The dire threats of weather men are manifesting as heavy rain and gray skies instead of the threatened snow.

A day for indoor pursuits: cats, tea, making a necklace, and gloating over yesterday’s good mail:

A crow patch from bird&b at etsy.
And all the way from Australia…

…a bracelet by Helle at gooseflesh, which I immediately put on and wore out to an art opening. It kept me smiling in the middle of a roomful of networking arteeests.

After three years of being quietly green, the plant I believe to be an iris is blooming. I wake up to large, outrageously complex flowers. They last a day, wilt, and then new flowers grow out of the dead heads.

It blows my mind.

Some things I noticed this week:

A woman cycling very slowly with an accordion on her back.

Two fat sparrows scavenging nest-building supplies on a pile of abandoned rubble.

The wind vane on the steeple of the Jefferson Market library swinging wildly 45 degrees back and forth while no one on 6th Avenue noticed besides me .

A pug racing around the dog park with a bulldog, a weimaraner, a german shepherd, and two black labs.

A man giving his subway seat to a lady wearing a purple raincoat and a bell-shaped pink & purple felted hat.

A plastic bag floating in place, 3 floors up.

A two-year-old stopping traffic on a busy stair while he insisted on taking them one at a time.

The distinct smell of hyacinths on a crowded bus.

Meabh Warburton’s post, Disappointing Day, sends my thinking in several directions:

To delightful collections of useless objects similar to her son’s bowl of broken pencil leads. I have a small jar filled with the little zig zag ends I cut off zippers at a time when I was sewing dozens of zipper bags.

In the same drawer I keep a box of cat whiskers, picked up off the floor with a “thank you!” to the cat who gifted it.

My thinking also goes to how difficult yet necessary it is to fail in the studio. It’s good to hear Andy Goldsworthy saying he makes a lot of crap when I admire his work so much. I’ve also heard that the Modernist painter Rawlston Crawford said “I reserve the right to make bad art”; a good reminder not to get too precious about results.

But when time in the studio is limited, and desperately needed, I need the encouragement that comes from success. Or at least from being satisfied with the general direction. To finally be working, and then look at the piece and see it’s limitations; that’s hard. So it’s good to know that I’m not alone, and to hear about the bad days.

Friday night. That feeling of being rich with two full days ahead and no plans. Time is passing so fast, weeks blinking by; I feel that I’m in a rushing river when I’d like to be on the bridge, looking down and playing Pooh Sticks. Reminds me of a Laurie Anderson lyric:

Days go by. And they just keep going by… endlessly.
Endlessly pulling you… into the future.

Yet there is also grace in this relentlessness. I am in my life; full of it. Finding balance, losing step, and finding balance again.

Noodling around the internet today; I landed at Magpie & Cake where I saw this photograph of artist Chris Cobb’s installation, There is Nothing Wrong in this Whole Wide World, at Adobe Books in San Francisco.

Reading the quote from an interview with Cox I found this:

In some Native American cultures, if you make something, you have to then sleep with it next to you overnight, so that the object is transformed through your dreaming.

A little synchronistic encouragement from the universe after my last post.

I love objects organized by color beyond any reasonable explanation. I feel a deep sense of satisfaction and pleasure similar to when I color matched my mother’s sewing supplies as a child.

Something I still do with my own.

Sunday night and I’m still tired. A month into adjusting to a new schedule, new outside work, and increased commuting, I figure it’ll take another month or two to recover my stride.

I’m spending daily chunks on public transportation. A week ago I watched the man in front of me on the bus crochet a hat at high velocity as we bumped along. Just when I was wondering if he was following a pattern, he carefully took off the wonderful hat he was wearing (and had obviously made) and placed the little hat-to-be, yarmulke-style, on his head, checking that the shaping was correct. By the time I got off he had it down to his ears.

Inspired by this sighting as well as by Jude over at Spirit Cloth who quilts while commuting, and having run out of reading material, I have started knitting while traveling. I thought I’d feel self-conscious but I’m far too absorbed for that. And when standing on the subway, I’m far too busy keeping my balance. (I’ve found that bracing against the door frame and keeping my knees bent works well.)

It’s amazing how much I can get done in these in-between times. I finished a beret in a few days, a bigger version of the Purl Bee pattern, which is being blocked as I write, stretched over a dinner plate.

I love this quote from Marion Woodman:

If you travel far enough,
one day you will recognize yourself
coming down the road to meet you.
And you will say
YES.

Yes.

Last weekend there was a pretty bad leak in my bathroom, and the water traveled, causing some speedy dragging of belongings out of closets. I still haven’t restored order, but the upside is that I’m finally sorting through those boxes that remained unpacked after moving, and the piles of papers that get hurriedly shoved into hiding whenever I have guests.

One uncovered treat is the stack of photographs I took in my final semester of art school. And this one seemed right for today, when snow is predicted, and the heater keeps revving up, and the landscape is monochromatic. This is the path to Tyningham beach, not too far from Edinburgh, Scotland. It’s one of my favorite places. The shadows and lush green promise peace as you transition from the fields to the sea, through the forest.

I’ve had a considerable amount of dental work done over the past year. I go to a university dental school where the students are required to seek the approval of faculty before they do any thing, which makes for a lot of waiting. I usually bring a book, but yesterday I had my knitting.

There was a classic rock station playing, and here’s what I have to report: You’re The One That I Want from Grease makes for some serious speed-knitting. Roberta Flack’s Killing Me Softly With His Song, not so much.