euro pro

i can't believe that i never have thought once about just buying my own sewing machine. i have always thought them to be way too expensive and really all i had to do was go to target and find the machine section. my dear friend kate nicely informed me of how inexpensive a sewing machine could be. i don't need or want anything fancy. just a little plastock sewing machine. my next payday is on october sixth and possibly then i'll have the moolah to spend on a euro pro.

tonight i'm going to a picnic at a park. i hope i have good time. i also think it might be a good time to get some more babysitting jobs.

if she were me

.

i have admired loretta lux photography for some time now. thinking that most of you had found her by now i was too hesitant to bring her up again. i find the photographs to be quite mesmerizing and rather charming. i especially like this little one, with the orange blouse. i often feel like this tiny girl or i'll imagine myself in her shoes, with her crossed arms and face.

i am so glad that autumn is finally on it's way i've missed the coolness. ever sense i was younger, this time of year gives me butterflies in my stomach. it could be that it was time to go back to school after a long hot summer and seeing all of my friends made for anxious morning stomach gurbles. oddly though i'm not going back to school and the gurbles come back in the morning and in the afternoon when i get off work, right before i get into bed for an early evening nap. outside in the parking lot across the street there are three yellow trees that i park underneath. they have lost the majority of their leaves and the scent is musty like a campfire.

i have been inspired to work again in a scrapbook. it came upon me when i worked with s'more last tuesday night on an independent project for her ap art class. i haven't done a really nice collage in some time and that might be because i've ran clean out of my personal stock of color copies. i have been painting so often in the last couple of years that the only time i do a collage is for the purpose of invitations or stationary. the thing i mostly want is a sewing machine. i'm desperately seeking one (my mother's mother's) sewing machine. i'll continue to beg and plead with her for it, but her response is always the same. "it needs to be fixed, then i'll put it to use myself." oh brother. i refuse to sew anything by hand. i'd like kinko's to invest in a few sewing machines for those of us less fortunate. that way we can have our cards printed and sewn conveniently at the same location. if she, being my mom, were me, i'd give the sewing machine to me, once and for all.

today i've been going through a stack of charts that are expired patients with negative or positive financial balances. because i am here and there it takes me a little longer. i have an hour of work to go.

paint bucket

to be honest with you, i have not got a digital camera or a scanner or any of those expensive things that could make this family tree aesthetically pleasing to look through. so i take pictures that i like from either the 45's photobucket or
veer. usually there's a hint of veer down in the corner of each piece that i include in my blog, just so you know that the images aren't mine.

this weekend i spent some time watching television. i watched the premiere of joan of arcadia on friday night. saturday i spent the early afternoon cleaning the alexanders home. then in the evening i went with aaron & laurie and chris & ann ammons to the pickle barrel. after we ate laurie, ann and i went to see hero. i thought it was a beautiful movie and really had forgotten about it until i realized that father and son wasn't going to cut it just yet in my movie watching itinerary. sunday night i went to work on my mural for three hours. i spent time painting the third kings robe, joseph's robe, hands and faces. one of the funny things about the mural is that throughout this whole entire time it never occurred to me to include adam and eve. i don't feel as though i need to go back and somehow try and fit them in, but up until last night i never once thought of them. i think with all of the people i did include, missing adam and eve won't really matter. afterall, painted naked people in a nursery room might push the envelope further than necessary. despite all of the semi business i had a good weekend.

stick to me

i want to show you one of my most favorite things in the world. i can barely go a whole month without buying new stickers. before the 45 left to go back to honolulu we went to morning glory which is the korean version of sanrio a.k.a. hello kitty. i am having a hard time finding any pictures of the little girl i like the most, but i can tell you this, her name is not pucca. so if you are reading this and think it's pucca it is not.

kk1000 asked me about where my brother is presently employed. he was hired at redbank highschool as a freshman english teacher. he's got six classes a day, zero planning period. he and i talk once a week and he basically could fill an entire year with one days worth of school adventure.

laurie coe collier is presently working at erlanger on the pediatric floor. she's working from 7pm-7am, 3 or 4 days on 3 or 4 days off. i'm not really quite sure.

honosushi

when i visited honolulu the 45 and i ate a whole bunch of sushi. you can go to the seven eleven and purchase a bottle of beer and a six piece california roll. one of the places i miss the most in honolulu is zippy's restaurant. zippy's is opened twenty four hours a day like steak n shake or wafflehouse, expect there's fish&rice on the menu and vegetarian chili. but i miss the cheaper quik stop sushi. one has to be extremely careful in honolulu because the native hawaiian custom is to use spam in their sushi instead of fish. "spiced ham" will never take the place of shrimp, crab, yellowtail or salmon. where is the confusion?

