DOGS, CATS & OTHERWISE

Our inside thermometer at this moment tells us that it is 109.2 in the shade of our front porch. I am thinking maybe we are going to tax our electical grid to the point where it gives us, at a minimum, a brownout, and at a maximum, the dreaded BLACKOUT! So I changed what I intended to write in the blog and will just share some easy photos with you. Above is my granddog, Libby (may she rest in peace.) I had a nice photo of her and when I was taking the Photoshop course I practiced on her, causing her to have her own unique "portrait."


This cat wandered into our yard one day many years ago. Oh, he was such a beat up old male. He had nothing to recommend himself as a cat we'd ordinarily take in -- except for those amazing eyes. We named him Chauncey, thinking we could "up" his image of himself with such an elegant name. We kept him in our house for a week. When we let him go outside on day 8, he moved up to the roof for a few days, and then went off again, as unneutered male cats mostly do.


Baby Dolly actually came into our house in the arms of our daughter Bryn. She was, without a doubt, the cutest baby cat we had ever seen. She grew up to be beautiful, not cute. But we referred to her (out of her hearing, of course) as our dumb blonde. To let us know that she wanted to go outside, she's sit in front of the hinge side of the front door until someone noticed her. When Bryn married, she left Dolly for us.


Moses (Moe, for short) and Smokey are our Los Angeles grandcats. This is their birdwatching perch.


And above is the white tiger I cross-stitched during the time I lived in Istanbul. It was the first time I tried anything big and intricate. About half-way through I though I'd never be able to finish it. I've gone on to do three more - a lion, a spotted jaguar and a black panther.

The temp has dropped to 108.8, so maybe we've peaked early today. Usually our highest temps are at 3 p.m. I'm going to save other pictures for later and get this posted while I still have power.


Hope you enjoyed the pix.

THE BURDEN OF UNFINISHED PROJECTS

As many of you know, I am engaged in a big genealogy project of my own making: the goal is to get everything I know about the ancestry of each of my four grandparents into a written and illustrated booklet and into my kids’ hands. I figured it would take me two months to complete one grandparent’s book, so the overall project would be, allowing for slight variations of time available to do this, done in a year’s time. I finished up my Grandma Maud Susan McConnell Dobbins’s family in two months. I finished up my Grandma Jessie Davis Ryland’s family in two months. I’m now working on my Grandpa Byrd Ryland’s family and I may need to use a little bit of that built-in variation time for him, because his two month period spans both Thanksgiving and Christmas, never a good time to find oneself at a loss for something to do. Anyway, I’m still on schedule as of this writing.


This morning I was at the Laundromat knitting furiously while the machines did their work and I was thinking about when this knit-hat project was going to be done. The hat I made for Olivia didn’t fit well, so I’m knitting another one. It needs to be done by Saturday, because that’s when I’ll see her next. I thought to myself, “Projects, projects, projects!”


Lurking in the back of my mind is an unfinished cross-stitch piece that I set aside some time back and just haven’t returned to finish it. I thought how unlike me to not finish a project. And at that point I felt my nose growing longer and my tongue turning black, both signs of a big, fat lie. And once I acknowledged to myself that I had more than one unfinished project, my mind’s eye remembered what was in one of my office drawers. In addition to the three unfinished cross-stitch pieces I’m showing, I found two that hadn’t even been started yet, and found four that I had started but didn’t like and know I’ll never get back to them. Those four are now residing in my trash can.


And because I DO know that I will keep doing the cross-stitches I dare not throw away all the threads that I’ve collected over the years. I started putting them into nice little cubby-holed boxes but finally rather than buy MORE boxes I decided to chuff them in zip-lock bags. That quantity of possibly usable embroidery threads takes up a great deal of space; I am not able to let even 1 of them go!

I do hate to have unfinished projects hanging around. Whenever I used to go housesit for Kerry I always took a bunch of projects with me. I never knew what I would feel like working on. “Feeling” is not a good rationale for completing projects. But if I assign myself too many deadlines for completing things, I feel that I don’t have time to smell the roses.

I am definitely not going to buy any more pieces to cross-stitch, nor am I going to do any more hats once Olivia’s gets finished. I AM going to make a little something for the newest Great-granddaughter, but I think I’ll draw the line there. One by one I’ll finish the projects I’ve started, finish up Grandpa Scott Dobbins’ family report by February 2010, and just maybe do nothing for a while except read. And smell a few flowers, too.

THERE ARE MANDALAS ....AND MANDALAS!

