It was a perfect day for an air show - cool, sunny, not a cloud in the sky. There were some great performances, some fun airplanes to ogle, and it was an opportunity to hang out with my dad and my brother.
Despite the increasing jingoism inherent in the relentless drumming of the military recruitment message, it was a very nice day. The flying was awesome, breeze was refreshing, and we had a pretty great place to sit.





Flickr Set - this year starts here.

More from the Quilt Show:


Special highlights of interest to vermilionsun and shogunsquirrel under the cut. Hee. :)

( photos )

Mom and Dad and I went to this tonight:
The Jung Center of Houston: The Soul of Houston -- Blues Stories:

The Soul of Houston: Blues Stories

Following our successful spring conference, this free lecture series, hosted by Houston author Roger Wood, continues to explore the hidden, unexplored soul of our community by focusing on the music and fascinating life stories of three Houston blues legends.

... and it was awesome. 
Texas Johnny Brown was born in 1928 and is still going strong, playing blues and telling stories about his life inside the music. It was amazing.
And then afterwards Mom talked to him over coffee while he was signing CDs, and Dad regaled some of the Blues Society folks with a tale of the Beatles' visit to Houston, when they were mobbed by crazy fans. They never came back to Texas after that.  ;)
Anyway, it was a really nice time, and I just fell in love with the Jung Center. Why have I not been taking crazy amounts of classes there and hitting their lecture circuit since I moved back?  It makes me want to go back and re-examine Pacifica's graduate programs in Depth Psychology and Mythology, too. Mmm, myth.

There are two more Wednesdays of Blues programs, we're planning to go to those, too.

This evening Mom and I attended the Progressive Forum again. 
Tonight the speaker was Karen Armstrong, and she was amazing. Brilliant. Incredibly well-spoken, fun to listen to, grounded in her knowledge, and beautifully eloquent. Plus bonus British accent.
But seriously, I was so moved at times during her lecture, and her answer to one of the questions during the Q&A portion had me choked up.
It reminded me with deep, loving nostalgia of the best of my class in Seminary.

Her talk was about god, in a very early sense of the word. She spoke of traditions having a special language and breathing to discuss god, the concept beyond realization. About finding the moment when one's word become too much and one is reduced to silence and awe. (Like the moment, the beat at the end of a symphony, the breath before the applause begins.)  The goal of the practice is to breathe in the silence, in the presence of that awe.
She spoke of creation stories or cosmologies as therapeutic exercises, guides for personal creativity with an emphasis on personal sacrifice. Never does something come from nothing; something always from something.
She spoke of revelation as an ongoing process. Scripture, in the Rabbinic tradition, as something to be re-interpreted for and by each generation.
She spoke of the complementary relationship in pre-16th century society between logos and mythos. Logos as knowledge, science, the physical reality. Myth as a way to deal with inner issues, emotion, pain, despair, psyche. Myth as a program for action. Religion, she said, is like dancing - a skill requiring practice.  A belief is not enough. And belief as a word did not mean then what it did now, but represented a commitment, love, dedication, a doing.
She spoke of dialogue as a spiritual exercise in the Socratic tradition, its goal to realize the profundity of human ignorance, and from there begin to seek wisdom. She said that one difficulty we have now is that instead of proceeding in the dialogue with gentleness, as Socrates said, these days we feel the need not only to win, to prove our knowledge, but also to humiliate our opponents.
And of course, she spoke of compassion. She is developing a Charter for Compassion online. (See the page at the TED prize about her wish.)

One of the most intriguing and resonant things she said, to me, was about the need for silence.  Specifically inner silence as a place of spiritual revelation and knowing. This reminded me so much of one of the books that was formative to my young spirituality, Sati by Christopher Pike. We are all god, and this can be discovered in silence.

When asked to describe her idea of god:
"I try not to have any ideas of god at all." She does not wish to 'domesticate the transcendence', but to keep it in the realm of music, poetry, etc. She feels intimations of awe and wonder during the day: "I do feel touched within, but what that is I don't know - and it's better not to ask."

At the very end she spoke about hope for the future in the face of so much misunderstanding and upheaval.

In short, it was an awesome evening.

Also, happy happy birthday to my awesome Dad. :)

Friday night the parental units and I descended upon one of Houston's dens of indie rock, Fitzgerald's, to see the debut of Peter's new band, CommieHilfiger. Yes, it's satire. They were hilarious and loud and awesome. And they did a synchronized dance number. Win!

