Happy Birthday, Cello!

Cello's 40th birthday is Sunday, and we had a little party for him today. It was really difficult, because he's away from the office so much. We wanted to surprise him, so we didn't want to tell him, but he kept calling and saying he had another stop to make, or someone else he had to see, and we kept waiting and waiting for him to get back. He finally showed up at about 3:00.

We had all dressed in black, and Dave and John had decorated his office with black balloons and crepe paper, and put black streamers in the doorways, including the elevator door. It was pretty impressive.

Later in the afternoon, there was a chocolate cheesecake. Oh, and leis! A sparkly tinsel one for Cello, and black ones for the rest of us. Dave really went all out. Cello said he's saving the stuff to use this summer when Dave turns 40 . . .

I had kind of an adventure this afternoon after I left work. I had ordered some tea from Stash Tea, and had it delivered to the office. I guess I had gotten complacent with Adagio, who uses FedEx to deliver. I expected Stash to use FedEx, or, more likely, UPS, but they used the post office.

The postman tried to deliver the package yesterday morning, apparently. Although I'm sure there was something there at the office when he tried, the elevator was probably turned off--it opens right into our office, so it usually doesn't get turned on until either I or Cello get in in the morning--and he assumed that the office was closed rather than climbing the stairs. Understandable, I guess.

I had had it shipped to the office because I thought it would be easier, of course, but it ended up meaning that I had to go to the downtown post office to pick it up, which was the adventure.

I hadn't realized it, but I actually drive very close to the post office on my way home every night, so while I'd never been there, I thought it would be a piece of cake. As it turned out, they had moved, for one thing. And for another, it was, of course, tax day. And then once I'd found the new location, parked, and stood in line, I was told that I couldn't pick up packages there, I had to get back in the car, drive a couple of blocks, drive underground into the parking garage, and pick up the package in a different building. Or, who knows, maybe it was the same building--by the time I got there I was so turned around that I couldn't tell.

But it all worked out in the end. I got my Stash.

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More

After I posted the pictures last night, I got busy doing something else, and then was too tired to write anything about them. It was kind of fun to let them stand for themselves, though, maybe. My camera isn't the greatest for taking close-up shots, but at least it gives an idea.

The outside (top and sides) is covered with wide printed ribbon, then lightly varnished. The hearts on the doors are glued-on wooden pieces, and there are various pieces of paper collage both inside and out. There's a little mirror on the top shelf, and silver metal beads spelling out "WISHES." On the inside of one door is a tiny spring clothespin holding a miniature tarot card of The Sun (the card isn't glued in, so the clothespin could hold anything--a fortune cookie fortune, maybe?); the word inside the other door is "BOUNTEOUS," which dictionary.com says means "Generously and copiously given."

There's an image of an old key glued to the floor symbolizing hidden secrets. The key and the mirror are both important, I think--the mirror, in addition to being a reflective surface to bring light in, also reminds anyone looking in that ultimately, we are responsible for fulfilling our own wishes and dreams, and that we have the ability to do that inside ourselves.

I worked on a second one tonight. This one is painted green, lightly distressed and antiqued, with sort of a "garden" theme--it has a tiny pile of terra cotta pots, and a birdhouse, and a little chair . . . I varnished it tonight, and can put in the ornaments tomorrow. I'm trying not to overdo it, to leave plenty of room for personal treasures. They're sort of like "interactive" art, maybe. Sort of whimsical, yet it has a use, it's not just decorative.

I haven't decided what's going to happen with them yet. It's a really interesting process to me. It's very difficult for me to allow myself to make art that isn't structured, to allow myself to just do something, anything, without being attached to the outcome. To allow myself to make mistakes. Although, in general, that's where the exciting stuff happens. You have to get to the point where you're not afraid that you're going to ruin it, and that's very hard. But if you only color inside the lines, you never figure out what else you might be able to do.

So anyway, I'm finding it very liberating and exciting. Photos of the new one tomorrow, hopefully.

Someone wrote tonight and asked me if I had been inspired by Joseph Cornell. I had never heard of him, but oh! What wonderful stuff! I Googled his name and found the WebMuseum link above. Really amazing stuff. Kind of like Nick Bantock's work, but three dimensional.

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Wishes, Secrets, Dreams

I finished the first of the little shrines tonight. I'm calling it "Wishes, Secrets, Dreams."

