(Does your Mother Goose say “Jiggity Jig?”  Mine never did.)

Back from Utah, tired but happy.

The llamas and dogs and people we love out there are all well.  We had unusually cold weather, which I liked.  And we ventured into Colorado–my first visit there.

That post about photography may have been prescient. Something went very wrong with my camera when we were in Canyon Pintado.  It may be possible to retrieve the photos I took up to that point, but it may not.  Now is not the time to try.  Cross your fingers for me–there are some good llama photos on that afflicted memory stick.

Otherwise, books were read, food was cooked and eaten, drinks were drunk, birds were watched, llamas were led, dogs were petted and thumped, and knitting was accomplished on a Fleece Artist sweater (which will bear discussion) and a lace stocking (which I ripped out and restarted as a lace sock because sometimes math is  so much better than real disappointment),

If I go out of my way to do anything, it’s to travel with and to see friends, particularly if it means we’ll be together away from television and computers and work and all of those things that get in the way of people really looking each other in the eye and hearing each other speak. 

A few weeks ago I was at John the Farrier’s with my tribe, celebrating Beltaine and welcoming home one of our members who had been far too far away in far too dangerous a place for a year. 

Before that I was in Chicago, dancing and listening to tunes with friends who I can normally only reach over wires. 

Last weekend, I was with some of my favorite women in the world on the Potomac Delta, watching Osprey hunt, and singing, and laughing hysterically for hours on end. 

In a few days, Scott and I are flying to Utah to see his family, their dogs, and the llamas-in-law. 

In all cases, I stay away from screens and electronics as much as I can.  I always chastise myself for forgetting to take pictures, or treating photography and journaling as homework or chores when I’m on these trips.  But in the moment, a lens on a gadget, or a pen and a book just seem like they distance me from the people I’m trying to be with.  So I could post a photo I don’t think captures what I’m trying to say to you, but I won’t.  I’ll try to remember to take just the right photo out west, and if I get close I’ll paste it in later.  If I don’t, you’ll have to settle for my words this time. 

In the meantime, I’ll be scrambling to set up a couple of gigs with Tethera and our annual group trip to Celtic summer camp, while simultaneously trying to dig out from the remodel and maybe paint a couple of walls in my sleep. The next time I complain about being too busy, please remind me that the busy spells precede and follow journeys, and that it’s all for the best.

The guys laid the last of the floor yesterday afternoon and are taking a break from us to go work on some strangers’ floor for a little while.  In the interim, we’re going to try to get some more painting done and to get things back in order.  I’m also going to try to get rid of at least half of our property.

So, here is proof of our toil, and our willingness to paint with real, saturated color.  The library is a lovely, deep orange.  The curtains aren’t going in until I paint the windows and closet doors, but they’re the same deep blue linen drapes we’ve had for a long time, and I think they’ll look wonderful against those saturated walls.

I took some measurements, and we’re still short of shelf space.  I’ve managed to winnow out six books.  It nearly made me have a panic attack.  I’ll try again in a few days.  We are making space in the shelves in the living room by finally letting go of our CD cases, but we’ll still be short of shelving space in all of the rooms.  How do people handle this?  Random book collection decimation?

Next, I give you the completed bath, and the tile I love like no other.

The white tub, tile, and trim make me very very happy, as does the double shower rod–I use this bathroom most of the time and it’s also our guest bath, and there were never enough places to hang towels before.  On the right, you can see the great stain match Mike got between the bamboo floors and the new pine closet doors.  The hallway wall isn’t showing its true color there–the green is a bit richer and deeper, but not dark.  It will also be going on most of the living room walls.

This doesn’t really show the wall color accurately either, but it does demonstrate how well we matched the woods to the dog.  Kayo is glad that the nail gun has left the building.  He is opposed to nailing, and nails, and people who are doing things other than playing with him.  And he thinks cameras are stupid as soon as he remembers they don’t dispense treats.

Now look at the stairs with the floor. Just look at that!  How did he do that?  He matched 40 year old oak stair treads to brand new bamboo.  How?  The mind boggles (ignore the ugliness of the risers–they’ll turn pretty soon).

The rooms upstairs are further from completion.  Everything from both rooms is stuffed into one side of the bedroom.  We still need to pick a paint color for the bedroom and the  stairwell.  I want it all to be blue.  I also might want my studio to be blue, at least in part.

