Ideas and Decisions

Wow... over two months since my last post!  I'm sorry, life got away from me and I'm just now catching up.

Etsy’s question of the day on Facebook today asked “What are you most afraid of?” Most people answered with typical things like snakes, heights, spiders, clowns, some rational and some irrational.  My greatest fear when I was younger was rejection or disapproval, either by the “cool kids” or my parents or teachers.  That fear steered me into a lot of self-criticism, low self-esteem, and bad relationships based on the fact that I didn’t think I deserved anything better, regardless of what anyone else told me.  As I got older and realized how defeating and untrue that was, my fear of rejection morphed into something else: a fear of being merely ordinary.  My greatest fear now is to one day look back on a humdrum unsatisfying life devoid of all things extraordinary.  Granted, I still hold myself to (often unrealistically) high standards, and the things that I would consider satisfying and extraordinary don’t necessarily fall into those categories for everyone, but my life is my life, no one else’s.  Does everyone take pride and satisfaction in a home-cooked meal? No, but I certainly do.  It’s one of the little things that reminds me how to really live.

It’s easy to get caught up in the minutae of everyday life.  It’s easy to drown in to-do lists, especially this time of year, and I’m horribly guilty of that.  It’s easy to grab fast food or a pre-packaged overly processed “dinner,” “forget” to go to the gym or turn on the exercise video, and slug out in front of the television for the rest of the evening because the rest of the day was so exhausting. It’s easy to stay in the rut of a job that doesn’t use you to your full potential, especially in this economic climate.  It’s easy to let your hectic lifestyle drown your personality.  It’s easy to let your passions die if they’re not convenient.

It’s easy to get caught up in emotional causes like the Occupy movement but stop short of doing anything to make a difference.  I do support the movement because of the underlying belief that money shouldn’t speak louder than a person’s vote and I applaud those who are actually working to make the movement worthwhile.  There are some who are turning it into a gripe-fest and some on the other side who refuse to acknowledge the true goals of the protestors, which just leads to more nonproductive finger-pointing.  Luckily, there are many people involved that are trying to keep things nonviolent and productive so I hope things continue that way.  I am taking the energy of the movement personally to challenge myself and make my life feel worthwhile.  I have taken the stories of the 99% to heart, not as collective whining as some would call it but as solidarity and comfort that I’m not the only one struggling here and many of them have it far worse than I do. 

The fact that I’m struggling like millions of others doesn’t give me an excuse to abandon my passions and sit around complaining.  My job is good enough for now, and will get better when other peoples’ fortunes improve and they can bring in more insurance policies, but it doesn’t define me.  Luckily it’s regular and I know exactly what my paychecks will be.  Symphony started up again and we just had our first concert of the season, so it’s nice to be playing again.  I auditioned on French Horn for the concert coming up in April, but it turns out they might move me to that section before then.  One of the current members lives nearby so she and I will be getting together to play duets, which could open up opportunities for holiday gigs, as well as with the rest of the horn section.  It’s really good to be playing again and especially nice that there are opportunities for it opening up before my eyes.

As part of these decisions I’ve been making, I had to cancel violin lessons with my little student.  She was finally doing really well and I miss her, but her parents both work on the railroad so their schedules were just too crazy for them to commit to anything.  Lessons were getting cancelled left and right, and sometimes they’d just forget about it and leave home, so I’d show up to an empty house.  I don’t have the passion for teaching, I learned that in college, and I had taken on this one student to see how things went, mostly out of obligation for trying to make any money with music.  That’s the one thing that EVERYONE suggests when I say I’m a musician… “Why don’t you teach?” (I have a long answer for that one… don’t get me started!)  It had gotten to the point where the flakiness of the parents was regularly disrupting my day and I just couldn’t be okay with that anymore.  It comes down to them making decisions for their daughters and it’s not my place to be critical of their parenting, but every week it became my problem.  Instead, I have now blocked off Monday mornings solely for writing music.  It’s difficult, since I’m used to running all kinds of errands on Mondays and getting as much done as I can during business hours, but it’s an exercise in self-discipline that I need if my writing is ever going to go anywhere.  What better time to work on it than now, when I’m only working part-time?  My goal is to apply for a state Arts grant in the spring and I need a body of work to show them, plus I need to be in a good routine of writing regularly enough to actually earn that grant.  More on that later.

