Spirit of Bees

Driving down the expressway, I found some art on the back door of a truck in front of me.

It’s been a month filled with moment after moment of little problems just about every single week.

It took two tries to get the thermocoupler installed in the heater so we could finally get heat at the studio. Hoped to get back to business as usual. But the down time meant that we got behind of course.

Then, although we got the new DSL installed at home, we have yet to get the router working correctly. On top of that, something happened while I was downloading pics from the camera to screw up my old Netscape program, making it impossible for me to access my email at home or use the Netscape browser. Computers at home won’t run OSX, so that left me struggling with the horror of an old Microsoft Explorer browser, which doesn’t seem to enable Blogger at all. How do you people who use it tolerate it? And. in addition, I could only access my email via the web server.

So,I lost incentive to do things internet,and just concentrated on taking care of my granddaughter, who successfully wrapped me around her little finger, thus requiring more attention than usual. Ah well, life is short, might as well enjoy her and love her every minute I get a chance, right?

Meantime, I decided it was time to bite the bullet and buy new computers for work so we could bring home the ones we have there to replace our old iMacs and hopefully get up to speed and a be little more current. I’m hoping that will make things more efficient everywhere. So I dug into the savings and popped for “refreshed” new iMacs.

Finally, things being back in order, more or less. I was ready to go. Then my knee locked up on Sunday night. So I had to stay at home in bed all day Monday waiting and hoping that it would unlock by Tuesday. After more than 24 hours it finally did. So I ran in to work and tried to catch up there before the next two days of Maia.(I have to make hundreds of earrings again.)Got some done, but I have a lot more to go. So today, Friday, I am finally back and hope to catch up.

The computers are supposed to arrive today, or so they say. Hooray!!!! Well, that’s good and bad, because I will want to get my new toy up and running right away, thus neglecting the real work. Maybe not though, since I know I have to replace my savings as fast as possible.

I just wanted to drop in an entry here so that my two regular readers will not give up hope entirely. Hah!

Freezing here.

Went in to the studio later in the morning, hoping it wouldn’t be quite as cold,only to find that the heater had gone off completely. We cannot light it no matter what we try. It’s 43 degrees in here and dropping, so I don’t think anything is going to get done today considering I need to use my hands for most everything I do. Hoping the heater guy will return our call and show up sometime in the not to distant future, otherwise, we are certain to loose a couple days work.

In addition, I do child care for the grand daughter on Wednesday and Thursday so that pretty much shoots the entire week. I am not going to be a happy camper.

I will check to see if there is anything I can take home to work on. I can sew text blocks at home, and I have some coptic books prepared, so I will try to do that.

At least we now have DSL at home so I should not suffer from internet deprivation too much.

Fingers are freezing as I type this, so back to the gloves. Weather, please warm up!

Today is Martin Luther King Day. There is always a lot of programming devoted to honoring his memory and of course there is a lot of repetitiveness. Sometimes I start to feel annoyed that I am missing my regular programming, and then I start to listen. And I am always drawn in by his charismatic style, and I inevitably begin to feel energized when I hear the I Have a Dream speech.

It’s good to remember the efforts of all of those who carried on the movement after his assassination; to hear the inspiring speeches of Jesse Jackson and Barbara Jordan, among others. It’s good to remember all the energy surrounding the movement and to remember that so much really was accomplished. Not only as a direct result of King’s vision, but also as a result of many people great and small, hearing the message and taking up the banner for social justice and peace. It’s good to remember when I was young and my friends and I were also out there marching for equality and for peace and justice.

For we can never be reminded too often about this country’s long history of marginalizing others and of the difficult and ongoing struggle to right these wrongs of discrimination because of color, gender or sexual orientation.

So, I listen to the memorials and speeches and I stop being annoyed that I am missing my usual programming and I can just be an old idealist with hope that someday we will all really hear Kings message, and that one day we will finally learn to treat all people with the respect they deserve.

‘Twas the night before Christmas…I don’t think so. But it is the night before my family holiday celebration.

I’m not crazy about its being this late, but at least it is happening. Finally.

Way too late in the season to have a tree up, or anything like that. So I just stuffed everything into the fireplace opening and plopped an old Santa figure on a table. The stockings look nice hung up though. Actually it’s not at all bad for a make do sort of thing.

