Marie: An Incomparable Ballet

On Saturday night, Michael and I attended the Houston Ballet's production of a brand-new ballet: Marie. Choreographed by Stanton Welch, the HB's artistic director since Ben Stevenson retired, Marie is a stunning production the caliber of Cleopatra.

I began attending the Houston Ballet in 1992 with my friend and co-worker Irene Duke. Daughter Alexandra joined us somewhere along the line, then Irene got busy and dropped out of our season ticket group. Alex and I attended together for many years, but eventually she too found it hard to fit into her schedule. For a while I bought two tickets and invited one of my friends to join me so I wouldn't be alone. I really tried to get Michael interested, but he resisted.

Occasionally, when there was a fabulous ballet, I could get him to attend with me and we developed an accord about attending performances. Each season, we go through the schedule and select four of the contemporary, mixed program type performances to attend on a mini-subscription. Michael doesn't care for the story ballets and, over 18 years, I have seen most of them more than once, so I can take them or leave them. But the contemporary programs, which often feature new work, give you three different experiences in one evening. They are often cutting-edge in terms of costuming and stylization, and they are frequently set to music no one associates with ballet, such as Moby or The Kronos Quartet.

So, for the last couple of years, Michael and I have enjoyed our four performances per season of the Houston Ballet, making a date of it on Saturday night instead of attending on Sunday afternoons like I used to. This year's contemporary performances have been outstanding. In addition, we attended the performance of Les Grands Ballets Canadiens de Montréal as well as the Jubilee of Dance, an annual, one-evening extravaganza featuring the best of everything from the Houston Ballet.

We picked Marie for this year's tickets because it was a world premiere. Welch's new works showcased in the contemporary performances have been excellent and we wanted to see what he would do with this story. The run-up hype for the show referenced the recent movie about Marie Antoinette, but we hadn't seen that, so we really had no other concept of Marie Antoinette than the "let them eat bread" stuff that always portrayed her as an uncaring, unenlightened snob.

The Saturday morning Chronicle review of the opening night performance gave us our first clue that the story would take a different tack and portray the queen in a sympathetic way. We arrived early enough to attend the regular pre-show dance talk, which Nancy Wozny, an old friend of mine, gave. Nancy had as her guest one of the costuming department's top people. They discussed the intricacies of crafting this ballet and demonstrated the lengths Welch and his team went to to get all the details just right by displaying a huge book of notes and sketches just for the character of Marie. Nancy also informed us about some of the little known history of Marie Antoinette. Reading the performance notes in the program put the icing on the cake. By the time the curtain rose, I had already been convinced that everything I knew about Marie Antoinette was biased and libelous.

Moments into the performance, I no longer cared about any of that. I became totally engrossed in the story unfolding before my eyes - and my ears, for that matter. The use of Shostakovich to score the dance was perfect. The music lacked the signals that the "made-for-ballet" compositions include to elicit knee-jerk reactions from the audience. Shostakovich's music blended subtly with the dance, partnered it rather than leading it.

And the dance itself - simply exquisite. From the confusion of two sheltered youths who had not a clue how to consummate their marriage to the raucous excesses of a libertine court to the terror of the revolution and the pathos of the royal family's deaths, the choreography could not have matched more perfectly. We had the privilege of seeing Melody Herrera dance the lead role. She performed with an understated command of the role, capturing and reflecting back to the audience the myriad qualities that made up this complex girl/woman. We saw her as a joyful child Marie; as an overwhelmed and frightened maiden Marie; as a madcap libertine Marie, and as a womanly Marie with a lover. We saw her terror, then her fortitude, when the revolution swept her family into danger and prison. But most of all, we saw HER with compassion and sorrow.

I have never attended a ballet that left me weeping until I went to Marie. I have been awed, as in the pas de deux in Don Quixote. I have been baffled and put off, as by the ballet Cruel Garden about Frederico Lorca. I have laughed at the antics in Coppelia and marveled at the staging in Cleopatra. But Marie simply reduced me to tears and I couldn't stop leaking them for quite a long time after the curtain closed. I went to the Green Room to congratulate Ms. Herrera and barely got the words out without losing it again.

Why did this ballet affect me so much? I think that the combination of choreography and music, plus the authentic and heartfelt performance of Melody Herrera, put this ballet over the top into a world-class category. I imagine it will be performed over and over as the years go by because it is just that good. And I will be pleased to be one of those who saw it during it's debut run.

If you like dance, then you must go see this ballet now. I suspectshows are going to sell out as word gets around - if they haven't already. So don't dawdle, balletophiles. Buy your tickets now. Buy the best seats you an afford and if they aren't up close and personal, bring your opera glasses along. There are subtleties in this ballet that you won't want to miss!

Ciao

P.S. My next blog will be about the First International Convocation of Unitarian Universalist Woman and Progressive Woman of Faith.

