Things will Pick Up Soon

When I last blogged, my parents were leaving Florida for their annual trek up to Maine. Well, they're here! They stay with Sissy, which is good and bad. Last night, we drove two hours round trip to have dinner with them (that's the bad). Tomorrow, I am taking them to Longwood Gardens. The good thing about gardens is that they change from week to week. I'm sure I'll see something I didn't get to see two weeks ago when I was there. Saturday, they are off to Massachusetts for a Memorial Day wedding.

But will I get a chance to sit and stitch? Noooooo. Sissy and Jersey are moving to Pennsylvania. And guess who gets to help? It's not like they are even going to be any closer. But they will have a pool, which is a pretty good perk. Especially since it promises to be hot and humid for the move. Lucky me, I don't have to go to New Jersey to schlep furniture. Sissy wants me to help clean. LOLOLOLOLOLOL. Seriously? Who looks and me (and my kitchen) and says, I bet she could help me clean. On Sunday I'll be pruning the lilac (a month late) and the rhododendron (only a couple weeks late) and putting up the window boxes. And then on Monday, we shall rest. Or grill. Or remember. Or something.

I Just Put Down the Computer for a Second

When my MIL was here, we did a lot of sightseeing, but we were spending like five minutes a night on the computer. She finally made a comment about how much more time we spend on the computer than she does. So we shut them down for the most part. We had nice wholesome nights of reading books together. We watched genealogy shows and Antiques Roadshow, but otherwise our entire evenings were upheaved. (Right now the dude and I are back on our computers. And all's right with the world.) I hardly picked up a needle.


Weedy
My MIL is a gardener, so we visited gardens, and gardening centers and actually did gardening. We started by weeding the new bed. (Yes, I had really let things go.) But she's a real trooper, because while I was at work, she weeded three more beds! Don't worry, we gave her time off for good behavior and took her to Winterthur, Longwood, Bowman's Hill Wildflower Preserve, Morris Arboretum, Haverford College's Arboretum, and Chanticleer. The latter is her absolute favorite.

Midway 

I was still trying to decide about plants and how to lay them out when we were ready to plant. I have to admit to a lot of hemming and hawing and backing and forthing. (What you see here was put in last fall, randomly.) Then I just drew something up and stuck with it. She helped us plant on Mother's Day. (Earlier that day, she had vacuumed the downstairs. Because the thing to do to your MIL on Mother's Day is to put her to work. Hangs head in shame.) (But she loves gardening and she did ask to "Hoover," instead of "sitting around like a lemon.") (She's industrious.)

All Over but the Growing

New gardens always look a little sad, but in the end, your two puny daylilies will grow large enough that you can split them into five and line the new walkway with them. So we must wait to see the full glory of the purple garden. (Except for the grass, everything flowers purple.) (There are still six plants I need: one callicarpa, two caryopteris, and three dwarf New England asters, but those come out later in the season.)

When I first showed you our happy little house in 2005, we had a Japanese maple tree that we soon lost. We've wanted to replace it for years. In fact, for the past two years I've had a redbud on my wish list. The university where the dude works is participating in Plant One Million and they were giving away free trees. (Including redbuds.) We signed up for a small flowering tree and were put on the wait list. We were excited when we were taken off the list two weeks ago. We tried to get there early in the morning, so we could get first choice and a redbud. The bad news is no redbud (they didn't have any, not that we were too late). So we were introduced to a few flowering trees.

Meet our new fringe tree. It's a lightly scented native that we really liked when we saw it in Longwood last week. How lucky we are!

April Showers; May Flowers

Today my parents have been married for 46 years. Inertia? Love? Who can tell?


I also dropped a glass bottle of juice onto my foot when I was putting it into my grocery cart. I was telling the dude about it: "I told the stock boy that if there was a way to hurt myself..." "You have a special talent for finding ways to hurt yourself," the dude finished. {Sigh.} The good news is that I didn't break the juice bottle. The bad news is weight bearing isn't going so well with the foot.


