fall

it's sideways. i know. i'm desperate, you see.

i managed to delete my entire file of pictures that i've been sharing. bum. mer. so i've been scrounging around for stuff to upload. i think this is why i've been so lax lately about posting. no picture, no post, right? grrrrrr....

so it's definitely fall up here in the great north. birds flying in formation. turncoats. rain. leaves turning. people asking us at farmers market when's the last day we'll be open. wearing long johns to market! long johns, i tell you. it's ridiculous. where did my lovely summer go?

i've been crocheting up a storm. i've got like five projects in the works and so many plans! i'm afraid i won't be able to do much with it after classes start. my favorite project is a granny square skirt--i need sixty squares. i've got 25 done so far. i'm not yet sick of the whole thing, which is a good thing.

the other life

i'm an australian in some deep way. the other life i could've had.

the thing is this; my parents were given a choice. alaska or australia. these opportunities were available to them after we lived in california. i was going into fourth grade, so becca and i weren't really told about the options at the time. i found out later i could've been an australian. mom was more inclined to go to australia, but we all would've had to give up our american citizenship and she wasn't too hip on that, so off to alaska we lumbered. and here i am. alaskan to the core.

but australia... it certainly is a tempting thought. who would i be if we had moved there? surely more active... skinnier? tanner? i understand that there is a bit more sexism there, as in women haven't got the same opportunities as they do in america. maybe that's false info. i don't know. i've never been, so i really can't say. i'm not even sure *where* in australia we would've gone... considering dad was a botanist/forester we probably would've lived in the bush. so we would've moved to a rather insular community that maybe didn't like newcomers. not much different than the tiny eskimo community we moved to here in alaska. maybe i would've turned out exactly the same... nature v.s. nurture, right?

the romance of another life... with no mistakes in it. *that's* what's tempting about it, really.

summer

this is the memory of summer i cherish; windows wide open at night, fans going in all of the rooms, light in the sky all night long... yes, i live in alaska, land of the midnight sun. little song birds chirping at three in the morning, cause it's light, and that's a perfect reason to sing. the *memory* of summer is almost as intoxicating as the actual moments... love, love, love those blissful, easy days of liquid summer.

yesterday at farmer's market i reached a milestone.

i sold a $100 necklace!!!!! it was turquoise and coral, just beautiful. i kept the matching bracelet and wear it all the time. now it will remind me of this awesome occasion.

woot, woot!

my aunt

my dear aunt died this last week. aunt corine. i'm profoundly sad. the world feels a little lonelier without her loving me. but i know she's in a better place without pain. with two of her daughters. that has got to be wonderful. beyond words wonderful.

in lighter news, i'm going back to school in the fall. i got accepted back to my old university. my financial aid came through. yay! i'll be majoring in art, hopefully accepted into the bfa program. i have 141 credits and still about five classes left to go in my core curriculum. when i went to school before, i couldn't seem to make myself take those last few hated core classes. it's stuff like economy and anthropology and math. yucky. but i have to do them if i want a degree, and i think i want i bad enough now, nine years later, that i can do them. not sure what i want to do with the degree once i've got it, but degreed people get better jobs. so. maybe i'll try to teach art. art therapy. i don't know. right now it's just enough to be striving for it.

as far as the drawing is concerned, i'm not sure i like it. pink and turquoise are a classic combo but the drawing is just a little off. hmmm....

15 books

i'm supposed to come up with fifteen books that made a difference to me.

hmmm....

1)Beauty by Robin McKinley; this was my first fantasy. up to this point i'd been reading the horrible sweet valley high series--okay, they probably weren't horrible, but after reading beauty i couldn't pick another one up without criinging

2)Teen Titans, Cloak and Dagger, X-men; comic books rocked my world in high school and junior high. 'nuff said.

3) Anne of Green Gables; i got my hot little mits on this one in sixth grade. i then commenced to mooning around, imagining i had consumption, and writing really bad prose

4)Sharon Oldes; poetry as meaningful, mind-blowing shit

5)The Key of Hed trilogy by Patricia McKillip

6)The Great Gatsby

7)Hemingway; i had, up to this point, emilated L.M. Montgomery in my own writing. just a bit too much for this day and age. but Hemingway taught me to be sparing. brilliant author, horrible man.

8)Beth Moore's bible studies--whoa. good stuff.