Where does this leave my jewelry business? Nowhere.  It’s a hobby that basically keeps up with costs and I can make gifts for people instead of buying them.  That’s worth it, for now.  I may bump it up when I can, but I can’t make it a higher priority than my music. 

Today I’ve also seen a few good articles on the unsustainability (it’s a word now!) of the American lifestyle, which has given me ideas about my garden for next year and possibly starting up a community garden or farmer’s market program in town to make our little community a little more self-sufficient, thereby helping everyone in the process.  Part of my realization about the Occupy movement is that we can’t depend on the “top” to take care of us, we have to depend on each other, so we need to find ways to do that and keep this world healthy for future generations.  That starts at home, in each household, changing the demand so that the top has no choice but to support it.  That’s my theory anyway, we’ll see how it goes.

Summer Fun: More days at home please?

The last couple of months have been kinda crazy.  My days fill up with various things that I don't want to give as much attention as they demand, but they all have their reasons so I just sort of grit my teeth and deal with it.  Taking care of Mom's house really took a lot out of me and I'm still recovering from that, but next week I'll have to do it again, this time without Dad to help with the kitties.  They're going to a kubelwagen convention in Ohio and although Mom isn't thrilled to be going, she's not insisting on staying either.  They'll be gone for a week or so while I'm trying to prepare an audition and get the house (and myself) ready for my boyfriend to be here from Alabama for a week or so.  I have 3 days at home this weekend so I'm pushing myself pretty hard to get as much done as I can before my parents leave so I don't go crazy before my man gets here.  Last week I was home all day Sunday only, and the week or two before that I hadn't had any full days at home so my poor house was rather neglected.  On top of that, it makes me crazy when I can't have a day or two at home, I need the time to myself to fill with projects as I see fit.  Having 3 days this weekend is a wonderful thing and I wish it would happen more often like it was in the spring.

Quick rundown of what I did on Saturday:  Got up later than usual but still kinda early for yoga with my friends.  It's been at least 2 months since we were all 3 able to be together, the way our schedules have been.  The yoga was good, the girl talk was great, and I'm sure we all needed it.  We're hoping to meet on Monday too.  When I got home and before it got too hot out, I cleaned out my car, wiped down the dash, washed the inside of the windshield and windows, sprayed down the floormats, and vacuumed.  It needed to be done... badly... and that's one thing I wanted to cross off the list before he gets here. 

Next I worked on my poor little garden that has been as neglected as my house.  I've been able to water it enough and we do get occasional rainstorms that help with that, but something has been eating some of my plants and I hadn't had a chance to pull out the dead stuff and find more chicken wire to put up.  The first thing to go was my beans.  I'm still rather unhappy about that... the plants were doing so well and they had lots of flowers, in a few more days I would've had a good handful of beans to harvest, and overnight they were eaten down to the dirt.  That made me so mad.  I got some wire and put it up to keep the deer out, but since then something smaller has been getting in and nipping off my garlic.  That makes me suspect it's not a rabbit, since theoretically they don't like garlic, but I don't know that for sure either.  We've seen a couple squirrels out here, which is very unusual, and yesterday Mom had a skunk look in the back door at her, so who knows what's gnawing on my garden!

The lettuce and one tomato plant and all of the petunias have been nibbled down too, but that's probably from the grasshoppers.  Not much I can do about them, except I did have a lovely black and yellow garden spider that I had to move to work in the garden today.  She's not as big as the one down at Mom's house, but I'm glad to have her around.  I hope she finds her way back up into the plants and sets up camp again, she eats all kinds of bugs that we have too many of, like mosquitos and mud wasps and grasshoppers.  I was sad to move her, but I had to.  See that very sad cherry tomato plant behind her?  Yeah... Also, the fabric pot on the left used to have my beans in it.