Thank you for all your comments lately. Questions were raised regarding how I find out about this dirty cross-stitch stuff. I read widely among the craft blogs, and I have google set up to alert me to stories about cross-stitch. Nothing untoward at all.

So here we are at the end of another month. April's plans included:

1. See a movie--well, we watched the DVD of Iron Man the other day. Our neighbor lent it to us when he heard we hand't seen it. That was like six months ago...But we really hoped to go to the movies to see things before they came out on DVD. 
2. Read two books--Wickett's Remedy by the ever intriguing Myla Goldberg. The Sherlockian, Graham Moore
3. Finish  That Dern Parrot--I didn't even pick this up.
4. Work on Star Ligh Star Bright--I love working on this. I might have to keep at it until I'm done!

I am getting even less done than I had predicted. This month, my MIL is here for the first two weeks, and my parents will be with us for a few days sometime after that. Still, I'll persist:

1. See a movie
2. Read two books
3. Work on Star Ligh Star Bright
4. 10 hours on another project

Civil Unrest

I remember exactly what I was doing twenty years ago today. It was a Wednesday. I had spent the day grading papers. I was teaching Freshman Writing at the University of Southern California, and we did this group grading thing to help ensure that grading across the sections was equitable. Our group finished at about 3:45. I needed to have a prescription filled, so I went to the student health center where I overheard two African American women saying that they couldn't believe they had gotten off. Even with no context, I knew exactly what they were talking about. Anyone in Los Angeles would have. We had all been thinking about it. Waiting. Expecting the opposite.

I took the shuttle back to my dorm in downtown. LA's downtown at that time was mostly a place where no one lived. There were very few places to eat. Almost none were open for dinner. When the business people went home, the sidewalks rolled up. It didn't matter to me; that was one of the nights the dorm served dinner. (It was an unusual graduate student living experiment; communal dinner was only served a few nights a week.) I ate and went back to my room to calculate final grades that were supposed to be turned in before Friday. It was warm in my room. I opened the window. Weird...I smelled smoke.

Later I noticed I had a message. My sister: "I just wanted to make sure you were safe. Call me." I called the dude (we had been dating for just about three months and he lived two floors up). He didn't know anything. I went to my next door neighbor, who had a television. The city was on fire. At least that explained the smoke.

Thursday was another bright and sunny day in Los Angeles. Classes were over, and so a group of people who lived in the dorm went out for lunch. We went to Hamburger Hamlet. Normally it would have been a huge wait behind long lines of businessmen. That day, we were seated right away. We lingered over lunch. Finally, the manager came over, "When you leave, we're closing and sending everyone home." We could take a hint; we left. On the walk back to our dorm we noticed handwritten signs in all kinds of businesses. Places were closing early. I was on the phone with my parents when I noticed the Lady Footlocker next door being looted. That night, no dorm dinner. Fortunately for us, The Pantry has never closed. (Not even for the unrest.) A few friends called me and offered to come take me away from downtown. But in the end, the places they lived (Santa Monica and Pasadena) would not escape unscathed. That night the rioting continued.

On Friday, Rodney King asked if we could all get along. Those of us who remained--loads of people had gone home--were in lock down. USC's administration sent food for us. And the R.As had a series of movies for entertainment (which is why I will always associate When Harry Met Sally with the riots). USC put forth a policy for the outlying dorms: they told us to pack a bag and be prepared to evacuate to campus. Those of you who know USC will perhaps find that counterintuitive, bringing us into South Central for the emergency. But USC had (has?) the only riot trained campus police in the country.  More security officers who were licensed to carry were sent to our dorm. On Friday night, I moved to the dude's room because my room faced the street. I remember listening to the helicopters and asking if he thought this was what it was like to be in a war. (Perhaps, in retrospect, a bit overwrought.)

On Saturday, the Marines came. The President had promised a federal investigation. There was a Peace Rally. It was strange, but you could feel that there was a change in the air, and to me, it seemed not to come from the Marines or the President, but from the Angelenos themselves. On Sunday people started cleaning up. It wasn't over, but it was.

Twenty years ago today.

God Save The...