Have I mentioned I’m almost as bad about blue as I am about green?  I realized a couple of days ago that I have apparently been plotting this whole color scheme of this remodel around my own and Scott’s coloring, what with the blue-eye blues and green-eye green and the dark brown and the deep orange (I have freckles and an orangey-brown nevis in one eye–not jaundice).  That may be the most narcissistic thing I have ever done, but at least it started out as an accident.  I’m going to try not to focus on that though, and just work on convincing Scott that blue and green paints are good paints.  Because, really, what other colors do people paint things?  I already  used orange and yellow, and a deep red stairwell is not going to feel safe to me.

I clearly need a nap.  I’m heading to our annual women’s beach trip this weekend.  Maybe one of my artsy pals can snap me out of the blue and green thing before I buy more paint.

I’ve been studying Ireland in particular and the Celtic world in general–from Paleolithic to Present–for almost as long as I remember.  I’m sure I’ve dedicated more hours to my subject than the average medical or law student has to theirs.  And yet I can’t really explain why.  I’m often asked to.  There aren’t many people immersed in the sort of cultural studies I undertake, particularly when said studies pay less than a penny on the hour, all told, and when they’ve been misrepresented and cheated so often by American pop culture.  To many people, Ireland is no more than green beer and fake accents in bad commercials.  They put it on like a bad Halloween costume, and discard it again as carelessly.

There are the answers I give people at cocktail parties–I fell in love with the mythology, and then the music, and then the literature and language and history and archeology, and haven’t looked back since.  Which is all true, but far from the whole truth.

When I’m being honest–which I think most of us are trying to at least play at with our blogs–I say that studying Ireland, at least at first, felt like some sort of replacement for the side of the family that abandoned us.  I can’t have and really don’t want a relationship with my actual father.  But I want some connection to that missing half of my family, and I guess it feels safer to build a bridge to a long dead ancestor than to an aunt or uncle who just never bothered to try to hold on.  Some strange sense of pride or betrayal made my paternal grandfather try to take our name from my brother and me when my Mom left my father, and I’ve clung tightly to that surname and some birthright I thought it entailed.  Later, that grandfather tried to reconnect with us once he realized how destructive his eldest son was and how right my Mother was to leave him, for us.   But theirs will never be my family reunions.  I see my name attached to some genetic relative now and again–all of the people in the US with my name are direct relatives–and just once had the chance to talk to a distant cousin who had no knowledge of my personal family’s sundering.  It was strange and exciting, and it happened because my name was in a program at a Celtic Festival where I was performing.

And then, studying Celtic cultures is something I can share with my step-father, he who regularly insists that I picked the wrong country to focus on.  He is the child of a Scottish immigrant, and he introduced us to the festival scene that ended up entangling me so fully.  We picked different eras to study, and my obsession with music isn’t something he can truly share, but bridies and bagpipes would be glue enough to connect us as friends even without our shared love for our family.

On some level, I’ve always felt like a traitor for focusing so much of my energy on the culture I wasn’t exposed to by my Mother’s family, whom I have always  known and loved as my own and only.  Why isn’t “I” for Italy in my mind?  Why didn’t German culture appeal?  It don’t think the stain of WWII stopped me from focusing more on either, because my Mom’s family was all here at the beginning of the 20th century and railed against the the modern countries that wrought that horrifying war.   Maybe it’s a Jungian response–a desperate grab at some collective unconscious I’ve been sequestered from.  I do worry sometimes that I’ll outgrow it, and then feel a fool when someone asks me what my MA is in . . . many many people already react to my resume as if it says “BA in artsy-fartsy with a side of teaching, MA in cliches and boredom.”  But no–my obsession carries on.

Because, whyever and however I fell for Eireann, I fell hard, and my love abides.  The tunes and language and literature feel like home as they rattle around in my skull.  The history–even after all these years of study–enthralls me, and appalls me, and sends me from worried insomnia to ecstatic reverie as I study it. I own it.  I need it.  I lived there, and swam in those waters, and ate food from Ireland’s soil, and hope to do so again and again.  I toy with the  idea of seeking dual citizenship, despite the fact that doing so would bar me from a fairly large percentage of the jobs that are available to me here in my current home.

In short, Is leor don dreoilín a nead, agus Níl aon sceal eile orm.

Middlesex: A Novel by Jeffrey Eugenides.

I try to try to read all of the big prizewinning novels.  I loved The Virgin Suicides, and decided to hold off on reading this one for a little while until I knew I could savor it.  And savor it I did.  I think, with this one, Eugenides has written a defining boom of an age.  I know that sounds ridiculously grandiose, but the novel is astoundingly good. 

