Pisces Moon Studio

Why don’t we manage to get things done? We make plans and set goals and then things happen and another year has gone by and we haven’t accomplished anything we set out to do.

(Raises hand. GUILTY.)

Part of it is, of course, that “life is what happens while you are making other plans.” Your energy gets poleaxed by a lengthy illness, you trip over a footstool in the middle of the night and break something important like your dominant hand. A family member needs extensive care. Not much we can do about these things.

Read the rest of this entry »

In which we begin a new series all about WordPress to help make you a Blogging Ninja.

Why Choose WordPress?

Let’s begin at the very beginning. There are several free options that make it really easy to start a blog. Blogspot is the most popular, with TypePad, LiveJournal, and WordPress’s own hosted blogs right behind. These are easy to set up and they don’t require you to buy a domain name or a hosting plan.

So why would you choose to spend roughly $75 a year and have your own separate WordPress blog if the freebies are, well, free, and easy to set up?

Read the rest of this entry »

I’m in the process of redeveloping the main Pisces Moon website. Until that’s done, I have redirected the main page to the blog, so there’s at least something for you to read. :)

There are 31 days left in 2009. What will you do with them?

I’m getting a head start on next year. Instead of winding down the old one and fretting over holidays interfering with the end-of-year stuff, I’ve decided to look at this as Month Zero of 2010. A whole month for planning! When everyone wakes up hung over on January 1 and starts blearily thinking about New Year’s Resolutions, I’ll have spent 31 days thinking, planning, getting priorities in place for a successful and happy 2010.

Who will join me in Month Zero of 2010?

Yes, it’s true. Carol’s blog rises from the UnDead. Again. (And if anyone arrives with stakes or silver bullets in hand, prepare to be repelled. I’m a skilled zombie-hunter hunter.)

Two years and two days. That’s a long time to be away from blogging, and it’s going to take a very long time to build an audience again. So what’s the story? Why did I go away — and even more importantly — why did I come back?

If you read back through the last few posts before this one, you’ll see that in April of 2007 I went with my sister to the M D Anderson Cancer Center in Houston and then broke my right hand almost immediately thereafter. In April of 2008 my husband was hit by a car as he was crossing a street downtown. He ended up on the pavement under the car, with three bones broken and all the tendons in his right knee torn loose. I told him we were canceling April from now on.

Read the rest of this entry »

It is so cold here today

that even the mannequin is bundled up for warmth.

Click on image for larger version.

It’s been awhile, hasn’t it?

I essentially quit writing earlier this year for several reasons. I broke my hand; I was busy with work, which includes much typing and was progressing much more slowly than usual due to the break; I had done no art for more than a year; and my life was very uneventful and I simply had nothing to say.

The hand has healed, mostly, although it’s still not quite as it was. I’m busier than ever with work, for which I am extremely thankful. I still haven’t done any art.

But for some reason, a couple of months ago my husband decided after 34 years of marriage that perhaps it was time to go out and do things. Social things. Visual and performing arts things.

It started late in the summer, I think. We had gone to several of the summer classic movies at the Alabama Theatre, a 1927 movie palace extravaganza in downtown Birmingham. At one of them I noticed a poster advertising a performance of the Nutcracker by the Moscow Ballet, scheduled for the Alabama late in November. I made some general comment about not having been to a live ballet since elementary school, and he asked, completely out of the blue, “Would you like to go?”

Then he started wondering about seasonal events. I started checking local calendars and setting up things for us to see and do. So far, just in the past month, we’ve

• seen an exhibition of artifacts from Pompeii: Tales of an Eruption at the Birmingham Museum of Art;
• attended a performance of Handel’s Messiah by the Alabama Civic Chorale;
• visited an exhibition by many of Alabama’s famous folk artists, including Thornton Dial, Mose Tolliver, Nora Ezell, and Lonnie Holley;
• attended a performance of Christmas music by Colla Voce, a 30-voice ensemble, presented at a local church.

The ballet is Friday night. On Saturday night we go to another Festival of Christmas Music at Samford University. There’s another one Sunday afternoon by the Birmingham-Southern College choir, and an orchestral performance the following Sunday. I have at least one more art exhibition I want to see, The Black Madonna at the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute.

So I will have some things to talk about for a while. I’m looking forward to comparing the various choral groups’ performances, because there are great differences even to my untrained ear.

It isn’t fiber art, but hey. I’m getting there.

Ever since YouTube became a genuine phenomenon, more and more of the blogs I read are embedding videos into their posts. Now I happen to be a curmudgeonly Luddite: I have my browser set for no animations, no ads, and no Flash unless I deliberately click on it. This means that when I view a post with an embedded YouTube I see

Note: This is not a link or embed; it’s a screen capture. Don’t try to click it.

Now in this particular case I know who Steve is (a brilliant, insightful, well-liked political blogger who died this week at a tragically young age) so I can guess what the content might be.

In many cases, though, the posts consists of a title like “For your viewing pleasure,” which is uninformative and does not inspire me to click through and watch. It takes up screen room, it takes up bandwidth, and it strikes me as being supremely lazy. When I have nothing to say, I don’t post. It seems like such a waste of effort to embed a YouTube video without comment just to have something to list on the post calendar for that day.

Okay, now I’ve had my say for the day. It was perhaps a trifle lazy, but I got it out of my system.

This morning I was released from the cast on my right hand. I still must tape my middle and ring fingers together to prevent any chance of reinjury to the break, but this is much, much better.

This is the first time I’ve ever broken a bone and there have been some major surprises involved. The first is that the break itself didn’t hurt that much. I remember being in pain right after I fell, but after a couple of minutes I was convinced it was just a bad sprain. I didn’t go get it x-rayed for more than a day, until the swelling became truly alarming. Even after it was set and casted (“casted?” is that right?) there still wasn’t much pain and I never took anything stronger than Advil.

What did astound me was how quickly my muscle strength deteriorated and especially how painful the immobilized joints became. After three weeks I was convinced that I had really bad arthritis in my fingers; the joints swelled and it hurt to try to move. My fingers became essentially useless. After another week or so, they started hurting even when I didn’t move them. Advil became my constant friend, leading (naturally) to stomach inflammation and pain.

I have fibro. I live with pain. This should not have poleaxed me like it did.

The good news from this morning, however, is that all of this is normal and to be expected. As I exercise and stretch the ligaments, the flexibility should return and the pain should eventually go away. It will still, says the ortho guy, take months before everything is back to normal, so patience is called for.

The other good news? As a dual result of not being able to cook and not being able to eat, I’ve lost about five pounds in the last six weeks. On the whole, however, I do not recommend breaking your hand as a weight-loss mechanism.