time soon. So in the meantime I will live my life as best I can, with some restrictions, and wear a KN95 if it feels prudent, and I will take every damn booster shot that's offered to me until my left arm falls off or the pandemic ends, whichever comes first. 

If you follow me elsewhere, or know me in person, you know our dog Willa had a seizure and died a little over a month ago. I've finally stopped crying every day, but her absence has left a huge hole, and if you know grief, that treacherous asshole, you know it abates for a while before striking again in full effect, without warning. And when it does I feel like I've been punched right in the heart.

Losing an old pet is very sad, but it's no tragedy. It's a pain we all sign up for, knowing our time together is short; the clock is already ticking the day we take our new friend home. Willa died fairly quickly--though it certainly didn't feel that way at the time--and maybe a little on the young side; 11 doesn't seem that old for a dog. But the painful arthritis that warped her front paws was progressing and our exuberant girl was very slowly but noticeably becoming more withdrawn, even grumpy. We were going to have some very hard conversations in the not-too-distant-future.

I know all this. I know. But today was a clear, perfect fall day, and damn it, I would trade a lot to sit in the backyard with my dog in the November sunshine for a minute and stroke the soft, perfect triangles of her ears while she sniffed the air and turned her intelligent eyes to mine, as if to say, are you getting all this? 

Last time I did a mosaic demo it was a Christmas market event at an art gallery in Georgetown, Texas, in 2019, and I brought a piece featuring a manatee that I had just started working on. I picked away at it for a couple of hours, politely answering questions from the occasional bored adult who wandered through--until an entire Girl Scout troop stopped by. They were probably nine or ten; that cool, interesting late elementary school age. Their troop's float had won first place in the town Christmas parade that morning, so they were super effusive and high on their success.

They unselfconsciously hijacked my project, gluing in tiles any which way and advising me that I should really incorporate a tsunami into the design. It was an absolute blast. (Though I admit I did scrape most of their work off the board after I was sure they were gone.) 

I'll probably never quite recreate the magic from that encounter, but I'm keeping the fun of that afternoon in mind as I prepare my piece for Saturday. The idea is I'll have a primary image already in place, and anyone who stops by will be welcome to add something to the background. I'm in an interesting spot, design-wise, as I'd like to have something elaborate and pretty enough to give people an idea of the possibilities of the art form, but also something simple enough that no one will feel weird about letting their six-year-old glue a bunch of shit to. I think I can straddle that. 

I saw a dead red-shouldered hawk in the grass on my walk to the library to return a book this morning. Then, at the library, people were setting up a press conference for a guy who was announcing his run for city council. I'm not in that district, though, so I didn't stick around to hear what he had to say.

I didn't see much of interest on the walk back. 

I spent the rest of the day working from home, moving plants around the backyard, and doing a grout study for the demo I'm doing on Saturday. 

Before

The idea is to lay out your tiles in multiple, identical configurations and then use different grout colors to compare the different effects.

During

In this case, light gray, medium gray, and dark gray.

After

It always blows my mind what a difference grout color makes. A very pale piece with all white tiles might call for a lighter grout, and a medium grout color can help pull together contrasting colors without washing one of them out. But in a case like this, I almost always prefer the dark grout. I love how vibrant it makes the tile colors in comparison. Although the medium gray splits the difference nicely. It's really a matter of preference. 

I finished deep cleaning my home office this afternoon. Before the pandemic, I would frequently go in there before I had to leave for work in the morning to grab something I needed or spend a few minutes on a project, and I would linger in the doorway on the way out for a moment. The room has a north and an east window and looks great in the morning: sunny brightness from the east cut by the soft, diffuse light from the north window, barely green from being filtered through the leaves of the pecan tree outside. It's very inviting and conducive to creative work when it's like that. I would look at this light and sigh and think it would be so great it I could spend the whole day in there all the time instead of getting in my stupid car and driving on the stupid highway to my stupid office building; god, could I be retired already so I could do that? And then I would clomp down the stairs to the garage, chiding myself to not be one of those miserable people who wishes for her life to speed up and be done with so as to be through with the less appealing parts of it. But somewhere, a cursed monkey's paw must have curled a withered finger and waited patiently for circumstance to catch up, because soon enough I was working from home every day in that room, often well into the night and on weekends too, driven to agitation by endless Slack notifications and goggle-eyed from glaring at a computer monitor while my unfinished personal art projects taunted me from the adjacent table. Womp womp, bitch. 

So the deep clean was cathartic if also a little traumatic. I wiped up all the grime, threw out a ton of papers and crap, and found a place for everything else, even if that place happens to be a teetering stack of stuff in the back corner of the closet. It looks great in there now, and I can't wait to start cluttering it up again; for the time being, the ratio will skew more toward the personal projects than the professional. Eventually we'll go back to the office at least some of the time, and I can start messing up that space again as well.

Really, I would like a black hole of some sort where I can stash the things I don't need right away or don't feel like dealing with quite yet without actually having to allot any physical space to them. Don't tell the monkey's paw I said that, though. I'm pretty sure it'd get things all twisted up again and I'd end up living at the edge of a quasar, cursing my luck. And even there, somehow, I'd still have to respond to those fucking Slack notifications.