I’m sure the kids will be fine with it. The older ones are way too old to buy into the Santa myth. And the baby is 7 months. It is nothing more to her than a bunch of pretty colors and an opportunity to eat some nice paper and ribbons.

It was also too late to find a turkey at a decent price. I should have gone out right after Christmas and foraged for one n sale, but there was not room in my freezer to store it. We decided to have boneless pork roast since all the same turkey fixings also go great with pork. My granddaughter dubbed it “pork log” a few years ago. No, it is not because it’s tough and overcooked, thank you very much. Rather, because it kind of looks like a log when it’s cooked. So we’ll pretend it’s a Yule log.

I’m sure we will all have a good time, in spite of the late date.

Couldn’t sleep tonight so I got up about an hour ago to surf the web. I figure that eventually I’ll get tired and bored and sleep will return. Might as well post to the blog while I am at it.

I couldn’t sleep mainly because I started thinking about my son’s dog. Daughter in law called me on New Year’s day to tell me that his dog had gotten out and been hit by a car New Year’s Eve. The stupid, probably drunk, driver did not even stop to see if the dog was still alive or to call them to let them know their dog was injured. The next morning some other, kinder stranger stopped and called to tell them that their dog was dead.

They are devastated, of course. And I feel very bad for them. It brings up my own memories of lost pets and how bad it all feels. Pets are like family, sometimes nicer than some family members, actually. It’s tough loosing a beloved pet. There is really nothing I can do, though. I told them to think of their dog as being reincarnated as the hit and run driver’s worst nightmare. Oddly, that thought gave my son some solace.

As if that’s not enough of a bad start to the New Year, my other son’s car was stolen out of a parking lot while they were at a movie.

I hope things start improving.

I don’t like how this year is beginning.

After the big push to clean up the studio, we were on a roll so on New Year’s Day we also cleaned up the apartment. Gotta take advantage of the mood. Not to mention that our family…ummm..Christmas celebration…can you call it that this late?…will be at our place on Saturday.

So we’ll be making a fresh start going into the New Year. No excuses not to get right down to work next week. And I am going to try to keep blogging. 55 entries is a good start, and blogger is a lot easier than doing your own html.

Today we had the older grand daughters, 14 and 16, over and went to a movie, Night At the Museum, After that we then rented two other movies, American Dreamz and Little Miss Sunshine.All that adds up to a movie marathon which is just about to end.

Tomorrow, after they go home it will be Christmas shopping….or whatever it is when it is this late. Maybe Twelfth Night or Epiphany? Are they both the same? I’ve forgotten. Festivus will do.

Anyhow, it will be a busy week.

2006 was most significant in that it brought the miracle of the birth of my newest grand daughter, who I will refer to here as The Papaya here.

New Years Eve we baby sat for her for the first time she’s been away from her parents overnight. She was a delight, aside from a tiny fuss over going to bed, and once she was asleep she slept from 8:00 PM until 8:30 AM when I went in to check on her to make sure she was OK. And she was fine, of course, just playing with her toys and happy as a lark. I never saw a baby who wakes up in the morning with no crying.

I’ve written about her here before in a few Granny Blog entries. I do child care for her a couple times a week, which I am happy to do in the short term, until my daughter secures a place in her preferred day care. She’s such a good tempered baby, and easily satisfied most of the time, so it makes it easy to have her around.

One thing the Papaya loves is music, and she loves to have someone sing to her. So even though I am always flat, and really can barely carry a tune, I always sing to her when I feed her.

I thought a lot about what I would sing to her. I wanted a song which would be associated specifically with me which would give her comfort.

My mother died in 1994. As adults, we did not have an ideal relationship by any means. As a matter of fact, as soon as I started to become independent in any real way, our troubles began. But I do have good memories of her when I was a tiny child; as long as I was dependent on her, things were fine, she was a great baby mother. She would sing and rock me to sleep. Later, when I was a little older, if I was sick, I would often ask her to sing to me. So now, in memory, these are the moments with her that I try to focus on, not the bad times.