I planted more beans in that pot, more carrots in another pot, Italian salad greens, and sugar snap peas and transplanted a couple petunias.  I found some more chicken wire to put up, so hopefully that keeps whatever it is out.  My cucumber plant is doing really well so I moved it so it has more room to do its thing.  I got 3 nice sized cucs off of it today and there are plenty of little ones there now.

I pulled a bunch of weeds out of my flowerbed and along the "walkway" to my front door, gathered rocks from my "yard" (if you can call it that lol) to put up against the skirting to keep the weeds down and help keep the weather out from under my house, and got another section of deck railing stained before it got dark.  The rock project will take a while to get all the way around, but there are plenty of rocks to do it with and when I get to actually moving dirt to fill the gaps there will be rocks in that too so it will kinda do itself once I get that far.  These red bricks will be replaced with limestone slabs like my little steps but for now, they'll do.  They're basically useless in the summer but in the winter they shovel easily, melt snow quickly, and the ice forms around them instead of on them.  They were a quick fix when the mud was horrible so they're not ideal by any stretch, but they work.  At any rate, I need to continue the gravel edging partly for aesthetics and partly to help with insulation and make upkeep easier.  It's gonna take forever to pick up all the rocks...there may come a point where I just buy several bags of pea gravel and use that instead.  We'll see.

Sunday's plan:  First thing, stain the rest of the deck railing.  The top part at least, since the slats take a while to do, but the top really needs to get sealed before the weather beats up the wood too much more.  It's already warped and splitting from the extremes, so that needs to stop.  Staining when it's too hot out does strange things when it dries, but doing it in the evenings means it gets dark before I can get very far and the water rinse to get the dust off doesn't dry quickly enough.  It's supposed to get into the high 90s again tomorrow so I'll get as much of that done first thing as I can before the heat kicks in.  After that, laundry needs to happen (which of course will heat up the house...but I can't put it off for too much longer), and if I'm lucky Dad and I might work on the terrace a little.  Maybe that's just wishful thinking... but the Deere has the front shovel on it now, and I'd like to see what it can do so I can maybe get some shrubs and fall bulbs planted before winter hits and I have to deal with the incessant mud for another 6 months.  If that doesn't happen, or if it's too hot to do it for long, I'll probably spend the rest of the day working inside. 

My office needs rearranging or something, the office closet needs painting and shelves put up, and there are a couple piles in the living room/kitchen that need to be gone through and dealt with before I'm comfortable having company.  The office closet is a big project that I can't get done in one day, so I may not attempt it just yet.  It took a day to do the front closet and that one's much smaller, although some of that included putting linoleum down and I don't have to do that in here.  I need to decide what I want to do about my desk too...hrm.  Well, for now it's time to get my horn out and practice, then bedtime.

Fresh from the desk: Biker chic

The hills are rumbling with the sound of Harleys.  It's that time of year again and for the next few weeks all the little towns throughout the Hills will be swarming with bikers on their vacations.  Of course, I hope to get in on the action a little. ;)  However, that means I need to gear a few pieces towards them, without looking like everything else they can find at any gift shop anywhere in the area.  Behind the leather and spikes they're all just normal people, dentists and such, so maybe I shouldn't worry about it too much, but there are specific styles and motifs that biker style tends to gravitate to.  Namely, chunky silver chains and skulls (the more skulls the better lol) mostly in black, silver, gunmetal, red, orange.  A lot of them go for the more tribal look with leather, bone beads, feathers, teeth, claws, etc.  Problem is, all of those things are all over every store in the area, so how to make mine different?

My plan, if you can call it a plan, is to stay with the same style sensibility I am used to working in but use the darker colors and keep everything on the masculine side with just a touch of femininity.  The fire agate hemp necklace I made last week should do well.  Last night I made this one, with a carved bone pendant, leopard jasper, rose quartz, and hematite strung with black seed beads and gunmetal silver bugle beads, with the metal-free closure I had basically abandoned for too long just for the ease of using a toggle clasp.  It's strong, a little tough, a little frilly, hypoallergenic, and I hope it bridges the gap a little bit.  If nothing else, I like it a lot!

