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I wrote this in 2018 on a college parents’ page, and while 2020 has its own challenges, it still might ring true for parents navigating this path. Hopefully it will privide a trail of breadcrumbs: Thoughts from a mom of 2 upperclassmen Falcons, and a longtime teacher of college students: (for what it’s worth). One…

Here’s what I’ve learned by this point in midlife, for what it’s worth: 1.) Surround yourself with creative people who say yes first and work out the details later. Learn to do the same. 2.) Seek critique from people whose work you respect — and know the difference between your ego and your art. 3.)…

Originally posted on Thing-a-Day Forever: They can’t all be fabulous. What can I say? It was a long meeting.

Originally posted on Thing-a-Day Forever: I am kind of a seed hoarder, and before I go to the local seed swap next weekend I have to make sure which of my stockpile of seed packets is still viable. I used 15 gallon sized ziplocs with a paper towel in each — coded the packets and…

Originally posted on Thing-a-Day Forever: It’s nothing unique — just a die cutter from Michaels that I got for a friend’s art journalling class. But since I didn’t have the right machine for it, I jerry rigged a slab roller made for clay — and it worked!

Originally posted on Thing-a-Day Forever: I cannot lie. My mail order chicks came in the mail and I did nothing but sit and watch them all afternoon. I took this pic for my facebook page and so this pic is my sole creative pursuit today.

Originally posted on Thing-a-Day Forever: Another jug for yesterday… I didn’t get a pic up in time. But that’s thing-a-day nine. Still wet, not fired yet.

I have a sick hen. I thought she was egg bound, and brought her in yesterday, soaked her for half an hour in a sink full of soapy water to get the goop and poop off the belly she had been dragging. There is no egg in there. Her bell is soft and distended like…

I demoed handbuilt clay rattles today. These are drying on the classroom windowsill.

He’s already a BGSU veteran and knows his way around campus… the dorm is older but has some charm and friendliness… he’s got a coffee pot and an alarm clock, his mom made his bed and put his clothes away, and he’s a full time, on campus, non-commuter college kid now. I’m not freaked out.…

It’s that season when instinct sharpens our focus, when memories braided in DNA remind us that this is for real, that nature doesn’t mess around. The mouse who stole from my kitchen was dead in the trap this morning, because this is my kitchen and not hers. Wide-eyed owls row silently through the dark, and…

So I’ve had a kitchenaid forever. I have worked two to death, canning applesauce, grinding flour, grinding venison and making sausage, kneading artisan bread, shredding kraut and making tomato sauce.  I called kitchenaid and they shipped me a new one in a day’s time — sometimes an upgrade. But this last one was long past warranty when it…

Don’t get me wrong — I have been making long lists of projects and outings I plan to embark on “Once Finals Are Over” — everything from cleaning the basement to having friends on the deck. Still, while I count days to the end of a crazy teaching schedule at two colleges, I always feel…

Having teenagers is kind of a trip down memory lane. I think my teens are much more level headed than I was about the whole social environment at school. Maybe homeschooling gave them a better sense of who they are, so they are less vulnerable to peer weirdness.  Or maybe teen angst doesn’t show on the surface,…

I really liked this print by Roger Disney at the art fair in Ann Arbor today. It reminded me of something… can’t put my finger on it…

My name is Kelly, and I am a recovering workshopaholic. When my house was full of little kids and I was stealing naptimes to throw pots in a tarp-lined linen closet, my annual workshop was like a pilgrimage to Mecca: a weekend at Functional Ceramics in Wooster, at Charlie Cummings’ studio in Fort Wayne,  or even (dare to dream)…

I drove North for three hours this afternoon, passing through the tornado damaged areas near Toledo, and then on to rolling landscapes of impossibly lush green… wheat and soybeans starting to go gold already, and fields with standing water from the week’s storms mirroring brilliant blue skies, framed in fringes of emerald corn. I love Michigan’s red barns, orchards,…

I circled the first  hive, looking for signs of life.  Pressed my ear to the lid: nothing.  Though it’s really too early to open a hive and risk chilling fragile spring brood, I had worried my way through bone chilling weeks all winter.  I hoped for some sign of survival, now that the snow was gone and the sun…

On Monday, my last homeschooler will load up a backpack and lunchbox and head for school. She’s thrilled.  She went to shadow for three days as a preparation for next fall, and had a marvelous time.  She came home saying, “I want to join!”  I wasn’t at all surprised, and actually had expected and encouraged…

If my family had a crest, it would have to contain the latin words for “Look, a bunny!”  It’s a standing joke, at our house, how often we fail at linear thinking (or speaking, or action…) In other words, we’re “highly distractable”. For instance: this morning, with no students on my calendar and nothing scheduled…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zueJtbu-v70 A view from ground level…

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gqteDWzcZGs Here’s the link to the zombies at the mall, from my last post. It really doesn’t do justice to the event… it’s shot from the balcony, it’s hard to see the costumes, and the real dancing doesn’t happen until about 3.00 on the counter… the kids did the best they could under the circumstances,…

… and a couple of teenaged zombies walk in. I mean, ragged clothes, one missing an eye, blood dripping down the chins. They’re kind of doing the stagger, vacant eyed and one leg dragging, or walking with a hitch like something’s broken. They stumbled around the food court, between shoppers and people waiting in line…

Jeff and I are pretty smart. We have graduate degrees, a good work ethic, and a reasonable degree of savvy about how the world works. So it’s not that we’re too stupid or too lazy to be “successful”.  I needed to say that aloud to myself today, and am still working it over in my…

