Category Archives: digital play

Pics and a little sound

We walked in the woods today. The frogs were LOUD.

Next door neighbor’s yard crew showed up for the first time this season today. After asking them to take their ladder off of my Rose of Sharon sapling near the curb, I retired to the basement. Two leaf blowers went on and on but I didn’t care. My new plan. My sanctuary!

Cleaned out three bins of fabric, worked on D’s quilt until I ran out of bobbin thread, and made this little collage, above.

The initial three-house black and white was a gelatin print made with a cardboard and onion bag resist.

We just had an early and simple dinner: grilled cheese sandwiches and leftover soup. For real sustenance, we listened to Biden’s speech from this morning.

Remnants and Collage

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Once upon a time, there was a snow man…

I thought I’d be banging out collages after I let the Paris Collage Collective weekly prompt routine go at year’s end. Instead, I have produced one themed set, just one. Rethinking.

Meanwhile, I am revising my Author’s Note today in preparation of my first query letter.

Lastly, much gratitude for thoughtful readers who commented yesterday.

Echoes of Good Friday

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Look at the tweet below. Someone said it should be a painting. With that in mind, I doctored it a few ways.

First photo below is the original, the next two, are filtered using Prisma. In the third photo, I double exposed it with one I took on Good Friday in Assisi in 2019.

I am very moved by the picture, and of course — I was raised Catholic. It also reminds me of a ceremony I witnessed in Assisi three years ago, when they ritually removed Christ from the cross in the Cathedral of San Rufino and ceremoniously carried him down the hill to the Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis. It was quite an amazing experience.

* * * *

I am not the only one to observe that some of our collective response to this crisis surely depends on the fact that Ukrainians are white.

Covid Silver Linings, Lasagne and ADD

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I’ll start the list of Covid silver linings with two.

One, The first thing I hear every morning is, “I’ll go down and start the coffee.”

Do you now how nice this is?

Husband used to leave the house at 6:15, which meant he was up and out in full dark for portions of the year. I’d be so dead to the world I wouldn’t even hear his NPR-set alarm. I never minded making coffee but it is so nice to rise and shine with it ready to pour. His company is nice too.

Two, Covid has normalized my wardrobe choices. Ha! Most of what I wear has to meet a single criteria — is this outfit as comfortable as pajamas? The rest of the world has caught up to me I guess.

This is the time of year when my holiday timing clashes with my husband’s. That’s why I will begin to sneakily remove the smaller ornaments and put them away. Hope he doesn’t notice! Actually, this year he might go for full take-down before New Year’s because we got our tree the day after Thanksgiving. It is dry.

I got a rice cooker for Christmas and we might just have rice every evening from here on out. It comes out perfect every time. I used to have one. Here’s a fun fact you probably don’t know about me: I ate nearly exclusively with chopsticks for about five years.

But what am I saying about rice? I have all the ingredients for lasagne. I really hope it’s as good as the batch I made for my brother the trip before last. They purchased some specialty ricotta which was creamier than what I usually buy, and I think that made the difference. Wish me luck! It’s a lot of work for a meh-meal.

Lastly, I get to congratulate myself (again) for sticking with the Paris Collage Collective’s challenge for the entire year, even with four trips to Los Angeles and one to Boulder. I doubt I’ll do it again in 2022. I am eager to make some collages fueled by more personal images. This week’s image was a hand holding a balloon.

If you don’t have ADD or don’t know anyone with ADD, you probably can’t quite appreciate why this is such a big deal.

Plug in remedies?

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A series of really crappy moods.

Good — got that out of the way!

I may have to deactivate all my WordPress plug ins and then update them after sussing out which one is preventing easy access to media files. Ugh. I am too unschooled to do this by myself.

I’ve been busy, as you know, with my manuscript. Essentially I’ve deleted a novella — 20,000 words in the Silo Folder of Deletions with more to join them soon. It’s mostly relieving to have another set of eyes helping me decide what’s wheat and what’s chaff. But today I feel exhausted by it.

Finn got into a stock pot somehow. We don’t know when or how. But he got quite sick, depositing turmeric-yellow puddles of vomit threaded with scallion leaves. It wasn’t until all the rugs had been scoured that I sat in my writing chair for class and discovered he’d puked all over it as well.

I just scraped the deep seams of the upholstery with a knife, and soaped it all up, and vacuumed, and sprayed with pet enzymes. It’s one of the grosser things I’ve done in a while.

I seem to be in need of cheering up. Gonna pop a few pictures on here and deliver some gingerbread whoopie pies to my neighbor. Then it’ll be almost time to tune in to Deadline Whitehouse. Ugh. Bye, bye Roe? I’ve mostly been avoiding twitter but have seen enough to know how sickening it is to have trump’s partisan hacks on the Court.