No Strings Attached

Posted By Kathleen David on March 29, 2012

And I haven’t heard back from the people I was going to be doing something for so I am going to assume that I am not doing it.

So who’s going? I will be there Saturday and maybe Sunday depending on how Saturday goes.

I plan to bring the 8th Doctor puppet with me so that’ll be a clue that you found me.

Today is my volunteer day at Caroline’s school. It is about 2 hours of my day but I know how much it helps the school and the kids.

Once I get back home, I go back to the list that never ends and try to figure out what to do first.

I have a screwy idea for a novel or rather a series of short stories with a structure but I don’t know if those are commercially viable any more. Still thinking about that.

Itching to make some dolls. I have an idea for something I want to try and I want to make Peter his calot.

After I-Con I am going to be getting ready for Passover and Easter which are rather on top of each other this year since Good Friday and the first night of Passover are on the same night. Which works since the Last Supper was a Passover Seder.

I am grateful for options even when it is hard to choose.

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Posted By Kathleen David on March 28, 2012

Caroline is nine going on ten. Or as she puts it, in her last year of single digit age. She is looking forward to being in double digits. I guess I am too but sometimes it is so hard to believe that is has almost been 10 years since she joined us.

Recently I have a looks into the future and the past with my daughter.

We went to the last Broadway Bears auction a couple of weeks ago. Caroline was pretty excited about it and wanted to get dressed up for it. So we shopped for a dress that could be used for more formal functions and a pair of shoes that we would agree on. The dress was a find both for style and price. She liked the dress’ look and I liked the length of the skirt and the shoulders. The shoes were a little more of a debate because she wanted a real heel on the shoe. We found a compromise shoe with a chunky heel. She had her hair cut and put up in pin curls the day before. She slept with the pins in so her hair would be beautiful the next day. No make-up was allowed nor did she ask for any. She borrowed my pearls and wore her Lion King charm bracelet.

(for the Visually Impaired: This is Caroline standing in front of a tree. She is wearing a pink dress with black lace over it, black tights, and black shoes. She is wearing a pearl necklace around her neck and a charm bracelet on her right wrist. Her hair is down in long curls. Her head is slightly tilted and she had a bemused smile on her face)

She looked so grown-up to me. And not only me but the people at the bear auction that have seen her since she was a baby. They see her once a year and catch up on family news as I catch up on their family news. It uses to be that when she dressed up, she looked like a very young child in a party dress. Now I can see the beginnings of the teenager and young lady that she will become.

But there are other times I can still see the very young kid in her. Peter and Caroline beat Kaos in Skylanders yesterday evening. It was a group effort with my help taking figures on and off the platform. In the end it was Trigger Happy with a Machine gun that did the deed. She was so excited that they got through a section that had just not worked before. But they had been building up the characters and planning strategy together for a couple of weeks for that attack. She was still beaming about it this morning.

Yesterday morning I came down to a sound I hadn’t heard in a while, the roar of the dinosaur. She was happily playing with her plastic dinosaurs on her prehistoric play mat. I listened to her telling a story as she played. There were two sets of dinosaurs that weren’t getting along and it was the fault of one dino that was a bully. There was a fight and a lot of roaring before the conflict was resolved and they joined to take care of the meteor heading their direction.

I know my baby is now a little girl who is rapidly becoming a big girl and heading to adulthood. But I hold in my mind the images of her as a baby and a toddler and a preschooler knowing that when I blink, I am going to be looking at my teenager because I can already see that young lady standing in front of me.

Caroline writing in her diary

(For the Visually Impair: This is a photo of Caroline sitting with her legs up on the couch. She is wearing a black shirt with the Lion King logo on it and black pants. She is writing in her purple diary with a purple pen with a flower on top)

I am so very grateful that Caroline is in my life.

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Posted By Kathleen David on March 27, 2012

Consider this sort of a book review of random books I am using for my next couple of projects and some books that are in print and useful to me and I hope to you as well.