An Artistic Weekend

I had such an inspiring, artistic weekend. On Saturday, Michael, Alexandra, and I attended the gallery show at STUDIO2315. The building houses many artist studios, but we were there particularly to support friends Carol Watson and Luisa Duarte-Green.

Carol works in the fiber arts, primarily constructing wearable art clothing. More recently, she has added beautiful paintings and drawings, fiber collages, and other visual arts to her creative oeuvre. Carol's studio itself is a work of art, thoughtfully and exquisitely adorned with her art, where beautifully clothed mannequins interact visually with watercolor and ink drawings. Her studio has both a small gallery space and a workshop space, but the inviting workshop is artful, too.

Walking into the building's main gallery, Carol's 10-foot high, fabric collage banner immediately commands your eye and makes a stunning impact. The complexity of the banner is not apparent until you come close and see the variety of stitches, fabrics, and assemblage it contains. The surprise is that behind this huge piece of art is more of Carol's work. She has two enrobed mannequins in the big gallery along with the collage banner.

Luisa primarily paints in watercolor, but is by no means limited to that medium. An architect by training and an ex-pat of Maracaibo, Venezuela, Luisa's work is imbued with hot, tropical colors and well-defined structural elements, often stacked on each other into tall building-like constructs. Luisa's watercolors are mostly vivid and deep-hued with rich colors, although she has also painted a somber and moving series in shades of gray that reflect her mourning after the untimely death of her husband Peter last year. The power of this muted series does not surprise me because I have also seen Luisa's Stations of the Cross collage series which is equally dramatic and powerfully engaging.

Aside: When I commented on her dazzling palette, Luisa told me, "These are the colors of my city." Then she showed me photographs of houses in Maracaibo and I immediately recognized her inspiration.

In addition to the mourning series, the STUDIO2315 gallery features three new works Luisa completed in 2009. They are large and exuberant versions of the smaller works in her studio in which mere towers become skyscrapers filled with iconic elements to surprise and intrigue the viewer. Luisa's work embodies a lightness that makes the objects seem to float while her structural elements anchor them firmly to the ground.

As if Carol and Luisa's art works were not prize enough for our long trek from the burbs, we found wonderful work in studio after studio of the STUDIO2315 artists. Anne Delpine's delicately colored collage/paintings intrigued and seduced me into looking closer and closer to discover the building blocks she had used to create them, including dictionary pages with words and illustrations. My favorite piece was inspired by a tiny dictionary drawing of a sea urchin, and I felt so pleased with myself that I actually recognized the sea urchin as a "real thing" even through Anne's complex and intricate stylizing. See if you can identify this piece on Anne's website.

Next door to Anne's studio, I discovered Charles Jones, a master print maker and bookbinder who teaches at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches, Texas. Charles had a table full of his exquisitely bound books which he generously shared with us. Each book had compelling content, including reflections on the war in Vietnam by two artists who fought on opposite sides in the same area at the same time (Charles and a Vietnamese artist friend). Another book paid homage to great artists of the 19th and 20th centuries with poetry and prints. Yet another memorialized the life and works of a young German woman whose death would otherwise have silenced. I could go on, because I love hand bound books, but I must restrain myself. Charles also had wonderful, nearly life-sized prints of literary figures displayed around the studio he shares with his wife, Corinne Jones.

At the last stop of our pilgrimage around STUDIO2315, we met Kia Gardner, who makes lovely crystal and gemstone jewelry. Her space is tucked in the back, down a hallway, and might easily be missed. Be sure to look for her behind the red door at the end of a beautifully painted red and white faux carpet.

To cap our weekend of artistic adventure, Michael and I attended a performance at the Alley Theatre of Eurydice by Susan Ruhl, who also wrote The Clean House, which we saw (and loved) last year. In Eurydice, Ruhl created, from the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a stirring and poignant tale of love, loss, and regret. Although the story seems to be about the young lovers, Orpheus and Eurydice, I found myself most affected by the bonds of father and daughter in this retelling. The staging wowed me - shower heads streaming water, extensive walkways, an old-fashioned water pump (with running water, of course), and an elevator (probably not a working model, but the illusion held up well) - Eurydice was a visual cornucopia. Michael and I have season tickets to the Alley and our seats for the Neuhaus Stage (their smaller, more flexible venue) are in the front row south. We are quite often practically members of the cast because of this. With a walkway just inches from our seats, this performance felt very intimate.

Aside: This worked to our disadvantage last year in the famously gory, gross, and gruesome play The Lieutenant of Inishmore by Martin McDonagh that featured a man hanging upside down being tortured. His "rig" - with him hanging from it - rolled by me about 6 inches from my right elbow. It did not delight me in the least.

We topped our weekend of artistic pursuits off with the Academy Awards. It may not be art, but at least now we have some idea which of the movies we missed last year are worth the effort to see this year, even if we have to view them on the small screen.