As some folks already know, I spent today being sick. Ugh.  I still have a low-grade fever, and the persistance of that will determine whether or not I go to work tomorrow.
I spent this morning at the emergency clinic with Awesome!Chauffeur!Dad, and then the rest of the day in varying stages of sleep or eating under Mom's eye.
Now I'm taking advantage of brief moments of concentration and hoping that I can sleep through the night. Or at least large chunks of it.

So begins my quest to blog more frequently...

Last night I visited the ancestral homestead, where I picked up various fun things like my laundry, a box of things Mom wanted to get rid of (mostly my bookends - two of them are carved stone figures that are bloody heavy, even for bookends), and some of Mom's lentil soup, this time the cumin and coriander variation.
I am eating the soup right now and it's awesome, but I do wish I'd had the forethought to add some cheese to it before I left. There are so few foods that cannot be improved by the application of some extra sharp cheddar.

It's a rather nice change to have so much of my floor visible at home, although I still don't have all my flat spaces cleared. I can't sew yet, for one thing. But I'm close, very close.

Yesterday I did actually draw something, too. It may or may not morph into a full-blown illustration, we'll see.

Also, I took a Democratic Party political survey, the mail-in kind, and I mostly wished I had a big red marker to strike through half of it. "Mark the issues most important to you right now" - well, it's hard to do when they aren't even on your stupid list, Democratic Party. I added some write-ins.
"Which party do you trust to look after your interests?" NONE.
I hope they don't just throw my survey away because it has so much writing on it, outside of the "Please tell us anything else you think we should know" box. I have extremely neat handwriting, Democratic Party interns, you can handle it!

I've had a rather bad several days, interrupted by some really great stuff.
Been doing art, building furniture, being very depressed, having a great time at work, going to various meetings, being depressed again, calling therapists and doctors, and re-arranging my living quarters.
I got to go to the ancestral home for Mom's birthday on Sunday to play Ticket to Ride: Europe with Mom, my aunt, the scion and Hillary. And then on Tuesday Dad and I went to IKEA for dinner and to pick up the table I wanted. Mom came over yesterday to help me put it together, along with the laptop table and task chair that I'm using now for the computer. It's so much easier to do stuff with a workstation that lets me keep a good posture. Typing on the laptop on the coffee table just was not a winning situation.
Due to my two bouts of severe sorrow, I got behind on my art commitments, so I'm working tonight on finishing the last overdue one.
I'm also watching a DVD that isn't Merlin. Ha, ha, ha, I know.  I've watched Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Real Genius, and now I'm watching the really awesome episodes of Season 3 of Babylon 5.

OMG my love for Andreas Katsulas as G'kar just swells my heart to bursting.  God, what brilliance. Such a good show... such a loss.
Ok, moment over.

Now I'm having some dessert (angel food cake with strawberries) as a reward for finishing the line art for this overdue piece - with my fanart style, when the line art is final, the piece is 60% done.
Tomorrow I'm home from work, so I'll be finishing up some other obligations, including data entry, and more furniture arranging plus the disposal of all the styrofoam and cardboard.

I'm really having a lot of trouble with my GI stuff - Mom says I need to give myself more credit for dealing with a chronic health problem as well as I have, mostly.  It just got really frustrating for a few days - with all the other stresses, then feeling like I was unable to eat just was a bit of the last straw.  I've got to rethink my habits.  One great thing is that my Wellness Counseling at work has been going really well, including keeping a food diary. That will hopefully help once I can do a bit of analysis. Only another few weeks before I get back in to the gastroenterologist.

Mom's been encouraging me to meditate, and it kind of sort of maybe helps. And I should really do a tarot reading or something. What's all that stuff for if not to offer guidance in times of stress?

Oh, and bonus - despite the stress and stuff, I am happy to say that I still have fingernails.

Now it's back to the drawing board, or in this case the brilliant Wacom tablet.

Happy Birthday to my awesome mom!  :D

Here I am at my lunch break, thinking that I have not been doing much blogging lately.
Things have been happening, thoughts have been thunk, writing has not really happened but a lot of art has gotten done...

I've been calling on my parents a lot for help with the apartment, arranging and unpacking and such. I have some stuff from IKEA that hasn't yet come out of the box - perhaps I should have that Flat Pack Party after all.
I think that this evening I shall go buy a television at last, and maybe put some books away.

