Around Here

Around here we enjoyed a week of delightful spring weather.  The warm sunshine melted all the snow that has been on the ground since Thanksgiving, causing the grass to green up a bit and shoots to begin appearing in brown garden beds.  We even found a crocus blooming yesterday.  Despite the fact that March is generally one of our snowiest months and we are, in fact,  expecting a small snowfall tomorrow, it has been wonderfully reassuring and heartening to experience a week of spring. 

The spring weather brings out the CU students! 

Around here I've managed to get some creative work done.  I finished up this little 11x14" canvas-mounted piece, last mentioned in this post way back in January. 

At that same painting session in January I painted these two fabrics.  On one auspicious day recently I challenged myself to use them.

I did some improvisational piecing adding a few commercial white fabrics and a dark green that I had painted many years ago.   Here is the result, a 12x12" piece I'm calling "Let's Talk," because it seemed to me that all the pieces are successfully talking to each other, something I wish we'd all emulate.   

I had such a good time making Let's Talk that I teamed up with a friend to paint more fabric yesterday.  Here are some of the results.  While I like all of them just as they are, what really excites me is cutting them up and seeing how they make many small interesting pieces.  

I painted a couple of white fabrics but I also "overpainted" onto existing painted or dyed pieces that I didn't like.  This one, for instance, was a piece of flowered muslin that I had used as a wrapper for some silk tie dying I did done last year.   

I also had fun quilting up a crib size charity quilt using a Noah's Ark panel.

Around here Paul is finishing up his work on Boulder High's spring musical, The Addams Family.  Although no longer a student he is welcomed by the directors and was given two challenges, one to recover a sofa (!) and the other to do some complicated Photoshop work that resulted in an image that was projected at a critical time in the show.  Here's a photo of me pretending to be Wednesday, one of the main characters.  

My actual enjoyment of the production was greatly tempered by the news that we heard right before the show and during intermission.  Like everyone else we've been closely watching the spread of the Coronavirus and the ensuing disruptions.  Paul’s trip to China has, of course, been cancelled, and the current plan is to go to Peru instead.  But we're learning that anything can happen and happen quickly.   CU and other area colleges are rapidly “moving towards remote learning” and have cancelled all large events including concerts by the Boulder Philharmonic that take place in the CU auditoriums, the much loved annual Conference on World Affairs, and all CU Presents performances.    

When we met up with my friend Sara last night she told us that the trip for Boulder High's jazz students trip to Norway set to start late next week had been cancelled by the school district.  Sara is the lead parent on this trip and has worked for over a year to get it up and running, so she was crushed.  And Paul's friend Louis was one of the students looking forward to going on it.    

Then during intermission we learned that the President had announced a ban on travel from Europe (later clarified by the White House as not including travel by American citizens and not including flights from Great Britain), that the NBA was cancelling its season due to a positive diagnosis of a player, and that Tom Hanks and his wife both had the virus.  All this bad news made it hard to appreciate the show, especially one of the major songs of the second act was  "Death is Right Around the Corner."  

Just now Paul came in to tell me that all student activities apart from school itself have been cancelled as of tomorrow,  including the last three performances of The Adams Family.  

As of this morning Colorado has 44 confirmed cases.  Today we learned that Broadway is closed for the next month and that Disneyland has closed.   As a wise man said, "It's a crazy world."  

Around here we like to end on a positive note so let's talk about Turbo and Sheba.  Turbo is growing up and has learned that Sheba gets to sleep on our bed.  Of course, he wants to as well and he seems to know that his success in meeting that goal depends on his ability to not bother  Sheba.  So in the evening before he goes into his crate to sleep and in the morning when he comes out Turbo jumps up on the bed and quietly collapses into a little fur ball paying little attention to the cat.  Turbo's strategy appears to be "I'm not really here,"  and it seems to be working. 

But check out Sheba's eyes in the photo; she's keeping a wary watch on this interloper!