One general sewing book that is new to me and I have found very informative is Sarai Mitnick’s The Colette Sewing Handbook. It has very clear direction for pattern making and how to think about the shape of a garment. The information on darts is worth its weight in gold to me. The book’s author assumes that the reader is a beginner but don’t let that stop you from taking a look at this book. She also has some good advise to think about how you view clothing and what works for you. It is also one of the clearest explanations of what all those strange markings on a pattern pieces are.

In the realm of men’s fashion, I found The Victorian Tailor by Jason Maclochlainn very useful but it does assume a certain knowledge of patterns and pattern making. It is also interesting in the historical context that it presents. Again not for the beginner but if you have put a couple patterns together, this book is an interesting read.

If your interest goes towards steampunk but you haven’t a clue or a little clue as to how to make the gadgets that go with the look, I can recommend Steampunk: Gears, Gadgets and Gizmos by Thomas Willeford. These projects are great jumping off points for bigger ideas and the “where to find your gears” section is very useful. The author is a first class scrounger but also gives modern alternatives that you can find in your local hardware shop or fabric store.

In the realm of puppetry I really like 10-minute puppets by Noel MacNeal who is better known to many as Bear from Bear in the Big Blue House. The puppets are simple but the principles can be used to create more complicated puppets. Most of the materials are easy to find and this is a great book for teachers looking to put puppets in the classroom.

John E. Kennedy has two books out that I find useful but you have to read them in order since one builds on things from the other. Puppet Mania is a great book for the beginning puppet builder. He lays out a lot of the basic techniques that you need to make more complicated puppets. His follow up book, Puppet Planet builds on the first book and gives more advanced techniques to be used.

These are books that I know are still in print. Next week I think are some treasures that are out of print but I use all the time.

I am grateful for books that I can currently get my hands on.

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Posted By Kathleen David on March 26, 2012

Yes, it is Monday. Caroline goes back to school and the household goes into its weekly rhythm.

I feel out of rhythm. There are things that I need to do and things I MUST do today along with the usual things I want to do. I have been sorting them out in my head but I think I need to write them down to give myself some sort of schedule. There are the parts of the day locked in stone like when Caroline goes to school, that she has chorus so she has to be picked up at the school. She pretty much goes from there to her Kung Fu class. She gets home and I am off to bowling. This week I have the transportation duties because Peter is hitting some serious deadlines today for various projects.

I checked out a number of books from the library on various subjects which will leaded to the making of objects d’art. I found an interesting one on puppet making for kids that had a couple of really good projects I plan to keep in my bag o’ puppet tricks. I am going to try them with Caroline first to see what could/might go wrong. I do need to add a compass to my kit to get this to work.

There are times that I wish I could find a job that would use my research talents to their best. I am really good about finding information on a topic and distilling it down so it can be explain to someone else. Also I retain this kind of stuff and find myself pulling things out of my head I read in my 20s to help Peter with story elements. It sure helped as an editor and a fact checker.

There is a new version of book banning in schools and this one is much more subversive and has a current federal law behind it that was created to “save” the children from the more unsavory parts of the Internet (Children’s Internet Protection Act). So sites like “It gets Better” and the GLAAD site are unavailable because they are classified as sexual but sites like Exodus International and People Can Change are classified as religious and therefor are allowed. I remember in one school there was a hue and cry because information on breast exam was considered pornographic even though the site had no photos of naked breasts on it at all. Just information on how to do a breast self exam which is pretty important information. The scary thing is that the schools are buying these filtering programs and they haven’t a clue who is doing the deciding of what is fine and what is not fine. When complaints are brought up, it is a long and winding process through a metric ton of red tape to get a site unblocked. By the time it is done, the students that needed the information have graduated and there is a whole new reason that the site isn’t allowed. I am not saying that the Internet in all its glory should be allowed into our schools because there is a lot out there that doesn’t need to be in our schools, but I think the process of getting a website approved needs to be streamlined AND we need to look at what kind of information we are letting into our schools and to our children.

I swear the cats are in cahoots to try to trip me up today. They have been under foot all morning and they have food and water. I have given lots of pets to the critters but they want something, I just haven’t figured out what.

Project Runway, I finally saw the final show and it landed about where I expected considering the previous weeks show. Personally I thought that one person did better over all than the winner but I do understand why they went the way that they did since the winner did get robbed the first time round in my book.

