Birthdays and Endings

My DH had a really nice birthday. He had requested a Candy Cane pie, so I picked one of those up first thing in the morning. I gave him my replacement iPod from the replacement I got after my iPod bit the dust at Thanksgiving (it seems so long ago - LOL). He's really looking forward to dumping some CD's onto it, so I'll set up an iTunes account for him and teach him how to use his iPod on Sunday. It's always a chore to teach him how to use new features, but I think he really wants to do this so it might work - LOL.

This is M27, also called the Dumbbell Nebula. Take a look at it. It's beautiful, isn't it? This, by best estimates, is what our own Sun will look like after it explodes in the future. We'll contribute to the beauty of the universe. Personally, I think that's simply marvelous. So I'm sharing my joy with all of you today. Have a phenomenal day today!

Beauty and the Beast

No, I am not placing myself in the Beauty definition above.  I know myself all too well and I haven't qualified for "beauty", at least in body, for many years.  But the video I am linking to here...

http://vimeo.com/24253126

this qualifies as beauty.  In the extreme.  I think I could watch this 1000 times and never grow tired of it. 

This picture of beauty and the beast is by

staje on deviant art.  Wonderful work!



The beast, on the other hand, well that's fairly self-explanatory.  Apparently since we haven't had a great deal of time to discuss my trip to Milwaukee, I'm being "tricksy" again and hiding things again.  Then we decided to cook shish-k-bob for our dinner on the 4th, picked up the meat and a sesame-ginger marinade, and various veggies.  I was going to cut things up...but NO.  Apparently I would do it all wrong.  I also should have purchased a red pepper instead of the green one and the marinade that I chose was questionable.  Such drek!  I'm so tired of his believing that I never do anything right.  *sigh*  I'm just counting the days until I leave for MCWC at the end of the week, because I think I really need a break. 

Progress---But Still More to Come

I worked on my beadwork quite hard yesterday and finished the foreground, beginning work on the stars.  The entire starfield needs to be beaded, but this is random and non-patterned.  It still is a large expanse of fabric, though, that needs to be covered.  I like the way that it is looking, though, it has a subtle sparkle that will augment the glue-on Swarovski crystals that will also be placed eventually.  I want to take one more close look at the cosmography of Middle Earth before I glue on the crystals - I actually want to have the "Sickle" and perhaps the "Warrior" constellations pictured in my sky. 

I also wired up my etched copper yesterday.  After the disk had been cruel to my wire twice before by breaking my wire when I tried to tighten the spans, I had grabbed my round needle file and filed each of the holes from both sides.  This time I had success and didn't break my wires.  So, it was a successful studio day and I'm ready to dive back into shop work later this morning.  I have enough remaining to do that I will still be carrying my project back and forth from work and trying to get one hour or a bit more of beading finished every morning.  Have a creative day!

Coupons and Projects

Is anything better than a coupon from a well-loved store? I simply live for my coupons from Barnes & Noble Booksellers and from Dick Blick's Art Supplies. Last night, to take advantage of a Dick Blick's coupon for 30% off a single, standard priced item, DH and I made a night of it. We were originally going to have a quick dinner at home and then go to the store. But DH phoned me at work and suggested that we go to the store first and then he would take me out for pizza. Hard to beat that! So I picked up the supplies that I needed for Chickie's holiday gift, he picked up some modeling clay for his sculpting, and we had an awesome pizza afterwards (which reflected on the scale this morning-so it's time to be careful about what I eat again for a few days). Now I can get to work designing the works for Chickie's gift. It'll be fun!

I showed my almost-finished cloisonnae disks of Telperion and Laurelin to DH last night. He says I have something to learn about the anatomy of trees (LOL), but I'm very happy with them. I hope to get some photos up here for people to see within a week or so.

I have two projects in the works for when the disks are complete. I have the piece for Chickie's holiday gift, and I have a much larger piece that I want to do in pierced copper called "Vision of the Straight Road". DH printed out a reference photo for me last night and I also downloaded lots of reference pieces to look at before I sit down with a sketchbook. I've actually sketched a couple of possible versions over the past few days, but I need to start getting a bit more serious about the layout. I think I'll be putting this into one of the mahogany frames that I've acquired, so that gives me my dimensions. It's fairly large, though. So piecing will be necessary since I have such a small kiln. Have a wonderful weekend!

Stars and Song

Thank you to Hubble. Not the person (although he deserves thanks in the field of Astronomy and physics) but the telescope. Every day I wake up to an astronomy picture of the day (see the link to the right in my blog) and over the years, the 1000's of pictures that I have in books, calendars and have seen on-line have helped to make my days more pleasant. Not because they are so wonderful to look at, but because somewhere, somehow, there was something beyond all of my conception that allowed this to exist in all of its' multidimensional glory. Wow. I consider the stars to be the visual of a Song - the Song of creation.

That Song of life pulses through everything - there is a deep rhythm that underlies the universe. Some scientists might consider it to be the vibration of a molecule, or perhaps the undulation of the strings in string theory. I look at it as music - Divine Music - the Song. These vibrant notes, beyond the ability of mere humans to hear, underlie all within the universe. And the Song is, in essence, Love. I think it was Dante who ended his Divine Comedy with the belief that it is the Eternal Spirit - Love - that moves the stars and causes them to dance and sing (paraphrased). So, through Hubble, we have all been privileged to see this divine dance and see the underlying Song. And now that Hubble has been fixed, upgraded, and released once more, we will again have the opportunity to see phenomena that were never dreamed of by our ancestors. Thanks are completely inadequate, but all that I can do. I look forward to many more years of inspiration and introspection brought about by the views from Hubble.

