No tiller for me--

--unless I rent one.  Seems Neighbor Tim did manage to kill his off by leaving it tarped out back for a few summers, and winters and springs and falls too..  "The flywheel's rusted solid," he said on the phone yesterday.  Ah well, I didn't really have a place to keep it anyway.  Thanks for giving it a try, Neighbor Tim, I appreciate the effort.  That's okay, a spot of hard work won't kill me, plus it'll be good for my pores to sweat out a gallon or two of impurities, right?  Diving friend Kev called last night and we got it all arranged to go on Sunday.  Part of me wanted to back out (for reasons I don't understand) but I powered through those feelings and I'll be packing my gear on Saturday night. Better check the air level in my tanks.  We'll stop for subs on the way up (I get a little meat or cheese and a flatbread-load of veggies on mine with a squirt of honey mustard or sweet onion sauce, yum.  And I usually cave and buy a bag of Baked Lays, but hey, it's a diving lunch.  I'll pack some grapes and baby carrots too, and lots of water.  See?  Healthy.)  Today I'm off to walk our rascally grand-dog along the river, then come back to start sewing on that gift, meet Cookie, Skully & maybe Julie for lunch at Olive Garden, then back to sew some more, and then go to yoga & knitting at Harmony Cafe next to Goodwill.  Sounds like a fun day, doesn't it?  I'm excited to get going on it.  Maybe someday I'll have a sewing studio that's above grade and not have to spend sunny spring days in the basement but until then I love my space down there.  I've got lots of storage, plenty of room for my 3 sewing machines & ironing board, and a big open space where that fabulous table I inherited from Mom can be opened out for cutting or assembly or yarn winding or whatever needs doing.  There's a phone and a sink, even a microwave.  The only lack is a potty but i can deal.  It's pure, freaking luxury people.  Luxury with burnt orange carpeting.  Soon I'll have the workshop area around the corner sorted out and tidied too so that Durwood and I can make some quality sawdust down there, and it'll be a studio for two.  Won't that be loverly?  It'll be like Mecca.  Ahhh.  Don't you just love it when it's cool and sunny in the early morning?  The birds are singing, a far-off woodpecker is rapping, the distant traffic is humming, and the rhythmic sounds of the pile-drivers out on Hwy. 41 fill the morning air.  Spring in Green Bay--what's not to love?

May 25--American, The Souper Dress.  I could hide wearing this.  In the soup aisle I'd be invisible, or I would have been then in the 60s when this dress was new.  In those days soup was lined up in ranks on the shelves and 99% of the soup on those shelves was Campbell's.  Were there even other brands of soup then?  I don't remember.  But Andy Warhol recognized how iconic those red and white labels were, lined up like that, ready to feed our untutored palates.  Warhol's painting of a soup can was a revelation and a rebellion.  He pushed at the edges of Art making us look at the commonplace with new eyes.  No one emerged from that decade unscathed.  I certainly didn't.

Ah, the Warhol soup can craze in art... or should I say Art?  It always seemed kind of self-consciously, pushily arty to me.  Still does.  You make the most of today, okay?  I intend to do my damnedest.  Toodle-oo.
--Barbara