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The Bloody Claw

Bob and I have both really been enjoying Apple's iTunes. Bob could never really use it before, since he was still on a dial-up connection, but once we finally did what we should have done months ago and got him networked to the highspeed connection, he can actually listen to the previews and watch videos and everything. He's been buying bottles of Diet Pepsi and checking the bottlecaps, and he's gotten quite a few free songs, which he's being very frugal with. I bought him an iTunes gift card because I wanted him to splurge a little, but a couple of weeks after I did, he's still got 8 of the 15 songs left.

I haven't been quite as frugal, although I haven't bought much of anything the past few weeks. I did splurge the other night and buy several songs, a couple of older Barenaked Ladies ones, a few from a new artist that I'd never heard of--Ari Hest--and one that I'm absolutely enamored of: Regresa a Mi, by Il Divo. There's a video on the iTunes site, too, which is wonderful, and made me swoon, and makes me want to go to Italy . . .

The full album won't be out for a couple of weeks. I can't wait!

Spring arrived here with April, and I wore shorts to work every day last week. It was a little chilly on Thursday, and windy all week but even so, the sun was shining, and the weather was beautiful.

The flowering trees are blooming, the herbs in pots on the back porch are starting to come up, and the backyard is covered in violets. I've been making an effort to keep the birdfeeders filled, and every morning there are goldfinches and purple finches at the finch feeders, doves on the ground eating what the finches have spilled, and various other birds at the other feeders, the ones with sunflower seeds in them.

Yesterday there was a big blue jay, too big really to sit on the feeder. He would fly down to the feeder, perch on it for a second, and grab a sunflower seed, then fly up to a branch on the tree, hold it with his feet, then peck at it with his beak to break the shell, then eat the nut, and fly down to get another one.

I have a couple of feeders hanging on the fence, too. Those are really for the squirrel. He hangs upside down from the fence and reaches in and picks out a sunflower seed, then hangs there and eats it. I know I shouldn't encourage the squirrels, but they're cute, and I figure they need to eat, too.

Writing about the squirrel (okay, it wasn't really writing about the squirrel, it was writing about the blue jay and wanting to type "paws" instead of "feet") makes me remember what happened Friday night.

When I came home I noticed that there were a lot of clumps of fur in the hallway. Obviously the cats had gotten into it while we were gone. We picked up both of them and looked them over, but didn't see any obvious wounds. Then I saw the bloody pawprints across my desk, and we found a bloody claw on the dining room table (that would make a great title for a movie, wouldn't it?). From the look of the claw (Dinah's claws are thin and sharp, and Pye's are fat and blunt, mostly), it seemed to be Dinah's, and she seems to be favoring her right paw a little bit.

She won't let me look at it, but I figure I'll have Bob help me tonight and we'll look at it and see if it looks like she needs to see the vet. We're just guessing what happened, of course, but we think she probably got a claw hung up on something, probably my office chair, panicked, pulled too hard and ripped off (probably just the outer sheath of) the claw, screamed, scared Pyewacket, and they got in a tussle, causing the clumps of hair.

It's always been a fear of mine--that one of them will get hung up on something while we're gone and rip out a claw, but I guess now that it's happened we've proven that even if it does happen, they're not going to bleed to death. Bob trims Pyewacket's claws more often than Dinah's get clipped, because Pye will lie on his lap and let him trim them, while it takes both of us to do Dinah's. But we'll do them tonight, and check out the injured one. Poor baby. Not that it seems to be bothering her that much.

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Wacky dreams

I'm sure I've enumerated here before my repertoire of stress dreams. The travel ones are the most ubiquitous--forgetting to pack, forgetting what day the flight is and missing it, losing my luggage, forgetting my luggage, etc. There's even the one about forgetting to leave the hotel room once I get there. I'll dream that I'm on vacation at the beach, but totally forget to go to the beach until it's time to leave! That's the weirdest one, I think, and one that I imagine means something, if only I could figure out what . . .

Then there are the dreams about being lost, either walking or driving. Walking in a strange part of town, or a strange city, and not being able to find where I want to be. Or getting lost while driving, or wandering through a large apartment complex or hotel, totally unable to find my apartment or hotel room (this one has happened in real life, in those huge, rambling, every-building-looks-the-same resorts at Disney World).

