Category: w00t

Oh. That’s New.

*blink* Ow!

*shrug* oooouch!

*wiggle little toe* aiiyyeeeeeee!

Ah yes, folks, the unmistakable sounds of a post-move body.

Everything hurts. My arms and legs are bruised all to heck and my knee is making a crunching sound it didn’t used to make.

In my younger days, I would bounce back from this sort of event within a day or two and go on about my day. Today I have to remind myself to get up from my desk at least once an hour or I will surely become locked up like the Tinman.

When the alarm clock went off this morning I muttered “should have taken today off” but alas, I didn’t.

For a work day, I have to say this morning was pretty nice. Instead of my usual 45 minutes to an hour commute across busy roads and over a bridge, today my commute was just 13 minutes (I timed it) on surface streets.

That right there makes a few days (weeks?) of sore muscles all worth it.

So far we are loving our new pad. A lot. On Sunday we took a short walk in the neighborhood and managed to meet the neighborhood kook. She’s a friendly kook, but a kook nonetheless.

I happen to think knowing the local kook is an important part of settling in to any neighborhood.

So for now we are still living out of boxes, but we’ve even put a pretty good dent in that work. All in, I’d have to say the whole move went really well.

It was, dare I say…a smooth move? (*snicker, snort, guffaw*)

Onward to this sunny Spring Monday. May you all have a song in your heart and a bounce in your step.







Image found here.




I Keep Looking Over My Shoulder

I think I’m being stalked. I’m not sure how to prove it or what to do about it but I am pretty sure I’m totally being followed. By an otherwordly entity.

I have shouted “what do you want?!?!” but the face of the man following along remains passive, as if my shouts are lost to the cosmos.

This stalker goes by a few names, but we’ll go with Man in the Moon for the sake of ease and understanding. MITM keeps showing up everywhere lately, getting real close and glowy.

In the small morning hours when I head out to work, he’s there, peering over the hills and looking quite chilly yet magnetic. As I ride the train, he rides along but fades away as I get closer to work.

In the evenings as I drive home, he’s there hanging low on the horizon looking quite handsome. The evening attire is more of a warm and inviting yellow tone. He hangs out over the Bay and turns the tips of saltwater waves a golden amber. They wave as if beckoning me to dive in.

I try to ignore his intense gaze and then take a sharp curve in the road. For a moment I think he’s gone but then voop! there he is again, a little less bigger-than-life when taken from that angle but still there staring down at me with persistence.

I thought it was just a couple coincidences, but I’m pretty sure that the moon is chasing me. And maybe flirting with me too, just a little.

For all the world that big shining Snow Moon looks just like a gigantic cosmic Snickerdoodle.

He’s so charming, I just might take a bite.

———

Now tell me this doesn’t look like a snickerdoodle.



The full Moon as seen in Japan on Feb. 25, 2013. Credit and copyright: Masashi Ito.





Photo from Universe Today.




What a World

I had a really good day yesterday. An exceptionally good day. Really top notch, if I do say so myself.

I belong to a group of professionals who do the same kind of work that I do. Internet modesty causes me to decline to state. Suffice to say, it’s not like I’m a part of the Action Hero Institute or Society of Scientists Doing Cool Stuff. For the sake of ease of this post, let’s call what I do paper shuffling.

This group has some meetings and they fund their cause by offering training courses in the various aspects and disciplines within the paper shuffling profession.

A few years ago they put out a call for instructors and I threw my hat in the ring. Back in 2010 I conducted my first training class, a four hour session. This was my first time teaching a course and 80+ slides and four hours of talking seemed daunting. I was as nervous as I’d been in a long time (pit stains reminiscent of passing my boards for my MBA) but I ended up having a really good experience.

Recently, the Paper Shuffling Professionals of America asked me to come back and teach again. I agreed and that queasy nervousness set in right away. I pulled up the PowerPoint deck I had used back in 2010 and said aloud, “hey…this is pretty good.”

I had a class of fifteen souls yesterday who actually paid money to listen to me yammer on for four hours about the art and science of paper shuffling.

It was such a great group, though. They were fun and interactive and even seemed to laugh at a good portion of my humor. Teaching the class didn’t give me pit stains this time, the hours seemed to fly. I ended the class energized as all get out and walking about half a foot off the ground.

I felt, dare I say it, very proud of myself.

As you’ll recall from this blog, I’m the girl who once, as a child, had to have a doctor extract a piñon nut I had shoved up my nose.

I once got a dime up there too. My big sister was able to get that out before the folks caught wind of the situation.

I’m the girl who was following my big brother on a hike in the mountains of Cuba, New Mexico and was trying so hard to keep up that I ran smack into a tree branch and scratched my face.

I’m the girl who wrapped a rubber band around the end of my nose. In the hour before I was to attend a ballet class. How was I to know it would badly bruise and I would be mocked mercilessly by those prissy ballet girls?

In college I once got so lost on the Border Highway I had to go to someone’s home and knock on their door to ask for directions back to Las Cruces (pre-mobile phone days). This was at night. I am still amazed I didn’t get shot.

I cannot add a column of numbers in my head. I cannot tell you which direction is north (I could do it when I had the Sandias as my guide). I often drool when I sleep. I am prone to cursing like a sailor.

And most recently, I am the girl who, just before leaving the house to go to teach a training class, used the rest room and as I flushed I also manged to drop my keys in the toilet. Big important teacher woman leapt into the bowl and held on to them for dear life as the waters rushed by (thankfully it was only a #1 bowlful).

And yet, the Paper Shuffling Professionals of America wanted me to teach a class, and worse yet people paid good money to listen to what I had to say.

