Too Many Maps!

You know how you encounter something new, then you see it everywhere? That’s what it’s like with me and maps. My first project for Fibers is “Personal Geographies”, where we turn things into maps of places we’ve been. So I’m supposed to be on the lookout for maps, map samplers, Google Earth printouts, etc. etc. All right, I’ll pay some attention for a while.

But then it’s everywhere. My new day planner (which I’ll be telling you about soon) has maps in the back. My pen pal sent me a hand-drawn-from-memory map of Minnesota. (I laughed at that, albeit flabbergasted that she was so on-topic without realizing it.) Goodnight Little Spoon recently posted about maps. Really, if it’s not one thing it’s another!

What have you learned about recently that you suddenly started noticing everywhere? Has this happened to you as well?

P.S. Becky posted about fall already, but she hardly gets it. I had thought that our lovely, mid-80s weather would hold despite the autumnal equinox of last week — how could the simple change of longer nights than days change how warm it was so drastically? How could I have been so dumb? We went from gorgeous mid-80s to incredibly windy and lows of high 30s to the highest temp. of next week predicted as 61˚F. Brrr. I really have to go shopping if this keeps up — my summer wardrobe is substantial enough, but fall and winter? Uh-oh…

Autumn

Fall is my favorite season. I love the changing of the winds, the turning of the weather, the rain, the leaves. Fall in Austin isn’t nearly as epic as it was in my hometown in Pennsylvania, but it’s still wonderful here. It hits you so suddenly, the chill of the wind, and you feel as if we skipped Fall and went straight to Winter. After months of drought, we have nothing but rain. So here we are, and the temperature is 65F, the skies thick with rain, and when you walk outside you can smell Fall.

sup dudes.

I keep thinking about this post niggling around the back of my mind (I just use the same cliches as everyone else don’t I? I don’t have the craft yet to change that), but whenever I sit down to write it out my mind goes blank. So instead I’ll write a few things in list form.

• School always helps me see wondrous things in the first few weeks, then after that makes me crazy with all the work put into the seeing, then I go on a brain freeze during breaks. For a few marvelous weeks a year I see new ways of thinking, and quite enjoy it; now the challenge is to extend those few weeks into the whole semester.
• I do not drink enough tea.
• I do not read enough for fun or culture.
• The library has a TON of periodicals that I wish I’d been paying more attention to. (Real) magazines for free? Yes please. I’ll pay especial attention to The New Yorker, Harper’s, and Publisher’s Weekly, for my publishing class. (Yes, glamor girls, they do stock Glamour as well. But so much more!)
• The health & wellness center advises you not to go to class if you have a fever of 100.1˚F or more. But what stops you if your fever is under that?
• Yeah, don’t ask.

I am now going to do something moderately relaxing before I have another class.

Where have I been?

I don’t know what it is, but I’m a very restless person when it comes to places. The last “vacation” I had been on was the Staycation, which was fun, but all summer I really wanted to go to the beach. Yes, I know, I just got back from San Francisco which has plenty of beaches, and yes, I did go to the beach in SF, but come on. Have you ever tried swimming in the Pacific Ocean? In San Francisco? It’s miserable. The day we went to the beach it was like 60F and raining. And I stuck my feet in. And that was it for me – I swear to god I can’t swim in anything colder than bath water, but that was RIDICULOUS. So I wanted to swim. And I didn’t want to swim in the public pool, which we’ve also done. I wanted a beach. A real, live beach with warm water and white sands.

As it so happened, because I’ve been working so much, the project manager gave us a free day off from work, whenever we wanted. So Chris took a vacation day, I took my free day, and off we went to South Padre Island, Texas.

Now, I had never been to the beach in Texas but everyone told me I’d be disappointed since my only experiences with the beach have been Hawaii and Puerto Rico. But I wasn’t disappointed at all – the beach was great! For those of you who don’t know, South Padre Island is at the southernmost tip of Texas, right near the border of Mexico. So the weather was warm, the water was warm, and the beach was great! Sure, it was like a 6 hour drive, after which I was ready to kill myself (seriously, who designed Texas anyway? If it were up to me I’d split it into like four different states or at least compress all the cities to be within 200 miles of each other), but it was totally worth it. The weather forecast predicted rain every single moment we were there, but it only rained twice – once while we were sleeping and once Friday afternoon when we were tired anyway.

We ended up hitting the grocery store and buying tons of snacks before we left so we actually only bought one meal there – the rest of the time we ate tomato and cheese sandwiches, tuna sandwiches, brie with crackers, goldfish, chips, etc. We took a 12-pack of root beer and polished that off easily. It worked out really, really well! And the beach was great by the way – 80F water, 85F air temperatures, and blue skies. I got a teensy tiny tan despite lathering up with sunscreen every moment, but neither of us got burned, which rocks considering Chris is fair and blonde and I’m fair (who knows what color hair I have anymore?).

