See you there!

xoxo
J.

I'll be leaving the archives to rest where they are (in case anyone ever wants to go back and read stuff from way back before I went to grad school and got boring) but have copied my last month's worth of entries (for once I'm glad there have been so few!) over to my shiny new Wordpress weblog. This morning I spent what seemed like an eternity pretending to be you guys in order to painstakingly copy all of your comments over onto those entries as well; a fabulously executed fraud. Now I'm planning to get all new-leafy, write more often, reply to more comments, maybe jump on the 365 bandwagon (the flickr photos bandwagon, not the post-every-day one; I'm not totally off my rocker, y'all!).

So, ladies and gentlemen, point your browsers! All it takes is two little letters, to change your subscription from www.jodigreen.ca/blog to www.jodigreen.ca/weblog. So easy, so gratifying.

See you there!

swimmer no. 3, mixed media drawing, 1983

The above image was originally nicked from this web gallery in 2006 for a flickr set of drawings I put together to show my drawing students.

So. Next weekend we're having a party, and I've suddenly decided that I can't possibly have people see our hideous and embarrassing bathroom (even though they've all seen it before). Because the longer we wait to rip out and renovate this eyesore, the more people might think we actually like it, and of course you know that like all new homeowners, we have far better taste than the owners before us. I think there's some kind of universal law about that.

Here, have a look at this bathroom and tell me it's not puke-inducingly bad:

Plastic-coated masonite fake tiles and artfully uneven faux-sauna wood trim.

A vanity that juts out in front of the doorway and also partially covers the floor heat vent. Smart.

And a barely functional jacuzzi tub with a shower head placed so that you have to sit down to use it. Sideways. With scrunched-up crossed legs because the tub is narrow. Oh, and the water runs straight through the wall and falls on the dining room ceiling below, which is actually in less danger of collapsing on our heads than the living room ceiling is (from before-our-time sink and toilet leakage) only because we never, ever use this tub. So it's not only an eyesore but also a totally unusable waste of valuable bathroom real estate.

A few days ago I floated the idea to Peter of painting the bathroom black. All of it, fake tile walls, wood trim, tub, vanity counter, everything. After some negotiations we settled on bubblegum pink, planning to leave only the toilet and sink unpainted and to spray paint the toilet seat a glossy red. But Peter had misgivings about the whole thing, which culminated in some marital strife (or, the living in sin version of marital strife, whatever that's called) right in the paint aisle of Canadian Tire and ending with me being bitchy and pouting at the mall and spilling my Tim Hortons tea on my skirt and using profanity right in front of a doe-eyed ancient old lady who happened to be wearing the least convincing wig I've ever laid eyes on. So. The upshot of all of this is that we decided to instead cut pages and pages out of the hundreds of old National Geographic magazines we inherited from Peter's mom and wallpaper the whole bathroom in them. Which, I might add, is a good deal more labour intensive than just painting it all pink.

Choosing images is harder than I thought it would be. I don't want it to be all gorgeous boring landscapes, or to be too wild kingdom. But I also don't want to use images that fetishize indigenous cultures, and I don't want a lot of piles of half-dug-up bones, and I'm hesitant to use images from stories that have to do with intense human suffering of any kind. Also this whole task is a bit risky for me because I freak out if I see a picture of a fish, especially freshwater fish. Especially dead ones or dying ones, so stories about Alaska or about bears are particularly dangerous. Hey, those fish are SCARY, y'all. Still, after going through not even a third of the magazines I have a big stack of pages to start with plus lots of smaller images and words that we'll cut and paste into something funny once the background layer is down. Then I can draw on the whole thing with markers later on too. The funniest image we've found so far is a man sitting on a Ronald McDonald head. The funniest photo caption: L'afrique le chic.

1: sweater recycling centre: set up a knitting machine in a gallery space. unravel discarded/secondhand sweaters directly into the machine and knit one long continuous panel (full needle bed width). cut and sew new sweaters from the panel. leave panel attached to machine, spread across the floor with garment shapes cut out. sort of like the study for a remnant factory installation/performance, only with knitting.

this one is a go just as soon as i get off my arse to find a space to do it in. right now it has to be a space that i don't have to pay for.

