sumer is i-cumin in, / lhude sing, cuccu!
Wednesday 7 May 2008 | 7 cookies in the jar
I FINISHED.
Well okay almost—one student posted a .docx instead of a .doc file for her final and I have to open/read/grade it at school tomorrow. And I still have to write my own final for the Duende. And a letter of reference. But basically?
I FINISHED.
And now there is bliss. Ecstasy. Dancing in the streets. Feasting and whooping and sensual celebrating of all descriptions. Or, more accurately, I slept like a dead thing from 4 am to 11 am, not even aware that the Brujo was recording his (uninhibitedly loud) radio show in the living room. But NOW there will be feasting and whooping and celebrating—
True, I am broke. True, after the next paycheck there are no more paychecks until August and some sort of decision will need to be made about how to keep body and soul together this summer, especially given the fact that I apparently cannot go a week without spending money on fabric. True, the Korean car hasn’t started in 3 weeks and is dead in the driveway gathering tree spall and bird poop on its hood. True, the Brujo is also broke and has no insurance and we just put another $500 on the credit card for his dental emergency last week (oh, he was in PAIN and it was hard to see…stuff came up for me that hadn’t visited since I cared for Maman….). True, Aunt Freud and I have never managed to do bupkis; yet I owe her squillions of dollars in copays; and worst of all my meds have mysteriously and completely given out and thus so do I, every day around 3 pm, dissolve into sniffling and Existential Despair and usually, very shortly thereafter, bed. (Whence mercifully I can retire daily now.)
Yes, all these things are true. AND. A barrage of good stuff follows, in image and word. Bodhi wahoo!
• I don’t teach comp again until 2009! This fall I teach POETRY to 20 students and in the spring I teach LITERATURE to 25 students (and presumably another comp section) and also I take my own classes and I WRITE. (This is where we live by the way—our house has the red car in front, not where the little green G••gle arrow inaccurately points. See how we live in the suburbs?!)
• The library, it turns out, not only has books on literature and education and writing and so forth, but, can you believe it?? Books exist on QUILTING!!! and FABRIC!!! Who knew?! Behold my latest gloating stack—best of all, a book about SILK, an utterly anti-ecological substance with which I am currently completely obsessed. I’m going to use the grad computer room scanner to scan in quilts and show them to you….some have literally brought me to tears.
• The Brujo has decided to teach summer school and then full-time this fall, which will be hard on him, but hopefully enable him to get out of tax debt, AND he’ll have health insurance and some kind of dental coverage, both of which are good for a fiesty field-collecting 47-year-old Brujo to have.
• Not only the Dying Book, but also my own little book of poultry comes out any day now! ‘Twas supposed to be published in April, but Particle Series Books is a brand-new micropress and besides I was insanely late getting my final version to them, bless their hearts for even still speaking to me.
• Why I am the best thrift store shopper ever: a brilliant vintage Sears ironing board for $5.99, beating the Wal-Mart/Hanjin Shipping price by $6, AND it’s much more stylish, especially when I finish its new Robert Kaufman paisley ironing-board cover. I need to take a better picture revealing its fashionable space-age atomic-era curving legs, freshly sheathed in buttery almond high-gloss paint. But I no longer have to press fabric on a burnt-towel-covered piano bench whilst kneeling on the floor!
• Why I am the best thrift-store shopper ever part II: sewing table for $10, so I no longer have to stab my knees into the makeshift steamer-trunk arrangement, and/or remove entire sewing set-up everytime I want a notion or stash fabric out of said steamer trunks. Behold, new sewing corner, with Virgin of Guadalupe pillows in the making. Yay for spiritofjoy’s suggesting that I start by sewing something for myself. Fabric for said pillows: SIXTY-TWO CENTS at the fabric-by-the-pound joint across the street, possibly because She has a bolt seam running across Her middle; but we don’t mind it much.
• Why I am the best thrift-store shopper ever part III, pictures to come:
1. red-and-black floral Betsey Johnson silk skirt: $2.75.
2. Limited silk skirt, pink with wee brown polka dots: $2.50
3. unremarkable but cute pale green silk camisole: $2.25
4. stunning pale blue Vietnamese silk housecoat: $2.75
• I made vichyssoise and coconut cream flan for the Brujo because he can’t chew, and he loved them and so did I. Ooh, and my salsa has been fabuloso this spring! With lots of lime and cilantro, and deseeded tomatoes and scallions and jalapeño and nothing else. Simple and good on corn tortillas, which the B. was able to masticate gingerly on one side of his jaw.
• A yard of caramel-colored dupioni that I extravagantly bid on and won via the Bay which is evil (sometime in the depths of February—I think—about $3?), and then thought dismally I will never ever use this—has now revealed itself to be PERFECT for an arty silk coin quilt which will look something like this. And within it I will use the special bamboo batting; yes.
• Speaking of which quilting class starts again May 22 so I can finish all the half-sewn, half-cut-out mini quilts I began this winter and did not complete due to getting February/the semester all over me, see above. Or below.
• Behold my fledgling inspiration board….why, just this morning I gazed glazedly upon it, cereal bowl clutched in bleary hand, and conceived a brilliant idea for a silk quilt for Oleoptene—can you guess what it will be?
And maybe, just maybe, all of these things also mean I can stop the incessant in-my-head writing of blog posts and starting of poems and imagining of quilt shapes/fabric colors, and instead construct actual Things in that which it pleases us to call Reality, for a while. The State School seems to want no part of me between now and August 18; and while I have the standard 100+ end-of-semester panicky oh-God-please-don’t-give-me-an-A-minus emails, plus I have woefully neglected my staunchly faithless and frequently texting/telephoning beloved Fruitbat, and Oleoptene and Persephone, plus the house is unspeakably filthy, plus plus plus plus plus….yet:
Time. Opens up and beckons. And I. Rush grateful forward into her.
7 cookies in the jar
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are you saying that you are being published!?!? like, in a real book by a ‘real’ publishing co.? oh how i admire! and of course, many congratulations!
Hallelujah!
OK, Venetian glass bits at the top? No link or catchy subtitles when I hover my mouse? Sigh. Loving the happy post, and now stuck with freshman chorus manual song in my head which I may have to force the children to sing for me later. And thinking how a lesser person would have killed several birds with a single stone and sold grades. Then you could blame the spiral downward on fabric addiction and
rightwrite a killer memoir illustrated with quilts. Right?Okies, fabric links added…why, I didn’t know you cared! ;o)
I TRIED to pay the B. to grade everything for me but he wouldn’t do it.
Which song? Not Wachet auf, or Ave verum, surely?
My freshman class spent spent months getting “sumer is i-cumen in” sung in a round. It was… something. Though. When I was a child, no, actually, to this day, my parents would greet the first day of summer vacation with the Jamies’ “Summertime” (by phone or email now) and maybe that is a family tradition to be updated or what would be the opposite of updated by a couple centuries?
(And can we beg mercy and the correction of the homophone typo with a charming story of being woken at 2 am by a husband stumbling over the things on our nightstand looking for eye drops and being stupidly tired this morning?)
And yes, we are obsessive about the charming link-labels and think we ought to learn to do that ourselves one day.
Wow….love the cushions (and I love your machine!!) (I have a thing for old Singer sewing machines)
Haha, would have fixed homophone typo and hesitated for a long time before finally deciding you were being clever in some way I was too tired to understand!