liralen | Slow and Quiet (Reply)

It's been interesting, doing all the fic posting now, when I actually haven't written that much for a couple of days.

Jet and I have been enjoying some time together now that he's off from school for the summer. He and I had an evening together while John had 25 guys over for a "Beverages" and Brats night and discussions, and then Jet and I went to Crackpots to paint pottery so I could get

annieroo2's commission done.

The evening was laid back and easy. We went to the local little mall and hit up the pizza counter for Jet's pizza. The guy wasn't behind the counter when we first arrived and he tried to do a lot of jokes that Jet didn't find particularly funny. And then Jet startled me when I was paying for the pizza by saying, "Love you, Mom."

I answered, "Love you, too, Jet." And he hugged me. The guy behind the counter kept his thoughts to himself, but he stopped making the jokes and was very polite to me after that.

I got my dinner from the Panda Express, and Jet and I talked Mechaton possibilities during dinner and then talked over our plans for the evening. I wanted to see if the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory was open, but they were closed. The post office/candy shop had closed it's doors permanently, and there were no other candy shops in the mall. So we went over to the Glow Golf place, where we got to play putt putt golf under black lights, and got a good round in. Both of us got a hole in one at some point, and we didn't keep score. Jet beat me, hands down, the first five rounds, so he carried that triumph throughout.

From there we hit up Game Stop and found the second Avatar game along with an old Tomb Raider game for me. I wanted to see what the more modern version of the game is like, now. Jet said, "I can play Teen games... but you really should play it first to see if it's okay."

"Yes, Jet."

The next day John was working at the OUR center, so Jet and I had the morning to ourselves. We built stuff, drew things for bookmarks, laminated them, and had fun with a little bit of the game. At lunch time, though, I was just cranky. Jet picked his lunch, no problem. I think that by practicing, "What do you want?" He now has a pretty good sense of what he wants and doesn't want, something I still have immense troubles with. And when I contemplated our refrigerator, I realized that there really wasn't anything I wanted.

I started whining a little about that, and Jet started asking me. "Well, why don't you eat some goldfish?"

"I don't like goldfish."

"How about a banana or an apple?"

"I had an apple for breakfast, I don't want another one."

"How about some grilled cheese?"

"I don't want a grilled cheese."

"Well," Jet said, exasperated, "Why don't you eat something you don't want? You'll get less cranky."

"Man... you're probably right," I said crankily.

And he was. I ate some sweet potato tagliatelle that was in the pantry. Just a big plate of pasta with some butter and fresh sage from the garden. And I felt much better.

The Crackpots experience was good, too. Jet decided to do a tea cup and saucer, while I did the plate, and he was a little too embarrassed to bring in his Captain Underpants book for a reference. Instead, he put plants and a star on the cup and a big pineapple on the plate itself, from a pattern he had that was on a candle. That worked out very nicely.

I think I messed up the scale of the plate, when I made the first few flowers rather too large; but I tried to balance it with the birds. We'll see how it turns out... it'll be different than my sparrows plate, but it may turn out just fine.

I've also finished one of Gretchen's gloves, and am well into the second one, so I'm pretty happy with that. The KPPPM is just a marvel to work with. Smooth, solid, strong, and springy it feels amazing to work with compared to any other wool I've worked with. I think the only thing that's comparable are a few wool-silk blends I've worked with. And the dye job!! I love the speckled depth to the colors, but the 800 turned out to actually be more gold than yellow against the purple, most browns than I'd expected. But it gives the impression of burnished wood and silken finishes rather than the bright yellow I'd expected from the picture.

Still beautiful, but a mite more somber. But the speckling within each field of color has made me think a bit more about how I dye yarn, and it'll be interesting to see how my next dye batching comes out.

I've also been running through the "How to Draw Manga Sketching Manga-Style" Handbook, lots of good exercises on what makes a person look the way they do, and how to create character in each face. It's amazing how few elements there are in a human face, and yet they're all unique... and sketching just for the sake of sketching rather than thinking I might follow through with ink and color has been oddly satisfying.

So I've been keeping busy... and still getting a couple thousand words out of "Misfit Toys"... it'll be interesting to see if I've actually written a whole story with those boys...