There’s a daily chore chart to keep the kids on task without nagging, but once a week we all work together to get the house clean. On Sundays we gather around the bingo cage, each with a little scrap of paper to list our jobs, and a bowl to hold the number ball until the…

I had the jitters today… nerves a bit jangled, frustrations circling my head like angry guard bees. A neighbor’s disaster, a snarky email, reality-lag from vacation, anger over my stolen ipod (they caught the guy) and ever present economic worries have likely combined with a hormonal low tide to produce kind of an irritating background…

We spent a week traveling with the little pop-up camper, visiting relatives near DC and in Wilmington, NC — museums and monuments, beaches and fun. It made good memories for the kids, and vacation from an endless list of projects for Jeff and I. Now we are home, and it’s like picking up a book when…

I guess if there’s news this early summer, it’s that I have learned to capture swarms of bees. The packages above — one mine, and one a friend’s — represent over $200 worth of packaged bees ordered throug the mail, shipped with a queen at the center in a small box. I couldn’t afford more…

When we first got involved, blog, dear, you filled all my needs. I could indulge the lifelong illusion that every thought and half formed notion that popped into my head should be recorded for posterity. Even as a kid, I wrote in my childhood diary about my somewhat ordinary childhood and my uneventful suburban life,…

Before I had kids, I did a poet-in-the-schools thing with elementary aged children. I took a hidden tape recorder, and asked the kids absurd questions. What sound does the color blue make? How does green taste? Where would you explore if you were an ant? a pirate? a bird? The littlest ones flailed their arms…

Totally naked cat. Yikes. The males look particularly silly from behind.

Bat? Gargoyle? Dobby?

Last weekend we braved the snow to attend a cat show at the rec center. I don’t know what was more interesting: the homeschool lesson in breeding/genetics/diversity, or the peoplewatching. Cat show people are an interesting breed all by themselves. Some creatures seem a bit overbred, to me.  I wonder, once natural selection is out…

A couple days ago I woke before dawn and heard a strange sound.. kind of like a cross between a squeak and a bark. I laid awake and listened for more.. sure enough, the chicks we hatched from purloined eggs had just hit puberty, and the two roosters were trying out their crows like a…

We walked in the park today after an ice storm. Everything was perfectly glazed with a coating of ice.  This bud caught my eye… it seems a good metaphor for the darkest, shortest, coldest day of the year.  There’s a promise, there, somewhere.  If you can be patient.

Just a minute for an update before spaghetti and meatballs, and headin goff to teach at the guild. Holiday time at the Savinos is amazingly not too hectic, with two of us here to work out the homeschooling, cooking, budgeting and job hunting. Jeff will be teaching a field ecology class at Lourdes college one…

I am working hard to come up with a rationale for winter that sounds more convincing than “it feels so good when it stops”.  I am weary already of the hunched posture of winter in the north, the clench against the cold, and the days of grey rain or sloppy melting snow.  The things people…

Yesterday we raked, dragged and blew the leaves from the back yard to the curb, where the big orange city trucks will come by and vacuum them up. Some are piled in the garden, some over the raspberry beds, some around the beehive, and some tucking in the flowerbeds and herb garden for the winter.…

When nothing is happening in my life, I have time to sit here and tappity tap out details of daily triviata, small comforts, dear-diary. When suddenly life goes haywire, I don’t write. Sometimes because situations are intense and controversial and you never know who is reading… sometimes because, as I told my friend Tony —…

Molly was sad to have lost her guinea pig, Ebony… but her brother’s pig, Snowflake, is getting lots of extra attention.  She took this picture this afternoon.

Today’s tally: One trip to the downtown farmer’s market… in sweatshirts, a first for the year. I found myself walking, arms linked, with my two sons.. one now four inches taller than I am, the other almost my height and strong enough to take my half-bushels of plums, bags of cooking onions, and boxes of…

I came to the kitchen one afternoon to discover that Molly had awarded me this honor.  Yeah, I earned it this month! So far I have emptied out one of my attics, a huge loft full of decades of stored paperwork/fabric/memorabilia, and half my basement. I have sent dozens of bags to charity — outgrown…

Ok, well, we did it ten years later than average, but we finally got a “first day of school” picture. Ty started last week at the Toledo School for the Arts. He’s enjoying it so far… updates as events warrant. Connor and Molly are easing into their schedules with the Ohio Virtual Academy (on line…

The abandoned kitten that Jeff brought home from work when Molly was brand new, the cat who slept on her or beside her for the last ten years like her appointed guardian, is gone tonight. Last night we watched old 1998 videos of little Spooky chasing a clothespin on a string, behind giggling three year…

I borrowed a friend’s big truck today and made the run to Ann Arbor again, to use my newly built arch form to take down the inner kiln arch. My mom and three kids rode along again to help (Jeff was at work this time). Warm day, but many hands make light work. The boxed…

She was studying this little critter while camping at the lake with the girl scouts last week, and it hopped up to take a closer look at her.

Here’s Jeff coming up to inspect my impressively engineered pigeon door. It can be set to allow the birds to come in, but not be able to leave again.. or it can be set wide open to allow them to go out in the morning. It is strong enough to be cat and ‘coon and…

This was the dovecote before the roof and final touches went on. I’m inordinately proud of it. It is made of four trash picked wooden shutters. lined with hardware cloth from our shed… four salvaged slabs of particle board from a construction project… sheets of pegboard I brought home from a fabric store that was…

So I bought a kiln on ebay. Which is kind of like buying an in-ground pool… first you dig the hole, pour the cement, etc. etc. In other words, what I really bought was a large pile of bricks, which need to be boxed up, hauled to my folks’ property at Wolf Lake, and then…