2: sarkasmatron: a giant box decorated like a carnival ride/vending machine, set up in a public space. sit inside and wait for people to put in a coin then dispense little slips of paper with handwritten sarcastic messages or insults.

this is something i've been talking about doing since ten years ago or more, back when i lived in london. i can't imagine it going over all that well in london. this project will probably never happen but it would be loads of fun.

3: listening project: listen to all of our records in chronological order. blog listening experience; host listening parties so others can join the conversation.

peter and i now have all of our records (587 as of last entry, not counting all the classical stuff which isn't being included in the project) entered into a database where we can organize them by release date. still working on expanding the collection but we should be ready to start listening soon.

4: waffle house north: buy the empty lot next to the mcdonalds at huron church road and college (or even better, buy the mcdonalds itself) and open a waffle house franchise. this will make waffle house the first thing travellers see when they enter canada via the ambassador bridge.

planning to start playing the lottery to fund this project; benefactors welcome.

5: wall of boggle: replace a wall in our house with stainless steel, then paint over it to match the other walls. glue magnets to the backs of thousands of scrabble tiles. fill the wall with scrabble tiles, randomly placed. play giant games of boggle.

peter and claire got bored one day and magnetized one set of scrabble tiles and stuck them on the fridge. i think peter has given up on the wall idea. not sure if i have but also not sure how to actually make this work in our 4-square craftsman house, which doesn't actually have many big walls.

6: footpath tapestry: have all of the people crossing a busy park or intersection carry a long (really long, skein long) ribbon, string, yarn, whatever. when two people meet one will pass his/her ribbon over, the other under. a weaving will be created across the space that draws its pattern from the way in which people move through it. kind of like a maypole dance only less uniform, stretched out over a broad public thoroughfare.

this too is something i wanted to do years ago, since my first year of university, inspired by jostling encounters with disconnected people hurrying across the space between university college and middlesex college on western's campus. after i moved to windsor i wanted to instead create a weaving (on a smaller scale) from patterns of traffic approaching and crossing the windsor-detroit border.

7: food spectrum: only eat red foods for one month. only eat orange foods for the next month. only eat yellow foods for the next month. and so on. see if my skin changes colour, or if certain colours cause me to lose/gain weight.

blue and indigo would have to be one colour or i might die from not getting enough to eat. i don't like blueberries.

8: wrapping: wrap all of my stuff with string or strips of cloth. or ask people to loan me things and then wrap the things i borrow in strings/strips of cloth. walk down my street and wrap all the things i see in cloth. maybe not people's cars.

i don't know what this is about, really, i just have been thinking a lot lately about wrapping things. i think my hands just want the feeling of wrapping things. i suppose if i just start wrapping things i'll figure out why i'm doing it eventually. anybody want to loan me some stuff?

So: this week. Of course we spent Tuesday glued to the tee vee like the rest of the free world. Drinking beers, hoping, hoping, then rejoicing. The trouncing of South Dakota's proposed abortion ban is a victory for all who believe that women's health doesn't belong in derisive air quotes. My heart does hurt for all the people who had their constitutional rights stomped on by a bigoted majority (isn't the state supposed to protect people from this?), but I have hope. Bigots will all die off someday. And, Mormon church: go fuck yourself.

I've started a new routine of spending every weekday morning working in the studio even if I'm working on something that I could just as easily do at home. It probably goes without saying that I get a lot more work done when I can't check the blogs and the twitter and the facebook and the flickr and the e-mail and the goddamned games and the rest of it. Just in the last few days I finished up a pile of drum leaf journals and put them up in the shop and got a couple of copper plates ready to print. At home in the afternoons I've been working on some new drawings that I'm pretty excited about. I'll show you those tomorrow morning, maybe. We're well into the days where there's only a short window of opportunity for taking decently-lit photos in the house.