Musings

Today as I awakened, I had been dreaming of standing in the center of a night-time garden, looking at a vault of luminescent stars above while the scents of flowers surrounded me. I didn't want to wake up. I wanted to turn 'round and 'round, getting dizzy with the awe of the beauty of the night sky. It is a sight that I have only seen a few times in my life. Where humans go, light follows, and light is the enemy of the nighttime sky. Without a doubt there is something wonderful about cresting a hill and looking upon a sea of colorful lights below where the city lies. The nightime views of Los Angeles that have been imprinted on generations of movie and television viewers are wonderful - the gridlines of white and red lights that appear on the freeways, the pools of vertical lights where the skyscrapers thrust high. I grew up with a similar vision when we would pull away from the western Rocky Mountains to enter the Denver area. It always took my breath away. But man has nothing on the stars.

So, in this time when Stephen Hawking is seriously ill, I will celebrate the stars. I am always amazed that there are so many of them. Millions, billions, trillions, and more. And how often can we really see them in all of their glory? So rarely that we have shut ourselves off from them and forgotten their glory. We have hidden away from the night in fear and have tinged it with the touch of evil. It is not the night that is dangerous and filled with evil. It is that we are creatures of the light. I adore the light and need the sun to be happy. But I forgot that the night also has its' charms - that I can look up and see the most tremendous lights of creation above me in wide swaths across the sky. I hope that someday, before I die and go to dance with the stars myself, that I can find at least one time when I am in a locale without light pollution and with a cloudless sky where I can just lay back and immerse myself in their song. Can you hear it?....

Light Pollution - The Price of Progress?

I love the stars. I have a link to the Astronomy Picture of the Day in the right-hand banner of my blog, and I start every day by clicking on this link and viewing some of the magnificence of the universe. They had a picture two days ago from Mauna Kea that was indescribably beautiful. As you move through the picture from left to right, you are left totally mesmerized by the heavens above. Why aren't we all out looking at our amazing panorama nightly? Light pollution. I live in the city. There are many advantages to living in the city, and I'm not sure I'm brave enough to become a country girl on a full-time basis. But living in the country, closer to nature and further from the city lights, allows you to see this wonderful painting of the sky. I've been in the country and far away from "civilization", but usually even in the far away places, there are some lights somewhere that are affecting the view. Light pollution has cut us off from our origins and turned our focus to a very small area from the vastness above.

People will translate that small, insular look of their surroundings to their immediate environment. We build shelter because we don't want to be exposed to all of the rain, snow, cold and other less than wonderful weather. We also build shelter for protection from other people and security for items that we cherish (items that are starting to get out of control for so many of us). The same thing can happen on the psychic level. We can build shelters for our mind (or our art). We erect walls for comfort, deciding that we will create within those walls. In extreme cases we can even build a full structure. But a creative person will view the walls and roof with suspicion and will, when able, blow up the roof and collapse the walls - creating their art "outside the box". I'm not fond of trite sayings, but it does seem that mankind is more comfortable inside a box than outside, and the challenge of any artist is twofold: 1) Get yourself out of your own personal box of comfort and create something entirely new, and 2) Through this artwork of your creation, chip away at the walls that others are creating to allow them to experience the joy that the panorama of the heavens allows. Turn off your personal light pollution and revel in the larger universe of creation. Valar valuvar.

Back to Real Life

Well, Christmas is over, the gifts are opened and Ooohed and AHHHed over, and the food and cookies have been eaten (with WAY too much food still waiting for it's turn). I finally got a chance to catch up on some sleep which was VERY appreciated. And I promise that I will take some photographs of what I made for my DH quite soon and show all of you how they turned out.

I had a wonderful day. It was pleasant to sleep in, wonderful to open gifts from friends and family, and generally I have items now that will keep me involved for the next year - books and DVDs. I'm already nose-deep in my first volume of the History of Middle Earth, so I'm very happy indeed.

I hope that all of you had a wonderful Christmas if that is the holiday that you celebrate. If your holiday is still on-going or upcoming, I wish you peace, love, and the joy of family on your own special day of giving. Mitakuye Oyasin (a Lakota blessing meaning "we are all related").

Friday - Another Week Closer to Ending

Today is Friday. For most people it means the last work day of the week. For me it means that the next two days of work will be shorter - but I will still be at work . This season is SO long!!! So even though I am fighting time to get everything finished and gifted or shipped on time, I will be SO happy to see the end of the season again and have a day off on Christmas Day.

Tonight will be joyful for me though. If the skies are clear, I will be able to see the largest full moon of the year rising at sunset tonight. I love the moon - when I was very young I called it my own. Having the moon shine through my windows at night while I was a child was amazingly comforting. Rather like a signal of hope and love - to have the light in the nighttime as well as the light in the day. I adore the stars also. However, I have noticed serious light pollution. I think, sometime before I die, I want to visit someplace in the world where they don't have light pollution so that I can see the sky in its' full glory. The way that the Creator intended us to see the stars before we turned night into day and threw our circadian rhythms into complete trash.