A BUNCH OF RAINY DAYS

It's been raining for almost a week. I haven't been able to cover up the car and have had to leave it out on T Street so it isn't under any trees. The tulips John planted are starting to come up. The picture only shows the blue and pink ones because we took it a week ago. Now there are yellow ones too. People stop and look at them because they kind of look like easter eggs on the corner there and they are sort of the only cheery bright thing in the neighborhood. You can get a little hint of the new house colors in this picture, too. It has also been cold, probably less that it's really cold and more because it just seems cold because it's gray and overcast. I still have a cough and I still have the pain in my chest. So it was a nice treat when I saw in the paper that the people who put on the antique market under the freeway on the second Sunday of the month have added a flea market and craft fair. I had a two-for-one ticket, but John is busy staying home worrying about his surgery tomorrow, so I went down by myself. As I started down there, I didn't think they were having it because I couldn't see any cars parked. Turns out it was over on the other side of 21st Street, while the antique market takes up from 20th to 22nd. Because of the bad weather and because of the apparently small number of exhibitors who showed up, they were only charging a dollar admission instead of $3. There wasn't much there of interest, though I did find some interesting animal heads at one stall and they were only 50 cents apiece. Zoe gave me her season ticket to see the play Master Class. She gave me the ticket a few weeks ago, but I seem to have lost it, so I had to go to the play early so I could get another one The play this afternoon was absolutely wonderful. I just took a picture of the stage because I got there so early to be sure I got my seat that I took a picture. This is an often-performed play, and the writing is so tight that it's just wonderful. Janis Stevens played Maria Callas, and she WAS Maria Callas. She still emanated diva, even though she was delivering diva past her prime. Made me want to read her bio (Maria Callas).

At least the weather was nice enough today that I was able to walk to the theater and back without rain.

Tomorrow we have to get up at 5 a.m. for John's cataract surgery. He got a new hearing aid so after he has his cataract surgery tomorrow he will be like a 30 year old again. Of course then he's going to see how old and wrinkled I am.

LAST DAY IN SANTA FE

Today is my last day in Santa Fe and I had to go to my all day class at 8:30 this morning.
The move to Daylight Savings Time last night didn't help, either. I am not a morning person. However, our teacher was a lot of fun and the teacher was a hoot, even though she was obviously very tired. I take it she's not a morning person either. She was very helpful, never sounded annoyed when we asked the same questions 35 times, nor when we made our clay a centimeter thick instead of a quarter inch. We had fun learning how to merge colors. I wasn't able to buy the colors I wanted most before I left home, so I wasn't entirely happy with my merged colors, but I loved learning how to do it. Polymer clay is a kind of new medium for me.
I think I tried it about ten years ago but I can't really remember. If I want to keep doing it, though, there's some pretty expensive equipment like a pasta machine and an oven like one would use in a motor home. Not too sure I want to invest that, but I do like doing it. She says it's okay to do this in a regular oven, but you have to clean it afterward because of the fumes. That doesn't sound like me. The project we were doing in our class was a kind of chunky bracelet. I didn't care too much for it and although I did what we were supposed to do, my heart wasn't in it. I mad a few other things afterwards so I ended up with quite a few things. I really had fun making the face

I had dinner at the Blue Corn Cafe tonight. I had a blue corn taco and a pork tamale. Both were pretty good. I also had a great volcano which was a chocolate cake thing with a molten chocolate center and ice cream on top.
I took a picture of the sunset on the way back to the hotel after dinner. Kind of a goodbye picture. Not that exciting a sunset for Santa Fe. I called John but he was gone, then he tried to call me back for quite awhile, but calls weren't coming through to my room. So I'm standing around in my lovely grandma nightgown and the guy from engineering comes up to fix my phone. He says the problem almost always turns out to be that somebody has plugged the phone line into the data line on the phone. I can see how this would happen, because there's a jack on the lamp that looks like it would be where you would plug in the computer, so I suspect while people are trying to find it they unplug the phone or something. Also probably explains why the people who didn't ask to get their clocks reset last night didn't get their wakeup calls this morning.

A DAY IN SANTA FE

I decided to spend the morning like a person who lives in Santa Fe, sitting in a coffee shop reading the paper. My other goal was to find a shop called Uli which is owned by a friend of Sue's and say hello to her. On my way looking for a coffee shop, I ran into a guy carrying a harp in a case. I asked him where he was going to play. He said to me, "Do you own a restaurant?" He opened the case up and started playing it on the street. We played a couple of things for each other and then parted ways.
So we stopped and chatted, then he got the harp out, which was some kind of a South American harp, and he played some stuff, and I tried to play some stuff. The string tension was really loose (because it's a harp you play with your fingernails), and he had also put the strings on kind of willy nilly, so he had one red C string, but the next red string was a G, and some of the dark (green) strings were G's but one was an F. And some of the colored strings weren't even there. It was fun. Several people passed us, but nobody stopped to listen or give him any money. I guess busking isn't expected much in Santa Fe. He had a great repertoire of various Mexican styles of music that were quite wonderful.


On my trip around town, I wandered into a shop called Passementrie because they had a plethora of colorful things in the entryway. Mostly quilts. When I got inside, everything was exciting to look at. A riot of color. I ended up buying an alpaca sweater from Peru. It's gorgeous. I'm wearing it in the picture. It's so colorful I get lost in this place.

I had worn my bracelet that's a necklace today, and one of the stores I went into was interested in perhaps selling it. It turned out that the owner wasn't interested, but they might be interested in some babes if I made them in a cowgirl style. When I get home, I'll email them and send a couple of samples.




