The Games We Play

For a few minutes at work today, I had the theme song to Rocky stuck in my head. This is a bit unusual because I've never watched these movies, but seeing as how it's such a classic, I could have picked it up from the radio or a commercial. It's understandable, only not how it got there.


While taking a road trip with Señor Wing this past weekend, he tried to explain the complete awesomeness that is Rocky IV, which I attempted to digest. He has always been incredibly vivid when describing movies/songs/books to me because he knows I miss many of the references. It usually goes something like this. "You know that movie we watched last year while we were on vacation? The one with the girl from Love Actually? No. The one we saw in the theater, not the hotel. You said you were cold and covered up with my rain coat? Yeah, that one. Well I was thinking that the guy who plays the older brother, who was the butler in the last movie we saw at Amie's house; looks just like the tall guy with the big forehead from Made, don't you think?" No joke. The whole time he goes through this process, he makes an effort to say something he knows I can relate to. His persistence and lack of frustration is quite impressive. Recently, I decided it's actually a game. It's gotten better, or I guess I've gotten better at remembering details. Now when he says, "no, it's one of the actors I don't like", I can quickly narrow it down to about 5 people. Aw, snap! Riding in the car, he summarizes the series in a few sentences (as only he can) and then acts out a fighting scene while humming the theme song. And there the tune stayed; dormant in my head until an unsuspecting moment where I'm sure I was actually trying to remember something important.


Ryan also plays a musical game when we are brushing our teeth or grocery shopping. I say HE plays because for 8-10 months, I didn't realize I was playing along. He walks by me all unsuspecting-like and hums a song. He doesn't say the words or even hum an entire verse, just enough. I will then have that song embedded in my head the entire day. When I come home and tell him about it, he just smiles and I know I've lost. In fact, I think the only way to win is to realize what he's doing when he starts. I've caught him a few times on songs I have minimal tolerance for. These songs include, but are not limited to anything by:

Gloria Estefan
Jimmy Buffet
The Little Spanish Flea
Friday by the YouTube girl


Other games in the Wing home include "Name the Mystery Ingredient", as I hand him a smoothie, "Guess what Shino Licked?" and "What Am I Saying?". The last one is also during teeth brushing; because I want to tell him something before I'm finished. It goes something like this: I start signing to him and do a pseudo-charades thing while he guesses and I froth at the mouth. "You need to go? No, you want me to go? No, Oh the dog, he's going? Oh, Could I let the dog out! Got it." An unconventional teaching method but he's picking up a lot of signs regardless.


Jewel Weed is my favorite plant. As fall gets closer, the little pods that extend off the branches become plump (I don't actually like that word but it's the most applicable) and when you pinch them gently, they pop open and startle you a bit. One of those things you know are coming but can't help but react to. I could pop these for hours and never get bored. I show these to the children in my life and they love playing too.

Words I love:

Pipette- squeezy thing in Chem.
Segmented
Iconic
Philanthropic
Integer
Monochromatic
Crux
Blog
Pumpernickel

Signs/Classifiers I Love (I'm glossing English words often used when interpreting these signs even though I'm not supposed to)

Jamaica
Let me know
Resolve
Jaw hanging down
Food (this was subconscious. I didn't even notice it until I asked Ryan to proofread)
Visualize-big picture
Predict
Go to bed
Russia

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to brush my teeth and ask Ryan what time he plans to leave on Saturday.

Ryan-1 for 1
SJ- 0 for 2















-sj thinks you're great!

Location:Home

Red #40

I'm allergic to red food coloring. Growing up the 'sweets' we had in the house were maple syrup, brown sugar, and honey. We had milk delivered to our door, my mom made her own Kiefer and lentil soup was a staple at the dinner table. Although I appreciate and enjoy eating healthy and living foods now, as a child I wanted nothing more than sticky sweets and bright colored candies. Any hard candy we ever saw came from the dentist (or my Papa, when he would visit). The manufacturers of these 'candies'  tried so hard to make up for the lack of sugar that the taste no longer resembled sweetness. I think they still sell these in the 'food for diabetics' aisle of the grocery store.

