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Quick List of Life Stuff: October 2023
Nov. 4th, 2023 03:41 pmI keep meaning to make posts that aren't my monthly tallies of media consumption and then not doing it, so I'm just declaring today to be the Day of Lists and running through non-media stuff first:
-End of September, now: As mentioned last time, I went to the folk school and finally got to take the mokuhanga (woodblock printmaking) class I'd been wanting to take since last year, when they sadly cross-scheduled it with the week I was teaching. It was great! And I came home and acquired all the tools and materials I'll need to do it myself, because unlike the wood engraving class I took, this style doesn't use a press and is thus much more doable at home. (There are no local art spaces/maker spaces with a type-high press around here, and it drives me nuts.) Last night I finally sat down with one of the postcard-sized blocks I bought for playing around with small test prints and committed to a design that I will hopefully start carving out today.
-Now that my brother and his kids have moved back to the same tri-city area as me and our parents, we've started a family-wide project of helping my 8yo niece catch up on literacy skills, which means I've been going over to my parents' house once a week as one of her "fun reading partners!" I collected a huge list of suggestions from college friends with kids in the same age bracket and my mom took the kids to get their new library cards, and we're hoping through having huge stacks of options she'll keep thinking of reading as a fun thing and not a chore. So far, it seems to be going well. We're actually already seeing improvement! (She's also in a new reading group at school, so this isn't just our efforts, but still.) However, during my second turn as reading partner, I promptly caught an elementary school sore throat crud (not COVID, thankfully) and was down for the rest of the week.
-One of those trips to my parents' house was also for the purposes of temari glamor shots, as all the international members of the Japan Temari Association have been asked to submit photos of temari in clearly non-Japanese settings, and my parents have been collecting local pottery and art for the past 40+ years. My mom and I also took a trip to the art museum and took a bunch of pictures with the outdoor installations. I haven't submitted mine yet, though, because I also want to see if I get any good one at the folk school when I go back to teach in a week. It's an interesting challenge trying to get a good background that says something about itself in a shot that's still focused on something that is by comparison quite small.
-Finished out the month by going to see the annual Halloween-themed ballet with my mother. This year was Frankenstein, which we actually saw a few years ago when it premiered. Our seats were better this time, but I do think the paired piece last time, an interpretation of Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was better than this year's, two pieces based on works by the Graveyard Poets, a subset of the Romantic movement.
-I spent the evening of Halloween holed up in the back bedroom of the house with all the other lights off because having a lifelong T1 diabetic spouse means residual bitterness about trick-or-treating, working on finally piecing together a sweater I've had all the panels done for for months. I made good progress on the sweater, and it turns out the good thing about the dog now being mostly deaf is he was unaware of the kids out in the street when not able to see them, so he remained unbothered by the whole experience.
-End of September, now: As mentioned last time, I went to the folk school and finally got to take the mokuhanga (woodblock printmaking) class I'd been wanting to take since last year, when they sadly cross-scheduled it with the week I was teaching. It was great! And I came home and acquired all the tools and materials I'll need to do it myself, because unlike the wood engraving class I took, this style doesn't use a press and is thus much more doable at home. (There are no local art spaces/maker spaces with a type-high press around here, and it drives me nuts.) Last night I finally sat down with one of the postcard-sized blocks I bought for playing around with small test prints and committed to a design that I will hopefully start carving out today.
-Now that my brother and his kids have moved back to the same tri-city area as me and our parents, we've started a family-wide project of helping my 8yo niece catch up on literacy skills, which means I've been going over to my parents' house once a week as one of her "fun reading partners!" I collected a huge list of suggestions from college friends with kids in the same age bracket and my mom took the kids to get their new library cards, and we're hoping through having huge stacks of options she'll keep thinking of reading as a fun thing and not a chore. So far, it seems to be going well. We're actually already seeing improvement! (She's also in a new reading group at school, so this isn't just our efforts, but still.) However, during my second turn as reading partner, I promptly caught an elementary school sore throat crud (not COVID, thankfully) and was down for the rest of the week.
-One of those trips to my parents' house was also for the purposes of temari glamor shots, as all the international members of the Japan Temari Association have been asked to submit photos of temari in clearly non-Japanese settings, and my parents have been collecting local pottery and art for the past 40+ years. My mom and I also took a trip to the art museum and took a bunch of pictures with the outdoor installations. I haven't submitted mine yet, though, because I also want to see if I get any good one at the folk school when I go back to teach in a week. It's an interesting challenge trying to get a good background that says something about itself in a shot that's still focused on something that is by comparison quite small.
-Finished out the month by going to see the annual Halloween-themed ballet with my mother. This year was Frankenstein, which we actually saw a few years ago when it premiered. Our seats were better this time, but I do think the paired piece last time, an interpretation of Rime of the Ancient Mariner, was better than this year's, two pieces based on works by the Graveyard Poets, a subset of the Romantic movement.
-I spent the evening of Halloween holed up in the back bedroom of the house with all the other lights off because having a lifelong T1 diabetic spouse means residual bitterness about trick-or-treating, working on finally piecing together a sweater I've had all the panels done for for months. I made good progress on the sweater, and it turns out the good thing about the dog now being mostly deaf is he was unaware of the kids out in the street when not able to see them, so he remained unbothered by the whole experience.
