. Spinning .

If I can hide out here in the shop, I may be able to post more entries today. I am avoiding the house. A couple hours ago my husband ran in here to tell me that there’s an inch of water in the furnace room, and of course the water crept into the one room where I store my life. Photos, papers, large yeast barrels containing my first twenty years; you know, the irreplaceable stuff. I called the plumber and moved boxes. J mopped as much as he could, but there are rugs down there (“yes, dear, I know we probably should have pulled them out when we moved in fourteen years ago…”).

The plumber has, for $144, fixed yet another pinhole leak we get from copper pipes and hard water (tasty, though!), and happily didn’t charge us for the fifteen minutes he spent tasting the various hot sauces my husband brought out for him to try on a bag of taco chips. After the plumber left, I sent J on his way as well. I can’t face the cellar right now–not the cleanup work, but the ruined memories of who I am, or was, or ever wanted to be.

Some things that were destroyed I must say I am happy about, for packratting is also among my many sins. Five years’ worth of overrun traditional archery magazines that I produced and just couldn’t throw away are, I believe, useless and now must be tossed. At least fifteen years’ worth of bank statements are gone as well, and thankfully a similar cellar flooding in a previous home took care of another twenty years.

Creatively, I cannot face the cellar now, but perhaps it will generate a story. Will that do?

Uh-boy. It seems I may have offended some treefolk with my popsicle version of life, and the inference that the bitter end is the stick. So to Kevin at Synthetic Reality v2.1 I offer this bit of poetry:

Life is a pine tree
sturdy and strong
and we musn’t blame the pine tree
if it grows gnarled and twisted
and so terribly wrong.

And, I suppose I must honor Creativectomy’s Jason’s theory of life as well:

Rollerblade through life swiftly
over smooth highway past
open field and rutted road
till you fall upon your ass.

Forrest Gump was wrong; life is not a box of chocolates. The character is sweet and inspirational, but let’s face it, didn’t have a grip on the reality that exists for most people. Of course, he is a fantasy character himself, so it’s not as if we have to take his word for anything anyway. But the line is one we’d like to believe because it just sounds so idealistic and hopeful. But it’s as useless in the real world as “Love means never having to say you’re sorry,” from Love Story.

No, life is a cherry popsicle. You must get your licks in before it melts. It’s refreshing and tasty, it’s good and it’s quick. But you have to hurry through it or you’ll lose much to the dripping. And in the end, if you’re like me, you’ll continue sucking on the wooden stick to get out every last bit of flavor until it no longer tastes sweet but more like a pine tree.

And that’s it.

Although what I really need and would appreciate is one extra bonus day a week, I suppose I must graciously accept this Leap Year gift of an extra day every four years and be grateful for it.

But why add just another day? Why don’t they just give us an extra Saturday, or for me, because I work on Saturday, an extra Sunday? I realize, of course, that it doesn’t work that way, but why couldn’t it? Things like this could be legislated. After all, they did the Daylight Savings Time thing and got away with it. Time is relative anyway. But wouldn’t it be a great idea if at least on the great Leap Years there were a week that included a double Saturday or Sunday? And while they’re at it, June would be my personal choice for the extra day rather than February when it’s so cold in half the world. The working men and women would certainly appreciate this. Maybe if we complain as consumers to Mr. Nader…

I’m really having a terribly frustrating time in attempting to draw and design a new banner for Spinning. Art, like writing, needs inspiration and that finally hit. But it also needs practiced skill. That’s what I’ve unfortunately neglected for decades. To an artist, writer’s block comes in the form of pencil strokes that just don’t follow the right line, don’t become real. The hand is not listening to the mind’s eye, and the double whammy of leaving a skill dormant is the experience that comes with practice, not just the experience of vision (or in the case of writing, the experience of reading.)

But I am determined to work on this, because I just won’t feel right about it if I throw a banner together from one of the software programs and clipart, or even just playing with photographs. I’ve nothing against it, but I do believe that I want original hand-drawn work since I should be able to do it.

Of course, this weblog isn’t exactly written in pencil either…