Category Archives: digital play

Light, silence, tooth, and time

Dull light this morning but no percussive hammering. I think it’s over.

Also over: the first (and most invasive) step in getting an implant for my front right tooth. The one with a history.

Grievance: a doctor who didn’t answer my email about anxiety meds until it was too late to do anything about it.

Humor: my brother disagreeing with her assessment that diazepam prescribed eleven years ago probably wouldn’t work. “Unless it’s turned to fungus,” he said, “it’s fine.”

It was fine. In fact it was so fine that I was relieved when K said he’d walk over with me. I felt that woozy.

Tonight I’m eating ice cream. I can be a bit of a baby.

Yesterday I wrote a scene where a character spins and spins and spins. Sufis were mentioned. Imagine my surprise as I noodled around with this week’s Paris Collage Collective visual prompt in bed later to see the Sufis emerge (from an old SoulCollage card). I remixed extensively to make them more visible (along the lower edge).

I didn’t seen them at first. With many of the dianaphoto app filters they disappeared. I love to be surprised like this.

A far cry from where I started.

The Christ-like figure is from a photo taken by Andrew J. Whitaker, a photographer for the Charleston paper The Post and Courier. He took it during the summer of George Floyd protests — George Floyd who recently would’ve turned 50.

@andrewjwhitaker on Instagram, photo itself

Other surprises from last night.

Incorporating photo of Hearts for Charleston Quilt

Canada, clutter, and prompts

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Passport. CHECK. Mouth guard and meds. CHECK (but didn’t have to carefully tuck them in carry on bag in case suitcase gets lost). Sewing, reading, and writing notebooks. CHECK (you’d think I’d have an elegant handmade etui to hand, but I don’t. I just stick needles and pins in whatever swatch of fabric is handy).

Our lovely house sitter will be taking GQ-level photos of Finn again no doubt. I can’t tell you how comforted I was to learn that she’d held a piece of cheese to her forehead for some of her darling shots from last trip.

I consolidated heaps of fabric and windexed here and there. The difference was relieving, noticeable. K said, “I’d live here,” which tells you something about his dry wit. What it perhaps doesn’t reveal as readily is how forbearing he is of my clutter.

Question to crafters: are works-in-progress demeaned by the label “clutter”?

Never mind that. What would be really hilarious if it weren’t so hypocritical is that I dare to ask him to please put his shoes away!

Traffic on 128 is bad. The trees are green. I will report back as we travel north. We may be in for some pretty foliage.

I’m excited to be going to Quebec City. Our older son went to McGill, so we’ve made many trips to Montreal in recent history, but I haven’t been to Quebec City since my French class traveled there in 1975.

WRITING PROMPT: Begin with “she said” and keep going. Whenever you get stuck, write it again, “she said.” Courtesy of Natalie Goldberg.

TWO MORE WRITING PROMPTS: Begin with “she could not get comfortable” or “so much depended on.” Both courtesy of Kathleen Olesky.

Lastly, I am reminded that people go through stuff and we don’t necessarily know about it. That’s as good a reason to be kind as any.

Discount equals self-esteem

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New rules about apple picture storage meant I started looking for alternatives. I do not want to pay for cloud storage. Period the end.

So I downloaded Amazon pics app yesterday. An Amazon prime account offers unlimited free picture storage (but not unlimited video). I set it to automatically download my images but then wondered, if I exceed the free video storage amount are they gonna automatically subscribe me to one of the paid plans, thereby ruining my cloud work around? So I interrupted it.

Started looking through them. Lots of videos of the dog. And Lila, Billy’s dog.

Mostly though, it’s those collage slideshows that I’m sure you’ve seen. They’re important to me. Even though unsophisticated (I use only a free app and my phone to create them) they provide a record: what I was thinking about, what I was feeling. Attending to the repeated imagery reveals some themes: racial inequity, trauma, the overturning of Roe v Wade, trump’s destruction (ongoing).

I thought of posting a bunch of videos here and then deleting them from my phone but then wondered, what happens when I run out of the space offered by WordPress business (which is decidedly NOT free but which I kind of had to upgrade to after I ran out of the space afforded by the free WordPress platform)?

I’m not adept at this crap and I do wonder why $12.00 a year for the cloud (or whatever) is provoking this penurious response.

Are we allowed our inconsistencies? I spent $250 on annuals yesterday. Boom. And it wasn’t a first trip.

The fact that I get a wholesaler discount and saved $100 does not make the total a penny cheaper, but somehow it feels better? A tad victorious, even, which is a good thing when I am feeling defeated by so much else.

Where am I going with this post?

To the garden.

Garden notes:

** Almost all filling-in around the new patio was achieved with divisions. ** My new copper bird bath has yet to see any action (that I’ve observed), so I keep moving it. ** When I run out of steam, I put divisions on the curb and they are always taken. ** The feeders attract: blue jays, purple finches, nuthatches, sparrows and wrens, cardinals, woodpeckers. Yesterday I saw my first red-winged blackbird.

For those of you with more tech savvy, feel free to educate me. My husband and older son are blasé about this upcoming change. Maybe it only applies to “recent uploads” (1,000 pix) which apple used to automatically upload to cloud so they’d be available across devices — a feature that has never mattered to me because I don’t use my iPad for picture stuff and my laptop is not a Mac. Oy.

So the real limit I need to worry about is the storage in my phone. I guess.

Wednesday I hear ravens

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I am still in California and it is still grey. At least it’s not the fire-roasted smoky grey of Boston or New York.

Sometimes in my double collage play with the Paris Collage visual prompt, the prompt gets lost. When it disappears, I don’t post to instagram, even though sometimes I like them better. Today I’ll share a bunch here.

It just occurred to me that making these double/triple/quadruple images might be my version of Hazel’s watercolors. I find her daily practice inspiring and the paintings expressive, sometimes beyond what her words say. I guess that’s one of the points of the practice.

As a writer friend announces after every read: THE END.

May ‘23 collage round up

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Themes? I’ll let the images speak for themselves.

The debt bill just passed the house. Ugh. The process. Certainly, some mastery at work by Biden.

In this house tonight, Jeopardy is competing with a soccer game. I think Jeopardy will win. I don’t want Ted Lasso to end — I really don’t— but we’ll watch that later.

Ready for a month’s worth of haiku tomorrow? Is a month all at once too much? Would weekly round ups be more digestible?

Pattern and Outrage

cloth, justice, writing, and food