Lately I've had lots of meetings and Meet-ups and a seemingly overwhelming amount of volunteer commitments, mostly online. How did I end up working on two back-to-back cons? Urgh.
I haven't got a costume for any of them, either. Although I may go shopping for something to wear to the dances, at least. 
I'm test-running some less-demanding-than-Adobe art software on my Mini, so that I won't have to lug Ginevra and all of her expensive software to San Francisco for the art demo I'm supposed to do. Does anybody out there use openCanvas regularly?  Got any good tips? Tutorials?

Other randomness:
Read The Graveyard Book, and it was excellent. Haven't yet managed to finish any of the other books I took from the library. Rereading the Enchanted Forest Chronicles omnibus instead.
Ran through the entirety of Avatar: The Last Airbender again. The finale chokes me up, man. Beautiful stuff. I may need to get DVDs.
Still re-watching Merlin, too. I'm easy.
Really, really wish I had Ghostbusters  on DVD.
I've made a lot of grilled cheese lately.  Also used almost every pan I own. Now I just need to make cookies (or pizza) and I think I will have used all possible kitchen tools at least once.
Have made minor progress on the current quilt, but won't really get far until the sewing table stops being the "put everything down here when you come inside" table. Working on it.
Been keeping a better food diary for the past few days, along with a general journal. I've stopped trying to separate everything and am just keeping everything in one book now. This combined with regular check-in with the Wellness Counselor at Rice should help me get a better handle on things. I hope.

And that's enough for now. Lunch break is well over, and I have things to do.

I love going to see movies with my parents. They are a riot.
( slightly spoilery riot within )

Also, there was a preview for G.I.Joe: The Rise of Cobra and I squealed in excitement in the first three seconds, which made everybody look at me funny. Sorry, but I recognized it immediately by the menacing Christopher Eccleston surrounded by evil types. Yay!

Mom did comment that so many of the movies we saw previews for were dark and violent. I was horrified by the preview for the new Tarantino film, and the ones for Transformers and Terminator both involved a bit of robot apocalypse so they were also really dark. Terminator moreso than Transformers in terms of actually being almost always dark and dreary with guts and explosions, but... can we maybe make a few good SF movies that aren't marketed solely to video gamers?

So, headed to the ancestral home for a combination of wallowing in the partial gene pool for a family event and doing chores.
My cousin's daughters had their First Communion, so Mom and Dad and I trekked out to Magnolia (over an hour's drive, whew) and hung out with them and some of their friends and my aunt.  It was actually kind of nice, and we had a good time.
Then when we came back I did laundry while watching more Avatar: The Last Airbender.  I just finished the series, and WOW I am so impressed.
Somebody point me to the commentary.  I feel like there's a lot going on there.  It was just excellent. I can't quite imagine it as a movie, but I can see why someone would think it would transfer well to a bigger screen.
So now I have clean laundry for my trip to NYC, and I still haven't found the box with my tarot cards in it. I should open some and dig around.

Started the day by watching the Doctor Who Easter special. Yay! Full of win!

Then collected my quilt-in-progress, the printer fabric and my thumb drive with photos and decamped to the ancestral home where there was a color printer.  Printed my photos.  Hung out with the folks for a bit.
Went to my aunt's house for family holiday hanging out, which was mainly lots and lots of conversation in the kitchen, a great meal and much grazing after, and fun gaming experiences.  Someone had a game about Urban Legends with Truth or Myth cards, and we played that a bit, then several rounds of Outburst.

It was a nice time.
Now I am home and have more maintenance issues for the mgmt to address come the AM, but mostly things are fine. Still largely chaos, but there have been a few more boxes unpacked and some things re-arranged.
Also retrieved yet more stuff from the ancestral home, yay.

Have yet to finish a piece of digital art here, but I have a deadline looming so I should get something together.

I think the Blog Every Day in April brigade probably had something more pithy in mind for entries, but I've got every day so far covered, I may as well go for the gold. Right? Here, have a funny family story.