This morning I spent some time with a couple of other people fixing a broken press at the studio, and as a result pretty much the whole day the Judas Priest song "Breaking the Law" was stuck in my head, only with the words "fixing the PRESS fixing the PRESS fixing the PRESS". The mental juke box can be such a pain in the arse.

Tonight Peter told me that he'd rather listen to The Who than Judas Priest (for context: we hate The Who. And I like Judas Priest). It caused me to wonder how the two of us are even compatible. But then I pretended that my yoghurt was cum shots on my face and he responded by pretending to deep throat his banana, and I was reassured. We're clearly meant for each other. Cue romantic music and chirpy bird sounds.

I almost forgot. Here's your Soctober Surprise:

For anyone who knows me, the surprise is not that I failed to finish the Soctoberfest mystery socks. Y'all may have noticed I'm not a very good -alonger. I knit the cuffs and then decided to knit a bigger size, then took the yarn with me for Thanksgiving weekend family-visiting, but I somehow only brought three needles so I had to knit the cuffs flat and couldn't start the legs until I got back home. Ah, there's one of those excruciating sentences. Still got the touch. So the leg pattern in the sock wasn't very intuitive at first and I hate looking at charts and the Dream in Colour Smooshy yarn, while it's lovely and lives up to its name in comfy smooshiness, is a pain in the arse to cable-without-a-cable-needle, and then it all got set aside in favour of some work knitting I'm doing. Finally, the pattern clicked in my head and I was able to set aside the chart and just knit the thing just in time for October to end and for me to really have to focus on the work knitting now. So it goes on the half-socks pile for now. In the meantime, I've just been seized by an intense desire to rip out my nearly-finished Noro Kureyon knee sock and make the Ziggy socks instead. At the end of Soctoberfest. Don't even bring up Norovember, it's just not gonna happen.

Normally Little Miss Picky who can't send text messages because I'm all hung up on grammar and spelling and complete sentences, I'm not even going to proofread this. Going to watch some Trailer Park Boys instead. That's the way she goes, boys.

I've decided to turn the comment moderation off for a while and risk getting slammed by sp@mmers again, because I don't like not getting e-mail notifications of comments. I miss being able to write back. We'll see how it goes.

*edit: how funny is this, a sp@m comment came in right when I was publishing this. ah well, I'm determined to leave it open for now so that I can start replying to your comments again!)

file under: road food

Everybody please rest assured that I did not eat that nasty lumpish thing I posted a photo of the other day. Cousin Mary got it right: the yellow thing masquerading as a fallen rutabaga on the roadside was actually a filthy blob of yellow insulation foam. I brought it home and threw it in the garbage, and tonight when we go for groceries I'll get myself a nice decent rutabaga that I'm sure will taste wonderful even though it didn't fall off a truck. By the way, the phrase "I dig rutabagas" came from a t-shirt my uncle Ken used to have in the seventies, that he got from the Ontario Rutabaga Producers' Marketing Board. It pictured a tall skinny dude with a shovel standing next to the words I Dig Rutabagas, and if I remember right the shirt was yellow on top fading to purple on the bottom. I've long wanted one of those shirts but am pretty sure they don't exist anymore, and a Google search on the phrase yields only one link: mine. Uncle Ken had a whole bunch of those shirts but had cut them all up for shop rags long before I thought to ask him for one.

file under: shill, baby, shill!

Oh, I slay me sometimes.

Speaking of my cousin Mary, she's been working all summer teaching herself lampworking, and has a new line of stitch markers up in her etsy store using gorgeous handmade glass beads. Y'all should show her some love so she'll keep making them and also so she'll upload all the amazing lampworked earrings I got to see when we visited last week. And remind her that I have a birthday coming up. Heh.