Ciao

Trying to be Laid Back about being Laid Off

I frequently think about blog topics in the middle of the night, or when I'm driving, or sitting in a waiting room - times when actually writing the blog would be very inconvenient or impossible. Now that I am sitting at my actual computer, I find that my mind is a blank and all the interesting items I thought about mere wisps in the ether. So I will meander through several current topics by way of update and see if, perhaps, one of them prompts a lost memory to return.

Michael lost his job in January. We had premonitions as early as October when, after an initial round of lay-offs, a senior manager said something to the effect that everyone left was safe until after Christmas. Michael came home that evening and told me he had 55 days of guaranteed employment. It cast a bit of a pall over our preparations for the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays. On December 22, his boss confirmed that the lay-offs were going to happen in January and that Michael would be one of the hundreds affected. We did not want to put the kibosh on anyone else's Christmas fun, so we kept that news to ourselves and even after Christmas only told a few people. I suppose we hoped it wouldn't really happen, but it did.

We have been through this before and know how to batten down the hatches and live lean, but it is discouraging to have to do so again so late in Michael's work life. Another five years and he could actually retire, but those five years of work between now and then are important to our plans for retirement. Everyday we read in the paper about thousands of additional layoffs in companies all over the US, but in this case, misery particularly does not love company. The more layoffs, the more competition for jobs that are already scarce.

It has prompted us to discuss alternative income sources. What could we do to make money? That is a challenging topic and one that we will be giving a lot of attention to if Michael's job search is not quickly productive. I have also thought about attempting to work part-time despite my health problems, but I am really at loss about what I could do. The telecommunications career I left behind 17 years ago is prehistoric by today's technology standards. My skills in sales and marketing would polish up pretty quickly, but I don't have any good ideas about who would like to hire a part-time sales and marketing person whose health is fragile. I can't stay on my feet for more than 15 or 20 minutes without serious pain, so retail jobs are pretty much off the list, as well as substitute teaching. Since necessity is the mother of invention, I'm hoping that, if our situation gets really dire, I will figure something out.

Meantime, I have to get my medicare updated to include prescription drugs and perhaps a more comprehensive medical plan than traditional medicare. I am so thankful to have medicare. Michael's company offered us coverage through COBRA for a mere $900+ per month. Not happening. Doesn't it seem strange that the insurance options for people who have been laid off are so expensive that you need a job to afford it? Another similar conundrum is that uninsured people get charged the highest price for medical services when they are the ones least able to pay it. I really don't get why people object to a single-payer insurance system for this country. Obviously, the medical/insurance industries object because they might not have so much cream to skim off the top of the milk bottle, but why do ordinary people object? They obviously have never had a medical or insurance crisis to deal with.

Someone quoted scripture to me today to the effect that God chose the smallest to carry the biggest load. What was she thinking???

Ciao

The Cat Whisperer

(There are pictures at the end of this entry. Don't miss them!)

We call her Mama and put food out for her everyday. Mama is a big, long-haired, gray tabby cat who has become a regular in our backyard. I suppose she had strolled through many times before we even paid attention to her. There's an old dinghy-style sailboat upside down on a boat trailer by our back fence and it would easily provide protection from the elements and from prying eyes.

What really brought Mama to my attention was something entirely unexpected. A large umbrella plant grows outside the picture window in our bathroom. It shields the lower part of the window from direct view and, since we can't put the mini blinds all the way down without crushing the potted plants on the windowsill, it helps to insure a complete visual barrier when we want privacy.

The window sits directly over our bathtub, a wide, deep contraption that I have to step into to reach the mini blinds. One morning, standing in the bathtub and casually surveying our little kingdom, I noticed the umbrella plant rustling the tiniest bit. I could not see evidence of a breeze, and so I looked closer at the plant. I like to watch the lizards and tree frogs that frequent our yard and expected to see either a large green anole or a small green tree frog hopping around the bush. Nothing seemed to be there.

Intrigued, I hunkered up to the window and craned my neck to look down towards the ground. To my utter amazement, I found myself looking into a nest of newborn kittens being watched carefully by our occasional visitor, the fluffy gray tabby cat. Mama, who had at that moment acquired her name, stared at me balefully, as if her look alone would keep me away. It wouldn't.

Aside: I love cats and I love kittens even more. My very first "only mine" pet was a kitten some farm friends from Larimore, North Dakota gave me when I was 9. The kitten really should have been left with her mom longer, but I fed her and cared for her and, eventually, she gifted me with kittens. My dad had little tolerance for cats, and the kittens were given away as soon as they were weaned. Mom went too, although I was allowed to keep one male kitten for my own. That made me happy enough - he was a kitten, after all. Unfortunately, the poor thing got distemper and died right outside my bedroom window within a few months. I never had another cat until I got my first apartment in 1969.

As I said, I could not resist taking a closer look at the litter in my umbrella plant, and I also thought Mama might need food, so I took her a dish of wet cat food and kept my distance while I watched the kittens squirm and listened to their squeaky mews. There were five of them, and I relished the thought of five playful kittens romping in my back yard. The next day, when I took more food out for Mama, they were all gone. All that Mama had left behind was a crushed spot at the base of my bush. I never saw those kittens again. And I didn't see Mama again for a long time either.