It is deciding if it is going to rain again or not. I think I know what I am sorting out first this morning and then onto the next part of the list. Then onto the next thing until I get to those parts of the day that are already sorted out for me.

I have one team in the final four *sigh*

I am grateful for things that put me back in my groove.

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Posted By Kathleen David on March 25, 2012

In which Caroline and I get about a close as you can to the circus without running away to join it.

Peter got an e-mail a while back about tickets to the circus that were a credit card exclusive. The theme this time around was Dragons which is probably Caroline favorite mythical creature. So we went ahead and got the tickets for the show in March.

When we saw the advertising on TV, Caroline kept saying that she wanted to see it and we made non-committal noises about that we would check into it.

Yesterday we went to see the show and had a magical and amazing time.

Now I am going to make one of my rare requests on my blog. I don’t want to debate about the animals in the circus. This is the first time I think I have been to Ringling Brothers since my parents took me when I was probably about 5 or 6. I got to share that experience with my daughter and it was wonderful.

The preshow was a mad house but Caroline did get a number of the performers and clowns autographs in her program book. She even got to tell one of the Shaolin warriors that she was taking Kung Fu. We saw an elephant paint a picture. And as they were clearing everything out, I got a shot of Caroline just outside the center ring.

We started with a big production number about what we were going to see and then saw amazing feats of horsemanship. They had things going on around so that the set changes weren’t too obvious. This included people over head on a motorcycle on a wire that had two young ladies doing aerial acrobatics over our heads. Caroline winced as two young ladies where doing an aerial act that had them hanging by their hair.

The big cats were brought out and Caroline was enchanted by them. The male lion seem to be looking right at her. Caroline speculated that he was looking at her as friend or possibly lunch. I remember seeing Gunther Gebel-Williams as the big cat tamer when I was a kid. Alexander Lacey had the same kind of moves and the same kind of patter. He even had the lion give him a kiss.

Then Caroline and I were invited to go onstage to watch the last two acts of that part of the show. We sat as part of the ring closest to the entrance for the performers. Caroline was vibrating with excitement. We got to see the Shaolin Warriors perform and the Soaring Scalas with the Russian bar up close and personal. We were surrounded by friendly clowns and invited to join in the percussion. Caroline was beaming and had a lot of fun.

Intermission seemed short but we were watching them set up for the trapezes artists. While the performers were soaring back and forth, I got to watch the ground crew get things into place and out of the way of the tricks.

We then had the domestic animal act in three rings. Ring 1 was cats, 2 was dogs, and 3 was ponies, lamas, goats and a sheep I think. This was a case of not knowing where to look first. All were doing fabulous tricks. It was entertaining and overwhelming.

They followed that up with some serious tumbling and launching of acrobats into the air. And the Shaolin warriors showed off various forms of Kung Fu.

Then we had the elephants. And I saw things that I remembered the elephants doing when I was a kid. For a split second I was a child again and the past and present collided with my daughter clutching my arm and bouncing in delight.

They got to the end and we saw the Dragon, which was pretty doggone cool. They sang their last song and the circus concluded.

Caroline was very happy.

I am grateful that I got to share this experience with Caroline.

The Male lion eyeing Caroline.
(For the Visually Impaired: This is the head of a male lion with a big mane around his face. The color is sort of pink because that was the color of the lighting.)

This is how close we were to the action.
(For the Visually Impaired: This is a picture of Caroline and me sitting on benches on the floor of the circus. On the left side of the photo you can see half of a performer wearing a blue and purple outfit. I am seated on the bench to the left of Caroline. She has her feet on a drum (she was drumming with her feet per the clown’s instruction). I am looking at Caroline and she is looking at me and smiling. To our right are a couple of other patrons)

This is one of my favorite photos that I took. This is when they went to blacklight when there were 7 motorcycles and cyclists in the sphere going around pretty fast.
(For the Visually Impaired. This is a picture of a large spherical cage in which motorcyclists roll around at a high rate of speed and use centrifugal force to defy gravity. At this point they are going so fast, they are just orange blurs in the sphere.)

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