glockgal has started a meme for fanartists to share the love. my fanart meme entry

It's really cold here, which is weird. And I've discovered that I'm kind of unprepared, so I'd best go pick up some things before the end of the month when I go to Philadelphia.
By the way, northeast folks - I'm going to be in Philadelphia for the end of the year. I'll probably have a day or an afternoon to meet with locals if you're in the area. Give me a call or drop me a line.

Good lord, I have less than a month before I leave.  Eek eek eek.

Art is proceeding well, but as usual my list of projects keeps growing ahead of my ability to finish anything.

Writing not proceeding so well, but slow is ok as long as it gets done.

Austin this weekend for SMOFCon, then next weekend is the election and then the next weekend is meeting and parties and when exactly was I hoping to get anything done again?  Hmm.

Still making my way through Doctor Who, although I took some time to listen to the three episode commentaries on the Volume 1 DVD of Merlin Series 2.  Interesting.  I wish those DVDs could include deleted scenes, even (perhaps especially) ones played out against CGI stand-ins or greenscreen.  It would be so interesting. Plus we might see some of the characters that appear to have gotten pretty short shrift in the show as aired. (Hi, Morgana!)

Right, gotta make art now.

So, I haven't really blogged much in the last few weeks, just highlighting a few things.
I've been busy with work and fandom, and that's pretty much been it. Also reading - I did a lot of reading recently.
Soulless by Gail Carriger -- awesome and funny and really enjoyable.
The Magicians by Lev Grossman -- intriguing and painful and extraordinary and terribly sad.
I'm in the middle of Boneshaker by Cherie Priest, which is so far excellent.

Also on Friday Mom and Dad and I watched Neverwhere. I'd never seen it, although I sort of remember reading it, maybe. It was quite awesome, and also had a lot of really amazing guest stars.

I'm eating Mom's Thanksgiving leftovers and they're full of yumminess. But now thanks to Rose Tyler and my Doctor Who marathon, I really crave french fries.  Rose and her chips.  Geez.

Today I'm in the middle of Season Two of Doctor Who and have seen the latest episode of Merlin, plus Merlin: Secrets & Magic  (why isn't it a half hour like DW:Confidential, I ask you?), and The Real Merlin and Arthur special, which was hilarious. I want more of the footage from the driving, because that was where they spent most of their days. Also, I have now seen 3 out of 6 members of the Merlin cast guesting on Doctor Who. And I know that Midnight is coming up later.

I'm working on lots of art for holiday exchanges, but once those are turned in (mid-December), I'll be done for now. That means I'll be able to concentrate on my own projects again, yay.
I'm in a short course at Rice Continuing Studies as well, which has two more sessions, and for that I'm working on graphite pieces based on Merlin and the Knights of the Tarot. Hopefully soon I'll be re-doing them in color as well.

OK, back to drawing.

It's me, doing things and having culture and stuff!
that is the entrance to Jones Hall from the underground parking garage that spans the underbelly of the entire Theater District. Cool art, for an underground lair. :D

Brahms was excellent. Mahler was odd. It was a great night.

Despite the patronizing headline, I did find this article helpful.

5 Things You Didn't Know About Veterans (And How You Can Support Them)

Veteran's Day only happens once a year, but our nation's veterans need our support year-round. We've pulled together five facts about U.S. veterans, the great organizations that are supporting them and how you can help any time of the year.

This evening the lovely alisanne was in town, so we met up for dinner and tea and much chatter of fandom and other topics.  It was quite a nice time. 
Now I must prepare for my weekend adventure in Austin, plus try to make some progress on my art coming due.

Long day at the polls, but relatively easy, too. It was a lovely space this time, and fabulous weather, and I got to do some writing planning, plus watched some Merlin.

This is the piece I did in the studio art class that just finished up today. She's a new incarnation of Sofia the Clockwork Engineer, and I think that this version of her is a character in the story I'm writing.


This is the 2009 Heritage Society Quilt Committee offering, called "The View from My Hammock". My mom did five, count 'em, five of the squares. Mom is awesome. I got a credit because I did some drafting and designing. I did not sew any of this quilt, though!

Ok, I'm leaving for the polling place where I will be spending all day Election Clerking. With no internet.  Woe.
See you all late tonight.

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.

I ran away to the circus.. er, Renaissance Festival today!
It was pirate weekend, so I got into a pseudo-costume (I wore jeans), and met Donna, Jon, Lando and some friends.
It was a long drive, by the way. Geez. It seems so much shorter when there is another person in the car.
This is us in front of the waterwheel by the carousel, which was the designated "let's all meet here" location.

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.

illogicalvulcan:  How did an @ wind up in my logs?
me:  it hatched from three brackets and a tilde.
illogicalvulcan:  whoa! kinky
me:  this is why typography is so popular
illogicalvulcan:  wow...vermilionsun never said
illogicalvulcan: top
illogicalvulcan: that was not for you
me:: :D I thought we were back to kinky typography
illogicalvulcan: no, now we're back to me sending you unix commands
me:: hee
illogicalvulcan: would you like to tell me your most resource intensive processes?
me:: paying my cable bill.
illogicalvulcan: I just LOLed

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!

I got a clean bill of health yesterday, and got a shot in each arm (flu, tetanus).

Ran by Spec's to get cookies and cheese and found a few other things to try. My food experiments have been kind of eh lately. Sometimes they work out, more often they leave me feeling gross for the rest of the day.

Also, been watching Avatar: the Last Airbender Book 2, which tends to make me very emotional. Between Appa and Aang I just cry at the drop of a hat in this book (In the next book, it's Zuko and Hiro that make me cry the most), but luckily Sokka is there to bring me back with a smile.

Time to go run some more errands, and hopefully reclaim my Firefly DVDs. By the time I get home, I should be able to find Merlin's latest episode, too.

Had a lot of stuff going on this week.  It's just been terribly busy, and I haven't slept well.
Thought about going to the memorial concert tonight, but wasn't up for it.  Spent the whole day reading various bizarre social networking posts about where people were in 2001. There was a hashtag for it, for goodness sakes. Bizarre, and yet I suppose completely human.
I doubt I'll ever forget, but the memory seems to change with each telling. And more than the day itself, the days and weeks immediately after stay in my mind. It was a hard time, but one that has faded with the passing of years so that its immediacy is lessened but certain indelible images and feelings remain, worn into the psyche beside all the rest of a life's traumas.

Hm, I seem to have gone a bit introspective despite my effort to avoid same this year.

I've finished two actual novels this week, though, which was great.  And they were both awesome in totally different ways.  Lavinia by Ursula K LeGuin, and The Shadow Queen by Anne Bishop.

Now I'm really tired and looking forward to a fun weekend, so I'd best get to bed and try to actually sleep.

Had a lovely crafty evening with Kim last night.  Found some fantastic Halloween accessories at Michael's that will make wonderful not-quite-so-tiny shrines, and achieved a significant amount on the quilt.
The quilting portion of the project is finished. Now I have only the binding and final touches before it is ready to send.  Yay!

I am so busy, in all aspects of my life, and it's funny the way that everything just gets more complicated. Luckily I have a really great workplace and a lot of resources for keeping my head above water.
There's a small list of urgent tasks I need to do in the next few days, but things have been made much easier by canceling some of my almost-scheduled out-of-town plans for this month and next.  Except for the RenFaire, there is now nothing on my plate requiring a large travel investment until the holiday season.

And plenty of time for crafty decompression.
(I hope!)

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!