Forever and a Day

I'm behind on my blogging, if that is something possible.  Both here and there.  I keep meaning to update my blogroll to list all the bloggers that comment here and that I read.  I will do that soon.  It's silly to depend on other blogrolls to see what's been updated. 

I have no idea why that paragraph above is offset.  I can't make it go back.

Anyway, I've again been working on some projects so my Etsy store is lacking freshness a bit; I was a bit worried because it seems like not constantly posting brand new items will make my regular customers and lurkers/browsers lose interest.   I did also notice my general views were waaaaay down, so I figured it would be a double whammy.

But my sales have been up a little, so I suppose I need to let go of the compulsion to list.  I took some more pictures of the strange and beautiful light we've been having in the house lately.

                                                          They didn't turn out.

So I messed around with them in Photoshop a lot to kind of caricaturize the feeling the light gave me.  These are some jewelry in wrappings all ready to be enveloped.  This desk is right next to my photography table so it gets that same swimming-pool reflective glow.

                                           The light was very clean and pure feeling.

Here is our piano at 6am.

You can probably tell between this photo and the first one that we live on Mars.  Not really; I just get into these weird photoshopping jags.  I know you can't tell from the outcomes, but I end up teaching myself how to work the controls for regular photos.  

Here's the actual untouched photo of the piano at 6am.  

You probably thought those starts and stuff were shopped in.  No; they are really there in real life.  The fabric stars were some of the very first things I sewed on the sewing machine my husband gave me for Valentine's Day a couple years ago.  I decided to make an outer space garland for the piano with them, and I also wanted to use up all the gross batch of hemp I got at Walmart because it smelled like goats.

If you look closely, you can also see the little Sharpie stars I drew on some of the keys to help me tell  which keys are which.  They're on little staffs like notes.  Something about this piano just screams for stars.  I know the word "literally" is very overused and I am quite guilty of it myself.  But in this case I am using it well, literally.  I literally almost died moving this piano.   

We got it off Freecycle, rented a U-Haul, and picked it up in a neighboring town.  Just my husband, son, and I.  Getting it into the truck was not easy, but getting it out?  It was the most difficult physically challenging thing I have ever done in my life.  Including giving birth for 42 hours.  

My son was younger with the piano fiasco, so when I realized how dangerous it was, I sent him inside to be out of the way; so it was just me and my husband maneuvering this behemoth around, trying to get it down the truck's ramp without killing ourselves or ruining the piano.  There was one point when I was downwind from it on the ramp, and very close to being pinned by it.  Strangely I don't remember the exact dynamics, just the feeling and timelessness of it all.  Kind of like giving birth.

I am still there in a way because of that timelessness, looking into my husband's eyes trying to communicate the urgency and threat of my status, even saying a goodbye a little bit.  It's interesting that I equate the physicality of it to birth, as I did experience that same sense of timelessness there, and also within events of the dying process of others.  It's something that I call 'superreality.'   

I think it comes naturally when something happens that forces you either out of your own ego-- or so far deep down into it that you experience the essence of self, which I believe shares the essense of all.  

Maybe it's what "living in the moment" or "enlightenment" is all about, but I would disagree superreality is a state to be lived in an everyday sense, as I think it is necessary to have the filters of distraction in order to have appropriate experiences.  Maybe just to have the first hand experience of  superreality and then use that as a reference is enough.  Anyway, it all turned out well and I didn't lose my life moving a piano--what a way to go.  We had to Fitzcaraldo it into the house across the yard, which is not small or flat. I kept seeing that word, HARDMAN on the front in all the heaving and hoing, and I wanted to punch its lights out.  Yeah, dude--har har.  It is very hard, man.  Yeah, piano, real funny.  It really struck the wrong chord with me.  Got me all keyed up.  On that note...

                                                  The piano, later in the day.

We have a real matching piano bench that goes with it of course, not these silly chairs we got off the side of the road.  Literally.  the bench is just out of the frame's view at the table where our friends' kids sit at dinner when they're over--perfect kid height.  Sometimes we just leave it and I'll just use a chair to play piano and it really feels different and wrong.  

But we got that loveseat in the first photo off the side of the road too.  Lots of other stuff as well.  It's really an amazing thing here--people just put all this stuff on the road on trash day, and we go curb shopping and get the good stuff.  Obviously "good" is relative.  Because the chance you take telling people you got your loveseat on the side of the road is the response, "Obviously." Which would be really funny though.

The blog title reminded me of this great cover by the great Bonnie Tyler.  Love her voice and this song as well.