Blatherskite

Foolish gibberish

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about

I am a Children’s Librarian living in the Portland, Oregon area. When I am not Children’s Librianing I like to play with cameras and film. I also like playing the ukulele, knitting, sketching, and hiking.

  • Happy New Year!

    2007 New Year's Eve in Berlin.
    Image via Wikipedia

    Hey guys! It’s 2008! Yay! I’m ready for a new year.

    I love New Year’s Day. It’s full of hope and possibilities. Full of looking-forward to the future. A day where we can wipe away everything and start fresh.

    So. I have lots of plans for this up-coming year. Lots of projects in mind.

    1. Project 365. I am participating in Project 365 on Flickr. It’s the official “picture-a-day” group. Yeah, I’m going to jump on that bandwagon again (Flickr set is here.) I am not going to post a picture here everyday. Maybe once or twice a week.

    2. Project Spectrum. Project Spectrum 3.0 kicks off in February! I’m very excited about the Elements theme this go ’round. The first element that we will be exploring is Fire. I have already started. I made a little trip to the fabric store and had fun picking out red, orange, and pink fabric for a quilt I will be doing. I may actually finish this before February because I’m really excited about it.

    3. Blogging. I am going to try to get in at least 4 blog posts a week. I like the format I used for Nablopomo so I think I will use that. Mondays will be the day I post about crafting (so all of you who are uninterested in that can just ignore). Tuesdays will be a random day. Wednesdays will be about current events. Thursdays random. Photography Friday. Saturday book talk.

    What are your resolutions? I’m not sure I have any hard and fast resolutions this year but I do want to focus on a few things.

    1. Yoga. I have recently discovered yoga and I’m am really loving it! I want to really explore it more this year.

    2. Vegetarianism. I’m going to focus more on becoming a vegetarian. If I do eat meat it will be chicken and fish. I am cutting red meat and pork out of my diet completely.

    3. Running. I always talk about this on New Years day. But this year I want to get back into a running practice. I got a pretty good start about a month ago but have been lagging over the holidays. Time to get back on track!

    4. Photography. I really want to focus on becoming a better photographer this year. This is to be my hobby of priority. I want to learn more!

    5. No Sugar! My husband and I are sugar addicts. In a major way. So we are determined to cut the sh*t out of our diet as best we can. No more cakes, cookies and candy! Damn it!

    Here’s to 2008 :raises glass:

    Have a good one!

  • Happy New Year!

    Thanks for your lovely comments regarding the article. And thanks for your support, too. I truly appreciate it. Sometimes we all feel inferior and it really helps to hear others validate your work. Thank you all so much.

  • We all get our 15 minutes

    Me and Mom holding our art

    Well, the article that I mentioned in this post made it today’s paper. The problem is that I can’t read it! It is published in the Spokane Valley section of the paper. I live on the South Hill. My mom didn’t get it either because she lives on the North Side. My boss, however, called me first thing this morning when I got to work, surprised to see an article (with a picture) written about me in the paper.

    I just now did a quick search on Google and was able to access the article online! I hope you can get to it from that link. I was frustrated earlier because when I clicked on the link for the article It was going to charge me. It irritates me to no end that the Spokesman Review charges people to read TODAY’S NEWS. But that is a rant for another time. And slightly unwarranted because I am looking at the online article right now as I type this.

    from the article:

    The creative spirit resides in most of us, whatever the medium or final product might be.

    On one level, Monica Smith is a storyteller, opening children’s imaginations through her job as a children’s librarian at the South Hill library. Her mother, Judy Doyle has also worked with children in Spokane Public Schools. Now retired, she focuses more of her time on painting while Smith snaps photos. Their creative spirits are alive and well.

    Read more here.

  • Godless

    The Golden Compass (film)
    Image via Wikipedia

    The Vatican has officially declared The Golden Compass “Godless.”

    That kind of makes me chuckle a little bit.

    First of all, it astounds me that the Church is STILL banning books and movies. What is this, the middle ages?

    Secondly, doesn’t this attitude from the Vatican kind of prove Pullman’s point? Hilarious, if you ask me.

    I’ve said this a million times, but if you haven’t read the books, you should. they are absolutely fantastic. Read them as a Fantasy, because that is what they are. You may see the anti-god part and you may not. Regardless, they are great books.

    We saw the movie on Sunday and it was good. Not as good as the book, but I wasn’t disappointed.

  • Vulnerable

    MeTwo things:
    1) I found a moth in one of my balls of yarn this morning!!! Ugh! I’m kind of freaking out a little bit about it. I must have had a premonition about it because last week I put my entire stash in little ziplock baggies. That’s how I found it. I was pulling out my yarn because I wanted to start a new project and I noticed something odd in a ball of Patons Classic Merino. I flicked the offending varmit into the garbage and noticed that there was, indeed, a little hole in the ball. sigh. I just threw it it away. A brand new ball of yarn. Gone.

    Now I’m freaking out a little bit. I decided to cook my yarn (for you non-knitters, I know this sounds crazy, but it supposedly works.) I started with some more of the Patons and cooked a few balls in a casserole dish for at about 175 for 40 minutes. Does anyone have any other ideas? I also decided to start vacuuming everyday. I’m going to line my closet with cedar. I’m not living with little wool-eating bastards!

    2) I was interviewed today with my mom for an article in the paper and I don’t know how I feel about it. I feel really weird about it. Let me give a little bit of background:
    My mom and I are going to have our artwork displayed at this hole-in-the wall coffee shop in this fly-by-night town next month. The coffee shop is really a super-small trailer. It’s nothing special at all. I thought it might be kind of cool to show my stuff in a very small venue like that to kind of get a feel for the whole thing. It didn’t seem very overwhelming.

    So my mom gets this phone call the other day from a writer at the newspaper who wants to interview us for the paper. We met her this morning before I came to work. I feel really weird about it. I HATE being the center of attention. I don’t like having the spotlight on me at all. It makes me very uncomfortable. The person who owns this little trailer/coffee shop didn’t tell us that this writer was going to contact us for this interview! She should have done that, I think. I came to this interview totally unprepared. I was supposed to write out some kind of biograpy on myself (like I have time to do that) and bring examples of my work. I didn’t do either of those things and the interviewer was kind of bitchy about that. She mentioned that she writes in-depth interviews about artists and when she said that I kind of freaked out a little. In depth? I feel a little bit uncomfortable with that. No, not a little. A lot uncomfortable with that.

    Eventually I told her exactly how I felt about the whole thing. I don’t like having a spotlight on me. I am a private person. I don’t feel like I deserve to have a spotlight on me as an artist. There are so many more photographers in Spokane who are so much better and so much more deserving of this. I feel like a poseur. I mean, most of my stuff is done with a point-n-shoot for God’s sake! sigh. So I spilled all of that out and then she kind of lightened up a little bit.

    So she ended up interviewing me after all. I am going to e-mail her examples of my favorite photographs and write up an essay on “what art means to me” or some bullshit thing like that.

    Maybe this is the beginning of a beautiful thing.

    As a side note on this: my husband is kind of pissed at me for my reaction. He can’t figure out why I’m so upset at being interviewed. And, frankly, I don’t really know why I am either. I should be happy about it. Why do I feel so weird?