We have two small ponds in our backyard which draw many creatures in search of water. We see squirrels, opossums, birds of all kinds, water snakes once in a while, lots of frogs, toads, and lizards, and cats. Once we found a large black lab in our pond up to his shoulders, just cooling off. I still don't know how he got into our yard! When Mama appeared again, it was at the pond. And she had two weaned kittens with her. This was long after the original batch I saw under the umbrella tree and must have been a new litter.

She had brought them for water, but we made a habit of feeding strays who came through, so the three of them stayed awhile to enjoy the easy meals. Mama would always sit off to the side, letting the kittens scarf up the food until they had had their fill. Then she would come over and eat her fill. This went on for a week or two, then we noticed that the kittens weren't always there. They stayed away longer and longer and soon stopped coming altogether. Mama kept coming though. To us, she became our "outside" cat; to her, we had no use except to serve dinner.

Mama remained so wary of us that we soon concluded she was actually feral and not a pet tossed out or lost. She would wait on the patio for us to notice her and bring her food out, but as soon as we opened the door, she would retreat ten or twenty feet, then wait until we went back inside before venturing to the meal. Michael and I made it a habit to talk to her whenever we saw her in the yard, trying to acclimate her to our voices and our presence. We succeeded enough that she became a daily visitor.

When we suddenly had lots of cat visitors in a few days, we suspected that Mama was in heat again. We began to think about having her spayed, but really didn't know how to get the job done when she was so scared and cautious. Soon enough, the vistors disappeared and we resumed our normal routine.

One morning, as I made my bed, I saw Mama in the side yard stretched out on the grass. Next to her a kitten of probably 6 weeks played by itself, ambushing stalks of grass, bugs, and Mama's tail in no particular order. A "tuxedo" cat, the kitten had longish, black and white fur and looked just like a neighbors' cat. The neighbors did not particularly like cats, but their daughter had adopted this one as a little girl and was so persistent about "Black and White" being her cat, that her parents eventually let her feed him. But he wasn't an inside cat and he didn't merit veterinary visits or neutering. No surprise Mama's baby looked just like him!

Mama came by everyday for meals, but Baby had disappeared. I took to spying on Mama, trying to figure out where she might have Baby stashed so I could tame it enough to get it adopted and also take it out of the reproductive cycle that had produced it. After many weeks, Baby did start coming along with Mama for meals, although it didn't eat kibble yet. While Mama ate, we watched the kitten play delightfully on our patio. Michael remembered his laser pointer and began a regular ritual of playing chase games with Baby through the window of our back door.

At night, the laser showed up all the way across the yard and seemed to convince Baby of it prey-ness with no trouble at all. It did not take long before Baby came looking for his "friend" the red dot in the evenings. But only the red dot - Baby fled in terror if it caught even a glimpse of a human being through the window. Try as we might, we could not get Baby to stay even as near as Mama when we brought food out.

Nevertheless, we kept up our soft-talking routine and always tried to be slow and careful with our movements. Once or twice I pretended to go back inside and stayed near the food, but out of sight. Baby inadvertently gamboled within two feet of me more than once, with predictable consequences as soon as he saw me. By this time, Baby was eating kibble, too. And, as before, Mama would wait for Baby to eat his fill before stepping up to the dish for her own meal.

The weather got cold and I began to worry about their protection, so I put a a large plastic bucket on its side, covered two-thirds of the opening with plastic sheeting, filled with large pieces of Michael's old, cut-up terry cloth robe, and began feeding them in the open part of the bucket. While Mama eschewed the offered bed, I did see Baby in there more than once on cold December days.

Which brings us practically current. Around Christmas time, Mama disappeared for several days. Baby came for food and to look for Mama. Its plaintive mewing really got to me and I began wracking my brain for ways to nab Baby while Mama was gone. On December 26th, I sat on the floor, hidden behind my back door, which I opened just enough to poke a toy on a stick through. I figured that after our many evenings of red-dot games, Baby would not be afraid of a toy.

It seems I was right. For an hour or so, I played with Baby from behind the door, offering the occasional treat and, when it seemed to like that, put a bit of canned cat food on the door sill. Cautious at first, Baby soon became curious enough to stick its head into our house. As soon as it saw me, of course, Baby hightailed back outside, but I deemed the adventure as success and planned to do it again the next evening.

December 27th brought us some of our coldest weather of the season. We had guests to celebrate Michael's birthday (the next day), so I didn't have a lot of time to think about Baby, but after our friends left, I resumed my position behind the back door, albeit somewhat colder that night than the previous! I played with Baby and fed Baby for about an hour before it walked right into our house! I scooped it up and began my taming campaign on the spot.

