jaeleslie

I have been gluing things today, and getting all the laundry done, very quietly. Mr S is off to the lake for some project, leaving us to our own devices, and the kid got his computer working again last night! Yay! This involved replacing the hard drive which had started skipping, making the installation of drivers or something, I'm not sure, very problematic, but for some reason he had another 20 gig hard drive lying around (in his other computer of course) so once he got that plugged into some appropriate port ("which wire did I just pull out mom?") and after a break for watching Firefly and John Doe he actually got it up and running again. Great rejoicing. It's been, oh, a month or so, and I've made only mildly encouraging noises that he should work this out himself ("I'll show you how to set up your email, so we can mail to each other in the house") since not being online all that time got him off the Evercrack. But he's been wanting to use my computer and printer for homework, and needs web access now so he can do an extra credit report for Health class all about various drugs. Hee hee. On the other hand he's been playing Grand Theft Auto instead, which makes worse noises that Everquest and seems a considerably less sociable activity.

I lay around and watched Law and Order last night and pulled apart a very old copy of an expensive fashion magazine. Then I threw all the pages away, hooray. Then today I had to take all the really nice heavy paper advertising pages out of the trash again, because I was looking through one of my bookbinding books and admiring all the little model book structures and decided those printed papers would be far nicer than construction paper. The reason I was consulting my bookbinding books was because I have been collaging a little book of four poems by Ryokan that I wrote out last spring, and decided that the usual kind of binding will spoil the center page spread and so I have to invent a completely new way of stitching it together. To test the new way of stitching the pages together that I am about to devise I had to put together a similar group of pages of the same size and weight. Thus are new projects born. So now I have two little books that are getting collage stuff pasted into them and various decorations. The one with the poems all written out, I really was just trying to decorate it up some more so it would be not so sketchy, and that one started out because I was writing out the poems separately and matting them (haven't sold any of those, pooh) and figured out I might as well put them all together somewhere too as long as I was spending so much time on the page layouts anyhoo.

It's been very pleasant to spend some time completely immersed in collage for a few days. It takes a ridiculous amount of time to figure out what to put together and where, but I find it quite absorbing and it cheers me up. I'm getting a little better about not getting glue all over the place too. We had our calligraphy study group yesterday, and talked about all our various projects. If it gets cold again -- hah! WHEN it gets cold again! -- we are going to do some frost painting. Last year there was only about a week that was cold enough.

It seems like I am just possibly getting my mind a bit better under control. Or maybe that is just how it looks.