I finally got to use my parka and mukluks made for mushing to mush!! Yeah for dog sledding..... That's me on the sled, and then from back to front, left to right, we have Earl, Zinger, Andy (my favorite dog in the world), and Ruby. Aren't they beautiful?? And so nice. Didn't even fake a bite! :)

Excerpts from a lost journal

1/14/06:
Painting - no, I don't want to write about that. That's another dimension. World really. I don't even know if I'm the same person as painter and all else. I don't know. I'm reading about Van Gogh. his artist saved him for a while. Mine could kill me.
1/16/06:
Hmmm. It's Julie's birthday. I think we found out today that it would kill me. I musn't let it. here's what I've got: 10 weeks. 7 paintings completed, 4 paintings started, and 4 left to be started, besides putting the supports together. . . But if there's something I hate right now besides George W. Bush and his idiotic regime for oil, war, death, and reversing the progress of women's rights, it is the very fact that . . . is leading me through the process. There's one simple problem. . . I am left to ask my respected classmates for what it is within me that I cannot find. This will build my character as an artist, or kill it, which in turn should save my life. What is more important to me? What I paint, or what I do with the rest of my time? It's not about what I paint anyway, it's the process. I feel stuck in one that dilutes the very emotion I need to transfer to the canvas. Sometimes I hit it dead on. Other times I hit what's holding it dead on and instinctively swear, get red in the face, and subsequently yell at whoever happens by with a word of encouragement or advice. Too bad for my husband, it is not I who has words of that kind, so as he slightly persuades my reasoning brain, awakening language and my voice, he hears the frustration the canvas glares at me as though it wasn't mine to begin with, yet reminding me I put it there.
But in other ways lucky for him that an artist I can't be, for I am other things that I can't quit. My love for other things I can not give up completely. Loving him, for example. Enjoying nature as it is and as it is meant to be and not wondering which colors express its emotion and mine. To feel without the obstacle of production. I will never stop creating. It is a part of me as my breath is a part of life. But I won't let it kill me, lest my breath fade and to this life I am no use. This I refuse to be. I cannot make anything better off if I am mad. My time in which being an artist would have saved me has come and gone. But art did not save me. Something else did. Art and I owe each other nothing. It is an activity that I do in my convenience. It owes me no masterpiece, nothing even at all good. And I owe it no time, though randomly I give it freely. I ask nothing from it, but that I may learn to become better for it. And I give it nothing but faith in just that.

blogs

I hate finding out about truly amazing moments in the lives of my frie nds because I happened upon a web page.

Oh my gosh I figured out how to do it all by myself!!!!

Mmmmm

I love bananas. So smooth and creamy and delicious they are. So pale yellow and packed with potassium. How do you spell pottassium? Oh here's a dictionary: I was right the first time.
And by reading it I made it so much uglier: though it prevents muscle cramps, it is, according to Webster's Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition, a silver-white, soft light low-melting univalent metallic element of the alkali metal group that occurs abundantly in nature esp. combined in minerals.
What the hell?
Mmmmm, I still love bananas.

Voltaire

Was Voltaire an idiot? Because, according to my Good Earth tea bag, he said, "Anything too stupid to be said is sung." Someone please explain to me why this makes sense,,, in a language I can hear. That would be great. Thanks.

sticky

Hmmm, that describes a lot more these days than Jessie's cat. By the way, Jess, if you find my blog and read this soon "viscosa" does mean viscous, but it also means sticky.. Somehow, that makes sense :) ... but I'll probably see you before then and tell you anyway.
This past weekend... that was sticky too. Somehow, we let other relationships get in the way of our own. Too many friends in too many places, or too few in too many places, or too few here. Probably all of it. We spent about 20 more minutes together this New Year's midnight than last New Year's. That equals about 20 minutes :) Parties and sickness and people that "comfort" is not the word to describe how it feels to be with them. And other people who fit that definition quite well, and solitude. Don't ever underestimate solitude. People are important, so never underestimate them, but it is so much easier to forget what solitude can give you if you let it. But it wasn't Saturday but Sunday and Monday that held the effects of la viscosidad.
But we made a Snow Brontosaurus yesterday, and a Baby Snow Brontosaurus. They're cute. Nothing is sticky anymore, except I guess the cat that lives three houses away. Hmmm. Interesting. :)