Trying something different in May, a spin on daily concepts we have talked about many times. I am curious to see how the month will take shape and am hoping this will rekindle something approximating the kind of “daily” that was, for a while, such a big part of me.

Choosing just one fragment each day is an odd process of distillation. One thing from all the moments in a day, or maybe two. And what is drawn may or may not be the most significant thing. It is just one thing.

Today, determined not to get behind, I tried to decide what to draw for day 7. Many moments vied for attention, all of them equal in the tide of a regular day. Why the moment of making dinner? Why that rather than the forgotten diabetes kit at school or the hours of writing at work or the funny moment in the car with the frisbee (yet again) or the accusation that I work all the time (as justification for whining about playing frisbee in the house) or the hands of gin rummy and the eighty second shower? All have something to do with the story of the day. And yesterday, three trips to the pharmacy probably shaped the day more than a funny comment in the car. Even funnier was that he conveniently forgot that his brother is away for most of the week and so got two cupcakes from the birthday kid, one for himself and one for his brother. Clever!

Choosing only one isolated moment flattens the day. What is the point and purpose? How can I be satisfied with so much of the texture if the days missing?

The juxtaposition of images and days is also interesting to watch as subtexts and sub narratives seem to emerge, intentionally or not. Two images from the early part of the month seem connected but they have no bearing on one another. Only in snapping a photo the first time of the early sketches did I see what might be perceived as cause and effect. It almost derailed me. And I keep trying to fit in enough markers to clarify the storyline. I am hyper aware of the confusion. But, really, the drawings are for me. And I know what is and isn’t related.

This is an exercise in paring down as much as it is an exercise in discipline and routine. It is not easy! And it may not be worth repeating. But is is, without a doubt, good practice.

When I posted earlier this week about ‘threes,’ I was only halfway serious. I was poking fun at myself and the seemingly unrelated string of odd events all in rapid succession. Maybe it is my way of standing up and roaring to the ether that I am still here, still standing, and still fighting even in the silence, even as untethered and as alone as things feel.

A few hours later, my post felt eerie and prescient, frightening and surreal, and all too-familiar. I had to call 911 for a medical issue, the second time in thirty days. As I quickly pushed everything out of the way to make room for paramedics and listened to the sounds of sirens coming down my street and knowing they were for my house, I knew the ‘next’ number three was unfolding.

Did I stop and take photos as I stood barefoot in the street at the ambulance door a half hour later or from the window as I listened to the idle of the ambulance still in the street an hour later? No. That was something I thought about even later, the fact that many of you would have chronicled the event, captured the moment of dark and lights and silence and noise and shock and fear. No photo.

Today, standing in the ICU, I snapped a photo and then another. Fodder maybe. Positions and equipment and things that are familiar because they dot the landscape of recent years, but things I would never be able to draw from my head. I looked at those photos to find something to attach with this note. And I couldn’t. Instead, the shoes I am in.

• Wonder
• Artists sketch floorplan of Friends apartments and other famous TV shows
• Iñaki Aliste Lizarralde’s floor plans (at Deviant Art)

Featured Podsafe Music:

Intro Clip: Jim Fidler ~ All I Really Wanted [PMN]
Arthur Lee Land ~ True North [Ariel Publicity]

I fell off a skateboard on Sunday. (Yeah, umm, okay… we could talk about why I was on a skateboard. Not a lot of damage, but still…)

Then on Tuesday, I got rear-ended. (Not a lot of damage but still…)

As I drove home from this morning’s pair of school drop-offs, I was thinking through things and wondering if there is still a “third” thing to come. Or maybe it has already happened in the recent span of days. I thought of seeing a coyote loping down the street as I turn up my hill on Friday evening. It took me a minute to process what I was seeing (a really strange, thin-legged, shaggy dog) and come up with “coyote.” I thought of the swell of tidal moods over the weekend. Or maybe there is something of significance yet to come, something more than an oddity or minor pulse in the days.

