The guidelines. You know how I feel about rules.

1. Link to the person who tagged you.
2. Post the rules on your blog.
3. Write six random things about yourself.
4. Tag six people at the end of your post and link to them.
5. Let each person know they’ve been tagged and leave a comment on their blog.
6. Let the tagger know when your entry is up.

The person who tapped me on the shoulder, and said, “Tag!”: Thalia of Amused Grace.  This is going to be hard. One of my six is even one of Thalia’s six. I’m going to nab that one to get the ball rolling.

1. I can sit for hours just going through my boxes of beads, boxes of fabric, embroidery wools (some even dyed by me just like Thalia), all calling me for this or that project. It is in fact the first step in the design process for me much of the time.  Sometimes I see a bit of art or craft from someone else that gets me going and I know exactly what fibers/materials I’m going to use. But sometimes I’m looking for whatever it is that needs to get out into the world and I pull out everything from its stash spots (goodness I can hardly wait to have a studio where everything is already out) and just moon and drool over them.  Then I start saying, Hey you go with this and I never noticed before how cool this is with that.  Yeah.  Perfect rainy afternoon. It is my art that gets me into more trouble with money.  I know how rare certain things are to find so I buy them when I see them and sometimes I simply can’t afford it. But some time later, sometimes years, I am really glad I snagged it.

2. I always have a project going on.  I always have a portable project going on. Even when I am in the space where the current project is purely of the mind (I always spend a lot of time desiging it in my head) I am working on something. I’ve knit a ton of socks over the years.  My brother has received most of them.  Some of them have been better than others as I try out new tips and tricks.  I almost always go back to the way I learned.  I knit these socks in my recovery meetings. I need projects at my recovery meetings to keep my hands busy and my monkey mind quiet. If my hands are not busy the monkey wakes up and I start taking everyone’s inventory but my own.  Not healthy. So I work on things.  As I quoted in another post recently, “If the devil makes work for idle hands, then could constantly busy hands entice angels to whisper in the knitter’s ear?”  I always hope that my busy hands will open my heart and mind for some bit of wisdom at meetings. Works every time too. I almost never knit at home unless I really am not into being creative in the sense that I need to engage the mind and heart. Knitting is for when I’m too tired or, like last night, too emotionally exhausted to do the work.  Socks I can knit without thought and sometimes thats as good as it gets. As I knit those socks in meetings, where the language of the heart is spoken, they are imbued with all my love and my peace and my serenity. Socks of Loooove.  It makes me happy to know that my brother wears my love on his feet. HAR!

3. I played classical violin for 9 years, private lessons, orchestras, the woiks.  Didn’t like it much then but I miss it now.  One day I will own a violin again and maybe take lessons. But not classical lessons.  I think I would have enjoyed it more if I could have seen how I could use it in the music I love.  Bluegrass, rock, celtic, hanging around the campfire.  It wasn’t an option open to me back then, back then I did as I was told.  Which is probably why at such a young age I turned to the dangerous stuff, dyed my hair pink, and took a journey to the Underworld.  When I sold my violin to pay for writing school (which is only now, 15 years later, showing itself not to have been a stupid idea) I opened the case and discovered that the neck was no longer attached to the body.  At the time I rode the bus with an aging gentleman, surely long gone now, who was a violin maker.  He had me come to his gracious and lovely home and he fixed it for me.  The only price was my time as he showed me how he did his work, a blackberry pie made by my hands, and an evening of music.  He had this really cool piece written by Mozart. It is a duet and is written in a very interesting way.  It is a mirror duet.  You place the one piece of sheet music between the two violinists.  You think it is upside down to one of them but it isn’t.  They both get playable music.  I find it charming, amazing. It was wonderful to share that with Antonio while his wife and my boyfriend listened.  It had been years since I’d played and yet after 4 run throughs I did very well.  I know I could pick it up again.

4.  I used to go hunting, birds, with a boyfriend from high school, he was much older and my parents approved, he kept me away from booze.  We would tramp through the sage brush, the swamps, the rivers, the fields, hours and hours and hours.  Duck hunting was the worst because we would sit in a damp cold cornfield for hours, smoking, waiting.  I preferred the walking hunts, pheasant, dove, quail.  I never did shoot anything, only ever fired on a bird once.  I never wanted to kill anything. He would get frustrated with me about that but I could kill a cornstalk at 30 paces, dead, with a 20 gauge side by side.  I learned to pluck and clean and cook game birds.  I’d rather not but I can. My first up close and personal look at death was the day I held a perfect, lovely, dove in my palms and cried.  While the BF did love to hunt, we did it to eat.  Nothing was ever wasted.  I remember the day we couldn’t find the pheasant that went down. We searched for hours for that bird.  He was pretty upset.  His reverence for life did not extend to crows and I remember that day he shot a bunch of them, kept on shooting at them dead in the dirt.  I was totally freaking out, yelling at him to stop.  His cruel streak was something to behold.  No wonder it didn’t last and thank goodness.  And when it ended for good, it ended in rape three months after the break up. The second of the two rapes I was to endure in this life time to date.  Whoa. Where did all that come from?  I didn’t set out to write that. Guess it needed to be said.

5. I used to be a potter.  Miss that work.

6. I think I mentioned this one once.  I was a sprinter in high school.  I ran hurdles too.  My hurdle relay team broke state record and my name made it to the front page of the sports section.  That always blows me away. Me. A jock.  My brother told me once I had the best legs of anyone he knew.  I did have some awesome legs, fit as a fiddle, I used to have an amazing bod.

I tag Foxchild, Green Witch beat to the punch, Idyll Conversation,  Shepton Witch,  The Flaming Rose, These Thoughts Escape Me,  Willow Golden Tree