9)White Oleander

10)Sharon Shinn--oh, my gawd, i absolutely adore her

11) Laurel K. Hamilton; vampires and werewolves and witches, oh my!

12)Wen Spencer; love, love, love her work

13)SARK; utterly brilliant--i'd follow her anywhere

14)the harry potter series--can't wait to read what Rowling has up her sleeve for a next go at it

15)Nora Roberts' trilogies, i'm embaressed to report. it's just that her characters are so real. there are a couple series to skip, but she really is an exellent story-teller

focused

i took this picture of my sister and her 5 year old daughter, deborah. i love how focused they are on the task. deborah *hated* having her nails clipped until just recently. becca (my sister) has brilliantly came up with the idea of bribing her with getting her nails polished if she lets mama clip her nails. so now it's this special thing that they do together. i painted my fingers black and deborah was like, "i want that color, mama!" uh, no. she gets pretty pink, purple and blue sparkly pastel shades. i'm a bad influence. naughty, naughty antie beth.

more sadness

this picture is supposed to be a little girl, but she ended up looking older than she actually was. so sad. but i'm still pretty happy with it.

here is the other poem i wrote while i was in hospital.

i feel

i feel

like a hollowed out tunnel,

blasted apart. maybe this

could be a time of

cleansing. or a time of

trials.

am i being forced

through the eye of a needle, to be

something else on the other

side? ordered. orderly.

straightened and true.

oooops

i just got back from the hospital.

i tried to kill myself. overdosed. 20 seroquel.

i wrote a poem about it and i'll share that. but other than that i'm not sure what to say. even though they say i've got a lot to say. hmmmm....

remembering

i remember bursts of noise,

skipping scenes of questions, "beth,

beth, what's this? what's that?"

i remember pain and

chaos.

i don't remember how bad

it was. how dangerous it got.

i don't remember them taking

my clothes. of moving from

ambulance to er, from er to

icu.

i don't want to remember why. or

how.

i remember taking the

pills. i remember that. but

i don't remember the

point. the reason escapes

me.

i don't remember why i

called the ambulance. why i

didn't just go blinking

into the dark. the in-

between.

i remember the big

reasons. the shame. the

guilt. but not the little

ones.

how did i let it go

so far?

i don't remember why

i didn't wake my family.

why didn't i call them

instead of emergency?

how close did i come?

how far did i go? how

close. how far. how timid

i am. how tired i am.

i don't remember waking.

i don't remember sleeping.

i don't remember anything.

some art

this is the first picture in my sketchbook. it's of my sister, rebecca. the black furry thing on the other side of the book is my cat, mnemosyne. that's pronounced nee-moss-y-nee. i call her nene (pronounced nee-nee). she is my precious treasure. and tiny, as i've mentioned before. six pounds. she's scared of *everything*, especially my two nieces, ages 2 and 5. we all live together so she spends a lot of time downstairs (where i live) or behind my chair. poor little thing. she is really the sweetest cat. the only cat sweeter is our dear tiger. tiger was the first cat we had, and was becca's. she's the uber cat, perfect in every way. she loved everyone (but especially becca), was calm and kind. one time she bit my finger when we were playing and you should have seen the look of horror on her face. she had not meant to do that! she was so sorry! she let you pet her wherever you wanted to, including her belly, her feet, and her tail. really, i can not say enough about tiger. she is the paragon that i hold every other cat up to, which really isn't fair. but life's not fair, princess. nene would be perfect if she weren't so scared of everything and everyone. she spends her time running away from everyone, which is probably why she's so skinny.

i did not start this out to be an ode to my cats, but there you have it. an ode to my precious dear ones.

no photos

it's totally raining, like a bucket turned over kinda rain. and it's thundering. so no art photos today. so sad. the reason i'm all hot and bothered over it is that the camera (which is not my camera, but my sisters) has been full of other photos. becca downloaded those, though, so it's available again. hence me being all, "i want to take the photos *now*." i guess i could try taking some inside.... will experiment.

self-discipline, part two

i've been thinking about the self-discipline thing more and have an adendum to add.

i'm actually really self-disciplined with my jobs. i give like, 110% at work. i *overwork* my self, throw my spirit into it. and get crushed and pummeled in return. so far my job experiences have not been positive. but i'm proud of how hard i worked. so that's something cool to think about.