Baby seemed more lonely than scared after I actually had it in my arms. The kitten hunkered down against my breast while I wrapped my sweater around him. For a long time, I simply held Baby and spoke quietly and calmly. By then, it was close to midnight, and we realized we needed a safe place to put Baby for the night. (I felt fairly certain our two 14 year-old cats would not welcome a kitten from the backyard with any kind of warmth and I did not want to risk spreading fleas, worms, or diseases Baby might have to our totally indoor cats!)

Since our guest bathroom had a sliding door shower enclosure, we put Baby up there, bringing in the bathrobe rags from the bucket-house and even warming them up in the dryer for Baby's comfort. In went food, water, and a makeshift litter box. I also found some toys to keep Baby occupied in our absence. Baby has been inside ever since.

"It" turned out to be "he" and "Baby" became "Smudge" because of the black spot on his pink nose that seemed like it should wipe off but wouldn't. I spent every possible moment snuggling Smudge and found, to my delight, that this scaredy-cat did not seemed scared of me. He slept in my arms and sometimes crawled into the sleeves of my over sized sweat-shirt shrug.

By New Year's Eve, my talk of taming Smudge so he could be adopted had become a family joke. We decided we should have him checked out by our vet so we could introduce him to Jack and Trixie, who were more than concerned about this THING in THEIR house. The vet let us know why Smudge had been so compliant and willing to lay sleeping in my arms so much - he had a respiratory infection and was running a fever. (Although he did not have fleas or worms, which made me happy.)

The vet suggested that he might be more active when he felt better. That certainly proved to be true! Smudge and I will have our one-month anniversary in a few days. He is a ball of fire now that he feels good, and he is a joy to play with and to cuddle. Jack and Trixie still don't like him, although Jack has decided that he might like to play a little after all and I foresee tolerance, if not friendship, around the corner. Smudge graduated from the bathroom unless supervised after he had his course of antibiotics.

To give him a leg up against the big cats, I put up a kitty skyscraper that had been in storage for a while because neither Jack nor Trixie would deign to climb on it. Smudge loves his tower. The big cats can't get his food or his toys or him. He is adept at flinging himself from our bed onto the skyscraper and sticking, a very handy skill when all four pounds of you has just pounced on a sleeping, eighteen-pound cat's tail!

Best of all, Smudge has adopted me as his new mom. He purrs like a turbo-charged car whenever I pick him up. He likes to snuggle up on my lap. He really likes to play games with me. And, amazingly to me, he loves my computer. Smudge sits on my lap and watches the cursor (or whatever else is moving) intently. Sometimes he tries to catch it, but mostly, Smudge contents himself with close observation of the monitor. When he gets bored, he sleeps on my lap. When he gets restless, he tries to eat my hands while I try to type. We are working things out pretty well. Here are some photos of Smudge in my lap. Until Michael showed up with the camera, Smudge had alternated between raptly watching the monitor and blissing out while I scratched his throat. The camera proved too diverting, though, and drew his attention away. If you don't think Smudge is the cutest cat ever, there is something wrong with you!!


Notice the little black spot on Smudge's nose. Don't you just want to get a towel and wipe it off?



BTW, we haven't forgotten Mama. She came back three or four days after leaving Smudge to his own devises. Obviously, she thought it was time for him to move along so she could start housekeeping with that black and white tomcat again. We plan to get a live trap this coming week and take her in for neutering, then return her to our back yard to live. We are happy to have Mama as a feral friend, but I can't take in any more kittens.

Ciao!

How I Almost Missed Christmas Making a T-Shirt Quilt & Marblized Quilting Fabric

2009 already. Wow! How did that happen?

The 2008 holiday season kept me busy every single minute right up to - and past - Christmas. Friends tell me that my feeling of being squeezed between Thanksgiving and Christmas happened because Thanksgiving was so late. Perhaps. My father's birthday also fell on Thanksgiving this year, so between November 27th and January 2, my family celebrated three birthdays, an anniversary, and three major holidays. That will put pressure on anyone.

More than that, I made two significant Christmas gifts this year: a tee-shirt quilt for my youngest daughter and hand-marbleized quilting fabric for my mother.

Disclaimer: I marbleized the fabric, I did not make the fabric.

I constructed Victoria's quilt from tee-shirts of hers that go all the way back to kindergarten. Since she is now a senior in high school, that is q long time and a lot of tees. I made the process up as I went along, with coaching from my sister-in-law Judi that helped me avoid some big mistakes. Working with tee-shirts presents unique problems. They are knit and soft and slippery, especially old, well-worn tees, and you cannot really cut them uniformly, a must in quilting. So the cutting step got extended. First I reduced the tee-shirts to separate fronts and backs with no sleeves, collars, or seams. Next, I ironed fusible interfacing onto each piece. Then I recut all the pieces to square, so they would sew up together properly.