Another thing my mother was good at was being a gramma. She loved her grandchildren and, later, her great grandchildren, and she doted on them when she was with them. She had a little bit of extra special feeling for my daughter, I think, since she was her namesake. So I know my mother would have been especially happy to have known the Papaya, and, of course, she would have adored her.

So when I chose my special song for the Papaya, I decided to choose the song I most loved for my mother to sing to me. I wanted to sing it to her as a sort of legacy from my mother, as a way of remembering her great grandmother. And that song was Redwing, lyrics below. It’s a totally non politically correct song about an Indian maid pining away for her warrior who has died in battle far away. I know, I know. But I can’t change what my mother sang or what my favorite was. And I will explain to the baby when she is older why I chose that particular song because of how much I loved having it sung to me.

So, every time I feed her I sing Redwing to her, and she has already come to expect it. She looks at me while she is sucking on her bottle and after a minute or two, she grabs my lips and squeezes them until I start to sing, and she stares at me while I am singing. And when I come to the chorus she stops sucking and grins a huge grin and milk dribbles down her chin. I can almost die from love every single time. And sometimes I tell her about my mom, and I cry a little because she will never know her. But I am already convinced that she will never forget the song sung to her by her gramma from her great gramma.

For 2007, may we leave the bad behind in the past,take the good forward into the present and look toward the future for new understanding.

REDWING (as my mother sang it)

There once was an Indian maid
A shy little prairie maid
Who sang alay, a love song gay
While on the plains she whiled away the day
She loved her warrior bold
This shy little maid of old
But brave and gay he rode one day
To battle far away.

(Chorus)
Now the moon shines bright on pretty Redwing
The night bird’s crying, the breeze is sighing.
Far away beneath the stars, her brave is sleeping,
And Redwing’s weeping her heart away.

She watched for him day and night
She kept the camp fire bright
And under the sky each night she would lie
And dream about his coming by and by
But when all the braves returned
The heart of Redwing yearned
For far far away her warrior gay
Fell bravely in the fray

(Chorus)

I make things for a living. Once I had mastered the basics of my craft, I came to realize that that there was much to learn beyond just knowing how to make something. In order to gain a deeper appreciation for my craft, I realized how important it was to learn how to maintain and repair my tools. Later, I also learned how to modify them to fit my specific needs. All this gave me a sense of freedom and control over my craft, and a lot of satisfaction. Eventually, I also realized that I wanted to learn how to make tools, or, specifically, to design and make a tool which would help to solve a problem and which might make my job easier.

So, in my quest to learn more and more, I took a workshop last summer which turned out to be a most satisfying experience. I learned to make and sharpen my own knives from scratch.

Actually they were not knives as you imagine, but the kind of knives used in bookbinding to pare leather and do other tasks. And not only did I make the bookbinding knives, but I also designed and made a jewelry making tool, which I had been thinking about for years. I needed a tool to use to pull along a straight edge to incise a tiny ‘v’ shaped groove in the metal. This would make it much easier to bend the metal up into a right angle, say, for example, if you needed to make a box.

We started from scratch using hack saw blades, first removing all the paint and grinding off the teeth on a belt sander and or a grinding wheel. Then after roughing out the basic shape we wanted, we ground the bevel on the edge to a 22 degree angle. After that we took it down on varying grits of paper until it was shiny and sharp and you could shave the hair off your arm with the knife.

I made a small knife first, then I designed and made my long imagined tool. I also made a larger leather paring knife from an industrial hack saw blade.

After the knives were complete and sharpened we used horsebutt (a kind of leather) to make the handles and cases for our knives. And, because we were all 12, we said horsebutt every chance we got.

I loved learning this new skill, and I had an epiphany regarding knife sharpening. It’s all in the burr, go for the burr, and you will have the sharpest knife in the drawer!

And best of all all my knives worked great, including the one I designed and made. I learned that there is no satisfaction like making your own tools from scratch. And if I were younger and had my life to do over again, I’d go straight back to the beginning, the tool making. For the ultimate control of your environment, knowing how to make the tools is where the power lies.

So here are some pictures of the knives I made in my workshop, from the raw blades to the finished tools.

Some knife parts I’ve prepped to have on hand in case I want to make more. Also a hack saw blade prior to modification.

The little curved tool below is my fantasy tool. The others are the bookbinding knives.

Knives with cases closed.