Am I superstitious about such things? Not really. I am pragmatic. I have learned over the last few years that there is no rule of threes. Sometimes things, good or bad or in between, come in dozens or, on the flip side, in nano threads that, taken together, might still be invisible to the naked eye. But today, the thought occurred to me that maybe I should “be careful,” that maybe there was still another shoe being thrown my way, a third still to come.

Home again and a few hours into my work morning, there was a sudden rift in the fabric of the day, and I realized that maybe I wasn’t looking at the big picture. Maybe the third thing was and is happening, just not a direct hit.

It is hard trying to keep things sorted out when philosophy, belief, faith, and personal mythos all seem to collide or swirl in and out of state.

Don’t you think?

I did, however, edit 173 today. A bit more production to make sure all the pieces are hooked up, and it will be available here on the site. It’s way overdue. Today is May 1, which makes me hang my head that there was no March release and no April release. Yikes. My good intentions and ‘year’ plans are being challenged, for sure.

There should be visible stitch lines in a post like this, the threads that hold the little clusters together before the post is posted, the stitches that show the stops and starts, the pauses, the get up and go and come back again that often interrupt and change the content that was unfolding.

I drafted the above, thinking I would snap a phone photo and post from the car either at the first pickup or at the afternoon soccer. I grabbed my things and headed out the door. Sitting, parked on a corner where I have parked a thousand times before but not where I usually park this year, I thought I would play a game of Scrabble in the few minutes before the bell.

Would you believe it that in those three minutes someone rear-ended me again? At low speed, obviously, but pulled straight into me, the crunch of impact jolting me from my fog. Really? I was already on the corner. The last car that should be there. And someone decided to park behind me–and in me.

As my kid came out and decided to skateboard up and down the sidewalk hill a few times, I held my breath and wondered, again… what is coming.

And how many!

I caught sight of my shadow looming in front of me. Seems somehow fitting.

While I was working in the kitchen the other night, I needed paper towels. Maximizing my efforts, I bundled up a bag of trash and headed down to the garage. When I came back up, ready to resume dinner-making, I realized I had forgotten the paper towels. I gathered up a load of recycling and headed down again. Back up, I stood at the counter again, ready for the same task, and realized I had forgotten the paper towels. Ranting aloud, I took out the under the sink trash, tied it up, and headed down. Up again and, you guessed it, still no paper towels. I went down the final time only to get them and succeeded. Crazy!

I thought about it today when I pulled out the pile if pieces I have been working on. Right now I seem unable to sew during the week, so u am looking to weekends to get seams in. But with six days in between, I have to stop and figure out again what pieces and strips were out and what sizes I need to put here and there to meet target sizes. Unfortunately the nice little piles I make each weekend get pushed aside, wadded into the buckets on the table, and obscured through the course of a week. So this morning, as I took stock if a bunch if in-progress pieces, I pinned on little identifiers so that I know what I need for each. Hopefully it will save time and maximize efforts.

Anyone need a paper towel?

It has been a not easy week. It gas been the kind of week that makes me doubt everything. But the fruit I picked up a few weeks back for my next EDM were going soft. It was the right thing to do this morning, centering in its own way. Why pencil? Not sure. It is what I grabbed, maybe because I have been scratching in cartoon panels in pencil now and again. Just a rough sketch and a memory of what daily sketching offers and how it feels to sit in the quiet morning and draw.

See all that mess in the phone pic of the fruit? I call that honesty in blogging! Sure. I could have shown you a beautiful bokah-laden photo of the fruit on a simple background. But this is the nitty-gritty folks.

(This is Everyday Matters prompt 24–draw a piece of fruit. The next few coming up on the list are odd “draw x or whatever you like” ones. But first draw a drinking glass.)

[A few days separate then and now.]

The things we do.