On my continuing hunt for skulls I passed a place called Il Piatto. Now, I'd been planning on stopping for coffee sometime this morning, but by now it's 1 p.m., so might as well have lunch. Well, this turned out to be really cool. They had a prix fixe menu (which was basically $15 to chose any three dishes on the menu. I had pumpkin truffle bisque to start, lemon rosemary chicken (which had too much lemon, and this is something I NEVER say) and tiramisu for dessert. I told the waiter I wanted to take the rest of the bread home and he brought me another three slices. DINNER!!


It's Lent so they have Jesus on the cross in front of the cathedral covered up with a purple cloth. I didn't know they did that on the outside of cathedrals.

I finally found Sue's friend Uli's place this afternoon. It's very close to the hotel, as it turns out, though I had a dozen people give me directions to it that I was incapable of following, including Sue. Right next door was an incredible bead shop where I found some really cool skulls -- literally the only ones in town. I've been on a skull hunt for months. Now I can make some killer muertos.


My last event of the day was a class in wirewrapping. Everybody who wants to do this has already been doing it for the last 20 years but I've never been that interested. Turned out it was a lot of fun and I was able to finish the project as fast as anybody in the class. I'm often the last person to finish a project, due to the fact that I don't follow directions all that well. I usually learn to do things by examining them and trying things out. This class was different in that the teacher was able to kind of explain things quite well without my having to make all the mistakes right away. So the project came out well.

CATCHING UP

Wow, the last time I posted was January 30.

So much has happened since then, some good but some just tiresome.

We had a few interesting things planned for February, but in some ways, they just fell away.

I got sick early in the month, enough so that we cancelled our planned night snowshoeing trip to Northstar on Valentines Day. The following Saturday February 19,(John's birthday) we had tickets to see Jane
Fonda in 33 Variations in Los Angeles, and I was damned if I was going to miss it. Even though I was literally coughing my head off, coughing for about 30 minutes out of every hour. The play was absolutely wonderful. Jane Fonda really did a fabulous job. I spent most of the time trying to keep from coughing when people weren't laughing or applauding. It's a serious play so it was more difficult than you might expect. We had planned on staying in LA until Tuesday, but decided to drive home on Monday so I could go to the doctor on Tuesday because I felt so miserable.
I didn't really want to come home early, but as it turned out, I was glad we did. Turns out I have pneumonia. I have many allergies to useful drugs, (sulfas, penicillin, and tetracyclines) which makes it kind of challenging to treat pneumonia. On the second round, of antibiotics, I still didn't feel much better.

I had bought tickets to go see Ensemble Galilei which was performing at the new Three Stages theater in Folsom. They are a wonderful group from D.C. and their harpist, Sue Richards, is a wonderful teacher and performer. She was willing to
give a workshop. I'm such a fan, that I agreed to plan it, which meant dragging my tired ass around cleaning house and making sure there were enough people to make it worth her while. I kept thinking that I'd be better by then, but as the date of the concert approached, February 26, I was too exhausted to go to the concert. It was a choice between going to the concert of saving my strength for the workshop. I opted for the workshop. And did I mention that she was staying with us? I had to borrow Billie's car so I could pick Sue up in Folsom and tak e her to the airport the next day (because I can't put a harp in a box in my car.)

Monday morning John fainted in the bathroom. We spend half of Monday at the ER. He apparently did not have any underlying cause for this, but it's a common syndrome where you pass out after urinating (I call this PAPO for piss and pass out). Of course there are a lot of really hard things to hit when you pass out in a bathroom and he's really hurting from possibly cracked ribs. So we're both on narcotics -- he's on vicodin, I'm on codeine. Ah, the golden years.

I was scheduled to play in a concert with Baroque & Beyond on March 9, and by the night of March 7 I finally felt like I might actually be able to play By Wednesday, the day of the concert, I felt quite wonderful, enough so that we went early, practiced quite a bit at the church, and went for a long, leisurely lunch afterward.

Yesterday I got on the plane at and came to Santa Fe. I felt quite good all day. I'm here for Beadfest, which is a gigantic bead show and includes various classes in things people who don't have a jeweler's bench might make. I had a chance to walk around downtown, and then went to the opening night of the exhibition, where I didn't spend a ton of money, amazingly, but got some interesting stuff. Then I went to Cafe Pasqual for dinner. I remember this place as being very busy withgoo people lining up to get in, but they weren't particularly busy last night. I had a gread south mexican tamale wrapped in banana leaves and a chocolate cake that was sort of halfway between a mousse and a flourless chocolate take, except it had olive oil in it. It was really good. I also had a glass of wine, which I haven't had for a month, and which meant I couldn't take my codeine cough medicine before I went to bed.

Today my high school friend Sue and her husband Tom came up to Santa Fe and took me out to lunch. I can't believe that I didn't take any pictures. By today it turned out I was really tired and having a kind of hard time breathing. I think this is due to my one good day, one bad day recovery and the fact that we're at 5000 or so feet here in Santa Fe. I was so tired that I took the shuttle bus to my class tonight which is 3 blocks from the hotel. The class was good, though it was a technique I already knew how to do, but this was to learn to do it with other materials. I had tried to do this (kumihimo) with beads before, but there was one important thing about moving the thread around that I didn't know before and that made a big difference in the way it turns out. In fact, when you do it this way the result looks a lot like a crocheted rope.

In the meantime while I am so totally self absorbed, I've become aware of the giant 8.5 earthquake in Japan (I hadn't turned on the TV since I got here) and the following tsunami. I have spent most of today resting and have been watching the tv coverage. (TV here is really weird. Among other things they have 7 sports channels and the hours are very screwed up.

Tomorrow I have most of the day free, and will have a class from 5-8 p.m. The next day, Sunday, I'm in class all day learning to make stuff with polymer clay.
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