Anyway, I don’t have any moral to this story except go on vacation. Which is what I say in almost all my posts these days. Pictures! (see more on my Flickr)

Back to school…

You may or may not have noticed my absence recently. I apologize; I should’ve warned you that I was going to be really busy. I had to move back to school, some hundreds of miles away from home, and, of course, classes started a week ago, I’ve been catching up with friends, and, well, time flies. (Everyone I know has uttered astonishment at not being able to find me easily on any instant messenger in the last week and a half as well.)

Honestly, I don’t really know how well I’ll be able to keep up with blogging and reading blogs. It looks like I’m going to have a lot of work this semester, plus hanging out with friends, reading books, making things… It’s all going to add up in a bit. Before I disappear entirely though, I want to talk a little about how excited I am about this semester.

I’m taking a course entitled “Sex and the (German) City”, exploring women’s sexuality from the Weimar Republic to now (I think? it’s sort of a vague class so far), German history from 1500 to 1871, Literary Publishing, and Fibers, an art class. Let me just say how incredibly stoked I am about Literary Publishing and Fibers. The teacher of my publishing class is a graduate of my college, from a number of years ago, and he’s currently an editor of a midsize, independent publishing company located here in the Twin Cities. He’s planning lots of field trips and guest speakers from the industry, people that write, edit, market, and publish books. As someone who’s always loved reading, writing, and lately might get into translating, this class just seems like an open door to the right connections and things and people to know. We will even get “advance reader copies” of books later in the semester to write reviews for a local review paper! (Hello, I better work on my reviewing skillz0rz.)

Fibers, on the other hand, is my first art class ever, but it’s amazing to me how many avenues of exploration just two class periods have opened up to me. Walking along from one class to another, ideas pop into my head of things to make and how. Another thing I read recently (before coming back to school) talked about how limits allow you to “reach new heights” creatively, and that rather than having an open-ended project, having limits gives your mind something to work with rather than being stuck because there is no starting point. This project is definitely giving me that feeling. Within the parameters I can explore whatever I desire.

So yes, I’m really excited about these two classes, and will probably keep talking about them here, since what else do I have to talk about? I’m in school, I should be immersed here right? Right? Right—

Home

So, I’m sure quite a few of you were wondering where I went. The truth is, I actually moved on the 15th of August, and things have been incredibly hectic. Now I’m living a lovely house with my two lovely cats and my lovely boyfriend Chris. Moving was ridiculous – I had to enlist the help of my mum, my brother, my brother’s wife, my best friend Andres, and Chris, and of course on that day I got a horrible migraine. Yet it’s done, and now I’m all moved in but unpacking has been slow. It’s funny how you don’t realize how much stuff you have until you move, and then you realize you have way more stuff than you need. So I’ve been going through it and throwing out/giving away a fair amount of stuff, but Chris and I are also going to have a garage sale on Saturday for all of this stuff (I mean, come on, why do we need two irons?).

Moving into a house that’s completely mine has been a crazy experience. My old apartment was tiny, damp, and cave-like, with only one tiny window that didn’t face a wall. It was damp because it flooded last December, and tiny because … well, because it just was. My two cats, Sata and Augustus absolutely hated it. They were cramped and Sata, who is indoor/outdoor, got terrible cabin fever and just wanted to go outside, dammit! But he couldn’t go outside because all the university students in my complex had bought aggressive male cats, failed to neuter them, and then left them outside 24/7. It was ridiculous.

So finally I’m gone from that place, and into an airy, windowed, lovely quaint house just two blocks from the grocery store and the local vegetarian restaurant. And despite it being not a downtown loft (which was my original goal), it’s really quite nice. It feels great to be able to make the place mine. Even though I’m only planning to be here a year or so, it doesn’t feel like a transition place like the last one did. And that means that it’s truly starting to feel like a home, even if there are boxes around.

In fact, I had never before realized how in between I had felt before. There wasn’t much about the apartment that truly felt like mine – and moreover, I realized that there was a lot I hadn’t unpacked at all in the year that I was there, including my easel. I had never before realized the value of feeling at home in your home until I unpacked my easel and set it up in my room. My creativity, my happiness, and my coziness was all stifled in that apartment, and now in the house I feel like I’m starting to get back into a routine again.

There’s still a lot to do. Lots of unpacking and moving things and situating and throwing out and giving away and selling. But even if I stopped unpacking and did nothing else, I’d be far more comfortable here than I was in my apartment. And that says a lot – I look forward to the times I will spend here!

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