So down by the grocery store my parents shop at is this gigantic cross looming over the freeway interchange.  Seriously, a gigantic cross. It lights up at night.  It is obnoxious.
And apparently it and some other megachurches and various schools do get some graffiti every so often. Apparently somebody spray-painted a Star of David on one of the big crosses as an act of protest.  I'm not sure what they were protesting, or what they wanted to accomplish, but nevertheless...
So as we were driving by the other day on our various errands, Mom wonders about the sort of graffiti an atheist might put on a big giant obnoxious light-up cross that suddenly sprouted across the freeway from the grocery store.
Naturally, I proposed that an atheist would post an equation.
That got us started on what sort of equation it should be.  Mom wanted to put a²+b²=c² but I objected that it didn't actually mean anything without an explanation of a, b, and c, so then we had a conversation about defined variables and constants and E=mc². And then Dad wanted something more interesting than E=mc² so I said, "Hey, I have a song with an equation in it!" and played Jonathan Coulton's Mandelbrot Set. Except they didn't realize that the equation was in the lyrics, so it was an exercise in hilarity. And that equation does have a heckuva lot of explanatory text.  Hard to spray-paint, you know, which was the (theoretical) point of the exercise. 
I think actually mom's idea would work perfectly well if she accompanied it with a labeled drawing of a triangle. 

(Disclaimer: This post not actually meant to encourage or condone graffiti on religious or other buildings. Can't we all just get along, and paint murals or something?)

Packing, shopping for a bed, figuring out that maybe I'm hypoglycemic in addition to the stomach issues because I almost passed out and was shaking Friday night and had to miss a birthday gathering for a friend because I didn't trust myself to drive.  :(
But Saturday was much better and I watched what I ate and there were birthday people to greet and a party to go to. (Why is almost everybody I know born in March?) Donna and Jon and Lando the Magnificent Walking, Babbling, Playing Boy met me for Donna's birthday lunch, and have now seen my apartment, empty and echoing. Lando christened it with drool and laughter, so yay.

Then I went to my cousin Dave's birthday party, which was a live action role-playing card game called Long Live the King.  It was pretty awesome, although I was still trying to control my headachy symptoms (plus even I get a couple weeks when the pollen wreaks havoc with my sinuses).  I played the Archbishop with a 3-minute Mitre made of construction paper, while there were vast levels of costumery among the other folks.  From simple tunics and capes to full-on Henry VIII style gear, it was a good night for costumes.
I didn't know most of the people there, because this cousin was one of the ones that I used to see only for Christmas each year, if then.  But he's discovered that I'm a geek and a gamer, so now I get invited to these things. :)
It was a fun time, but as with many of these games, I think that the next time it's played, things will go much more smoothly.  Last night we were a bit confused about what we could and could not do, and nobody knew exactly how to win. It always takes at least one round for the players to really grok the strategy.  So, I can only hope we find excuses to play again!

Also, another cousin had a birthday last week (and I should have e-mailed him or something - bad me.) and Peter and Hillary are Tuesday and today, respectively.
March - a popular month for being born.

Today mom and I have made it our mission to buy me a bed, and then I have to get the rest of the assorted misc junk off my floor and shelves and into boxes, because the movers are coming on THURSDAY. Yeep.

Happy Pi Day!

Last night I went to see Jonathan Coulton with Paul & Storm, of whom I had never really heard before last summer, nor ever seen perform, whether on youtube or live.  It was a really fantastic performance with lots of humor and audience interaction. Paul and Storm's opening show had me falling over laughing. Jonathan broke a string on his guitar in the first song, then later discovered his mouth harp was in the frame backwards. It being Friday the 13th, he joked, of course things went a bit awry. But none of that really interfered with the show, or the music. I could have done without the hair-flinging, loud-singing guy sitting one row down from me, but every concert-goer has crosses to bear, and as concerts go a hair-flinging, loud-singing obnoxious dude is better than drunken groping or being fallen on.
At one point near the end the entire balcony was doing Thriller-type zombie gesturing from their seats while shouting "All we want to do is eat your brains." Yeah. Nerds in groups. I should have taken photos. (The few I did take will be posted later, mostly of House of Blues itself.)
I went out with a party of six folks from the Houston SFF community, all active con-goers or organizers. We had dinner first with a few of them, then met at House of Blues downtown, where there were a bunch of other local nerds that folks in my party knew.  We ended up with seating right near each other in the balcony, oddly enough.
After the concert, we all went to a diner/coffeehouse on Westheimer and had food and drink and conversation until after midnight.  I did not get back to my car (I'd been ridesharing to avoid the downtown/midtown parking crunch) until 1:30 am. 
I haven't had a night out like that in quite some time, so it was pretty awesome.