The book is an intricate, beautifully researched and written novel about Greece, Smyrna,  family, war, silk, race, civil rights, Detroit, prohibition, gender, sex, and genetics.   The  scope seems unmanageable, but Eugenides pulls it off with grace and compassion and specificity.  I know I’ll read it again.  I’m tempted to read it again right now. 

Remember when I used to talk about books?  Yeah, me too.  I got very very distracted by Books For Ears and the ABC Along, and the remodel, and stopped talking to you about my regular reading.  But I have been reading,  And I will tell you about it. 

But, for now, I’m packing up my studio , because the guys are going to start installing the floor upstairs tomorrow.  And I’m unpacking my library, which now has a very fetching shade of orange on the walls.  And realizing that we really have a lot of books and a lot of fiber and yarn and fabric. 

And I’m falling hard for the green that’s going on the walls in our living room, and trying to puzzle out what color to put on the walls in the stairwell and the small landing upstairs, and the bedroom, and what to paint in the studio . . . everything is about choosing colors and appreciating the work our friends are doing for us.  I feel like a very bad gardener though, and am not sure if I’ll be able to make up the time in the dirt I’ve lost this spring. 

I say house, because it doesn’t ever really feel like home when you’re in the midst of a remodel.  We bought our house in 2000, not long after we got engaged and decided that buying a house was far more important than throwing a wedding right away. It’s a 1,500 square foot Cape Cod-ish (no fireplace = not really a Cape Cod) house, built in 1970.  The 1970 really showed, so we knew all along that this was a fixer upper.  We started working on the kitchen a year or two after we bought the place, and it took forever because we did most of the work with the help of family and without  much professional help.  This time around, we decided to hire some good friends to replace most of the floors and give the downstairs bath a major face lift while Scott and I handle simple stuff like repainting most of the rooms and shuffling our stuff from room to room so the guys can work.  Scheduling, of course, is tough. 

I’ll skip the before photos–the old carpets were beige and nasty.  The old bathroom had an odd pink tub and 1″x1″ pink and white glittery tiles, but the glitter had tarnished, and there were some obvious problems with the wall behind the shower tiles and tub. I had put a pretty cool mosaic on the old bathroom counter, but then the sink got a bad crack in it during  a party, and there was no way to replace the sink without destroying the counter.  That’s
when I started lobbying really loudly to gut the bathroom. 

I came home from Chicago a couple of weeks ago to find that our friends and contractors Mike and Ben had started demo on the bath. Now, we’re down to the finish work.  That tile on the floor is fantastic.  I love it like I love cake.  The pictures do not do it justice.  Scott and I still have some touch-up painting to do in there, and we need to add the blinds and towel bars and all those touches.

With the bathroom close to completion, the guys moved on to the rest of the floors.  We’re installing bamboo floors in all but the bathrooms, kitchen, and laundry.  I am absolutely enamored of the bamboo. 

And it looks great with our kitchen floor, even before the transition piece is in.

Now we have a lot of a paint colors to choose, and a lot of stuff to move from room to room to room as the work progresses.   It’s hard work, and I may have just broken a toe in a tragic run-in with a step stool.   Kayo and the cats disapprove of all of the work, of course.  Kayo expressed his disapproval on Thursday by running away, in fact, so we’re making cookies for the charming woman who took care of him until she could get in touch with us. 

So, back to working on our house.

I may have a problem.

When I was visiting Juno a few months ago, I bought some gorgeous hand-dyed Lobster Pot Cashmere yarn in a soft green.  I held off as long as I could, but decided to bring the yarn with me to work on when I went to Chicago last weekend.  And then I gorged on it.  I would have swallowed the skeins whole if I didn’t think someone would call me on it.

This is Branching Out.   You can’t see from these dark photos how pretty the subtle color changes are in the yarn, but I think this is a great pattern for the yarn.  It allowed me to use as much yarn as possible, to make something really wearable, and to wear it where my skin will truly benefit from its warmth and softness.  Ahhhhhh.

When last I wrote, I was talking about that lovely trip to Chicago I took last weekend.  On Sunday, Meg and I went to a great quilt show.  I was overwhelmed both by the marketplace (they were preying on my weakness for batik and Asian textiles, those sneaks!) and by the quilts on display.  I was astounded by the talent of the quilters showing.  I was paying a lot of attention to the use of black, to scale, and to the downright mania-inducing tiny patchwork some of these artisans engage in.  I’d never been to a quilt show before, and it was mind-blowing.  Photos of quilts never do them justice, and the people showing were brilliant technicians and great artists.  I hope I can come within a mile of their skills one day.