Any time I ate other food at a neighbor or friend's house, my mom knew immediately. My cheeks, which functioned as litmus paper, glowed red from the preservatives, high fructose corn syrup and most of all, the food coloring I had consumed earlier that day. "What did you eat?" she would ask me in a perplexed tone as if anything that made me react so violently had to be made of plastic or asbestos. "What? Oh, I dunno....I guess I ate a fruit roll up or something". It annoyed me that I couldn't hide this from her. There were usually several things I had eaten that I shouldn't have. Other days, I tried to pretend that my cheeks looked fine and "really, I didn't eat anything". I rubbed them in an attempt to turn them a normal color which was, of course, useless.

I find it amusing how many children are so oblivious to their parent's level of intellegence. I am including myself in this statistic. To veer on a little tangent, a boy I used to sit for once told me I "looked unexpected". Ryan thinks this is particularly insightful; so apparently not all 7 year old children see things the way I did.

In my early 20's I was convinced that like many adults, I had outgrown my childhood allergies. I keenly tested this theory by consuming maraschino cherry ice cream with my then roommate. Brilliant, right? I thought so too.

About an hour later, in the middle of L.L.Bean, I noticed that my stomach itched and then my throat was tight and then came the welts and the puffiness. I ignored it for a while (because heck, it might go away on its own) and then mentioned to the people I was with that we should probably find some drugs. I think I took antihistamines and those did nothing. I slept on it and when I woke up the next day, I could hardly breathe. At this point, I looked like a boxer that had just lost several matches...in a row (do boxers have matches or is that tennis?) The roommate drove me to the ER and I was seen shortly after that. I was going to skip over the part where the nurse looked at me and then my friend and asked what we needed, as if she wasn't sure which one of us was having issues, but really, it's a gem of a factoid.

This is where it starts to get good. I knew that I was afraid of needles because a couple of times in high school I tried to donate blood and passed out both times. My fellow student, who was running the pizza distribution table, actually yelled at me when I woke up. Apparently I was his first fainter. I laid back on the table as the nurse told me I needed steroids. I naïvely held out my had as though breathing wasn't that important and I could wait for pills to dissolve. Nope. Shots. I warned her I would probably faint and she assured me she would be gentle. Why do they say things like that? Don't they know it isn't about the pain? She gave me the shot and I passed out. I woke up with oxygen tubes in my nose and cold compresses on my head and then she yelled at me for fainting. Seriously? You couldn't have been more prepared!

Since then, other shots I've had I try and adequately prepare for. I have a system with my dentist where every time he needs to pull out a needle, I close my eyes and then stab my nail into my thumb and think about kittens. This has only not worked once when we were talking and he forgot to warn me. I was so startled that I swatted the needle from his hand and it flew across the room. It's a good thing the assistants stand at my head.

On another note, here are a few pics of things I've been embroidering. These needles don't seem to bother me as much.

Booger Shirt

I have sensitive ears. Not sensitive in an emotional way but in an "I'll give you a headache for the rest of the day if you don't take care of me" kind of way. When I was younger and we lived in NM ( i.e. no trees) I needed to wear earplugs everyday at recess. On a biweekly basis I would spend hours on my parent's bed alternating sides while mom poured peroxide into my ears and let them soak. I don't know if any of you have ever had liquid poured into your ears intentionally, but believe me, all you can imagine it's slowly leaking into your brain causing your eyes to look like water in a fishbowl.


This morning when Mr.Wing prepped the bikes for our morning ride, he noted that it was chilly. Let me insert here that he runs hot ALL the time and if he thinks it's chilly, I'm going to wear pants, long sleeves and my stupid ear head warmer thingy. It works incredibly well but doesn't fit under my bike helmet, hence the description. Cold rides also usually mean that my sinuses drain the entire time. I tend to this with a combination of wiping my face on my sleeve and spitting. I am always careful to make sure Ryan isn't behind me when I spit. Also, this is very calculated because we're moving forward speedily and I need to make sure I simultaneously turn my head and have enough to make it worth the effort. Gross, I suppose, but it's not like I'm peeing myself mid marathon. And really unless I want to stop every 20 seconds to blow my nose, this is how it's going to be.

After riding we take our pup (and the one we're currently dog sitting) to the park. Because my nose-faucet is still on I turn my head to spit only this time there is no wind. Must-recalculate-not-enough-time-can't-stop. I plant a giant wad right on the shoulder of my shirt. All attempts to remove it fail. Now if I can only remember not to wipe my face on my sleeve until we get home.

This is a very roundabout way of saying that chilly mornings= Fall (soon). That said, here is my all-time top 5 favorite things I love about Fall.

