Dandelyon's Worlds

So, I did taxes last week which left me feeling very drained. A lot of that was the number of 1099s I just didn't have. Most of these are from inherited stuff that was from the breakup of Ma Bell, and they aren't large enough to make a real difference to my budget, but not putting those numbers into the tax forms would cause problems. I ended up spending time searching likely and unlikely places for more mail, and didn't find anything. Then I had to spend time going online or via telephone to get the numbers I needed for the forms. And hitting that button is always anxiety-inducing, because what if I missed something--and with half or more of the ones I expected were in the stack of mail that I'd carefully sequestered with the tax records, there was more anxixety than usual attached to that.

It is also worrysome because we've been getting a lot of mail that was addressed to this neighbor or that, so I'm wondering who got my mail. Ugh.

Then I moved to looking at the song swap songs, paying the end-of-month bills, and practicing music. Instead of just practicing, I started doing some lyric rewriting and rearranging of a couple of songs. I spent several days taking naps, which is unusual; not sure if that was related to getting over the dumb infection I was on antibiotics for or just getting to bed late or something else. But at least the infection symptoms didn't come back as the antibiotic left my system and I could sing without throat pain again, so I could sing and do that work on the songs.

So yesterday (Saturday) I got up, loaded instruments into the car, and headed to Ravenslake Studios. We did some talking and I did some music, including experimenting with different guitars on a couple of the songs, and got some good work. It ended with some frustration, when the 12-string broke a string, but we were just about out of time anyway. But we got some good work done, and then did some social music and went out for food, so it was a very good day. And then I drove to my sisters house to hang out for a bit, and she put a dumb movie on the TV, and she told me about the kitten she didn't adopt, and the different one my daughter did adopt while I was doing music stuff, and that was good too.

Until all the music stuff stopped being my sole focus and I remembered that Sunday was a writer's group day, and I hadn't read the submission I was to critique, and hadn't made a dish to share either. So I drove back to Milwaukee (from Chicago) and read the submission, asked My Angel to cut up and boil potatoes, and fell in bed. Then I got up too early (or at least it felt like that), chopped some onion and celery, boiled some eggs, and turned it all into potato salad. While I was working on that, my daughter texted pictures of her new kitten and we ended up chatting on the phone (communicating with my mouth is so much better when I need my fingers to make food). Writer's group went well too, and I managed to offer a few comments that made Writer's eyes gleam and her fingers tap. That's always a good feeling.

Then home to take care of at least a few chores, and I'm tired way too early. Or still. Or something like that. And my brain keeps on switching which of my songs is playing in the background, so there shall be more music happening soon. Just probably not tonight.

I woke up this morning feeling like being a recluse for a day, and left the TV completely off for hours and didn't tune in to Eurofilk. The quiet was very restful, and I feel much more in a suitable shape to participate in Filk Ontari-No.

I did FAWM again this year, and feel it was very successful for me. I managed even more songs than last year's total, but more importantly, I think the average quality of the songs was better. I feel so lucky that (after Capricon) I was able to put almost everything else aside and focus on writing songs. It was also a lot of fun.

I did post a few of the songs over on my patreon (https://www.patreon.com/Wyld_Dandelyon) during February; I've been setting the rest (or most of the rest) to post there over time. I may post some of them here too, or maybe just redirect people over there. My plan is that lyrics and chords will be posted to that site in public posts, and as I figure out more of this self-publishing stuff, I'll put early copies of stuff I'm planning to put up on bandcamp in subscriber-only posts.

Right now, I'm putting links to the FAWM demos into the posts, with the warning that the demos won't be there forever (In the case of FAWM demos hosted on the FAWM site, the expected day they'll become unavailable is April 1.) Yeah, I ran out of free space on Soundcloud, and decided to support FAWM instead of Soundcloud this year.

Then I got sick, something with post-nasal drip and a tiny bit of low coughing and a couple episodes of dizziness, but mostly just so tired. There was one weekend daytime zoom filk where I got up after what's normally a full night's sleep and could barely keep my eyes open, and had to get up and move around to even be awake enough to play a song when it was my turn. The test said not covid, thankfully. But I went back to bed right after the filk and spent nearly all of the next two days sleeping, which slowly got better over the course of a week.

So now I'm behind on stuff like doing taxes and housework, but not critically so. Soon, I have to start seedlings too. And before that, buy some potting soil and seed starter mix. But life goes on, and that's a good thing.

Oh, and I found a guitar pick that will stay in my hand for a whole song! And it's comfortable for me to hold too. It's so cool when you find the right gear!

I did FAWM last month, which was intense and chaotic and a LOT of fun. It left me feeling, well, a lot of people at the end said they felt burnt-out and that's not at all true for me. In the creative sense, I felt energized, but in a purely physical sense I was tired. March 1st I expected to be tired, since I'd deliberately interrupted my sleep to write one last song and I'd been pushing to reach a ridiculous song count the weekend before. But I was still tired yesterday, enough that I took a long nap!

