Dawn Albright
I upgraded the software, and the plugin that I was using to manage the images stopped working. So I guess going forward I will have to use something else. I suppose the safest thing to do is to simply use the basic wordpress features themselves to avoid this from happening in the future. Eventually, I will go back and fix old posts, or at least the ones that I liked the best, but don’t hold your breath.
It’s been a very long time since I updated. I’ve been busy and I’ve had lots of projects to put up. But I have to break my silence to share some good news.
The editor of podcastle contacted me to record my story “Black Ribbon” for an edition of their podcast this summer. The best thing about it is that she read my story when it first came out and remembered it all this time. It’s amazing to me that someone would remember it enough after sixteen years to come looking for me. It’s so easy to get discouraged with writing, like I’m just banging my head against the wall, but even the small amount of success I had went further than I’d realized. So I’m very happy.
The site looks good. They sent a schedule out today — I didn’t recognize many of the names on the list, but I will be following a story by Peter Beagle. When the story first appeared in print, the cover story in the issue before was by Madeline L’Engle. So this is the second time that I’ve been thrilled to have a tough act to follow.
They are at http://www.podcastle.org if you’d like to take a look.
This is one way to get some time for my projects… my son recently discovered a game called heroscape that he’s become totally obsessed by. It’s played with one inch tall figures. We had the brilliant idea of making our own figures and voila, now my every spare moment is spent with polymer clay again and if I want to do something else my son is now wheedling and nagging me to work with him on them. I’m not very good at the one inch size, so these aren’t artistic triumphs, but we are having a lot of fun.
This week, we were making an army of plant people. You can see two of our finished figures — I made the blushing plant girl, and Oz made the macho green man — and the armature we start with.
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Making this dress was an exercise in mood swings.
When I first started sewing the dress and I picked up the first two delicate pieces of silk, I thought that it was going to be a disaster. I thought there was no way I could possibly turn those tissue thin slippery pieces into a real dress. Then when I was 90% finished, I couldn’t believe how well it had turned out and I was practically dancing with joy. Then the last 10% of it turned out to take about 50% of the time and contain most of the mistakes and in the end, well, I didn’t ruin it too badly. At the first fitting, I couldn’t believe how close the pattern came. We only made one small adjustment to add another bust dart at the side to make the bust and the underarm work properly. (Dress patterns are almost always sized for B cups and need adjustment for anything else.) Then somehow we ended up with like ten different “last” fittings as teeny tiny things suddenly looked awful and I thought it was never going to work. But in the end, it’s not too bad.
I made the child too. That was also an exercise in mood swings, and there were times I thought it was never going to work out. Presumably, that will also turn out OK in the end.
The new job is great, but it’s not leaving me much energy for other things. I finished the baby sweater in time that it still fits the baby, but I gave it to her without getting a picture first, stupidly. I have been bit with the sewing bug again. I made a dress for myself and will try to get a picture up. I bought some beautiful light green Italian silk to make a prom dress for Alice. That’s my plan for this weekend, to get it roughed out. I don’t have a lot of time, so I better get moving on the prom dress or Alice will end up going in jeans.
Alice, my 15 year old daughter, requested these japanese fish pans for Christmas. It took her some time to figure out how to make these japanese pastries because the instructions and the recipe weren’t in English, but she persevered and worked it out. The pastries were beautiful and tasted wonderful.
Maybe you have to be the parent of a teenager to understand how thrilled I was — somedays, it feels like this kid can’t flip a switch (to judge from all the lights left on in the house) but then, here, she accomplished something complicated and very cool entirely by herself.
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I say in my mission statement that I don’t want anything in my life to be ordinary anymore. However, in my house, sometimes ordinary is a big step upwards.
When we were shopping for a house, the market was really tight. We kept offering the asking price on houses only to have them get into bidding wars and end up getting priced out of our range. Then finally, we found it… bubblegum pink walls, bulging plaster, moldy gold wallpaper, red shag carpet… it looked like a brothel in the low rent district. But most importantly, no one else wanted it, which meant that we could offer a price within our range and have it accepted. The other good thing about this is that I pretty much have free rein to do what I want in this house. Paint the house purple? Beats baby poop green. Paint murals on the wall? Way better than what was there before. Ordinarily, we are frightened by our half a million dollar investments to be conservative, but when the house starts off looking like this almost anything I want to do is an improvement.
However, I did decide that for the most part, floors should not call attention to themselves except by looking clean and providing a counter point to what is around them. We’ve been ripping up carpet little by little, and I finally broke down and had new bamboo floors installed. They’re shiny. It makes me happy. Every time I see these floors, I want to dance.
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The project in the previous post,btw, was replacing the blinds in our bedroom. I realize when I say that I don’t want anything in my life to be ordinary anymore, that sometimes ordinary is an improvement.
When we first bought our house, half of it was done in mildewed gold wallpaper and the other half was painted bubblegum pink. Bright, lurid pink the exact color of Bubble Yum. Every single bedroom. This is kind of hard to live with, but we had no time to paint when we were moving in, so live with it we have. I have slowly, painstakingly, taken care of this as time goes by. I wallpapered my bedroom a while back with little gold stars — it’s supposed to be kiddie wallpaper, but it was the only one that my husband and I both liked. Now, we have replaced the vile blinds with lovely bamboo blinds. Sometime down the road I will have to do something with the woodwork — it is still bright pink, but at least the pinkness of it all is cut by the wooden blinds.
Before and after pictures:
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I was very impressed with how my husband included our son in the latest round of house repair projects. I would have freaked out and told him to leave the room — Peter showed him how to change a drill bit and found little safe tasks that he could do so Oz was included without having his hands too close to the drill bit. I’d have never been able to do that.
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I have been very busy with things that don’t make good blog fodder, partially because of the lack of photos. I will be switching jobs in another week — looking for work took a lot out of me. I have also been writing an awful lot — it’s been very productive, but working on a novel doesn’t give me much to show here. The new critiquing group is fantastic — I am both horrified and ecstatic with how much they have found in my writing. I’ve been working on that thing for 18 years — why isn’t it perfect, already?
At http://www.worldbookday10.com/, they conducted a survey for ten books that you can’t live without or that changed your life. You can see their site for the winners. I present my list here:
1) Lord of the Rings
2) Wizard of Earthsea
3) Childhood’s End
4) Pinocchio (the real one by Carlos Collodi, the first book that I ever feel in love with.)
5) the Illuminatus Trilogy
6) Principia Discordia (the great religious book of the Discordians, of whom the founder said, “If I had known anyone was going to take this dumb religion seriously, I would have started one worshiping sex.”)
7) Spiral Dance (a somewhat more serious spiritual book.)
Laurel’s Kitchen (I wondered a bit if it was appropriate to put a cookbook on this list, but since the biggest contenders were all fiction books, I thought it was good to branch out. It changed my life very profoundly at the time.)
9) A Wrinkle in TIme (a huge comfort when I was a gawky pre-teen.)
10) Alice in Wonderland (Another early read that got me to love books.)
No one else seemed to have voted for Childhood’s End, Principia Discordia, Spiral Dance, or Laurel’s Kitchen. I would have thought Spiral Dance should have a contingent. I can think of a dozen more children’s books that I would like to put on this list, but not too many more adult books. I suppose I was more open to having my life changed when I was younger than I am now.