Where did February go?

So I'm not very good at keeping up with the blogging... My Crafting 365 efforts lately have been finishing this board book sample for a class I'm teaching at Artist & Display on March 9. Yesterday's entry was "Taking artistic photos at Lakefront Brewery and KCDs"!

ATCards and The Mail Artist go bye-bye

Well, ATCards.com (The Artist Trading Card Forums) and themailartist.com have been shut down. The members have sought refuge at a temporary group on Flickr (you need to have a Flickr ID to join). Right now a lot of folks are volunteering their time and working their butts off to get a new site up and running as early as this coming week. So get ready for http://www.atcsforall.com/ A similar site for the Mail Artist will be going on-line later this year. If you were an ATCards member and want to get on the e-mail update list, send your e-mail and ATCards ID to adriayna @ yahoodotcom. Past updates can be found here.

A bit of news

Thanks to Sarah/Original Youth who pitched the idea to Ronna Mogelon, I've got an article about my ATC-a-Day project in the Spring (March 2008) issue of the ATC Quarterly.

Last week, on the day of the Big Blizzard, I got an envelope in the mail - my Dia de los Muertos mini-art quilts finally came home from Eugene, Oregon, where they were in the annual Day of the Dead exhibit at the Maude Kerns Art Center.

Urgh.

Apparently I'm one of the 5% who get upset stomach from my antibiotic. Blugh.

On a more pleasant note, I've got as many ATCs as I think I'll manage to get done for Saturday's live trade at the Bay View Book Arts Gallery (Theme for February is Romance: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly)

The circular vintage images are from the Ten Two Studios Valentine's Day printables countdown, which ends tomorrow! (I can't guarantee, but images may be up a day or two longer.)

On the Mend

So the day after the Blizzard of '08, I woke up with a sore throat and a fever. That was Thursday, when I had a fever of 102.4 but I figured that was the peak. My Crafting 365 project was sketching out some ideas for the art quilt squares I need to make for a swap. Friday, instead of getting better, I managed to reach 102.8. (Crafting 365 - assembling the kits for my Mini-Matchbox Shrine class because obviously I would get better now that I had reached those dizzying heights).

Saturday, I woke up at 100 degrees, which was an improvement so I took some aspirin and drove up to Dodge County to teach my class with (I hope) reasonable coherence, and was horrified to discover on my return that my temperature had gone back up to 102 again. Lay down on the couch for the rest of the day. Drank excessive amounts of hot tea or water with lime juice. Glen brought me frozen custard for medicinal purposes (Snicker Swirl). Went to bed at 10 p.m. and finished Yiddish Policemen's Union (good book).

Officially got out of bed on Sunday morning around 11:30 a.m. and staggered to the couch to read the paper, and then read Laurie R. King's Touchstone (disappointing), while Glen watched NASCAR coverage. (He did offer to change the channel to whatever I wanted, but NASCAR actually helps me fall asleep with all that driving in circles.) My Crafting 365 entry was "tried to visualize piecing the circle quilt square" which was very difficult even with only a constant 100 degree fever because the circles tended to dance around in my imagination. We did consider my going to Urgent Care on Sunday, but the windchill was in the negative double digits, and I figured I was better off lying on the couch ingesting hot liquids.

So this morning I woke up at 98.6 degrees on the dot. I'm now at the point where I sound much worse than I feel, and was given orders to take zithromax and mucinex (and I thought they were supposed to be cutting back on antibiotic use). Meanwhile Glen's coming down with something too, but it doesn't seem to be the same thing.

Snow snow snow

About 2:30 p.m. with snow still falling
Originally uploaded by vintagepix

Looks like we got over a foot of snow, but it's hard to tell with the drifts! Glen got his car shoveled out and I'll have to finish shoveling mine out of the garage tomorrow. Fun, fun!

This was our driveway around 2:30 p.m. when he shoveled a path to the mailbox and decided it was too mucky to continue.

For winter comfort food, I made my version of Yellowman's Banana Lime Bread from Sundays at Moosewood:

3/4 cup brown sugar
1/2 cup butter
2 eggs
1 cup mashed ripe bananas (about 3)
3 tablespoons milk
1 tablespoon lime juice
1/2 teaspoon ground ginger
3/4 cup grated coconut
2 cups white flour
1 teaspoon baking powder

Preheat oven to 350F and spray a 9 x 5 x 3-inch loaf pan with non-stick cooking spray (if it's not already non-stick :o). In a large mixing bowl, cream the sugar and butter. Stir in the egg, bananas, milk, and lime juice. Add the salt, ginger, and coconut and mix well. Measure the flour and baking powder into a separate bowl. Sift the dry ingredients into the wet and mix until smooth. Scrape the batter into the prepared loaf pan and bake for one hour, or until a knife inserted in the center comes out clean. Cool the bread for about 10 minutes before removing from the pan. (There's a rum glaze that goes with this, but I'm too lazy to make it, and this is sweet and moist enough without it.)

What I'm Reading

I finally had a chance to read through the Ten Two Studios Basic Transfer Techniques how-to CD (which I had bought back before Christmas!) Can't wait to try some of the full-page transfer and decal projects. I haven't been that brave before this ;o)

I'm also working my way through Jane Wynn's Altered Curiosities: Assemblage Techniques and Projects, which I have to read one project at a time, or I get overstimulated. Will this be the year I finally learn to use that two-part resin epoxy stuff??

Bedside reading right now is Michael Chabon's The Yiddish Policemen's Union. I've never read any of his work, and I usually don't read Critically Acclaimed Literature, but I was attracted by the premise of a noir murder mystery set in an alternate timeline where displaced Jews end up settling in Alaska rather than Israel after WWII.

Old news now - but we did get the latest Pratchett Making Money from my brother and his wife for Christmas (OK, technically it's my husband's copy but I did recommend they get it for him.) I read it very quickly, went back and re-read Going Postal to remind myself where Moist von Lipwig got started, and then re-read Making Money at a more leisurely pace.

Over on Flickr, we're showing off our books.