Now - 12/16/09

I'm past due an aimless ramble, must be. The pace of everything is always so breathless that it's hard and almost scary to stop, to reflect, to write it down, to breathe. My job is sending me to Dreamweaver school tomorrow & Friday. I'm excited and grateful. I have all these websites that need to be built. How did that happen? They're coming at me from different directions and there are five needed yesterday and a couple more just a tad less urgently. Work has also bought the developers' version of WordPress Thesis, which is harder than it looked, even though I'm fairly comfortable in WordPress. I think I can manage it once I get it installed, which is beginning to feel like if I get it installed. I feel driven to do this, feel like I have to put my head down and work every night until I can build an elegant website, and it's Christmas!
And I made angels, for the first time in years! I used to make and sell them, before I went to work full time at our agency. I'd meant to last fall, brought a bag of Coleman porcelain home, but never got to it with Bel and Mama being sick and dying. I wish I had made angels with Bel and remembered to buy some bendy straws. So, I had a last minute burst of angel making Sunday and Monday nights. Some credit has to go to David Giardina whose visit forced me to clean off the "dressing room" that had grown on Bel's bed, so he could sleep in it. I slapped the canvas covered slab of Corian (the cooktop cutout from when we re-did the kitchen, or was it the sink?) onto the bed and went to town with the year-old bag of clay. I made twenty-eight of them. We have to get them through the fire, and probably just a hotish bisque. I'd like to try to get a couple through a glaze fire, but they're very thin. Bisque is bleached-bone pretty, its unfinished nature beautifully representative of the subject, I think.
So, throughout this busyness I've had all that Rob Thomas music in my head, after seeing him perform twice during his current tour. Just as his brokenness was a theme in Matchbox Twenty's evolution, much of his independent work has explored time being fleeting, life being short, the ways we make each other feel each moment being what matters. It's good background/marching music, facing each task in their turn with joy and an effort to be fully present, resisting my natural inclination toward impatience. It's been helpful to me.
So, wish me luck. It's getting to be embarrassing that I've tried this hard and long to learn Dreamweaver and gotten nowhere, and my angels still have to survive the fire that takes them from unthinkably fragile to what remains from past civilizations. And this weekend, I will buy and put up and decorate a Christmas tree.
Life just rocks.