Slooow Mo

So, with time zipping by so fast, I feel like I’m in a sluggish state these days. It’s a perspective problem, actually. I’m getting the normal amount of stuff done, it just isn’t all the stuff I wanted to get done to accomplish my goals for the winter.

When I was young my dad used to tell me and my siblings our heads weren’t screwed on tight. He wasn’t being funny at the time, but it certainly is funny now. The images I conjure today, along with the memories of my sister and I joking about how she or I must have forgotten to screw our head on at all and left it somewhere, make me laugh. But there are days I feel like I must have bent over at some point and my head just fell off and rolled into the corner. There it is, over there, watching from a different angle than I usually see things.

And it’s all very funny.

I was getting frustrated over the photo requirements of the magazine to which I wanted to submit an article with photos, because everything I learned was that new techniques were so different that the photos would lose a lot of quality if I followed through with those specifications. I wrote e-mails and called a couple of times to get clarification, but didn’t hear back from the magazine. So I studied and researched everything I could find about digital photos and had decided that I would have to buy some expensive software in order to do the required formatting on the photos. I was bummed, since it was so expensive, but a couple of articles would pay for the software and I have a list of about a dozen articles I want to write in the next couple of years, so I braced myself up to make the expense.

Then I got an e-mail from the magazine editor. I would not, after all, need to format the photos other than what the most basic software would do. Wow, after all that . . .

Meanwhile, the work on my novel was going so well I was floating on a cloud – but it turned out not to be Cloud 9. I had written the first draft of the first five chapters, which was about a fourth of the way through the novel, but when I read them from a freshened perspective, I realized that two of the chapters would have to be dumped. They were the chapters about the second primary character. It would all come together much better in the end if we don’t see what is going on behind within those scenes, which were actually slowing down the pace of the book anyway.

And I certainly don’t want to slow down.

So I had to toss a big chunk of my work and that’s when I figured out my cloud was number 13 or maybe 17 instead of number 9. And now we have another pottery order, which we’ll have to squeeze out between days working for Ursula, so we have a bit more of a challenging time crunch.

But we have started tiling the studio windows (which only took us 18 years). We made a lot of tiles last winter. We knew we didn’t have enough glazed to do all three of the smaller windows, though we figured we had enough to do two windows and I was getting excited to get them done, but then spring and landscaping came too early to begin the tiling process.

So, yesterday we got the tiles up on one window and discovered we only had enough tiles to do one window. Wow, after all that . . .

But we did get started:

They look a lot like our bathroom tiles, but with a different texture

And the studio tiles are blue and green, rather than just green like in the bathroom

We still have to grout them, but already it’s feeling a tiny bit less like we’re living and working in a warehouse

(That’s our old water heater outside the window, which we still haven’t hauled off . . .)