Pisces Moon Studio

Two lovely things from today:

Greedy little light-hogs… my four-day-old dill plants. I turn the pot three or four times a day, to keep them growing fairly straight, but an hour later they are stretching for the window again.

And from this evening: A glorious mystery I noticed while preparing dinner.

It’s after 9:00 pm and the sewer guys are still out there, but it hasn’t been as bad as I thought it would be. The repair seems to involve a very long hose, a thing that sounds like a giant vacuum cleaner, and a bunch of guys in fluorescent chartreuse vests wading in the creek. No jackhammers and no tearing up the street.

Still haven’t been able to wash dishes, though. (I shouldn’t complain. Gives me an excuse for a night off, no?)

And so far (touch wood) the internet is behaving itself today. Maybe it was yesterday’s lunar eclipse that had everything so topsy-turvy.

Who knows — maybe tomorrow I will even make some art.

My dear friend Sadie wants to know where I’ve been the last week or so. It’s the usual long story.

About a week ago I started having trouble again with the Internet connection. By Thursday I was completely unable to connect. Spent an hour or so on the phone with a pleasant and helpful young man at the cable company, who made a number of suggestions which all boiled down to “there’s nothing wrong with our signal up to where it goes into your house; try this and this and this and call Microsoft and then let me know if you’ve solved the problem.”

Well… I spent the next three days completely wiping and reformatting my hard drive, reinstalling all my software, restoring all my backed-up files (only to discover that my email from January 27 to the present had gone poof into the ether)… and it didn’t work. Not only that, I hooked up my old laptop and then my son’s computer to the cable modem and they were exhibiting exactly the same behavior.

So I eliminated absolutely every variable I could think of and finally said it had to be the modem. Mr. Cable Tech Guy was positive that it could not be the modem. We went around on this for a day or so before he finally threw up his hands and authorized me to go to the local office and swap out the modem.

Did that Monday morning and everything was great for about four hours. Today it’s been getting slower and slower again. Neither router would work at all for a while, until about the fourteenth time I cold-cycled everything, and then it mysteriously started to work again. For the moment I’m online and doing okay (but I almost hate to say that in case the gremlins are listening).

At any rate… I have done absolutely no fiber work since the ill-fated Labyrinth, and I just haven’t had much to say that isn’t about frustration and dead ends.

Tomorrow the sewer repair guys will be digging up the street in front of my house again, with sewer service shut off for 10 to 12 hours.

I’ll try to think of something more positive to post about soon. I promise. Right afer I go have a good cry.

Deb Roby,* reacting to a quote from another blogger, posts a question:

I answered in Deb’s comments, but I decided I would also post my reaction to the first quoted paragraph here and ask for your reactions to my reactions.

“Are thoughts … really necessary to share at all? If so, why?”

One of the reasons that I go on hiatus from time to time is this very insecurity. Who wants to read about me? How do I have the chutzpah to think that anything I have to say is interesting?

On the other hand, I am extremely short on nearby human beings to share stuff with (particularly art stuff), so I often feel the need to shoot words into the void and see if echoes bounce back to me. It’s a way of checking to see whether I am still alive.

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*I normally link directly to a specific post, but there is apparently something wrong with Deb’s template right now. The post link comes up a blank page. I am referring to Deb’s post of March 2, 2006, entitled ” Thinking Like a Blogger.”

“Why do you think you are struggling so with Labyrinth?”

It wasn’t all the Labyrinth pieces; just the green monster. After allowing the subconscious mice a couple of days to nibble on the idea in the dark, I think that the answer might be as simple as I hated the colors. Then I put brown on it, and that made it worse. There’s something very depressing about brown. I keep trying to make friends with it, and it rebuffs me every time.

Another thing that is bothering me about the project is that I realized that the metaphor is inaccurate. Life isn’t a journey, however twisty and full of turns, along one pre-defined path. It’s full of dead ends, forks in the road, broad highways that narrow to two-lane counry roads and then to tar-and-gravel farm lanes that peter out into gravel and dirt and end in a tangle of brambles (where sometimes there are ripe blackberries and sometimes there are just thorns).

I haven’t given up on it. The blue piece is great, and I really like the fire piece. There’s another idea germinating to use these backgrounds. But it won’t be the thing I started out to do.