Last night I did something that we hope we never have to so, but something that many times I have thought necessary and, even so, a step I have never taken. Until last night. I called 911 for an ambulance after a frightening afternoon with a sick adult, an adult who has often been sick but never this way. I called for an ambulance, and then I moved everything out of the way so that they could get in. In the minutes after being on hold and then explaining the situation to the dispatcher, I scrambled around the room trying to clear a path between the door and the suddenly dangerously narrow hallway. I moved two baskets of clean but unfolded laundry. I moved the bin of library books. i moved backpacks and shoes. I moved the couch. It felt oddly like cleaning up for a house cleaner to come in. And then there were eight or nine men filing the house, asking questions, taking over. It was not like on TV. It wasn’t overly friendly or reassuring. And then they were gone, tape and packaging remnants scattered throughout the hallway.

There was a stillness in the house, though I could hear the sounds of the ambulance still on the street for another ten minutes or more. And there was the weight of all of it, of two kids watching it happen, of a hole in the hallway wall that I put packing tape over because the kids were as afraid that something might come through the wall as they were by the fact that the hole was caused by someone falling and hitting the wall with a head. There was weight all around us, pressing in, and yet for those who are left behind to wait, the hours move on. We finished the show we had been watching, the three of us, said goodbye to the lost hour of the time change, read at bedtime as we always do.

Later, when I could not sleep, I played through my scrabble games and then endless rounds of solitaire in between calls from the ER and then, later, the ICU. The weight of everything, all the implications, realities, worries, and more, kept me company through the night as I tried to figure out how to walk the next steps.

The next morning after coffee, the stillness within me sat like lead. With no one to call for help juggling the kids, I waited. I did my regular things, regular morning things, regular Sunday things, regular parenting things, all with an ear to the silent phone, all while mentally planning how to fit Sunday necessities into an amorphous day of waiting.

I looked at the list of daily drawing prompts and contemplated a piece of clothing to draw. It’s a drawing prompt I’ve been tasked with before, and it is always one I find difficult. But “a piece of clothing” was the prompt ahead of me, so getting back “in” to the rhythm and the sketchbook meant starting there even though, in truth, I am going to skip several of the ones coming up. A piece of clothing. I considered a scarf. Simple pattern. But interesting. And then I spotted a sweater, a sweater that has lived a life of its own. I have two of the same sweater in different colors, each more than 15 years old, each seriously oversized, even in all the sizes I’ve been then and now. I wear them now in the mornings when it is cold, or late at night. Each is a silky soft chenille on the back, collar, and cuffs with a smooth front that is soft but not chenille at all. Though they’ve never been exposed to moths and are not wool in nature, the chenille has a worn appearance, a see-through quality when you hold it up to the light, as if sections are being somehow washed away. These are seriously old sweaters. They are not sentimental. They are simply cozy.

I picked one up, tried to drape it here and there so I could get some angle on it. Mostly I was unsuccessful, but finally I left it over the arm of a large loveseat and sat down to fill a page. And I did.

Later, I sat and searched for new (to me) podcasts and stocked my phone with a playlist of shows I have not tried before. I scrolled through the few people I follow at Facebook and flipped over and read an essay that appeared on a “weekend list” Ali Edwards had linked to from her blog, a piece written to (and in defense of) a parent on a phone. I read just enough to find it brought me to tears, tears I was woodenly keeping at bay. I clipped it to Evernote and put it aside for later. It is a beautiful piece and a reminder that what you think you see may or may not be the while story. So often these days I see the insular way in which people draw boundaries and make interpretations. It is a good piece to read, whether your phone is a lifeline for a hundred reasons or not. I went back a day later and read it all the way through. I know none of the people the author knows, and yet I am many of them.

When I left the computer, still waiting, I stood in front of a pile of fabric. I cut some pieces. I sewed a few seams. I looked at the almost finished piece marking last year, and yet I filled my head and hands with pieces for this year’s project, one defined but not yet begun. I waited, and I worked on something new. And I stopped at one point and pondered the role of the process, the normalcy and calm of the act of creating in such moments when, really, one’s hands are tied.