The next step in creating a quilt is to sew the pieces together to create your quilt top. I alternated fronts and backs, mixing them up so that the colors varied as much as possible. Apparently, most message and organizational tee-shirts are white, black, or gray, so I worked with a fairly limited palette. For the back of the quilt, I used a nice piece of cream colored cotton with tiny treble clefs and musical notes printed densely on it. (Victoria is a talented musician, playing the flute, piano, and singing.)

The top and bottom of the quilt sandwich around batting, the stuff that makes a quilt warm and soft. I do not care for the basting or pinning that one must do to hold a quilt together for finishing, so I tried something new this time - a fusible batting. It turned out to be fine, but I inadvertently purchased crib-sized batting, so I had to piece two of them together in order to make Victoria's quilt. Then I had to crawl around on my tile floor, ironing and steaming the entire quilt to fuse it together. A tedious process at best, but I did it.

I had decided to machine stitch this quilt because I could not possible hand quilt it in time for Christmas 2008, but I had never machine quilted before and I had a brand new sewing machine that I wasn't practiced with. Hmmm ... could this point to trouble ahead? Well yes, but I won't bore you except to say that an entire three-layer quilt is a LOT of fabric to squeeze through the small opening under the arm of a standard-sized sewing machine. Imagine my reaction as I came to the end of my diagonal, red thread quilting and discovered that I put one of the tee-shirt rectangles in inside out! Picking out stitching, taking apart seams, turning the fabric, resewing it into a (heretofore) finished quilt and replacing all the stitching provoked a highly colorful, nearly continuous, stream of bad language from my kitchen. (I had to relocate my sewing machine cabinet to the kitchen so I could use my kitchen table to hold the quilt while I machine quilted.)

All-in-all, making this quilt is not a task I am eager to reprise, although given some time, I might relent. The finished product turned out better than I deserved it to based on my skills. And Victoria loved it, which count more than anything.

Here are a few photos of the finished quilt.




My next project for Christmas - marbleizing fabric for my mother, a creative, prolific, and talented quilter who has made over a hundred quilts in the last 20 years. I only recently learned how to marbleize anything, and this would be my first solo endeavor. My materials were quite old and not as sophisticated as the materials that my teacher provided, but I did my best.

Aside: I took the class from Galen Berry, a fabulously talented artist from Oklahoma, at the Museum of Printing History in Houston, a unique venue that anyone who can visit should visit.

The main deficiency, if it is one, of my marbled fabric is that the designs are quite light and not the visit hues that Galen's paint produced. But everything doesn't have to be vivid, so I made my mother 9 subtle, color-coordinated fat eighths (a quilting term meaning an eighth of a yard plus a bit - thus the "fat" part of the name.) I made each one increasingly darker, to give her the opportunity to create interest with her piecing. She really liked them, which delights me. When I get new paints, I'll make her a set of vivid fat eighths to make another quilt with ... because Mother is undoubtedly going to make another quilt as soon as this one is done!

Take a look at the fat eighths I marbleized for her:




I feel good about these two accomplishments, although the time I spent making them kept me from doing other things, like blogging. I intend to catch up, but not all in one sitting, so watch for me to return with more tales of my holiday season.

Ciao!

Why Obama's Election Makes Me Jubilant PLUS a Moving Commentary by an Unknown British Woman

I found this commentary online following an article that reported international reaction to the election on the CBS website. It really touched me. Whether you supported Obama or not, I think it will touch you as an American. As an Obama supporter, I am jubilant and optimistic. I hope that the disappointed McCain supporters among you will come to believe that this was right choice, at the right time.

I have raised (almost - Tori is only 17) two biracial children. I married Alix's father, a black man, in 1973. The world was so different then that many people in my own family refused to attend the wedding or even acknowledge it. Thankfully, my family long ago found the heart to accept my three children, black and white, birthed and adopted, but many incidents throughout the years have reminded our family that racism, especially institutional racism, remained part of the American scene.

Obama's victory in this election gives me hope that the spector of racism is diminishing quickly enough that my future grandchildren will not suffer from it. May it be so. (No more racism AND grandchildren someday!!)

Lane

From a comment board in The Guardian Newspaper (UK)
Posted by SubstanceD on the CBS website 11-5-08

Sometimes I wish I was an American, in those moments where they seem to stand apart from us. Their endless optimism, their endless desire for change, and movement, and history. They make history, where, as an English woman, I feel I am just you know in it. I sat up and watched Obama become the 44th American President, I watched Americans cry and I cried and I believed in him and his words and the fact that really this is going to have an impact on us all, and to say that we are not involved is really fruitless.

Sometimes I wish I was an American just so I could be proud and wave a flag and not feel like a loser. I wish that I could hold my flag and say you know what, I want my country to be amazing and believe we are, in many more ways that you will never ever understand; and, most of all, I am proud to be English, I am proud to be British.

But I cannot, not just yet, but maybe one day we will chant, Yes we can! and I will teach my children to believe that they can do anything and be anything; and , more over, that we are all safe tonight. And we will live to a dream that those Yanks make seem a little less fluffy and at times like these very real.