 This one was simple enough.  Carved bone pendant in the shape of an acorn, hematite beads, red horn beads, black and white bone beads, and glass  beads with a slightly greenish mottled finish on sterling silver memory wire.  The acorn came in the same package as the other black bone pendant above, so I guess we'll see if anyone is interested in that one at the show.  I have other pendants I can switch out, or just leave the pendant out entirely.  We'll see how it goes.  As the evening goes on, I'm toying with the idea of switching it out for the other that was in that package, which is carved to look sort of like a claw.  Maybe I should do that, it would probably appeal to more people than the acorn does.

One more on memory wire.  I'm not sure what the stones are exactly, but the large center stone is dyed turquoise with goldish veins throughout.  The silver spacers jangle a little on the sterling silver memory wire and the white stone chips have grey veins throughout.  This one is definitely something I'd wear regularly, but it's not overly girly.  It's a simple but slightly chunky light statement piece that should make people take notice without being too loud.  I just wish I knew what the stones were... people do ask about that.

I'll make more tonight to get ready for another Saturday sale tomorrow.  Have a great weekend everyone, and enjoy the Rally if you're headed North!

*UPDATE*  I did end up reworking the acorn necklace with the carved bone claw and replaced the seed beads with all hematite beads.  Much better, yes?

Fresh from the desk: Pink camo purse

Yes, that's what it is!  The button is mother-of-pearl, hand-crocheted in 100% US-grown cotton yarn.  I wasn't expecting the color to turn out like this, since I'm new to crocheting and hadn't worked with anything variegated, so I didn't think the color would be so blocky, but the purse pattern was cute and I wanted to try it and by the time I realized that it looked like pink camo I wanted to just finish the thing.  When I was picking out the yarn, I had been browsing Fall runway fashion and was looking for something slightly more interesting than khaki (which is EVERYWHERE on the runways... seriously...) but was still basically neutral.  Oh well.

So, here we are!  It is a cute pattern, and as much as people love camo out here I'm sure it's perfect for someone.  The next one I make will have a longer strap but otherwise I like the pattern a lot.  And maybe some fringe or beads or something...hmmmmm...

Summer Fun: Stone steps

My dad has a new riding mower.  A fancy one, that likely cost more than my car.  (Granted, my car is old, and it was old when we bought it... but still!)  And, it came with 2 hats!  Lol.  Anyway, this thing has a nice cart and a front shovel/blade combo thing, is powerful enough to mow down the prairie, and it makes him giggle like a schoolgirl.  It's rather hilarious.  Point is, this thing can get the dirt work done that I need and haul stuff up and down the hill without any trouble. 

Yesterday we took it out onto the back acres to find some big, flat limestone rocks.  I know there are tons back there, it was just a matter of having a way to get them hauled to where i could do something with them.  I need them for walkways and such around my trailer so I don't have to trudge through the mud all the time, something that would last and look nice and not cost much (if anything), and I knew we had lots of limestone.  We loaded up the cart and took that load of rocks up the hill, sorted them a little, then picked one little spot we could finish up in just a couple of hours.  It was pretty hot out there and I've been fighting off a pseudo cold all week and didn't want to push too hard and he's been at work a lot and needed to get a nap in before he went back.

We picked the little hill just outside my back door.  When my water pipes froze repeatedly last winter (I'm in negotiations with the contractor who built the skirting to get the gaps filled in so it doesn't happen again... that's all kinds of fun, let me tell ya) I had to keep getting underneath the trailer to turn the space heater up, move it, turn it down when it was nice out, all that.  I had to get under there at least once a week for probably 3 months, usually in the deep snow and subzero temps.  Out my back door is a little walkway from the door to the back hill... not sure why he built it that way, instead of connecting it to the deck or building some stairs... but the hill is steep right there and every time I had to get under the trailer I had to slide down the hill on my butt so I didn't land on my face in the snow.  Getting back up was fun too. 

So, we built some stairs.  They're cute, they'll get the job done, and they were free.  Unless you count what my parents paid for the land and the mower... Point is, we didn't have to buy anything extra for them and now I don't have to slide down the snowy hill in the middle of the night anymore.  Hooray!  We have more rocks that we brought up that will need to be a walking path from the deck stairs to the front door eventually.  I'll probably start at the deck and work my way around one little load at a time, so that maybe by the time I turn the corner toward the front door there will be an entryway room built on with some real stairs!  Well, maybe not.  A girl can dream, anyway... it'll be a while before the contractor we like can get out here for that.  At least I need to get something by the deck stairs because the first step is too high off the ground and a nice thick slab right there will help with that considerably.