But I did get things done yesterday too. I awoke to the lovely sound of a cat barfing, so before breakfast I mopped the kitchen. Then after breakfast I got out the pre-garden gardening stuff and very carefully teased apart the potful of very crowded volunteer tomato plants and repotted them separately. There were a few really badly crowded ones that had already died, and a few more that didn't retain enough roots to try to plant again, but very few, really, given how long I'd ignored that pot. A couple of them were still 6" tall even after I buried 2-3 inches of stem to encourage the plant to develop a more robust root system.

The tiniest ones went into one of the little plant nursery-thingies (basically a flat tray to hold the little pots with a warmer underneath and a plastic dome-ish thing--ish because it's rectangular to fit the tray--and a grow light on top. The bigger ones went back into the window to use natural light.

And then the nap.

Next, I filled a bunch of the small pots with potting soil, topped them off with starter mix, and planted non-volunteer tomatoes. A bunch of Northern Lights, some Cherokee Purple, several varieties of Brandywine, Black Krim, Purple Russian, and some Anna's Zebra that the place where I bought the Northern Lights seeds sent as a thank you. For the peppers, I planted Cayenne and...Huh, I don't remember. But I labeled everything but the volunteer tomatoes, so that's all right. I may have to separate some of those, since most of the seeds were from last year or older, so I planted more in each pot to try to guarantee I'd have at least one sprout in each.

And then I had to clean up everything, and I mopped the kitchen again.

I did duolinguo (I'm on a 312 day streak, as the program counts it, which included some "freeze" days, mostly when I was sick).

I thought about writing this post afterward, but didn't have the energy. So then I went to the FAWM site with the plan of listening to some songs and commenting on them, and I was too tired for that too. I ended up listening to some of my own stuff, to consider what I'd done well and what needed improvement (a lot of what I'd done was skirmishes, where you write a song and record a scratch demo in an hour, or as close to that as you can manage, so there's a lot of room for improvement especially in the recordings), and also to try to get the tunes solidified in my memory. I don't need a lot of energy to let my brain work on memorizing a melody, thank goodness.

More about FAWM later. I think I'm still processing it at a nonverbal, or at least a not-coherent-enough-to-easily-write-about level. Since I was focusing on learning new skills, both trying to improve my songwriting and to learn recording stuff, I guess that's not surprising.

Challenge #4

In your own space, make a list of things that you wish existed in fandom or elsewhere, and/or that you'd like someone to create or do for you.

So, things I wish for, besides the general stuff like more time and more health and more money, all of which matter, and none of which are gonna happen.  I have all the time in the world, just like everybody else, even if the chronic illness means I so often can't do as much as I want with it.  I also will acknowledge that some of the things I wish for aren't possible, or are so vanishingly unlikely that either way, I'm acknowledging that it's OK to want things you will never get, and it's also OK to express that wish as your truth, regardless of the realities of living in this world.

So, I'll list a few things, the stuff that comes to mind right now.  But my biggest impossible wish is for a TARDIS.  It would make going to cons with my instruments so very much easier!

1.  I got a looper from another filker, but I don't have the technical skills to set it up.  I'm sure there's a you tube video, but I'm still struggling to get my house back in order after the roof leaks and get my bedroom painted and still be doing music and writing (and maybe painting again soon).  I have a friend who said he'd come over and help me get things set up, but with covid and his own creative projects it hasn't happened yet.

2.  I'd love to find a remote (probably via zoom) role playing game to play in, something with an emphasis on roleplaying rather than fighting or rules-lawyering.

3.  I want more than one FAWM event in the year.  Certainly I couldn't sustain that level of focus on just one of my creative endeavors year-round, but I find the playfulness, inspiration, and creative connection of that event very valuable and energizing. 

4.  I want NaNoWriMo to happen in some other month than November.  November is just way too busy every single year for it to work as well for me as, say, January would.

Challenge #1

In your own space, update your fandom information!

Fannishly, I guess I'm primarily a filker, though I love so many stories in print and other media.  I've been filking since my very first convention, Windycon One or Two, and that led to so many wonderful things in my life.  I got to play an autoharp there, which prompted my wonderful siblings to convince my father to buy me one, and that has led to so much of the joy in my life.  The music was a solace through college, where I was very much a misfit, and a joy at nearly every convention I've attended over the years. 

I write songs too, though I'm not as prolific as some of my filker friends.  Filk is what led me to learn about and try FAWM, which is February Album-Writing Month.  The challenge is to write at least 14 songs in the month of February--that is, enough for an album.  The first time I joined, I got a song or two, and counted it a good effort, since that was more songs than I'd have written otherwise.  One of the premises of FAWM is that practicing a thing makes you better at it.  So far, that has proved to be accurate, since every year I've written more songs in February than the previous year.  Last year I got more than 30!  (I'm still astonished).  I spent months getting to really know the best songs I wrote then, so I'm not aiming to keep up the increase in quantity this year.  Instead I'm hoping to increase quality and to also manage to keep up writing at least a little fiction on a daily or almost daily basis.