Obama, not as an American but as a Human, has given me my Human flag, and for this moment, we live in hope.

Thank you America, and I wish us all a happy and optimistic future!

Thoughts on Hurricane Ike

Hurricanes. When we moved to the Texas Gulf Coast 19 years ago, I gave only passing thought to hurricanes. I grew up in tornado country and vividly remember riding with my family to Fargo, North Dakota to look at the aftermath of a big tornado there as a little girl. Two of the sights that awed me that day included a ladies slip streaming in the wind from a tree branch high above the ground and a house opened like a child's toy with the tub and commode gleaming whitely in the after-storm sunshine. After my eighteen years in North Dakota, I spent many more years in Missouri and Kansas, states also very susceptible to unpredictable and dangerous weather.

My next residence, California, did not have tornadoes, but it did have earthquakes, which, like tornadoes, are only marginally predictable. Our first California earthquake scared the beejesus out of me and resulted in two funny (now) family stories. In the first bit of humor, I leaped out of bed and rousted Alix and Lupe (our foster daughter) planting them in the doorway of their bedroom. This is the correct thing to do, but planting them in their doorway meant that they were staring straight across the hallway at Michael who, because he slept nude, was therefore trapped in bed and unable to protect himself from the earthquake!

Leaving Michael, Alix, and Lupe in their awkward triangle, I rushed into Nick's room. Nick was about 6 at the time and sleeping in the upper level of his bunk bed. I snatched him from his covers without a word and stuck him in the doorway of his room before he even had time to wake up. Later, Nick said to me, "Mom, next time we have an earthquake, do you think you could say 'Excuse me, Nick, there's an earthquake.' before you grab me out of bed?"

When we then moved to Houston and people mentioned the possibility of hurricanes, I blithely said, "Well, at least we'll know they are coming."

Turns out that isn't so much help.

When it became apparent that Houston would be involved in Ike to some degree or another, Michael and I made our plans. We had evacuated for Hurricane Rita, joining the maddeningly slow exodus of millions of people, most of whom - like us - should have stayed home. Although we had an enjoyable visit with my brother and sister-in-law in Omaha, getting there and getting home was beyond awful. Why did we evacuate? Because our elected officials told us to. They forgot to mention the now-familiar mantra: Run from water, hide from wind. Why did we run to Omaha? Because when Nick and Julia left New Orleans fleeing Katrina just days before, they planned to be gone 5 days and they didn't get back for 6 months. They lost almost everything. We figured if we were going to be homeless, we should go to a place where we could stay a while without spending our entire retirement fund.

So we fled Rita and swore thereafter that we would not evacuate ever again. We had to prepare to weather Hurricane Ike.

Aside: Isn't it interesting that we use the word 'weather' to indicate coping with the effects of "weather'?

I dutifully acquired enough canned food to last us for ten days. I filled two bath tubs with water for hygiene and etc. I also filled two ten-gallon collapsible containers with drinking water. We moved breakables to safe locations away from windows. Michael taped up the picture window in our bathroom, the only one we felt really worried about because our other windows are mullioned. Michael, with some help from me, cleared everything from our front and back yards that could possibly fly around and hurt someone. We planned to take down and wrap our artwork in plastic, but by the time we got to that, I was too exhausted to care.

A safe spot for us posed a big problem. Our house has no interior rooms unless you count the foyer coat closet and it would not accommodate one of us for very long! We decided to use the bedroom hallway which is enclosed for about six feet and turns out to be the exact width of a twin bed mattress. Victoria's mattress would work, so, on Friday afternoon, we put clean sheets on it and positioned near the hallway for later use.

The coming storm and its television coverage seemed to hypnotize us and we kept watching the reports over and over again while we waited patiently for it to arrive in our area. Ike moved slowly and we live on the northwest edge of Houston, in an unincorporated area of Harris County. From Galveston to our house is one hundred miles and our wait for the storm seemed to last forever.

We did not turn in until 1:00 in the morning. The hallway felt stuffy, so Michael plugged a fan in and pointed the welcome coolness at our pallet. Our cats, Jack and Trixie, seemed baffled by our decision to sleep on the floor. We had moved their litter box into our bathroom from its usual hallway location, for our nose comfort and also to keep them from walking back and forth on top of us during the night. Unfortunately, neither of them stayed put in our bedroom as we had hoped. (To be able to corral them more easily if a disaster occurred.)

By 1:30 a.m. we had snuggled into our cozy bed. Our very cozy bed. Our cozier cozy bed than any we had ever shared in thirty-two years of marriage. Michael and I are not as thin and svelte as we once were. (I have pictures to prove that we were once svelte!) Laying flat, we touched each the hallway walls one side and each other in the middle. Turning onto our sides scarcely helped matters but we soldiered on. At about 2:00 a.m., our power went out. Now fan-less and A/C-less, we added sweltering to cramped. After a horribly miserable hour of dosing and waking, we abandoned safety for comfort.