I got an email from Keepsake Needlearts, advertising the Diamond Jubilee. They have a page or so of "British" patterns and things for the Anglophile needleworker. 

Me: "Hey, dude, I'm going to stitch you this."

Dude*: "You just the hell better not."

I'm kinda glad he said that because you know how I feel about the celebrity face in cross-stitch. But I'm also the kind of person who doesn't understand hanging a picture of the queen or the president or the pope in your house. I mean, it's not like you're related. (Anyway, I'm sure that some people have very good and patriotic or religious reasons for doing so.) (I am still allowed to be all freaked out when I go into someone's house and have to walk by the Pope on my way to the bathroom.)

*Some newcomers may not be aware, but the dude is a transplanted Brit.

More Boobs

Thanks for your rather thoughtful responses to the p-o-r-n. If, as Miss Quoted suggests, porn is just too "done" to be surprising--maybe all the subversive sayings are too--what is the new shocking thing that will raise cross-stitch to an art? We thought maybe violence. But what do you say?

Can you tell I haven't been stitching? More media: Remember that artist who cross-stitched the Vogue covers? Inge Jacobsen has been hired by a jewelry company to stitch images from the catalog. Some of them are really weird, and the model looks like she stuck her head into one of those cut outs at the fair. Only instead of making her look like she's really fat or in an odd situation, she looks like she's been cross-stitched. But not her face. Or the jewelry. Cross-stitched jewelry, how are they supposed to sell that?

The artist was assisted by the Royal School of Needlework, "who helped create the Duchess of Cambridge's Alexander McQueen wedding dress." I'm pretty sure that until Kate M. makes a real boner, the Royal School of Needlework at Hampton Court is going to be forever associated with that dress. No matter how many other projects they work on. It's how we're making needlework relevant for the masses.

Am I too cranky for this blog?

Cross Stitch Porn

Thank you for sharing my disgust with the way the media covers cross-stitch. It's a little tiresome, but it's good to know you are with me! Because I've got more...you knew?

(Warning clicking leads to) Cross-stitch Porn. I'm not using the term loosely as in "food porn." No, I am using it literally. (For those of you who sometimes say your head, "like, literally exploded." I am using literally correctly here to mean "actually or exactly; in a literal manner.") I'd illustrate this post with a picture, but I'll tell you not safe for work. You will be happy to know that cross-stitch here knows no grannies, but it is usually used to "depict cats, flowers, and country homesteads." Seriously? Are these the only two paths we can take? Cats, flowers, and country homesteads or anal sex, blowjobs, and nudity? Oh, you know if it's not one thing it's another!

It is so simple for us to elevate ourselves from craft to Art...

The artist, Leah Emery, does say some interesting things about the juxtaposition of cross-stitch and let me just re-emphasize hard core porn:

As the works are entirely pixelated at close inspection, if you're focusing on the colours, substance and craftsmanship of the work initially it can be difficult to determine the content of the image. Once you take a few steps back the image sheds its ambiguity and becomes clear enough to render the craftsmanship void. 

What I thought at first was, why would you spend so much time stitching these pieces, when it takes 15 minutes to write a porn script and another hour more to make a whole movie?

But she addresses that:

Pitting together the two themes—laborious and beautiful domestic handiwork and the cheap and easy world of the sexually explicit —allows each viewer to respond to the work in their own way, depending on how the ensuing chaos grips them.

But I'm not sure I'd let her get away with that for an answer. It starts out so promising, then devolves.  (Sometimes I think my training as a critic unfits me for listening to what artists say about their art. Maybe that works for you. Sometimes it really is just me.)

Is it art? We've seen this around, so it's not unique. Does it get to be art because it is in a gallery? Because she's trained as an artist? Because she thinks she is elevating the craft by not stitching cats, flowers, and country homesteads? Now there's an idea cross stitched country homesteads where the cats have sex. If I make some sort of bestiality joke here, have I gone too far?


Would this be the wrong time to welcome all my new followers? I do appreciate you being here, even if this isn't quite what you thought you signed up for! Cheers.