Writing.  I write fiction too, though not as prolifically as I want to be doing.  Some of that is the emotional and physical chaos.  I'm (still) working on getting my bedroom renovated so I can buy a new bed, and there are still things I haven't found after repeatedly having to hurry to move stuff out of the way of things like roof leaks so they wouldn't be damaged, or out of rooms that had to be emptied and repaired because of those leaks  Writing takes mental bandwidth, so all the things that steal that bandwidth slow me down.

Art.  I paint and do fabric arts.  The fabric arts I love the most are time-intensive, sewing lovely things by hand.  A lot of them owe a lot to crazy-quilt, bringing diverse fabrics and colors and threads together to repair a thing or make something new.  i do some machine sewing too, but the chaos in the house has not been helpful for that either.  The hand sewing is also a meditation for me, sometimes a prayer for the world, that all of the diverse people and beings of this world can come together harmoniously and in beauty.

This started out as a dress.  Initially I repaired the top part with some of the dark blue flowers you see here, but eventually that didn't hold and I turned it into an altar cloth.  I am slowly lining the last unlined bits, and hope one day to have reinforced the fragile initial fabric enough that it won't need any new repairs.

This is a painting I did of a frog leaping into the sky.  I took the picture with the paintbrush on it, and decided I liked the whimsy of having it look like the frog is grabbing it.  The painting is acrylics on an 8 inch square canvass.

So, that's a little about me and my creative life.  It's that openness to creativity, both making your own and celebrating what others make, that drew me to and keeps me in fandom, I think.  Nobody here tells me it's a waste of time to sing a song, read a book, or sew flowers and butterflies on something old.

Well, my Google tells me Arisia is about to happen, and shadesong has some kind of thing planned there relating to her story, so here's the update.

Any one else go read her story? Any comments on the artwork?



P.S. And does anyone know how to get LJ to post a picture larger than this? (Doubling the img height & width in the html made it bigger but blurrier.)

This is inspired by shadesong 's story Angel of Fremont Street . (Her announcement is at shadesong.livejournal.com/3766662.html and includes a link to it). Yesterday's versions are at: wyld-dandelyon.livejournal.com/26592.html

Comments are welcome!





Not much added between versions--I realized how late it had gotten!  Tomorrow is a work day, so we'll see whether I can paint in the evening or other chores claim all my time.

Comments are welcome, by the way.

shadesong  has a short story published, and it's pretty cool. (Her announcement is at shadesong.livejournal.com/3766662.html and includes a link to it).

She asked if anyone wanted to do art after reading it, and I've started painting. I've been enjoying the "in process" views of others' work, so here's two pictures. The first is pretty blurry, but there's not much I can do about that--right now my camera is my cell phone, so unless I send it to the computer AND look at it full size on the computer, I can't tell if it's a good photo or not, and I've added to it since, so I can't retake it as it was.





Hopefully, more progress tomorrow. 

haikujaguar posted about sitting talking about art while doing art, which led me to want to share:



People who know me in person have probably seen this; after I painted it it became the front-piece for a dress.

Hmm...I wonder how other people manage to post pictures that appear large. I guess I'm still in the learning curve for this place.

Thunder Moon, Buck Moon, Summer Moon, Rose Moon.  I like the Chinese full moon name for July for a new moon—it’s Angry Ghost Moon.  The image seems to fit a new moon better than a full moon, nice and dark.  However, as far as I know I don’t have any angry ghosts.

I’ve been painting the places around the drain in the old, claw-foot tub upstairs, with a product called Porca-Fix, which keeps making me think of castrating certain farm animals (which is NOT the most pleasant thought for one’s bathtub, which should be for long soaks with good books).  But it was much more reasonably priced than the other two products, and I have the patience and a steady enough hand to paint layer after layer of white stuff to build it up to being the right thickness.  Soon I shall be able to take a comfortable bath again (the final coat must dry for 24 hours before use).  We also cleared off the stairs in the rear vestibule, which led to the inescapable conclusion that they need painting; the last few winters worth of wet and salt have worn the paint nearly away, and I do NOT want to have to rebuild the dang things.  So we swept and mopped and cleaned, and now, given Wisconsin’s current humidity, have been waiting for days for them to dry enough to paint.  Sigh.  Other progress has been made on the downstairs bathroom, and some progress in the mosquito-laden yard too.  And I've been doing mom-chores, and stuff like grocery shopping.

In more fun things, I’m starting to create an outline for the novel I’ve been wanting to write.  And boring stuff like lists of the people in it, and the various “races”.  And doing some painting, which I like better than drawing (though there are places you can draw but can’t paint).  And I've been doing a little music, tho not as much as I would, ideally, prefer.  Of course, to do all the creative things I really would prefer to be doing, I need to not work in an office five days a week...but that pays bills and provides health insurance, which are necessities.  

I think I’ll stick with Moon of Claiming for now; claiming new beginnings for my various creative projects, and claiming a better handle on house things.  Maybe even claiming a better relationship with my kid, though doing so while sending her to Europe (I have to be at the airport at 4:30 in the morning next Saturday—ick!) may seem a paradoxical way to do so.  But it’s a cool opportunity for her.  (http://www.studentambassadors.org)  And I suppose teenage years require paradoxical measures.

But someday I have to do something with "Angry Ghost Moon"…