Our headboard sits directly in front of two large, side-by-side windows. We closed the mini-blinds, piled pillows between the headboard and the blinds, crawled in and stretched out. Compared to the floor of a three-foot wide hallway, it was the Waldorf Astoria.

During this period, the wind rose and the rain pelted our roof harder and harder. We slept in snatches, an hour here, twenty minutes there, rousing and checking out the storm as the noise came and went. Amazingly, the night sky stayed so bright that we could see the storm's action clearly. I had heard how dark it became in Galveston when the storm hit and didn't expect this, but perhaps by the time Ike reached Cypress, the nearly-full moon had risen and was reflecting off the cloud cover.

We never heard the "freight train" sound, but I sat on the bench in the office and watched my neighbors forty-foot tall pine tree wave back and forth like a sparkler in a kid's hand. I watched the rain 'fall' horizontally. Standing by my front door, I felt the pull and push of wind moving the metal door in and out of its frame with odd little sucking sounds occurring at each pull. Our front door has a small entry area that is brick on three sides and open to the yard. Leaves plastered the window on the front door and pine needles danced on our welcome mat.

We worried about our pergola and Michael had tied clothesline rope through the lattice work top in 15 or 20 places to - hopefully - keep it in place. We expected to lose the vines that grew up the supporting beams and across the top. During the height of the storm, we watched out the backdoor window and saw that the clothesline rope hardly moved despite the wind's fury. Apparently, Michael and I built a sturdier structure than we even knew when we put the pergola up two years ago. The vines suffered some, especially the night-blooming and star jasmines which were on the exposed side of the patio, but all-in-all, the plants held up well.
We even had flowers blooming on our bougainvillea within a few days!

During the eye of the storm, when the wind dies down, we ventured out. By this time it was daylight. We pulled on ponchos and opened the front door. We had pulled our cars onto our front terrace the day before, thinking that in front of the house, they would be protected from falling trees, while in the driveway they would be exposed on three sides to danger. They blocked us in a bit, but we crawled through a gap and onto the driveway for our first good look at what had transpired in the first half of the storm.

Walking up and down our block, greeting others who had the same idea, we saw a lot of destruction. Fences were gone; big trees were uprooted, leaving peculiar looking hillocks where front yards had been. Many, many branches littered yards and streets and we saw a few roofs stripped down to bare wood and many others missing shingles. Our neighborhood has lots of pine trees and the usual mat of orange pine needles had been accented with lots of green needles. All the trees looked like fall had suddenly transpired: branches were nearly bare. In our case, we lost shingles in six or eight places,had a water leak inside the house, lost one large tree limb in the back yard (that landed safely in an open area!), had lots of small branches down, and the gardens were flattened. (The elephant ears took a real beating, probably the worst of all the plants. They remain flattened even now, so I suppose we'll have to wait for a crop to grow in.) We lost power for three days and cable, Internet, and phone for nearly ten days.

Pretty soon the wind picked up and we fled to the shelter of our house. Without power, it would eventually get uncomfortable, but while the storm made its way through our area, it stayed pretty cool. Saturday afternoon, the sun came out and so did our neighborhood. Everyone was cleaning up - raking debris into piles, propping up fences where they could, cutting up trees and tree limbs.

By Sunday afternoon, the wild disarray of the storm had disappeared, leaving remnants that I expect will be with us for quite a while. Fences are torn apart and piled on front berms along with other types of debris, like the old tire someone deposited on our berm when we weren't looking. Roofs sport blue tarps. Windows are boarded up. People aren't supposed to repair things anymore than absolutely necessary so the insurance adjuster's can see the damage and once seen, probably won't get repairs done until they get checks in hand, so I suppose the tattered look will be around for a while.

Texas insurance policies changed after Hurricane Rita and now insurance deductibles for "tropical cyclones"
are twice as high as the deductibles for any other type of damage. That means many people will not get covered, including - most likely - us. Michael had hoped for a new roof, but the adjuster who finally came by yesterday, says it will be "just repairs" for the roof and the foyer ceiling. With a deductible close to $4,000, we will most likely be paying for this out of our own pocket despite having insurance. That said, I wouldn't trade places with any of the poor souls who had more severe, even catastrophic, damage. We were lucky to be spared serious loss or injury.

Now that I have added hurricanes/tropical cyclones to my list of weathered weather, I can truly say I will be happy to go another nineteen years without seeing my next one!

I had a lot of difficulty getting this blog written. Although the date says 9-18 (when I actually started it), I found I did not want to keep working on it. In the weeks since the storm, I have felt terribly fatigued and down. The aftermath of the storm includes an emotional let down - from being ramped up on adrenaline? - and physical exhaustion. Many of my friends report these same feelings. I probably won't write any more about Hurricane Ike now that I've gotten it out of my system. I'd like to have a happier topic next time!!