1. Wearing sweaters and flip flops at the same time.
2. Pumpkin everything. Pie, soup, jack-o-lanters, etc.
3. Winding down. Let me rephrase, I wind up, the state winds down. Tourists go home, students go to school and construction slows.
4. Halloween. I really like this holiday but it's Ryan's favorite. It is an exciting time of year in our home.
5. All things outdoors. I really dislike standing outside doing nothing in particular and feeling sweat run down my back. Exercising, hiking, apple picking and just being outside in general, is infinitely more awesome in the fall.


Note to self: wash today's biking clothes ASAP


-sj thinks you're great!

Location:Home

It's An E Kinda Week

The other day I dreamt about Shirley Jackson. I woke up and groggily attempted to relay this dream to Mr. Wing and he looked at me with his brows furrowed and his lips puckered. This is his confused face. "Have you read Shirley Jackson?" he asked me. "Ummm, maybe?" I responded, I really couldn't remember. It was either that or he read something and told be about it and now I've catalogued it as one of my own memories. And in fact, this is was the case. I don't know at what point in our marriage our individual experiences merged into one but whenever it was, I wasn't paying attention. Maybe I was distracted by something shiny.

I go through periods of superstition and because the other day happened to be one of those periods, I took the dream as a sign to read one of her books. Apparently, The Lottery is her most famous short story but we had We Have Always Lived in the Castle on the bookshelf; so I took this to be a sign as well. Without giving anything away, the book is told from the perspective of a young lady who lives on the outskirts of a small town. She visits the town twice a week to do some shopping and although this is a regular thing that almost everyone can relate to, I found that as I read, it felt eerily familiar. The way Jackson's character sees the world reminds me of the way I sometimes see things. The objects she notices and the themes she finds in a day or a week. She has days of stringy things and days of gray ones. These are things that I do in my head (shutter). This is particularly disturbing because she is a little off her rocker. "Am I a little crazy?" I ask my husband in the most monotone, un-crazy-like voice I can muster. He thinks a minute...."just a little".

That said, this week is an E week. At work, part of my job is to process applications. When I step back to find patterns in my day, I notice like things tend to appear together. For example, it's Tuesday and I've already received 3 applications for people whose first name starts with an E. Last week it was an N week and the week before that, it was an orange sticker week. When one of our clients passes away, we pull their folder and place an orange sticker in the top right hand corner of their file. One day I'll make a project of things with orange stickers; maybe I'll put orange stickers on totems of things that represent things in my life that have died. I like this because it seems more gentile than writing deceased and shoving them in a drawer. Orange is a lively, active color and I chose it because I like to think of them living on, in the filing cabinet, having tea with the other orange stickers.

I think tomorrow will be a day of things falling; Wednesdays often are.

Birthday Buttons

It's Tuesday! This is our official studio and blog posting day. Just another step in trying to force ourselves to let go of the daily grind and embrace things we enjoy most. We usually have to trick ourselves into doing this. Most of the time, it's easier for us to do things for other people and not ourselves so we've worked around this by making things for each other. Well, for me it starts out that way and then I fall into my pattern of starting three projects simultaneously and then finishing them in order of their deadline. Surprisingly, this usually works.
I'm going to add here that it hasn't always worked and in one of my scrap books there is a list of things that people have asked me for that I've never finished. For example, in 2004, my dad requested a porcelain candle holder in the shape of a toilet that sits on the back of the toilet. Get it? Sorry Daddeo, still working on that one.

Sorting through this makes me feel infinitely better. I don't want to pick up the studio as it was (messy) and put it in a different place. As I'm sure you know, there is nothing more likely to deter you (this sounds like a collective 'you' but really I mean me) from making something than the thought of having to clean the space before using it. Tonight, I cleaned. I made piles and I sorted and as I did, I came across a little box of buttons I got for my birthday. Not this last birthday but the one just after I started sewing. It came from the partner of a good friend who passed away several years ago. If I remember it correctly, they were given to him by his grandmother...or aunt, I'm not certain. They are here and they're lovely.





Sewn to pieces of cardboard, I can hardly bring myself to use them. I know I will eventually but they will be saved for special projects and those will be lovely too.


On a less sentimental note, I also arranged my Sharpie's.





These were also a gift but I don't think they're vintage because they still work.


-sj thinks you're great!

Location:Home

Shakabuku

Shakabuku- A swift kick to the head that alters your reality.....this line is from memory, hence the lack of proper punctuation. I had forgotten that one of my sisters and I (#2) used to quote Grosse Pointe Blank on almost a daily basis, until Hubby used this word to describe our decision to move the studio.