A  quick note–all of the quilts I photographed were open for photography.  At this quilt show, there were very clear signs displayed on a number of  quilts requesting that they not be photographed.  This is just a small percentage of the fantastic work that was on display.

There was a segment of the show dedicated to architecture in quilting, and another on photo-realistic florals.

This chicken quilt greeted us on the way it–it won the day.  And this fantastic embroidery?  Yeah, that’s the back of a quilt.

I fell in love with this crow quilt.  Of course I did.  The purples and blues in the birds themselves, and the branches.  Wow.

And the crazy-making patchwork . . . some people have so much more patience and dedication than I do . . .

And, well, frogs play cards.  This was from a competition where quilters were challenged to use a specific line of fabrics as inspiration.  Gold star, I say.  Though black fabric mixed with batik and hand-dyed fabric was my obsession of the day.  Look at how those colors pop.

And then there were the reds.

It was just all so good.  I’m afraid I’ve already crushed your browsers with photos, so I’ll stop.

After the quilt show,  Meg was off to staff a show at the Old Town School of Folk Music and Jonathan and I went to a pub where he was playing in an Irish session.  And the wonderful Rachel came to hang out and listen to tunes and chat.  We’ve been online pen pals for years now, and last weekend was the first time we got to actually sit together and talk.  What a blast!  Listening to a friend play great tunes while talking about other great music with another far-flung friend . . . that’s a good way to spend a Sunday night.

Monday morning, Meg and I got to go to Rachel’s bookstore and see the spot it’s moving to sometime soon, and then all three of us had a nice lunch.  It was tough to get on that plane back to Dulles.  Can one of you come up with a cheap teleportation method now, please?  It would make this friends-all-over-the-place thing much easier to handle.

Right–back to the remodel.  We have a new tub and most of the tiling is done.  Now we’re moving furniture so the floors can go it and vacillating over paint chips.  I have to face packing up all of the books and my studio, and figure out what I can knit in the meantime.

Last weekend, I went out west to visit with Two Sock Knitters, and another Sock Knitter, and a whole passel of contra dancers.  The University of Chicago hosted a fantastic dance weekend, complete with the fantastic bands Cosmic Otters and Nightingale, and the amazing callers Adina Gordon and George Marshall.  We went to tons of yarn shops, a quilt show, three of the four contra dances the weekend provided, restaurants, Irish sessions–I haven’t caught my breath yet. 

We get the fun started with a trip to The Fold.  Of course we did–how could we not.  Jonathan got some spinning pointers from Toni, and Meg and I dedicated ourselves to supporting small business in the greater Chicagoland area. 

Toni has a thing or two worth considering on offer, in case you haven’t had a chance to stop by.

As usual, I didn’t take enough photos, and many of the ones I did take aren’t great.  Our surroundings for the dance weekend were beyond compare, though.  The university’s buildings are gorgeously ornate.  Even the locks were gorgeous. 

The stairs were worth the price of admission.

And the dancing and music?  Hot.  Inspirational.  Astoundingly good.   What a dance weekend. 

As if I wasn’t happy enough with all of these things, both bands included footwork in their sound.  Ahhhhhhh.  These are Keith’s feet during Nightingale’s Friday night dance.  I couldn’t take pictures on Saturday night because I had too much dancing to do.

I’ll tell you about the quilt show and my visit with another sock knitter next.  Now, I need to go prepare for the continued remodel here at our home sweet home and count the days till my next chance to dance.  Soon, I’ll be able to dance on my own floors for the first time in years AND I’ll be rid of the biggest source of allergies in my life.  The mere thought is making my eyes well up with tears of joy.   Get on your feet, and tune up your instruments, people, because the floor is going to catch fire under your toes if I have anything to say about it.

G is for gardening. 

I come from a long line of people who like to play in the dirt.  I feel like I never get enough time in the garden, between my crazy commute and my copious hobbies.  But when I do get down into the mud, I love it. 

I love blooms, and berries, and herbs, and vegetables as much as any gardener does.  But I plant and tend for the love the growth itself, and of transition.    Watching  a favorite perennial emerge from the soil is a gift every single time.   Or finding a sport that traveled from a neighbor’s garden or across the yard. 

I love taking part in this annual bargain with my plants–I offer them shelter and care, and they return year in and year out, breaking through the soil to fill whatever niche in our landscape.  I’ve had this Cranesbill since I was 18, and have moved transplant after transplant from one home to another since I first planted it. 

I love the decline and the deliquesce as well–gathering the fallen leaves and composting them, and harvesting compost wriggling with earthworms.  I’m a dyed in the wool tree-hugging, dirt-worshiper.