What a world, what a world. Who would have thought all my years of hard work would erase my beautiful dorkiness. If only for a moment.






Photo found on The History Bluff.




My Awkward Little Canvas

At the end of last month, I attended an artist’s salon hosted by my mentor and photography teacher Marty Springer. At these monthly events, a group of photography students and artists come together to review each other’s work and provide feedback and critique.

The ticket for entry is that you bring a printed photograph for review.

I’ve been feeling pretty unartistic lately, so I went to the salon, but I was unable to bring a print (long story involving the horrific lack of possibilities for serious photographers to have their work printed) and endured the mild chiding from my mentor.

We went forward and had a really good session. The people in this group are fantastically talented.

As we wrapped up Marty issued us a challenge. In addition to teaching, mentoring and being a well-paid professional photographer, she also curates a small gallery at a local public library. This is the venue where we have our annual photography show, and the rest of the year the gallery hosts all manner of art pieces including photos, paintings, mixed media, quilts and more.

Marty told us how she had booked an artist for a show to span the month of February, but he had shown up with all of his pieces so poorly and cheaply framed that they fell off the wall moments after she had hung them. The artist didn’t have the desire to fix his errors, so Marty was left without a show.

This was Sunday night and the show was due to open Thursday.

She told us she wanted to go ahead with an exhibit and we were all invited to contribute. Something was going up on February 1. She spoke to us about February and celebrating Valentines, but more than that, Marty wanted to put a show on the walls that was about love and about healing.

In the wake after the very tense election and then the horrible tragedies in Sandy Hook, Colorado and Oregon, she wanted to have a show that wasn’t all lacy Valentines and light, but something that showed love and strength and healing.

She asked us if we were up to the task. Turns out we were.

I had an immediate idea for a mixed media piece that had been simmering in my mind for a while and seemed perfect for this show. I asked if mixed media was ok since most of the pieces would be photography. She told me not only was mixed media welcomed, but encouraged.

That night I came home, pulled out a blank canvas and gesso’d it (to dry overnight) wondering just how in the HELL I was going to get this done in time. At that point I was two weeks into a new job and still adjusting to a pretty long commute. My hours of free time for working on art were pretty severely limited, but I wanted to try.

This meant I had to edit myself A LOT. I guess watching all the seasons of “Project Runway” had put that thought in my head. “Edit yourself,” I kept saying as I wanted to add more, embellish more, get more complicated and advanced in the few hours I had to complete this piece.

If I was going to make it in time, this needed to be simple, quiet and powerful.

On Wednesday night, only two days after I started the piece, I turned in a mixed media canvas with glue and varnish still a bit damp. My mentor gasped and danced a little when she saw it.




It’s a bit hard to see, but the canvas is actually ripped through, then closed up with thread and staples.


I was so very unsure about turning in this piece because it felt a little…intimate…to be sharing with the world. There is a lot of me in that canvas. Also, other than a county fair a couple years back, I hadn’t exhibited any of my art pieces and showing my creations to anyone other than The Good Man makes me a bit shy.

As I handed it over, I could only see all of the many errors I needed to fix. If only there was time. My nerve began to waver, but I relinquished my canvas to my mentor with the belief she’d find the right place for it in her exhibit.

This past weekend The Good Man and I finally got a chance to get over to the gallery to see my little humble canvas. I almost cried. She found a great spot for my piece and it flows into the show really well. It both stands out and blends in.

It is so very gratifying to see my little mended heart hanging proudly on a gallery wall.




Side note: No wonder the cartoon I posted for Valentine’s Day got to me so deeply! This idea of a broken and repaired heart has been on my creative brain for a while now.

Much gratitude to The Good Man, the great State of New Mexico, The Crafty Chica for the inspiration and know-how.

Photo and canvas are both Copyright 2013, Karen Fayeth, and subject to the Creative Commons license in the right column of this page. Photo taken with an iPhone5 and the Camera+ app.




Not Fit For Soundbyte Culture

He was inordinately fond of jokes, anecdotes, and stories. He loved to hear them, and still more to tell them himself out of the inexhaustible supply provided by his good memory…the coarser the joke, the lower the anecdote, and the more risky the story, the more he enjoyed them…

He possessed, moreover, a singular ingenuity in bringing about occasions in conversation for indulgences of this kind.

–Henry Villard

Reporter Henry Villard is discussing the tendency of his interview subject to tell bawdy jokes and stories, and to invent many occasions in conversation to insert his inexhaustible supply of coarse humor.

Sounds like a fun guy. The kind of guy I’d like to have a beer with. I do love coarse humor.

This guy certainly does not, however, sound like a good political candidate. In this internet era of “always on,” deep political gasping happens when a candidate so much as tap dances on a very wide line of humor. A candidate who inserts risky stories into conversation with a journalist from a widely read publication would not last long in this modern political atmosphere. We’ve seen a couple try and they have ended up becoming a footnote, a forgotten punchline and a big political loser.

In this instance, the year was 1858, the publication was The Atlantic, and the candidate for Senate being interviewed was none other than Abraham Lincoln.

In ways I can’t fully explain, it kind of cheers me up to know that Lincoln loved a good dirty joke. I knew he was a bit of an awkward man and was prone to being a “high talker” when he’s get worked up. But until today I didn’t know he had a penchant for bawdy humor.

I’ll never look at a penny the same way.

Happy Presidents Day!




“Tell me another fart joke, father.”
Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad.


Quote from “Recollections of Lincoln” by Henry Villard published in February 1904 in The Atlantic magazine.

Photo from HistoryPlace.com.