i was going to take a bunch of pictures of my artwork today, but it's all overcast and i want to take the pictures outside, since the pictures i think are really good that i've seen on the internet tend to be taken outside, without a flash. the photos of paintings i've taken inside tend to have a glare because i need the flash to illuminate the pictures. hmmmm.....

my best friends' dog was killed this week by a motorist. i'm so heartbroken. she was the dearest little thing, so loving and good. i'll miss her terribly. and i ache for my sweet friend. it's *so* hard, losing a pet. people don't get it. you're falling apart and they're like, jeez, it's just a dog. it's not like a family member died, they say. but they *are* a family member. dear, sweet lacey--i expect to see you in heaven. i love you, valette, and hope you will soon be able to remember her with joy instead of pain.

epiphany

i had a major epiphany last night. it's rather embarrassing that i didn't know this about myself.

i have no self-discipline. none. zilch. nada.

*why* has it taken me this long to figure this out? and then there's the embarrassment over the fact that i have no self-discipline. how old am i? two? i can't make myself do something i don't want to do. i just can't. there's nothing i can say to myself. nothing that i can trick myself into doing. if i don't wanna to do something, i just bloody well don't do it.

the effects of this failing are far reaching. i don't like a class i'm supposed to take to graduate? quit school. i don't like housework? let it lie. i don't want to eat that? so don't. i don't even think i'm aware of all the effects of this bad, bad, bad thing.

but i can say that i'm a bad person because of this. or a person doing bad things. or a person not doing bad things.....

horrible news

i just heard from my dear aunt that my 15 year old cousin was raped by a friend. oh, my, god. why do these things happen? how can i continue to believe in a good and loving god when things like this happen to good people? the question of pain and suffering. for a long time i thought that we *learn* from our suffering. the sifting of the wheat kind of thing. those that were meant to do good would become better people and those that will do bad things will just fall farther. now i'm not so sure. doesn't that seem cold-blooded? to make good people better and bad people worse. it's not fair! and god, do i know that life's not fair, princess. i guess we'll all just muddle through, like we always do. but i expect some answers.

commitments

i've just finished reading "Artful Blogging" by Somerset Studio. makes me want to blog more regularly. i think i need more of a focus for my blog, rather than just journaling at random. also, the bio on my blog is incredibly annoying; it's the bio for my other blog, the one my sister and i share to show of our jewelry. we *are* sisters, but having the bio on this blog makes no sense. i wonder how to get that fixed.
i think i want to focus more on my art than on plain journaling, which means i need to photograph my work. scary. so that's my new commitment. more regular updates, more art. let's see how it goes.

oh, my

a week ago i got in my little head that i wanted to read odd thomas by dean koontz. no one had told me i needed to read it. it was just this sudden *need*. i couldn't go to the library, 'cause i had an overdue book that i couldn't find, so i went in search of it at the stores. finally found it at barnes and noble. read it. loved it. have strangely avoided dean koontz. don't know why. just wasn't interested. so i read the second one, forever odd, which becca got for christmas. loved it, too. when i finally found that missing library book, i ran to the library and checked out more books by him. oh, my. have i become a dean koontz fan? how embarrassing.

christmas day

christmas was great. i got two phone calls from two of my favorite people in the whole world, which pleased me to no end. we ate french dip and opened presents and played pictionary. yay! what a great day, even with all of us sick.

merry christmas!

i have always been a night person; sometimes to the point of staying up 'till everyone else got up. but for the last month or so, i've been waking up around 10:30. very weird. this morning i woke up at 8:30, which i've done several times during this month. i'm not a morning person. really, i'm not. my brain doesn't function as well, i end up dragging half way through the day, wishing i could take a nap. it's a strange thing, this getting up in the morning. i actually get to see daylight, up here where the sun is only up for a few hours during the winter. and then i go to bed *early*, like ten or so. what's up with that? where are my happy nights spent wandering my empty house? and most important, *why* is this happening to me? rrrrrrrrrrr

presents and last minute shopping

last year i finished all my christmas shopping by the first week of december. i was so proud of myself; it was the first time i'd ever pulled it off and it felt *great*. this year, i planned to do the same, but what with money flow, i had to wait, and just got finished about a week ago. it seems to me that there's nothing more stressful than waiting 'till the last minute to shop for christmas. it totally wrecks the *spirit* of the season. ah, well. next year, maybe...