There are two other major themes. One is stairs--huge, winding staircases like the ones at Hogwarts in the Harry Potter books, or the bridge over the chasm where Galdalf fought the Balrog in Lord of the Rings. Tipsy, wobbling stairs, or bridges, ones with open spaces that I have to jump over. The other is water or ice. Driving through water, or driving over a bridge over water, or driving near the ocean, or driving on ice, always with the fear that I will drive off the bridge, or drive into the water, or the water will pour over me, or I'll slide off the ice into the water or off the bridge.

Oh, and the bathroom ones, although those aren't stress-related, I don't think. I dream a lot about not being able to find a bathroom, or finding one and the door is broken, or there is someone in it who won't come out, or the plumbing is stopped up or broken. Those are always resolved when I wake up and go to the bathroom.

I had three of the above one night last week. Oh, wait, I guess it was four. No, five. Travel, broken bathroom, stairs, being lost, water. I was on vacation, staying in a beautiful white stucco house at the beach. I needed to go to the bathroom, but couldn't find it. I finally found the bathroom, but the door was broken. It (the door) was leaning up against the wall outside the bathroom with a sign that said to just prop it up in front of the doorway, but there were people standing around, and I didn't feel comfortable doing that.

Then I was at a Mexican restaurant, and my friends were at a table on the second floor, and to get there I had to climb this set of spindly, rickety stairs, and then get in some kind of little cable car thing that would deliver me to their table. Then I was at a hospital. My mother was having some kind of test, and I had taken her there, then instead of waiting I had left. But as I was leaving I was thinking, oh, I shouldn't leave, I should have just waited, but I hadn't made note of the room she was in, or even what part of the hospital, and I had no idea how to find her again. I ended up wandering all over the hospital, frantically trying to find her.

Then I was back in the house at the beach, sitting in front of a big plate glass window, watching the tide come in. It came right up to the windows, and I wondered what would happen--would the water crash through the windows? Surely not, surely it must do this every night, surely the windows were strong enough, but what if they weren't?

Last night added a new dimension.

I have gotten in the habit of taking my cell phone upstairs to the bedroom at night when Bob is out of town. I started out doing it just so that when he called, I'd have it, but usually now he calls earlier and I'm usually still up. But I decided it made me feel more secure to have it there, so I'll take it upstairs when I go to bed and leave it on the bedside table.

Then that turned into taking my purse upstairs, but only when he was gone. That also made me feel more secure, although it also felt like kind of an obsessive-compulsive thing, and I wasn't sure it was good. But still, certainly not a bad idea not to leave my purse sitting downstairs for someone to grab if they broke in -- might as well not make it so easy. But I didn't want to be paranoid or obsessive (or any more than I already am). I mentioned it to Bob, though, and he said he thought it was a good idea--he'd been talking to someone about it, too, coincidentally--and he asked me to get a key hook to hang upstairs in the bedroom, like the one we have downstairs.

So I did. I found a little rack with four hooks, and he put it up in the bedroom, and when we come home at night we hang our keys on the hooks, and he brings his wallet and things upstairs and keeps them on the dresser rather than on the little table downstairs, and I put my purse under Doña's stool that sits next to the bed on my side.

We've only been doing it a week or so, and pretty much every morning I get ready for work, start to leave, and have to come back upstairs to get my purse. Sometimes I go downstairs with it, and have to come back up again for my keys.

Last night I dreamt that I was in New York visiting someone (the only person I know in New York is Misty, but I seemed to be visiting my brother). I had put my purse under the stool next to my bed, then left to drive home, and on the way I was going to go to a job interview. I was driving in a strange place, I had no idea where I was, and the streets were covered in ice. I made a turn and realized that I was driving through a bank drive-through the wrong way, and there were piles and piles of ice, as if they'd moved slush into piles and it had frozen that way.

So I'm driving -- bumping -- over these piles of slush, the wrong way, and I glance over at the passenger seat of the car and realize that I don't have my purse, that I left it in New York under the stool next to the bed. I call my dad (somehow I had my cell phone even though I didn't have my purse), hoping that they haven't left yet (at this point it seemed like we were visiting my grandmother), and asked him to bring my purse home with me. He said he would, and asked me if I was having any trouble finding where I was going.

I said no, no, everything was fine, I was sure I would be able to find it, thinking all the while that there was no WAY I was going to be able to find it. And I was late, too, of course. And then I thought, what am I going on a job interview for anyway? I like my job. I can always go on a job interview later, when (or if) I actually need a new one. That was kind of a revelation. I still didn't know where I was, though.

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