"Tense"

I'm too familiar with this word for the week.  I came home from work the other day feeling like I had worked a month of Mondays and felt like I had to unclamp every muscle in my body in order to sit down and pet the dog.

Since out there is stressful, I've been improving my habitat lately and decided to get new living room curtains.  I wanted a floral, white and green and summery.  It seemed so obviously attainable, it didn't occur to me that stores wouldn't have them.  In the end I bought a paisley, but the tops weren't right, and the length was too long.  I dragged out the sewing machine.

I made the curtains what I wanted them to be, which involved all sorts of things that I don't do: ironing, pinning, sewing... and the curtains turned out to be a lot like the old ones, but I'm happier.

I made Sculpey flowers and pinned them on, and put Grandpa's bells on the tie-back.  I ran Sculpey through a pasta machine and made feathers too.  (Not to be confused with my previous Sculpey feathers.)  It's a whole lot of nothing for nothing, and the kind of thing I get into.  It's my world, my space, and I can do whatever I want in it -- and sometimes that's really necessary when the world makes me too tense to pet the dog.

I've been continuing with my linoleum blocks too.  This sun was just fun for fun.  I don't have any plans for it.  Some day I'll be tired of looking at Sculpey flowers and feathers and they'll go to the basement.  I don't know if anyone else will ever want them, and the bother of trying to sell them takes away from my fun in creation.  Sometimes I wonder if my relatives will throw all of it away when I die, and what's the point of any of it.  Sometimes I can go too far into the whole existential philosophy of why bother with anything at all?  Maybe I should mention that I went to another funeral this week.  That kind of thing spurs existential angst.

I told my brother the word for the week is "tense".  He drew tents in a military encampment.  I observed that his tiny 1 1/2" drawing didn't really show the tents well enough so he provided the enlargement detail.

Making stuff is one of the ways I deal with life.  Some people cook, knit, or make furniture in the garage.  It's good to bring something new into the world.  I know other coping skills too, like watching ripples on the river or waves in the ocean, meditating, reading, tv, planting something in the garden.  Whatever feels good to us is what we should do unless it goes against someone else's happiness.

Sometimes we all get to the point where we feel like lashing out and taking our frustrations out on someone else.  It's better to make stuff and think out better solutions to our problems.  Sometimes I need to remind myself of that and pet the dog.

"Toy"

Does Play Doh count as a toy?  I love the smell and the cool feeling of the stuff.  Something I love quite a bit less is Sculpey or Fimo clay, but that has the benefit of hardening in the oven.  It doesn't smell nearly as good though, raw or cooked.

One of my coworkers has been clearing out a house lately, and she's been bringing me presents every day.  Amongst the many interesting things that she's brought me is Fimo clay, and like the child that I am, I've spent my evenings making completely useless items with oven-hardened permanence.

There's a little sadness behind the house cleaning.  The adult daughter, got cancer and died.  A couple of years later, her mom got another kind of cancer and died.  No more family, the friendly neighbor inherited, and the house full of stuff is getting cleared out by my coworker -- and I get Christmas every day in January.  Woo hoo!  I'd like to think the daughter is happy her things are going to a kindred spirit instead of to the dump.

I haven't been in the house, but there's a castle room where medals from Pennsic wars tell a silent story of medieval wars in Pennsylvania hosted by the Society of Creative Anachronisms.  I'm told the proper way to display those medals are in cleavage.  I passed the medals on to someone with more ample cleavage and actual Renaissance costumes.

I've gotten a turtle quilt, necklace, and coffee cup, a smiley cup, giant sketch pad, a pointy silver thing that I was told to use on my voodoo dolls... Just to be clear, I don't actually have voodoo dolls, but my need to vent frustrations is obviously apparent.  I may have made stabbing motions after a meeting recently.

In any case, I have some new toys, and tv time to play with them.  I made feathers.  I made an atom, a flower... who knows what else will get oven-hardened next?

I'm a bit frustrated with my atom.  I wrote recently about my bag of copper wire that's begging for an art project.  My brother whipped out a tree, and I suppressed some 3D jealousy.  The best I can say for my wire projects is that I embedded wire into my atom parts so the electron bee has a stinger and antennae and all the atom parts have copper loops to hang them.  What I really wanted was wire circles for them all to rotate around and jiggle, but I was foiled by my lack of technical expertise to make this all work.  Now I'm intimidated by my greater goal to make a copper wire mobile, perhaps with Sculpey adornments and counter weights.

He who taught me about atoms might argue with me about my atom interpretation.  The parts all have names of people who play those kinds of roles in real life.  I figure the feathers are illustration in another form because I just painted with clay instead of paint.

What kind of toys do you play with?