i've noticed that there are quite a few mexican restaurants popping up alongside of all the coffeehouses downtown. if i see one more coffeehouse or mexican restaurant i'm going to jump off a cliff. there is probably a record amount of coffeehouses per square mile in chattanooga then anywhere else in the country except for maybe new york city or portland oregon.

i was able to talk with kk1000 and fenn k. on saturday. they are both doing fairly well in very different ways. kk is going to have a baby girl i think or hopefully, we're not anywhere near able to know for sure. fenn is down in lakeland plugging away in the hot flordia hurricane sun and rain. we are miles apart from one another but in many ways i don't feel the distance at all and i am so thankful for cellphones and bestfriends.

this past friday night meine bruder aaron and i hung out and watched joan of arcadia. who else watches that show on friday night? i'm sure that most people are out drinking or picking out their choice of the best meat. who says staying at home on a friday night isn't cool. aaron and i drank some sierra nevada and skated around the block on my newfound skateboard. aaron is my youngest sibling. he's a freshman english teacher who married a little pediatric nurse. aaron has always been this supercool kid. when he was young he'd never really talk a whole lot. i remember he went through a year of his life when everytime we sat down to eat dinner as a family he'd choke or gag on something and mom would have to pull the hook finger to retrieve the mess from his throat. he also used to tell my mom and the rest of us, especially when we'd be in the car on a sunday afternoon drive, that he wasn't a traveler. he used to go around saying that 'smoking was a bad hobit.' because my mom read the hobit to us, but he was like three or four years old. aaron told me on friday night that skateboarding is coming back into style and that he lets all of his kids at school bring their skateboards into his room during the day so they won't get in trouble for carrying them around in the halls. aaron has a special way about him. it was definitely a nice time we had.

to be duke

last night i sat in my apartment on the second floor looking out across the rest of the city under heavy gusts of wind and rain. the quality of devastation on the southside seems to have been slight with the exception of partial flooding on main street. i never was afraid and if i had been i would have huddled low in the stairwell with turquoise trim. for days the weather patrol have been predicting all sorts of atmospheric catastrophe. to me it has felt like the long awaited autumn season.

in the evenings after eleven p.m. i listen to a local radiostation for my favorite music bits. i'll mute the television news and pretend the news crews are singing in the music videos of bjork, modest mouse, interpol, air and much much more. last night it was to be duke that inspired me to do the enigma's easy crossword puzzle and jot a piece of thought out onto the paper.

duke is on my page,
appearing dizzy footed
with ash and alcohol
at his smokey stool side
to order up the bass
and piano strings plucked
from final efforts to come between
windows that make micro
stained glass scopes turn notes
like lights into magnified
drops. one hit. one high.
one hand at a time.


i went outside for a smoke break and saw bluer sky between dark grey clouds. the worse is over for now. this weekend i will work on the mural and go to "push" at the local if thats what betafish wants to do. i don't have the map anymore. i thought it would be considered stealing so i took it back down to the basement. i'm sure i could go and get it back anytime i need directions. fortunately we all got a three percent raise here at uoha. due to the fact that medicare will be implementing major oncology cuts in 2005 the doctors are proceeding with caution when it comes to their expenditures. i'm thankful regardless and have plans to continue to work through the rest of the year and possibly much longer. i'm not ready to look for a new job yet. i feel overwhelmed in other avenues in my life right now. i resigned my lease at the grand hotel with chattanooga neighborhood enterprises yesterday. they did an apartment inspection and everything was graded good/excellent. i am a neater person now than i used to be. the only time things get out of control are during major art project times.

i am almost finished reading the 9/11 commission report. i'll let you know how it all turns out. no news is good news. if in doubt don't go out.

suffocation street

i must sound like a broken record. a forty five with one too many scratches.

least of my worries

in the basement of my apartment building we discovered a large map of chattanooga. i would love to have a wall big enough to hang it on. chris g had a good idea though. he's the one second from the left. he said i should cut the map apart and put sections of it in each room of my apartment. then when i'm headed to the bathroom or the kitchen i could say i'm going to redbank or let's go in to st elmo. the other idea is to laminate the whole map and use it as linoleum for breaking.

today the map is the least of my worries. the map between the 45 and i is so much bigger than anything that i could ever fit into my apartment. i hesitate to say much about how i feel about our geographical distance. i've been to honolulu to visit and i absolutely loved being there seeing a beautiful landscape everywhere i turned.