Today, a few days since… I read another post on “story,” on the telling of story, the crafting of story, on finding and identifying and following story. These are all things I have been thinking about in recent days, weeks, and months. Sometimes the story is in the subtext, another layer to a main story, an aside, something in the wings and waiting or while waiting. And always we pick and choose which parts to tell, which parts to weave together. Which parts to let stand alone, to let break a rule of grammar for a turn of phrase or a pause. Sometimes our stories are interwoven with others, sometimes connected to things past, things present, and things yet unknown. And always, always, there are more stories than we can really share, read, tell, and comprehend. But stories help us understand, survive, and better know ourselves and others. Over the last few days, I’ve paused in the midst of other things many times realizing I need to sit, with myself, and get down the bare bones of several stories, stories upon which I want to build, stories with details I do not want to lose and wonder about later. I’ve been telling myself that for months, over and over, as I run around with too many things on my plate, the fine lines of some stories fading fast. This post, in reality, was spawned by the moment of stopping and realizing that in the midst of a bad day, I turned, instinctively, to a pile of fabric. But in writing that reality, the nature of story rises to the surface.

Featured Podsafe Music:

Intro Clip: Jim Fidler ~ All I Really Wanted [PMN]
David Alter ~ Never Look Back [Ariel Publicity]

Oh no!

Yesterday was our middle school robotics group’s first competition. All the other schools at the event were high school level, so we went knowing that it was “for the experience” and, possibly, to open their eyes and to inspire them to what is possible in robot design. It was my first time seeing VEX robots in action. I knew a good bit about this year’s Sack Attack challenge from my work at Science Buddies. But I haven’t been involved in the robotics club at all. (He’s at that age!) So it was interesting to see what they had done and what others had done, given the same challenge and design and game objectives.

Once I decided to go, I responded to the query for a photographer. If no one else had offered, I said, I would shoot the event. “Are you a professional photographer,” was the reply.

You know how I responded in my head!

I explained that I don’t have the best camera (wish I could afford an upgrade) and that I am not a professional… but that I know what I am doing and have experience. How else do you respond to that question when you are an amateur, a hobbyist, someone for whom photography is one of many, many half-studied and loved creative pastimes?

So I went. I felt self-conscious. I shot.

And… I failed.

I was so disheartened this morning to pull up the day’s photos and find that though things looked fine on-screen while I was shooting… the lighting indoors was more of a challenge than I had realized. Far too many shots are less crisp than I would like. The kids were constantly in motion tinkering with the bots, and so there are far too many with blur (of hands). Ugggh. Just so disappointing. And I hate to even show the set. When I told the robotics member… he, too, was disappointed. That was interested… that’s the kind of comment that sends me wondering… disappointed because he will be embarrassed they are not great? Disappointed because he wanted to be able to show off what I could do? I just don’t know.

How many times can I wish for a different reality — on that would bring a camera upgrade? Every time I think we are back on track, the ground falls away again, and I find myself scrambling to keep perspective on whether or not I can even make ends meet. A camera is not a necessity.

Maybe next time I should just say no (or not volunteer).

I was not blogging or podcasting last year when a similar moment happened. But that time… my shots turned out fine, fully of story and tone. That time… led me to go ahead and say yes this time.

It was a very long day. We planned to be there just a few hours, home just after lunch so that I could have an afternoon of sewing while the kids absorbed themselves in minecraft and the science fair display board sections were typed up (hopefully not in that order). But at 4PM, the qualifying rounds were just ending. It was a very long day of standing around and, mostly, waiting and doing nothing.

I was so tired when I got home, I did something really indulgent and odd, something I used to do when I was 20-something. I had buttered popcorn and chocolate-covered toffee for dinner. There ya go!

Catching up on a year started and a year gone buy.

Featured Podsafe Music:

Intro Clip: Jim Fidler ~ All I Really Wanted [PMN]
David Alter ~ Live for Today [Ariel Publicity]
Jennifer Richman ~ Home Inside [Ariel Publicity]