Today I woke up at an ungodly hour to take care of my unruly stomach (it's pretty much a clockwork alarm all on its own - 6:25 am it wakes me without fail, just before my alarm.  I nibbled on a rice cracker and some orange juice and chatted with mom for a few minutes, then crashed again. I got up for real at about 11, and looked soberly at the packing I should be doing...  and turned away.
Instead, I cut some batting and the backing fabric for the quilt in progress, pinned it all together and trimmed it, and now I'm working on attaching the border pieces to the front before getting in there with the machine quilting.
Ideally I would like to have this finished in time to take it to New York at the end of April and present it to the recipients in person. I may not finish it before I move, but I'll definitely try to get as much done as possible before then, and keep the pieces in a separate box so I can find them pronto in the new place.

I just finished giving the kitchen floor a sweep and clean and mop, so I'm taking a sit-down break in front of a fan to type this up. My only minor angst today is that I really wanted to watch Ghostbusters while I did my sewing but I couldn't find the DVD.  I am pretty sure that I actually bought my own copy, but I could be mistaken. (Sorting out my stuff from the family stuff will be such fun!)  I put on The Last Unicorn  with Real Genius in the bullpen instead. 

Ok, and Dad just told me a joke he heard on Prairie Home Companion and I didn't know enough about music to get the pun in the punchline without clarification. FAIL.  :P   He needs to tell it to Peter.

This is just a quick update for those following the drama on the Personal filter (and as always, if you want off a filter, just drop me a comment).

Everything is ok, I have lots of apartment leads and one, maybe two viewings lined up for today.
Things are progressing. Work continues to be awesome, so at least that's one place where nothing is falling apart.  It's getting busier, but that's really ok.
I signed up for ten more weeks of watercolor class.
GI meds have not made any real dent in the problem, so it's probably back to the drawing board. I expect a call from the nurse later today to discuss it.
Dad has been out of town this week, which is sad because we miss him, but it also means that I got dibs on the DVD player so it's been all Merlin, all the time.  w00t!  (I know, I know, I am so silly when I get deep into a new fandom. At least the art has been fun.)
Have not been sewing lately, but that really needs to change. Quilt now probably solid with cat hair, despite being covered up with crinkly paper.  Whoever said that cats avoid lying on things that make noise has never met our cat.
Have been largely avoiding LJ and SFF flaps online, but am not unaware of them. I find myself gaping in disbelief a lot, but I've also found some really excellent new folks to read. 
Also, have been reading real books. In the middle of Alexandria, finished Lackey's The Fairy Godmother, and have made a start on Privilege of the Sword.
Umm...  I think that's a pretty good summary.

So, you know, don't worry too much.  Big thank yous to the folks who have been helping me out on this long-distance. You know who you are. I love you guys.

I have been caught in a vortex of never-ending meetings/meetups since last week. Not a bad thing necessarily, just so incredibly busy.  And I run from work to class or other meetings or to run important family errands and suddenly my to-do list is a mile longer than usual and I am just tired.
But today is Watercolor class and after that there is nothing but actually catching up on all the work stuff that doesn't involve meetings and no more meetups and then maybe I'll get to breathe because dude Friday is my birthday and I don't want to have any more meetings!  (Although if it doesn't rain I'm hoping for another picnic in the park.)

Also, the cat has been sleeping on my quilt-in-progress and you can all congratulate me on womanfully not throwing things at him to get him to remove himself.  Rowr!

p.s. My presentation went really well!

Mom and I have some last-minute errands to run before I skip town tomorrow.  (I scheduled another crack-of-dawn flight. Egads.)
We're going to the art supply. Yay!  I will be there more often soon.  One of my Yule gifts to myself was a Watercolor class at the Art League.  w00t! 
I am so excited. It starts my first week back in town. I am really looking forward to getting into more media on paper, and perhaps combining the watercolors with the pencils.  I had great success with watercolor pencils on my travels during high school.  My Poland journal is full of great art. I need to get back to that.

This afternoon the kids promised they'd be around to play games, so yay. Hopefully we can get in some railroad-building, some gloomy family wrangling, and some volcano sacrificing.  w00t! Mom and I have played a few games in the course of our holiday celebrations (which included reading the comics, doing the crossword, baking cookies, and reading aloud to each other from The United States Constitution: A Graphic Adaptation and The Quotable Atheist, which I gave to Mom for Christmas. Yes, irony, I know.) but we haven't had everybody together yet.

Then I have three pieces of digital art to finish and send before I leave town, and I must pack. I am bringing some art with me to work on, already in progress, and will have to decide about the rest of it. I am going to freeze my butt off!  Where did I leave my tights? And my boots? At least I have a new scarf.

Ok, must run. Happy Boxing Day/First Day of Christmas, people!