I've been plugging away (sluggishly, due to the chest/head cold I picked up over Thanksgiving) at getting my own shop updated, and finally managed to upload a couple of printed satchels, with more to come later in the week. Now just as soon as I feel I can go back to working under the buzzy studio lights without getting a migraine (a heightened possibility when I'm already compromised by illness), I can print up some more canvas for the next batch. I know, I'm such a delicate flower, it's pathetic.

file under: unwelcome guests

Last Tuesday I was sitting at the sewing machine in the front room with the front door wide open behind me (it was a beautiful warm day and we don't have a screen door on the front). I caught a movement in my peripheral vision and looked up to see a black squirrel standing next to the leg of my ironing board, a good metre and a half at least inside the door (that's about 5 feet, y'all). I said, sharply, "excuse me! get out of my house!". It turned and walked out, seemingly in no great hurry. I followed it to the door and there it was, sauntering down our sidewalk, whistling a happy tune.

I don't know if Cleo was asleep when this little dude slipped past her watch post but I get the sense she's not all that interested in catching things anymore. She used to be quite the efficient hunter in her day, but now that she's reached retirement age she seems quite happy to focus more on her hobbies: shedding fur, throwing up, and lying around in people's way:

file under: more harebrained ideas

I've decided to do the one hundred push ups programme, and today is my first day! I feel I've lost a lot of strength over the last few years, what with ditching the gym entirely during grad school (not that I was ever really able to do any significant amount of push ups). So: new leaf! Starting right now, in fact, as soon as I hit publish. Wish me luck.

me with goose and ducks, 1972

There were ducks, and Canada geese, llamas, goats, and a big old gentle-natured water buffalo with a brass ring at the end of his nose. We'd bring a loaf of bread and break each piece up small, giving the pieces out slowly, watching the hillside above until the deer who were timidly hiding up there caught wind of all the commotion and came down to join the others in taking bits of bread from our fingers.

me, mom and llamas (1977, I think)

About ten years ago, on the way up to Goderich at Thanksgiving, my mom and brother and I stopped there. The buildings were still standing but the animals were all gone, the weeds were taking over and the water in the pond was low and muddy, with barely enough room for the hordes of giant brown carp who were the last remaining residents. They swam around and around, around and around, frenzied. We didn't bring any bread.

This past Thanksgiving weekend I drove by the farm again with Peter; the place had changed so much I almost missed it completely. The pond is still there, deeper and cleaner-looking now, but the weeds have grown in so that it doesn't quite reach the fence anymore and the old log buildings are all gone. No matter how hard you stare at the high hillside, no matter how long you linger, the deer aren't coming down anymore.

looking up the hill

this is right about where the one-year-old me stood, chubby-handed, grasping the fence

On Monday we dawdled around Exeter a bit (where I successfully Kinneared a guy wearing the most amazing Pink Floyd trousers and a t-shirt with fireworks over a cruise ship), then made our way at a leisurely pace from my mom's house to London to visit Peter's sister. Along country roads I let my eyes slide half-distractedly over the ditches in vain hopes of spotting something crunchy and delicious there. Peter had already said that he would not stop to pick up any rutabagas; he shares neither my enthusiasm for the joys of found produce or my love of raw rutabaga. Still, when I spotted a familiar yellow lump lying in the grass I shrieked in excitement, "stop! stop! A RUTABAGA!".

There followed a tense scene: him disdainful, me pleading, him: do you seriously want me to go back?, me: well, I guess not, well, yes! not if you're going to be mad though, but YES GO BACK PLEASE. I promised him he wouldn't have to humour me with any of my stupid shit for the rest of the weekend (this is at noon on Monday of a long weekend, mind you, and while my intent was sincere, I was forgetting that by these terms he'd only be exempt from humouring me for about twelve more hours). He said he thought the exemption should last the rest of the month. I agreed at once, ready to give in to any demands just so long as we could GO BACK AND PICK UP MY RUTABAGA NOW.

We turned around, drove back a full concession then turned again in order to approach the treasure spot from the same direction as before. As soon as I caught sight of that yellow lump I began to have doubts, and as we came to a stop a little past it I said, "I'm not sure that's really a rutabaga. It looks like it might be a piece of wood". Through gritted teeth Peter said, "go back there and pick it up we are bringing it home whatever it is EVEN IF IT'S A FUCKING DEAD RABBIT".