That's a project for another day.  That's as far as we got yesterday because I got overheated, even in the shade... guess I didn't drink enough before we got started or something.  But all is well now, and the little stairs look good!

Next weekend is another show, possibly the last one of the summer, and I need to get some biker chic stuff made.  I've been crocheting like mad to fill out my inventory a bit, so I need to get back on the jewelry bandwagon.  Cheers!

Brain Flexing

The mind is like a muscle.  It needs to be exercised or it will get fat, lazy, sluggish, and just otherwise nonproductive.  I've been feeling this exact thing the last couple of years since finishing my Master's.  I seriously needed a break after all that, as I had been in school basically nonstop from age 5 to age 26 and frankly, I was worn out.  The end of my Master's was very intense and I tried to hit the ground running with the inevitable post-graduation job search, which was rather draining in itself, especially after hearing "no" (or nothing at all) as many times as I did, even when I set my goal to send out 5-10 applications and/or resumes a day.  I did this for months, got very sick a couple of times, broke my foot, found a couple horrible jobs, started making jewelry in the hopes of selling it, then moved back home.  While relieved to be home where I could actually get full-time work, I was extremely discouraged about my future as a composer.  I've been telling myself ever since that I have more opportunities for that here because I'm local and I likely know people involved in such projects simply because I grew up here and was out at the Black Hills Playhouse a few times.  That's several stories in itself, but suffice it to say that I do have connections to the arts community in the Hills, should I choose to take advantage of that.

I tried to stay at my first job here as long as I could.  It was good money for here, but I was working something like 55 hours a week without overtime and I was barely making it to Symphony rehearsals and concerts, never mind sleeping and eating and trying to be creative in any fashion.  It was a truly horrid job... I was the manager of a small loan company whose entire goal was to get people stuck in a credit hole so we could keep collecting loan fees off of them.  I've never had any management experience or training, never worked with any kind of financial institution, and they tossed me in with minimal training so I had no idea what I was doing, and the poor girl that was already working there was mad at me for getting hired off the street for the management position.  Don't blame her one bit for that, and we ended up being friends once she realized how little they prepared me for it.  I got in serious trouble the one day we didn't make a new loan... it was a Saturday, we were only open half the day, and it was blizzarding.  I saw maybe 3 cars all morning, and none of them stopped for us.  We were expected, and actually required, to entice people to renew their loans (after a certain point, they would be eligible to miss a payment if they renewed), and a renewed loan collects a new loan fee and keeps the ridiculous interest rate rolling in.  I couldn't sleep at night with that job.  I only lasted about 6 weeks.

After that was full-time retail and that was significantly less stressful, but still not a good job.  Irregular schedule (sporadic enough that it was impractical to get another job), hours not guaranteed, minimum wage (started out a tiny bit over that, because of my retail experience... whoopee.), and the store made it quite clear that there was no room for advancement for any of us when they hired a new assistant manager off the street with a little management experience but not in retail.  Shortly after that, and partly because they refused to hold one employee to the same standards that they expected from everyone else, I started looking around for new jobs, found my insurance one, and put in my notice.

I do like my job.  I'm still just part-time, but the better work I do the better our agency does and I get directly rewarded for that, so I have some sort of control over where I go here.  It gives me time to go to Symphony, make and sell my jewelry, and work on my house.  I'm still ridiculously poor, but I'm much happier here than I was at the other two jobs.

