a finished sock upon my lap.

If I die before I wake;

that second sock I won’t have to make.

Through some act of synchronicity I found a copy of The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron at a used bookstore. It has been extremely helpful in giving me something to work through while I sort myself out.

While I haven’t been craft blogging or even crafting that much, I have been writing and drawing and giving myself some time each day to collect my creative flow.

The delicious side effect of this is that my son has suddenly shown an interest in writing and has started keeping his own journal. I have actually had to tell him (the boy who would not write) to go eat his breakfast before handing him his notebook. I’m unspeakably proud of him for taking up writing on his own (and not just because I’ve held his gameboy hostage until his schoolwork is finished.)

I haven’t put forth any serious spinning effort in a while, every once in a while I grab my spindle and work on the reddish brown baby alpaca but the wheel has languished in the closet since August.

Opal knows what it takes to get a girl spinning again and put it all in one care package for me. Caramels, warm hats, comfy socks, and of course yummy roving. Thank you Opal!

Not pictured is the HK notepad, the coolest cabled hat ever (I’m not taking it off) or the caramels (because I’ve eaten them and they were yummy) or the gorgeous bracelet (note to self, buy more batteries for camera.)

Aren’t the amigurumi the cutest ever? Lexi loves them so much (according to Lexi they know all the funniest lines from Finding Nemo, it’s rare to find such movie loving crocheted sea dwellers.)

The roving is called Evil Clown, but spun up I think it is more “kind hearted Gypsy princess” than white faced carnie gone bad.

On other fronts I was called an “elitist b*tch” because I commented on how many knitters and spinners had cool blogs. That’s almost as good as last week when I was called a passive agressive control freak, not sure what that was for, or what the writer hoped to accomplish so I’ll go on assuming that the writer of that message had a psychotic break of some sort. This is the best I can do since I’ve given up on the cussing words.

I was offline just after the inauguration (power outage) but I did watch the inauguration ceremony and President Obama’s speech online prior to the outage and I made some notes when it was was clear I wouldn’t be able to comment until the lights came back on.

First and foremost is that I have a dim recollection of the National Lampoon’s “The lost white house tapes” and I half expected, half hoped that there would be a swearing out ceremony for George W. (perhaps Jesse Jackson could have delivered it.) I was rather disappointed that there was no swearing out ceremony.

Second was that the hot phrase on Fox News, was “a peaceful transition of power”– their correspondents must have said “a peaceful transition of power” at least 20 times in the ten minutes that we actually watched the live feed online. So much so that I figured that Fox had gone with the “If you can’t say anything nice, say nothing at all” bit of wisdom.

MSNBC was much better, and still it was a little creepy coverage-wise. There were many comparisons between Obama and Lincoln and Obama and Kennedy. As nice as those comparisons were, I figure it’s not good luck to compare a newly elected president to two presidents who, when all is said and done, are most famous for being assassinated. Don’t jinxy Obama!

(Yes, I am just superstitious enough.)

Knowing that most people fail to keep their resolutions past 4 weeks is depressing enough and I once read somewhere that February is the busiest time of the year for mortuaries. I’ve connected these two factoids in my mind and have developed a loose conspiracy theory surrounding the inhuman forces behind the tradition of making New Years resolutions, the employment of morticians and those buzzards over at Hallmark using New Years and Valentines days as a refined Machiavellian sort of population control.

Oh yeah, I quit cussing. Not as a resolution, but more or less because my spoken vocabulary has devolved to the point where I can hold my end of a somewhat meaningful conversation using only profanities and a few well placed adjectives. Variety is the spice of a good vocabulary, I can feel new neural pathways forming already.

Oddly enough, using actual acceptable in mixed company words has turned out to be far more interesting than expected. For example, kindly suggesting that a rude driver in the grocery store parking lot participate in some private asexual reproduction or accurately describing a particular computer program as the ignorant illegitamate son of a hog humper when it froze my computer for the g’zillionth time.

Somehow the results of expressing my frustration tend to be somewhat more lurid when actually not using naughty words. I’m pleased with these results, they are silly and irreverant.

