What I Am Into This Month – August 2011

Following suit, linked to Megan at SortaCrunchy and Sarah at Emerging Mummy, I will sum up my August.

On My Nightstand:

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  Together, hedged in by teeming life

  While I didn’t actually read Annie Dillard’s Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, or even read it in the past five years, I lived it every day in Ontario. The first night we stayed on the farm, blanketed in humidity, ears ringing with the overwhelming buzz of insects, blocked from my grandparents’ old house by thick and wild overgrowth, I thought of Annie and her knack for describing the awe-inspiring beauty and horror of her rural landscape. Case in point, the sheer number of cicadas my 2-yr-old son and I found on a single tree one day (about 5 and then more later), emerging from their skins:

Cicada emerging from its skin

• Elizabeth Hay’s Alone in the Classroom – not as engaging as her Late Nights on Air, I still appreciated the Canadian literary qualities of the book. I also enjoyed reading a book that showed me how a writer could link together stories from an ancestor’s life in the early 20th century.

• Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s Nurture Shock: New Thinking about Children – a fascinating book featuring eight topics like praise and self esteem, why kids lie, sleep deprivation, etc. I love this kind of book – lots of interesting research that is already changing my perspective and practices with our kids.

• The Bible – it’s always on my nightstand but it’s been open more than usual this month.

• Little Princes – orphans living in terrible conditions in Nepal after being sold by their parents, who were deceived by traffickers…it was a truly moving story. A young man goes down to volunteer and ends up starting a charity to help reconnect the families.

• Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants – just started it – so far pretty light reading.

• Great Grandmother’s letters & journals

• Syrie James’ The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen – light summer reading for my vacation – I got right into this story but at the end of the day, knowing it is fictional (but based on some facts) makes it intrinsically disappointing.

Want to Read: The Help, A Thousand Splendid Suns, The Book Thief

T.V. Shows
We don’t have cable, so the most TV I watched was on the flight back to BC from our family vacation in Ontario, when I watched 3 consecutive episodes of What not to Wear. It is worth noting that my plane TV screen only worked on one of four flights. And earlier this summer I watched (and surprisingly really enjoyed) the first season of Gilmore Girls.

Movies I’ve Seen: We actually took our two preschoolers to a real movie in the theatre: Winnie the Pooh. I borrow quite a few DVDs from the library such as Monsoon Wedding, the Red Balloon, Exit Through Gift Shop, Roman Holiday, etc. I watched Kandahar last week and it’s really stayed with me. 

In My Ears: I listen to music a lot to help me concentrate at work, and have finished about five months of going through my ipod songs in alphabetical order! Now I often go for shuffle songs, though I don’t like being surprised by all the Raffi and children’s music that ends up interspersed! Enjoying Broken Social Scene, Downhere (old college friends of mine, who have just released a new album), Bjork, Feist, Stereolab – the usual.

Newest Blog Reads and/or Internet Interest

• Dahlhaus – dear (yet far-flung) friend of ours who’s career as an artist has been advancing in leaps and bounds!
• My photographer husband, who is starting to embrace the marketing necessity of blogging (many great new posts to come).
• MelbourneMumma – another mom with lots of inspiring ideas and images.
• Other people who do similar types of art, such as artandtreasure, serendipity, knit the hell out (love that “vision” sweater thing! I hope I find time to knit this year), phrogmom, and more!

What I’m Looking Forward to Next Month:

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  My dear little almost 4-yr-old, so proud to be dressed like mommy (and my 2-yr-old oblivious of the point of the photo).

  The beginning of autumn, my favourite season – the crisp air, the morning mist that crouches over the riverbank where I work, apples from the orchard, curry, stuffed pumpkins, preschool (for my daughter), flannel sheets, fall leaves, purple asters. For me, autumn is like New Year’s Eve for some – I am often struck by a sense of renewal and artistic inspiration.

• My beautiful daughter’s fourth birthday next week. Watching her grow and learn to print, read, be kind. It is so much fun being a mom.
• A welcome return of Saturday brunches with friends…look forward to reconnecting with lots of you!
• A short trip to Victoria later in the month.
• Lots of fall events at work, which I am planning and designing ads, posters and promotional material for.

Deep forest

Today we returned to the place where Curtis took pictures of me at about 38 weeks pregnant. Here I am carrying her still, but on the outside. I loved getting back to this natural place that was so inspiring to me during the pregnancy and birth.

soybean painting

I’ve been immersed in my painting all weekend, except the 3 dinners with different friends. Those were great diversions though, and great food. We ate at the Foundation on Friday – the make really good vegetarian food and the atmosphere is great. The walls are covered in giant quotes.

Sitting in my chair, looking at my painting has taken up much of the painting time. That time is not wasted, which was an important thing I learned in my class. I’ve figured out how to deal with most of the puzzles, except one block of colour at the top is too weighty and I need to find some way to break it up or add something to it without losing the richness of the colour. When I was painting watercolour, the actual work was hard but I always knew the end result – I used a reference photo and tried to make my painting look like the picture. With abstract, you often don’t know where you are going. This big painting (3 feet by 2 maybe?) has a theme – two Wendell Berry poems (I actually got copyright permission to use them). “A bird the size of a leaf fills the whole lucid evening with his note, and flies.” The other is “Best of any song is bird song, in the quiet, but first you must have the quiet.” One was painstakingly scratched into wet gesso over dark paint. The other will probably go on this photo’s sky. There are 3 main colours going on. Two photos to be worked in. A lot of painting and scratching and mark making. A soybean stalk (my favourite feature) that I ripped out of the field when I was home. There is nothing in BC that I have seen that can quite compare to the beautiful colour of ripe soybean fields. That is one of the main colours. Then there is raw umber – a sort of chocoatey brown. And a sort of pale blue-white. I don’t usually use white or blue so that’s been a different challenge.

I’m finding it hard to go back to writing/thinking about linear things after all the painting. Thinking about my professional writing course coming up in January is daunting, but I know I’ll do fine. Classes tend to motivate me. January has always been a month of reflection, getting down to business, changing gears.