Back to my point.  My job now has its challenging moments when I need to figure out how to solve someone's insurance problem, remember how to work the policy management program or enter a new homeowners policy, decipher a confusing billing statement, things like that.  Mostly, I sit there by myself and scan and upload documents to their appropriate policies.  It's rather brain-melting once you've done it for a few hours.  I definitely feel like I'm losing sharpness (as can be proven by the rambly nature of this entire post... apologies!) and I'm riddled with guilt about not working on my music.  I'm getting a decent amount done with jewelry, and though I need to shift gears a little for the fall, it's basically in line with what it needs to be for now.  I need to be writing more.  I need to be practicing my instruments.  My symphony will need me on horn in the spring when we play Mahler's 1st Symphony and I'd really like to put together a decent audition for that in the fall so that maybe I can play horn in a couple other concerts too.  That's the instrument I got my degree in, so I'd rather be on that, it was just so much easier to get the cello skills back up and I didn't have to audition on that.

I got my cello out for a bit tonight and after I'm done writing here I'll get my horn out for a little bit before bed.  I took a mouthpiece to work to buzz on when I'm alone so that will help a lot to get my chops back up.

Creativity is also like a muscle, but one that needs a certain set of parameters in order to cooperate.  Only when one is regularly working with it can it come at will; before that it's very hard to snuff out and give up on.  That's what I've been wrestling with since I graduated.  I worked so hard on my thesis that I was pretty well burned out and it's been ridiculously hard to get back on the bandwagon.  My dad and I went to the 1345 Film Festival last weekend and I was impressed and inspired by the short, cute, low-budget films that 100+ people showed up to watch in Art Alley downtown.  It inspired me to get back on track and submit a short or 2 next year so I can make some connections with these people and start working on films again.

Next thing I need to do is figure out how I can start to get my composer brain back.  Maybe I should take a pad of staff paper to work and jot down ideas to work on when I get home?  I can't find the pad I was using in school so I'll need to get a new one.  I'll probably need to retrain my ear as far as getting the right intervals from my head to the page.  I don't want to skimp on my filing responsibilities, but I do need to be able to take 10-15 minutes here and there to do something that actually uses my brain, otherwise I feel like a pile of mush by the time I get home.

I didn't intend this to be as rambling or whiny as it ended up to be, but I think I needed to get all that written down so I can get on with finding solutions and making a plan.  Now, time for a little horn blowing, then bedtime!

Fresh from the desk: Ideas for Fall/Winter designs!

I've been doing a little bit of trend research for Fall/Winter jewelry and I've got some ideas.  Several of the trends are just horrid, I think... like the chunky neon chain thing... bleh.  I won't make anything like that, I'm sorry.  I try to use as little metal as possible most of the time and that would be entirely counterproductive.  I saw a crochet pattern for large chain links that could be strung together, but I didn't like the look of that either.  I'll stick with what I know.

There are a few things that did sound good though: Mixed media is huge.  Wood and pearls on leather with a ribbon, braided denim cuffs, feathers, you name it.  That's very good news for me considering the materials I like to use.  Stacked bangle bracelets and cuffs are big too, and while I can't do the metalworking to make bangles I can figure out how to crochet cuffs with beads.  I have a couple of patterns I'm playing around with to get that to work.  Statement necklaces are still in, and while some of them are gawdy, that still leaves me with plenty of room to experiment.  My statement pieces usually end up smaller than what's on the runway anyway, just because I know so few people who would actually buy something like that, but it does mean I can still use color.  While I work on crocheting cuff bracelets, I'll work on crochet chokers as well.  Vintage-made-new is something I should look into... maybe a couple trips to some local flea markets are in order.

Clothing trends are surprisingly bland.  Lots of colorblocks, mostly with variations of beige, with occasionally something in red.  Runway fashion makes me crazy... so little of it is actually wearable.  A lot of it reminded me of a large taupe square paper sack that even makes the model look stupid.

This next batch of jewelry I'm working on is for the Sturgis Rally that's coming up.  Soon, the Hills will be swarming with motorcycles and they will definitely be around town at the next Saturday show, so I have some ideas for biker-chic pieces to cater to that crowd.

We'll see how this one does... It has a fire agate center donut, hematite, bone, horn, and glass beads, strung on hemp 20" long when tied.  The differing textures of all the beads didn't quite come through, but Mom took the good camera with her to Cleveland so this is what I'm stuck with.  Oh well. 

The heat has finally lifted a little.  Finally, opening my windows lets in the cool evening air like usual!  That hasn't been the case this last week or so.  Hope you're all staying cool and hydrated!