and i’m off to the city again this weekend. sometimes i wonder what it would have been like if i had found the right place to live *there* instead of my airy garage apartment loft *here* last summer. i’m sure everything worked out as it should, but i can’t help but wonder what it would be like to live there and commute here on my working days. oh well. i love the place i live in, even though i’m tired of this town. i know when things start to change to green, it will look interesting to me again, for a while anyway. i love the change of seasons.

so the tooth mystery is resolved finally. even though it never hurt, just felt weird off and on, until the big swelling last weekend, i had a molar cracked under an ancient filling. since i have (finally) given up popcorn as a primary food group this year, the dentist agreed that it could have happened during the fall on the ice, since i hit so hard and even my headBones clacked. root canal, temporary crown, lots of money (most covered by Delta Dental thankyoubabyjebus), penicillin … and i will soon be all better. i guess i could think of some things more fun to spend my state tax return on, but sigh … at least i had it in the bank.

in other news, NOT MUCH! winter is winding down and now i have to get over the slight agoraphobia that occurs when i spend so much time indoors. still trying to figure out what is wrong with my artHands, why they won’t do what my artBrain wants. want to make more pictures, but bored of the environments available. and so on… sort of plodding, i guess, letting my hair grow.

for readers, i’ll open up the chapters that i have ready to post, for weekend reading, if anyone is so inclined. i continue to be grateful for your input! really!

the weekend had enough sun and warmth to make wandering around in the alleys downtown with a camera rather pleasant. i looked for new “art”. but didn’t find too much. also finished LOTS of prepared books, which i already advertised, and starting putting my book up for reading and commentary, which has also already been advertised. so there were good things. interspersed between the badness of a creepy abscess thing or something growing in my gum, a broken refrigerator and the fact that my Betsy has not called in approximately one hundred years.

well, i guess the thing in my mouth must not have been that bad, since it didn’t hurt enough to warrant as “emergency” and i can’t even get it looked at until Thursday morning, which doesn’t matter, since it mostly went away last night. my tooth still feels funny though. but doesn’t hurt. i wonder if i cracked it when i fell on the ice? after two days of bringing bags of ice from the quikshop, the refrigerator man (a little old fellow, just like a maytag advertisement!) came and fixed the thing in half an hour. but i wish Betsy would call. or email. or *something*. sad mama.

spring is probably coming. i saw crocus.

invite readers.

i need a few people to read my novel and provide response. please note, the response is VERY important. i need it badly, so if you do not really have the time for a long reading and some comments, please don’t request to read yet? i only feel comfortable with a few people at a time. otherwise, the only “requirement” is that you are open-minded about reading a variety of genres. i hope to have a variety of readers, too - age, sex, lifestyle, etc.

i have set up a dreamwidth account for the reading, so the other “requirement” is to have or open an account there. dreamwidth. i’m pretty sure a free account is easy to set up and YOU DON’T HAVE TO SEE ADS. god i am so mad at LJ about that … terrible, obnoxious, bouncy ads. ugh. to have a free account, you may need an invite code. there are tons here: invite codes

so here you go: cobaltika

the first chapter is up and ready to go. there should be one or two chapters a week posted.

please “sign up” at the dreamwidth, so i will have your user name? thanks!

gulp…

i have been busily finishing, scanning and listing some old and new prepared books this week. they are all ready for someone to enjoy completing, as journals, artBooks, or surprises. i hope you will look!

i’m gearing up for a long solitary weekend at home and at the artTable. i need one! even though the long solitary weekends have become rather lonely and almost bleak this winter, i haven’t had one for a month and i am ready. the weather has become much nicer and i am going to try to take some long alley walks with my camera. i need to move more! i don’t quite understand, though, why after beautiful sunny days while i was in office this week, it is now GRAY out there?

this week i have been working hard at the artTable, even after the office (!) and finishing up LOTS of prepared books, some in progress for a couple of years. then i will scan parts of them (ugh. i hate scanning books, but…) and place them on Etsy. i’ve sold most all of the ones that were there. i will make an announcement when they are up. then i hope to Start Something New - perhaps something that has been percolating…

i haven’t been writing since i finished the last draft of my novel and printed the hefty manuscript, which i left in Texas with my youngest sister. she has acknowledged the reading, but has not made comments yet. she agrees that i need readers that are not “family”. so … i tried to set up a new LJ to make a heavily filtered site for select readers, but … JEEZUS!!!! the effing ads on livejournal now!!! and the “themes” available to free users. it was all so ugly that i deleted the account after half an hour. my LJ a free account now, but when they first started doing ads, i hacked my code (shhhh!) so they don’t show up on my page or on my reading list. i only see them when i log in or comment on certain pages and they are not that offensive. but the ones on the new free accounts. god. jumping all around, ugly colors, on MY VERY PAGES. i would not invite people to sign up and read…

so i am still trying to decide. i am picky about presentation. i want to have the page look almost like my lj now. it’s simple and nice (to me). i suppose i could pony up the $$ again (i know i know, it’s not that much) and then pony up for the reading site, and copy my own code … well, i might play with it this weekend. i was SO ready to DO it though…

i love the mornings i don’t have to get up and go out. like today. it is so pleasant to sit in the nest with laptop and coffee for a while. now, more coffee and i am going to start on the third draft. i had so many ideas on the long driving trip … though my lack of response from my only two readers makes me think it must be awful and they are afraid to hurt my feelings … and i should throw the damned thing away … then i will get up and braid my hair and play at the artTable.

lately, i have actually wanted to make pictures of something beyond HOUSES. yes, true. i want to make pictures of rows of winter trees. partly because i want to use them in a mixed media project and partly because they please me so much and will soon be GONE. covered in fluffy green stuff (which is nice, sure, but just not the same)

this weekend, the poet and i had two great morning hikes and there were lots of trees. not quite the ones i need, but some of them might work out. i liked looking at them. there is nothing like a winter woods. also so enjoyable not to worry about snakes! but we did wonder if some of the scat we saw belonged to … BEARS? surely not.

we also saw two great films - Shutter Island, which i anticipated eagerly and was not disappointed by. what a creepy mindTwister. i still don’t know… then we also saw The White Ribbon, which was STUNNING. god. visually, it was beyond perfect. and the subject matter was rich. bleak, but so well-done. i never wanted it to end. i could have just looked for hours more…

i don’t want to go out today. it’s gray again. so maybe i just won’t.

ps - i am starting to downsize lots of my web activities and it is possible that i will disappear this journal soon. the exact same posts are always on my liveJournal, which i have kept for so many years. i tend to make more writing posts there, than i do here, where i have only posted the visual entries, for the most part. we’ll see… coming back from weekends away to find 100 crappy spambot comments is getting tedious…

for the most part, not many images resulted from the Texas trip, which is usually more about seeing as much of my family for as long as possible in a very short time. there is seldom time for wandering. however, as i was not scheduled to meet Margaret until late, i took a wandering stop in Guthrie, Oklahoma, a place i have wanted to see more closely since passing through on a Greyhound bus many many years ago. it has a fabulous downtown area. wonderful buildings, in good use. there are great houses around, too. and then some thrilling awful ones! i could have spend much more than an hour and a half there easily, wandering and capturing.

anyway, now off to the big city again, for a visit with the poet.

someday, i’m pretty sure i will sit down and make art again. i hope, anyway.

ps - it seems like sitting in a car for appx. 24 hours in a 6-day period might have been GOOD for my poor tailbone! yay.