My friends, I present to you my bounty, thankfully not a dead rabbit. And now Peter does not have to humour any of my stupid shit for the rest of the month.

I can't wait until November.

While I was uploading the photo I knit two more rows. That means my sock is now twice as long! Jealous?

a closeup on the buttons:

there is a reason why everyone on the planet is making this sweater right now. it's because it's awesome.

So, Mildred sent me a little chain letter the other day, one of these "write six random facts about yourself" things, and given my lack of interest lately in making the effort to write something meaningful here, I'm happy to comply. Except, since I love to break rules, I'm only going to give y'all five little tidbits today. "Four candles, six things" just didn't sound as good. Also I'm pretty sure I've done one of these things in the past, and folks, I'm just not all that interesting. Five things is plenty, trust me.

Mildred, by the way, is someone I met at the Southern Graphics Council conference last spring. She approached me at a gallery opening and said, "hi Jodi, I read your blog" and it pretty much made my night in the same sort of awesome hey, worlds collide! way as that time at a fibre festival when someone recognized me by my dress (from my thesis project). Maybe I told that story already, I forget. And I'm not going back and checking either. Deal with it, my dears.

Ahem. 1. I love yogurt, and I love dill, and I like cucumbers a lot too, but tzatziki makes me want to barf. Just the thought of any savoury flavour blended with yogurt grosses me out. Coffee flavoured yogurt? Yuck. I think it's because I'm allergic to dairy, and while yogurt is the one dairy food that I'm able to safely eat, if it's savoury it reminds me of things made with sour cream, from which my body wants to recoil so fiercely that I don't even like to pass the sour cream container at the supper table or move it around in the fridge. That dip that everyone loves to bring to parties, with the sour cream and mushroom soup mix? Ew, ew, ew.

2. The town I grew up in was a decommissioned Royal Canadian Air Force station, and when I was a kid the old air raid siren would go off at noon every day to signal lunch time to the factories. Every day in school we'd leap from our desks at the siren's call and run home to lunch. To this day the sound of an air raid siren makes me hungry, and knowing all about Pavlov and his dog doesn't make a damned bit of difference. So if you ever invite me to a movie about the Blitz you'd better be prepared to buy me some popcorn.

3. I think way too long and hard about my neuroses (see #s 1 and 2 above). Also, many of my neuroses have to do with food.

4. I love to crack my joints, and pretty much never go to sleep at night without first cracking all of my toes multiple times, which I'm sure just delights anyone who ever has to sleep with me (although Peter has rarely complained about it, he's a trouper). I would give just about anything for someone to teach me an easy and safe way to crack my spine at that spot right between the shoulder blades. Don't tell me this is bad for me, I do not even want to hear it. No, really.

5. I have a bad habit of starting something and being completely obsessed with it and nothing else for a while, usually until it's almost finished, then dropping it like a hot potato. Witness my February Lady sweater, which would have been completed in a week if I hadn't lost steam a third of the way into that second sleeve. It's sitting in a heap next to me now, waiting to be knitted, but I'm bored with it. The same thing happened with countless sweaters. With those thistles in the back yard that I was all pumped to cut down and kill and instead I just cut the tops off them and now they're two metres tall and take up an area of ground roughly the size of our deck. And with this weblog (four years old today), which has become just like all those sketchbooks I draw in until they're half filled and then stop, and upon finding them months or years later am unable to throw them out but no longer have any interest in filling those empty pages. I found a roll of drawings upstairs from four years ago, large half finished figure drawings that I now have no idea what to do with (recycling bin?). This paragraph, on the other hand, I should have quit ages ago now.

Here's something I did see through to the end today. Peter and I are working on a project, cataloguing all of our records. Pete created a database and I went through the shelves and wrote down every record we had and then entered them all. Now we can sort them by release date, and soon we're going to start listening to them all in chronological order and liveblogging our listening experience. I've been plugging away for the last week or so at entering artists and albums into the database and researching release dates, and this was the last record on my list, number 565 in the database: