What a Beautiful Chicago Day

I started it by riding my bicycle to the Lincoln Park Zoo where I volunteered for a few hours doing interpretive education, and having a wonderful time!! Then I cycled around the southern edge of the new Nature Boardwalk also in Lincoln Park to shop for tomatoes (from city farm) and raspberries (from Michigan) before cycling along the lake back home.

I finished my day with a quick trip to the oral surgeon (to prepare for extraction of my wisdom teeth at the end of July) where I got a super cool 3-D x-ray taken of my whole head and some M Burger (a Rick Tramonto burger joint which has a window into the kitchen of Tru). Then a nap. Now some quilting!

Happy Birthday to Me!!

Today is my birthday.

I am 31-which as I type that seems unrecognizably older than how I feel. And also younger than I feel, and also exactly right.

I feel hardly more than a teenager really, just old enough to drink. I feel fresh and inspired. But I also feel the fear that comes from living and being jaded paralyzing that inspiration, as I fret that I have waited too long to start what I want to do. Even as my new motto for my own art is two lines of a much longer manifesto, "Begin anywhere; don't be cool." And I feel as if I am what I am, the product of exactly the life I have lived at this point.

I am lucky to be healthy and safe and secure in a time when I know that isn't exactly true of many people across the world and many people of my own acquaintance and in my very own city.

I am also lucky to be at a turning point in my life that is actually swinging the good way on the pendulum. This will be a very good birthday, and I think 31 should shape up to be a wonderful year.

(Plus tonight I get dinner at Graham Elliot who charms me on top chef masters every season).

Back?

So I said I would update around my birthday (which is Monday), and here I am.

Sam is doing wonderfully. I am also doing very well. Getting used to everyone being functional and healthy at our house is oddly harder than it seems like it would be. It is amazing what you get used to when your 'normal' gets turned upside down by an addiction. Anyway, we all seem on the right path and even the world's angriest kitty seems to be dealing better with everyone (although I still think he would trade us for our housekeeper any day).

That will be the end of my speaking about that.

I said I would decide what to do about blogging. And I haven't totally decided. I miss having this blog as a forum to talk about things, but I also think it was really good for me to reboot on healthy privacy because quite frankly there are some things that should be kept to myself and if once upon a time I knew that, it has been a very very very long time since I put it into practice.

Right now, I think I am going to continue to blog, BUT it won't be about my personal life. It will be about my life but more thoughts about art and media and about restaurants and concerts and activities I participate in. Definitely more about my quilting. Quilt #3 has been started (it is the same pattern as the other two) and Quilt #4 has had the fabric selected. It should start to get cut out tomorrow.

In order to sort of reboot my blogging life, I am also going to make a major effort to post more pictures to the blog. I like blogs that look like that and the only reason mine does not is that I am a lazy person. I can fix that.

I will also likely blog an upcoming project that I am doing with a few friends. There is a book called "The Artist's Way" and it is like a 12 week life realignment to get you to say more yes to art in your everyday life. I had never heard of it or done it, and my friends all have. I think it will be super interesting and very helpful. I am however terrified of the 'Media free' week. No TV, no internet, no movies, no books!!!!!! I might actually physically die.