Before 1978 US copyright was an opt in system (unless we go back to the first English copyright laws in which case it was mandatory– because the monarchy wanted to know who to blame for certain works produced from that new fangled printing press.) In 1978 artists and writers were given an opt out system, meaning that from the time a piece was created (unless for commission) it automatically belonged to the creator of the work. Sonny Bono did something too, then he died– you’ll have to look it up on Wikipedia because I’m on a roll now.

Jump to now, where there is a legitimate problem with orphaned works, creative works that have no known copyright holder or the known copyright holder is dead without any apparent heirs but do not fall into the current definition of public domain. In an ideal world we (the public) would be able to hunt people down and ask for their permission or give fair use attribution, but this is often a less than ideal world so someone came up with a truly idiotic idea as a solution.

That idiotic idea is the revocation of automatic protection under copyright statutes, unless the creator(s) of a work submit it to a private registry within a period of time and goes easy on copyright infringers that can claim that they tried to find the original owner of a piece.

So if Mary wants to copyright her shawl pattern, under the proposed legislation she needs to pay a fee and register it with a private company (that as yet does not exist) and even if she does that an infringer can come along, create an obviously derivative work, and claim that they tried to track Mary down, but couldn’t so they aren’t liable for any damages to the value of Mary’s work. And if Mary’s name is on the shawl pattern but she didn’t register it (to a private company that does not exist yet) then she’s basically given it into the public domain as an orphaned work.

I don’t know if anyone’s noticed, but we’re primarily a service and entertainment supported country here in the US and this legislation would make it even easier to reduce the value of creative works by bootleggers and not very nice people.

Some links:

Op-ed in the NY Times

Photo advocates divided over Orphan works

Senate Committy OKs Orphan Works Bill

So I wish:

I wish for world peace. I wish people could get the idea across to politicians (from the school board up to the executive branch) that peace starts in the home, in the neighborhood, and in the streets. If we want peace “over there” then we need to work on having it “over here.” (PS Violating and/or ignoring Constitutional rights does not produce peace anywhere at any time, nor does a police/nanny-state produce peace.)

I wish for slow news days, fair elections, and the front page coverage of cute baby animals from around the world.

I wish for affordable housing, wholesome food, and extravagant displays of art for everyone.

I wish the advancements of science and technology take more attention than the latest news of Paris Hilton. I wish Paris Hilton would find something useful to do with her existence.

I wish the public schools could complain of all the extra money (from private donations, not taxes) they have to assign to art, science, math, music, and life skills programs.

I wish for more bicycles on the streets, more trees in the cities, and more music everywhere.

I wish all of you a happy, peaceful and prosperous New Year.

Here’s a screen cap of the pics on the auction for my new guitar. Don’t you love it? I like the Sex Pistols-esque “Hello Kitty” on the back. There was much debate on which was better for me, the pink or the black version, the font decided it all.

It’s a little disturbing and quite sweet that a concerned person emailed me to say that playing a Hello Kitty guitar might undermine my legitimacy and seriousness as a musician. At first I thought it was a joke. Then I realized this person has kindly overestimated my musical potential and emailed back explaining that legitimacy and seriousness are not things I’m known for musically.

For the record, I have a Hello Kitty waffle maker and I take waffles very seriously.

So what’s with the Hello Kitty stuff anyway?

Everything has a threshold, pass that threshold at the end of the spectrum and you flip into the extreme of the other side.

At one point in time all I wanted was a pair of black Chuck Taylors, a pair of Levi jeans that didn’t flair at the ankle and a gray and pink sweater. I got the Chucks. Then I got orthodic inserts which meant I couldn’t wear the Chucks, a leg brace, bifocals, orthodontic gear and back brace. Oh yeah, and my parents were in the middle of a bitter divorce.

There is no cool when you hit that point. It’s just cold.

I knew that, I gave up even trying. I picked a pair of Buddy Holly frames because they were the cheapest. I started buying pants at the military surplus store because they were not only cheap but because they concealed the leg brace. The shoes I wore (which I really had no choice, they were the only ones that were my size that could fit orthodics and my narrow feet) were ugly bulky British manufactured work boots and oxfords.

At this point in my life my favorite things included 4-H for dairy goats, home economics, reading, watching Monkees reruns, swimming and trying not to get beat up. Then I saw her. Hello Kitty. At age eleven I didn’t care about irony. I was just thinking how cute the t-shirt transfers bearing the pink maneki neko were.

