January

 Sinking into home and the winter work has been mostly lovely and I'm gradually finishing all the tasks on my long list. It's mostly the same list as I always have, but some things are bigger projects than others and have to wait. I almost rebuilt my back steps but lacked one piece of wood so convinced myself to wait for summer. Front steps need rebuilding too.

This sunny weather, although cold, has been useful as I decided to dye and print bandanas now, so every evening I do a dye load (30 bandanas, in the washer) and every day I hang them out in the sun and they get mostly dry, then come in the house to finish. Laundry is the same in the winter...pick a sunny day, put it out there, move it around to catch all the available sun, and then bring it in and hang it on all the cabinet doors until it is dry. It has been maybe 20 years without a clothes dryer now and I have done well without it. Electric heat is expensive enough without sending it all outside through a vent. 

Days like today the sun isn't quite hot enough to get me out there...it's not consistent and I don't have room inside for a lot of racks with drying bandanas. I've been doing a lot of hats, too. Prices went up so I got a lot of stock in and have been gradually printing it all for summer. My bags are almost used up. That will be interesting...I don't plan to start buying commercial bags. I've been spoiled with these custom-made ones, as the quality is much higher, but the sewing company retired (well-deserved) and I mostly have used up the pleated kind, though I still will have the smaller flat ones for at least this year. Bags are heavy, so this is somewhat intentional as well, and partly why I started the bandanas.

I'm enjoying the solitude although the Jell-O Art troupe is meeting weekly so I still have plenty of social interaction and more things to do. I need to focus on catching up with the Jell-O Art blog (Gelatinaceae) as I never really finished last year with a summary post or two, and I do plan to. Maybe today! Meanwhile I made some of these boingies, which are fun to play with and will make into something on down the line. Mostly Jell-O Art is confined to this offseason of January, February and March, and after the show on March 28th I mostly put it away for a year, unless something else comes up. One year we did the parade in September, when it was going to be our 30th year (2018) and now we are getting closer to 40. But no parade for me now that it is a Saturday night. Though you never know!

 I call these things boingies because they are reactive when you hold them by one end...fun to play with or stick on a hat (poking hazard....) You make them by putting the gelatin in a pie plate and cutting a strip out in a circular fashion...for more info, go read my Jell-O blog. I mostly needed to make something, so I decided to just have fun while awaiting other ideas.

Even though the sun is out, I am going over there to write now...we have practice tonight so I have to immerse today, and even sing a song or two. It's still early for us, so no urgency, but we really want to do a better job this year and practice more diligently. It will be worth it (hope so anyway.)

I've been watching TV shows from the 50s as research and I have to say, after having "If you can't say something nice, don't say nothing at all..." thrown at me twice lately, I remember the source of that, and it was Thumper the rabbit in the film Bambi. This was classic 50s Disney with the dead mother (all of his films had that) and the threats to the poor innocent deer all designed to make him a man before his time. Thumper was supposed to be the sensible, though cowardly and easily intimidated character, and none of the characters in Disney movies appealed to me as role models, though I was as influenced as any kid by the indoctrination of that Disney culture. There was that Hero's Journey, but it was not a great time to be a girl or woman and that's a big part of the evolving we had to do to get from the 50s to now. I discarded "nice" in my twenties. It means nothing. I am all for compassion, kindness, support and uplifting, but nice for its own sake is just a sugar cookie that will kill you. So those people who thought they might make me feel something did not make me feel like being nicer. 

But confrontation is so stressful, and there are so many bigger things happening in our world that need more attention than the internal politics of messiness.