i look cocky eyed in the picture of the 45 and i but i don't care. the 45 has a great job on Hickam AFB and he'll be starting the united airlines job in october. that's awesome and i'm so thankful to his parents for letting him live with them so he can save up a bundle of moolah moolah for us to beable to live out there. but we've pushed back the process and i miss him so terribly. and i'm emotionally distraught and confused about making a decision. my faith is being stretched to it's limits. i don't look forward to spending a year of our relationship apart just so that we can live in hawaii. but at the same time i know of plenty of couples who have been apart during crucial parts of their relationships and they make it and they are stronger for it. many people ask me why i haven't already moved out there and my answer to that question is that i would like to be married before i make a move like that. the other question people ask is why won't the 45 move back to chattanooga and then you both move back out to honolulu. we have some extremely tough choices to make. we were able to talk quite effectively while he was visiting and i felt like we came to a reasonable conclusion but he's only been gone three days and i'm hurting so badly right now. our primary focus has always been our love and our faith, but now we're both fighting to think and swim above the water. i know that there are tons of people out there praying for the 45 and i. kate and joel, jen kring, my mom and dad and brothers and sisters in law, shan alexander, and maryalice hatch, and recently i just found out that tobey carpenter has been praying for me. i know that i am blessed and i have felt the holy spirit surrounding me with wisdom, guidance, strength, love and grace and mercy. my god is miraculous and i am apart of a this miracle campaign. my appreciation to those of you who stand with me during this time in my life.

back against the wall

a week has passed with event after event under my belt. the 45 Revolver was here for the week and there were many people to see and things to do. a whirlwind blew threw and i felt a little like the people must feel down in flordia. today i'm back to the work force, playing a game of catch up. but while the 45 was intown he took a whole bunch of pictures of everything under the sun. i'm not about to post everything out here but one of the coolest things he did was take pics of my art. the most recent piece that i've been working on is a portrait of little josiah knutson. it's the first portrait i have done sense a piece i did of my brother aaron back about two years ago. i incorporated a lot into this specific painting. there is a layer of yellow grid drywall tape to give the piece a canvas like texture. there is wax and paper and thread. i also used some of those nice foam letters as additional dimension and force with in the piece. i have no probably with saying that i like the piece quite a bit. it came pretty naturally and yet i've got it hanging but it is not exactly finished. we'll see now that the 45 is gone i'll have more time to work again. i also got two new canvas from biglots the week before last. i really don't buy a whole lot of canvas i attempt to just paint on whatever i can find lying around the house. but i happened across the quality and picked up a couple. i'm supposed to work on two pieces for my mother. on of the old house and one for the newly painted guest bedroom. we'll see. definitely see.


i'll have some more to offer but until then keep up the checking up here.

wattstax

don't be surprised by the fact that i am finally back. the last week and a half have been absolutely crazy times at ridgemont high so to speak. last week i needed to improve my work production and i didn't want to spend a whole lot of time on the www. the work has been really stressful and discouraging for me lately. i have not felt that great about the atmosphere but i also don't think i've been as motivated. i know that in the last three years i've gone through these sort of phases of unmotivation at work but for some reason the conflict seems insurmountable. the 45Revolver got into knoxville on saturday on we decided to go to K.F.A.R. from there which is Knoxville's First amendment Radio Station. He played a set on air that just blew everyone away. The party was outside around a large bonfire and Ratchet made some homebrew for all of us to drink. Sunday he played the sunday morning reggea set and then we took off to come back down to chattanooga for ROOFLESS. ROOFLESS went off with much of a hitch other than not being able to get into the Local until 9pm which was the needledrop. Monday we all went to a Lookout's game, then all the kids came back to my apartment. I had so much fun with everyone. the 45 was so hilarious at the game. we have talked about going to a baseball game together sense we got together but we got together in december when the baseball season was off. yesterday, which was tuesday we just played fussball and went to the choochoo for breakfast and then we took pizza to the parentals house. my mom and the 45 are so similar. they get along so well, it's just incredible for me to watch my mom respond to someone like she responds to him. they just talk and talk and it makes me know that my mom and dad really like him, not just a little, but a whole bunch. tonight, after work, we're going over to aaron and laurie's house for dinner. i'm looking forward to spending the rest of the week with the 45 before he goes back to honolulu. i know that so many people have been praying for me and the 45 while he was visiting. i have felt those prayers. continue to pray for us both.

i'll be keeping everyone updated in the nearer future.