I bought them.

I took them home and carefully transfered the happy Hello Kitty onto some t-shirts that I’d tye-dyed with the little kids when I volunteered to help at church day camp.

Hello Kitty made me smile.

Later, Hello Kitty and kawai stuff became sort of an in-joke. The back of my motorcycle jacket was painted with a pink Kitty-like skull, Misfits style, by a friend in high school. Kitty’s face was sandblasted into the headlight of my Norton Mk3 by the body shop guy I worked for one summer. My kayak was Kitty pink.

Sometimes my hair is Kitty pink. I have the aforementioned HK waffle iron, plus bento box, and Pez dispensers. I have a few kitty hair combs. I want to buy the Kitty sewing machine for the kids.

Hello Kitty still makes me smile.

I will never be accused of selling my soul at the crossroads.

I played dulcimer in church and trumpet in school band. I wanted to play violin at church and flute in the band, but as you may have guessed; my parents hated me. Want to get your kid beat up at school and church? A dulcimer is the way to go.

My voice was not produced to make the sweet plaintive music of the raths and hills, to float like slow smoke over the ruins of forts and lodges and grass hay fields to sweeten the very sky. My bardic ancestors bequeathed me little in that way.

I can play Yellow Submarine on a ukulele, along with a handful of blues riffs– and much to the horror of my immediate family I am willing to do so, if given occasion or excuse, in public. Although I’ve failed to master Chuck Berry’s harmonized slide technique on any other instrument, it sounds great on the ukulele.

I think that I’m the only one of my circle who failed to learn the intro of “Stairway to Heaven” on the guitar when we were kids. I had a little acoustic guitar that I practiced on, but it was cheap and Oregon is humid and the neck bent so that I had to tune the stupid thing every two minutes. I cursed it then, but I am really good at tuning to this day, so at least it wasn’t a wasted effort.

My husband has purchased a guitar for me and I’m eagerly awaiting it’s arrival. I believe the Fed-Ex guy is a little scared of me, as I run out when the truck pulls up and ask “Is it here? It’s about this long and it’s from Massachusetts. Are you sure? Have you even looked in your truck?!”

A little obsessive? Me? Noo. Not me.

My very own Fender. On it’s way. To me.

My very own black Fender. Stratocaster.

My very own black Fender with a Hello Kitty pick guard.

In the words of the immortal Eric Cartman: “Super sweet”

At first it was because I knew I could purchase raw and processed fiber cheaper than finished yarn, and because I knew that I could spin yarn. Having more time than money, it seemed like a good idea. Just emerging from the infancy of my knitting habit and reeling from a little sticker shock of non-plastic yarn, I decided to revisit spinning.

Then there’s the warmth aspect. Not physical warmth, but emotional warmth. A batch of homemade cookies are inevitably yummier than store bought. Yarn is the same way. Yarn is yummier when it comes off of the spindle or wheel, it has a warmth that isn’t the attribute of physical properties.

Hand spun yarn is a little bohemian, a little earth child, and a little punk rock. The DIY ethic at large, instead of protesting commercialism or going anti-consumerism, hand spinning is doing something that is self sufficient and ends with obvious results. Don’t we all want to support something positive and see something from it instead of protesting anything negative with negligible results?

Smaller financial choices have larger personal impact. This is an odd one, when we choose to buy a fleece or send wool out for processing, or buy hand painted roving we are supporting small farms and cottage industries. In this way our cash is more valuable than merely another dollar to a large corporation, we’re helping a mom stay at home or keeping a rare breed of sheep in grain and care, or employing 5 people at the mini-mill and preserving a tradition while expanding the art. That feels like a better way to spend my dollar.

Hand spun yarn is unique, each different yarn has a personality of its own (especially for new spinners.) And hand spun, when it’s worked up, keeps that individuality.

Okay, enough contemplation for me. I have to stop typing and start spinning again. (That’s a good thing.)

Yup. “Cricket!”

It’s the nicest way to say “Hey I’m reading your blog, don’t have anything to say or can’t add anything to the conversation at this point, but here I am.”

Cricket!

Genius.