We've been talking about making a substantial change for about a year and even more seriously over the last 6 months. My side of the family is inherently nomadic and as a result, I get an itch to make a big change approximately every 3 years (as I write this I'm remembering a line from a Kurt Vonnegut book, maybe Hocus Pocus, where he says that by spelling out numbers, they loose their potency. I've always connected with that theory and will continue to apply it here). Mr. Wing has been an adult since the ripe old age of 5 and has moved about as he saw fit. Everywhere from Martha's Vineyard to Spain. Both of us daydream of selling off our belongings and living in a 500 sq/ft house on a large piece of land that's near water and not too hot. Ok, that's not true. We would keep our art supplies/equipment and the outdoor sporting paraphernalia and ditch the rest.

My point to all of this is that we aren't ready to take action on the traditional life changing events like buying a house, popping out kiddos, changing/quitting jobs or going to grad school, but we need something to make us adjust our perspective. We want creating to be a focal point in our lives and not have it be just something we squeeze in.
R. to the W. would say that it's because we aren't 'traditional' people and we need to find our own way. Love him.

The orange room has been home to my sewing studio since we moved here. This is also where Ryan's drawing table lives which is also know as 'the place where I put things that need to be pressed/assembled/sorted'. If you're thinking it's unfair that I get a studio and he has to unearth his desk to use it, you couldn't be more right. I admittedly have a project expanding problem and if there was a Slim Fast diet for such a thing, I would consider it.....briefly.




The Big Move!! Are you excited yet? We are!!
If we want creating to be a bigger part of our lives we need to embrace our crafty chub, let out our belts and watch it grow! Out with the couch and in with the sewing machine! *Our living room has relocated to the orange room and our COMBINED studios are in the biggest room of the house! If we ignore the fact that having company over will be tricky and our poor pup is riddled with anxiety, the move is going amazingly well.










I find it incredibly interesting that a concept so simple in origin can change everything. Here's to new projects and happier days!

More pics will be posted as design decisions are made because hey, who doesn't love before-and-after pics?!

"What is this feeling? Is it pain? Panic? Am I hungry, who's hungry?" GPB



*this was Mr.Wing's fantastic idea



-sj thinks you're great!

Location:Lunch

Origin Story

Admittedly, the name Peanut's Crafty Lab is a bit ridiculous but you see, my friend, that is the whole point.

Peanut is a nickname given to me as a kid by my dad and one he will randomly fashion to this day. It is not to say that I'm particularly small, just the smallest of the children in my family. It is hard to convey the way he says this because some things are just lost when translated to text, but I assure you it warrants a hug every time. I'm also going to note that the title 'Origin Story' I stole from Tina Fey's new book Bossypants because I'm currently listening to it via audiobook for the n'th time and it's just that clever.

I am an anxious person and I tend to over think almost everything. As a result, the things and projects I do and make yield the best results when acted upon as quickly as possible. In addition to this, if I've mentally figured out what the end product will look like, worked out the kinks and gone through all the steps in my head, I get so bored that I never even start the project.

The first blog names I came up with were conservative and vague. I couldn't help but imagine being interviewed by Etsy as a Featured Seller (again, I'm imagining) and having to stand behind a name that sounded juvenile and poorly planned. Really, this is a pet peeve of mine. I've denied establishments my patronage for years on this reason alone. Want to name you restaurant 'Amy's Breakfast' and only serve lunch and dinner? Yeah right. Give your Mexican cantina a Spanish name and have the waitresses pronounce it incorrectly? No dice. How was I ever going to come up with a name that could sum up a venture I hadn't even started and could accommodate all things mediocre and great?

The pressure was mounting. Maybe I shouldn't write a blog if it's taking me this long to decide on a name? My hubby, who is all manners of brilliant and helps me out of these stalemates daily, held the key to my dilemma. Don't figure it out. Start something and let it grow while you work on it over time. What? That's crazy talk and it's crushing my mind grapes! And then it happened....eureka! (that word isn't used nearly enough). I can't pile on the pressure of future everything-ness with a name like Peanut's Crafty Lab because you can't take it seriously. I can't take it seriously. The pressure lifted and the air cleared as a new adventure began.

Thanks Hubby, you're superb.


- Posted using BlogPress from my iPad

Location:Home