I have never been particularly fascinated by Mandalas - at least as far as the spiritual significance of Mandalas goes. But I have to admit that when I see Monks working on a Mandala like this (which is made of colored sand and which will be destroyed shortly after it is completed, showing the impermanence of life, I think), I can't help but take a quick, sharp breath and hold it while I feast my eyes on the work. Oh, such beauty and such detail. As one who has absolutely no capacity for generating art of any kind, I just cannot imagine the soul and spirit of those people like these Monks who can work in minute detail on what I'd imagine is a labor of love.

When I saw the photo of those men working away at their Mandala, I was reminded that when I was living for a couple of months in Amsterdam, the very cold weather in December and January made us stay inside a bit more than if we had been their during the summer. I found a nice embroidery shop and got acquainted with one of the owners there. This lady told me that the rage in Amsterdam at that time was doing a cross-stitch Mandala. She showed me several that she had done - and they were very large pieces and absolutely gorgeous. They were to be framed and hung on a wall. She said there were "rules" for doing them -- and as nearly as I can remember there could only be 8 colors used and all four quadrants had to be identical.

I was intrigued, so as our time in Amsterdam was drawing to a close, I picked out 8 colors, some material and decided to use that long plane ride home to work on MY Mandala. Before the plane's wheels hit American soil, it was obvious that my Mandala was not going to be anywhere near as fine as the Dutch ones I saw. I knew I had no talent for design or colors, but I guess I'd thought that as a mere "crafter" I could leave the conceptualizing to the artist and I'd just make crosses and let the design fall where it may.

Well, you can see that although the idea was very enticing, my execution of it was lacking in grace! I was so sorry that my skills just weren't good enough to make something as beautiful as what I'd seen in Amsterdam. Yet here it is, 18 years later and I'm still holding on to this scrap of Mandala, tucked away in a box. I really should just dump it! After I die and my kids come to clean out my things, I can hear it all now: "What on earth is this?" "It's horrible, whatever it is!" "Toss it in the trash!" "Yea, I don't want it." "Me neither!"

And that will be ok.
Now, while I was thinking about this I did a Google search on Dutch Mandalas. I found nothing, but I did find a whole area of cross-stitch Celtic Mandalas, and I must say I was as stunned by them as I was by the picture of the Monks doing their sand art. I would give my eye-teeth to be able to work on something like this one below. However, I may not be artistic but I AM smart enough to know that I have neither the eyesight nor the time to work on something like this. But oh, I can see it hanging on my wall, even if it is only in my imagination.

I have always said that artists need appreciators, those of us who stand in front of their works and swoon or drool or sigh or study or have sharp intakes of breath! I am definitely an appreciator, which is the best I can do for all the Mandala designers and makers of the world. Wish I could join you!

http://www.celticdesigns.com/ARTSITE/ARTPAGES/MandalaLrg.html

HENNY PENNY

Often there is a great affinity between women and hens -- and I think the reason is obvious: Who else has eggs and raises chickies?

Several years ago I got it into my head that I wanted to do a chicken cross-stitch. It took me a long time to find what I wanted. Actually I really intended to do a New Hampshire Red or a breed something like that, but I'd just finished doing a lion head that took bizillions of reddish/brownish stitches and I just couldn't bring myself to start another project with the same colors. So I chose this little lady and was very pleased with the way she turned out. You will notice, if you have good eyesight, that it says "MOM" down by the shadow. Henny Penny now resides with with my daugher Erin.

Back when we had our house in Orange I had thought about getting myself a real hen. Because we had no grass in the back yard - only a pool and cement, courtesy of the former owners - I knew it would have to be a hen in a cage. It wasn't enough that we had three cats and a dog; I thought a chicken would be a good addition. I even did some research on how to convert chicken droppings into usable fertilizer, thinking that if I could solve that problem I might have better luck in convincing Jerry that I wasn't just talking through my hat.

My own mother used to tell my sister and me about living on the farm and how my grandma used to love her chickens. In fact, she named them all (a dangerous practice if she intended to have chicken dinners, I think). I didn't know my grandma well and she died when I was young, so I think maybe all this is why I had a yen to have a chicken of my very own. Henny Penny, she would have been.

As you probably guessed, I did not get my chicken. So doing a cross-stitched Henny Penny all these years later had to suffice.

Which reminds me that in the Pet Cemetery on Beach Boulevard in Huntington Beach there is a chicken named Henny Penny buried there. On the little tombstone the epitaph reads something like, "The Best Chicken that Ever Lived." Now that was a very loved chicken. I would have loved my chicken like that too. Oh well, if there is one thing in life that is true it is that we don't always get everything we want.