I still have all my fingers......

 Hoping everyone and everything is still spinning around the sun and everyone is vertical.  

I am vertical and at; "stick a fork in her and see if she's done!"  Yup, fried would be a good way to put the last few weeks.  The days were cruising along, projects were coming along nicely and WHAM!  Mercury hits your garage again or the sun has an anal flare.  I don't know, sometimes there are few, if any answers for what is going on.  So buckle up and here is the latest run down and maybe now you will understand why we live in Paine Falls or make that Pain Falls...... 

Since last posting, just 20 short days ago,  I rolled into a few more projects.  Yes, I should be in the studio but I really want to wrap this stuff up.  I have grown comfortably oblivious to what is going on around this house.  You walk over a crack in the sidewalk everyday on your way to school.  One day someone fixes the crack but you just keep stepping over the now invisible crack.  I didn't even see the crack in the floor anymore, nobody fixed it; Comfortably Oblivious.  

After that false sense of superiority with tools and finally crossing one or two little projects off my list I thought why not, keep going, don't loose your momentum now because you might not get it back for another 11 years.  I suck at start/stop projects.  It's true in gardening, the kitchen, the house, the studio, life.  

While building the shelves I spent way too much time on my knees and noticing the floor was looking pretty tired.  It's a brown paper bag floor with three coats of poly.  After two dogs, a gardener, a construction guy, and basic traffic the floor needed a facelift.  I patched a couple cracks, three new coats of poly. Minwax and the floor looked pretty good again.  The sun faded area was gone and it looked liked new.         

a canning cupboard because I am not running canning stuff up and down the stairs anymore; I can year around. 

While waiting for the floor to dry between coats I finally finished the trim and paint on the bar.  

and put a badly needed shelf in the closet, then painted the closet because drywall just gets old after a few years. 

I still remembered where the studs were......  

I am never gonna be done in this house; 

I have a lot of mental notes and it's freeing up a lot of cranial space. 

I had been tripping over a slab of wood in the studio for two years and thought enough! 

Blew off the dust, washed off the glaze streaks, cut the ends off and installed in the back room on pipe legs.  We had kicked around buying a bigger tv since movies are no longer an option.  But once the TV got a lift, it looked huge!   My old collages were dusted off and hung on the wall too.  Facelift! 

And just to keep rolling.  Once the kitchen was put back together I tackled the downstairs bathroom.  It's a wee bathroom.  We added it right after we moved in in around 1986.  We had parents having trouble maneuvering stairs and then there was that potty training thing.   I painted murals with lattice and flours and a stone wall.  I had sketched in a cat and wrens and birds and never finished them.  

It was time to move on.  I started painting over everything and thought maybe not.  This was a fun little mural and when the kids were driving me nuts a place I could go and close the door and breath for 30 seconds before the house was burned down or there was jello slide in the kitchen.  I stopped and emailed the kids, now in homes of their own.   So I'm doing this......

I expected responses like NOOOOOOO!  Don't do it MOM!!  What did I get? 

End of era Mom....... move along.

  and then the kid I thought would be the saddest of all, sends this heartfelt text:

😂😂😂😂😂 goodbye downstairs bathroom, you were beautiful! 

message received, full steam ahead! 

So the bead board is up but behind the bead board is the faux stonewall :)  I have a sink drying in the studio and this sink will be be gone, after all a potter lives in this house.  Building a floating vanity and finally installing the hardware and faucet I bought in 2010.... timeless.  I wonder if I can still get parts? 

This week I will move onto the bar floor, goodbye 80's linoleum. Deal with some plumbing issues that have needed addressed for a while.  

Since the last post I had my skin cancer removed and look great for Halloween!  10 lovely stitches and I am hoping the folds of my chubby cheeks will bury the scar.  I don't do well with somebody digging in my face with a local anesthetic, then the pulling and tugging of stitches.  I promptly went out to my van and on the way home, puked.   Had a killer headache the rest of day.  My Dr. doesn't believe in pain killers and as the local wore off I thought I'd rather have a baby.  

But as the next day arrived and I arose in the chilly Fall darkness to let Kirby and the chickens out, make coffee on my way out the door.  I slid into my jeans and sat on the bed to put my socks on.  ZAP!  A yellow jacket had taken refuge in my sock over night.  I had just been stung two weeks earlier.  I have not had a bee sting, let alone a yellow jacket sting, in decades so two in two weeks in the same place had my attention.  Apparently the last poison still had not cleared my ankle so this was a double whammy and the swelling and blistering began.  

The good news ...... I completely forgot about my face!   Who needs pain killers?  Get a wasp or two!  I rode my bike, I iced my foot, I elevated and finally on the third day the swelling started going down and I could bend my ankle again.  Tomorrow I get my stitches out and I will share this new miraculous diversion therapy with my Dr.  I bet he goes for it!  

 Lots of baking therapy the last 20 days too!  

The last of the tomatoes are still being roasted with lots of garlic and onions and run through the food processor with a bit of olive oil and basil.

  Summer on a cracker!  

Molasses Crinkle cookies

Cinnamon Buns with maple drizzle, Whole Wheat bread and cinnamon swirl bread. 

The October Mom Box went out with cookies, breads, granola and a pair of these wonderful mittens 

made by kids first ever elementary art teacher and all around wonderful person; Mrs Liikala.  (I kept the blue ones for me, squeal with excitement, bring on the snow!)

And about the time I was feeling pretty down in the dumps with my new Frankestein face and foot and tripping over my fabulous tools which were scattered over the entire construction project called my house. 

The mail arrived.  And the generosity and beauty of artists and craftsmen are just beyond words, we are a grand tribe.  I had met Jeff Borda at Boston Mills last year and loved his work so much I bought two of his pens.  We follow each other on facebook and when shows started cancelling we asked how it was going.  2020 had been cancelled.  He enjoyed seeing what I was up too and I was watching his new cutting boards and pens coming out of his shop.  He asked if I could save some of the Black Lace Wyandotte feathers from the girls.  I sent him an envelope and hoped they worked for him.  At my lowest point of my year, an envelope arrived on my porch.  I opened the envelope and the most beautiful pen arrived with my chickens feathers in barrel of the pen.  

.  

Later in the week the coffee mug people in Alaska sent a box of delicious, rich roasted beans.  My postal carrier asked if I was getting coffee in the mail and did I share.  

I always felt if I kept busy and productive I could get through "things".  I started this year in the gardens and things sure did not go as planned but it was not a bust.  And then word came we might be in this Covid mess until the third quarter of 2021 and we would probably be spending a bit more time at home.  I cannibalized my booth for canning shelves and closet shelves.  More paper got glued to the floor.  Paint got slapped on the bare woodwork and drywall.  No money, no budget, no contractors in the house but lots of creativity and time.  I thought I might never do another show but I miss my tribe of crafts people and all the community that goes with it.  A website is nice but a face and a conversation is better.  Precious phone calls with friends to catch up and see if we might both be nuts.  Nope right as rain.   There are so many lessons that have come out of this too long year and I won't be sorry to see it go but God I have learned so much this year and rarely left this half acre.  Mittens, pens, beans texting and phone calls...... I am rich beyond words. ❤️