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| Image © 2014, A. Catherine Noon, All Rights Reserved
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Thank you for visiting and traveling with me during the April A-Z Blogging Challenge. I’ve enjoyed making new blogging friends and collecting new followers. It’s readers like you that make writing such a pleasure. I appreciate your support!
Happy blogging!
While the past can sometimes drag you under, and it’s important to stay rooted in today, our yesterdays teach us about where we’ve been, who we are, and where we want to go. As author and filmmaker Julia Cameron puts it, in order to create original work, we have to be the origin from which it comes.
Today, instead of letting the past haunt you, make peace with the fact that it happened. It’s over, and can’t be changed. Its story, however, can be told: it can be written down, made into a poem, painted, sculpted, cooked, cleaned and ordered, any of a hundred other interpretations – and all from the same root material: our own lives.
The development of X-Ray technology meant that we could look inside things. This revolutionized all sorts of things, from medicine to astronomy.
But I’m not going to talk about X-Rays in specific; I’m going to talk about the Scanning Electron Microscope!
While the SEM doesn’t use X-Rays to see stuff, it actually uses electrons to bombard an object and then take a picture, it’s a tool that allows us to see the surface of really small stuff – which is almost as cool as seeing inside stuff!
Pumping Station: One has the only working SEM in the country, that we’re aware of, that members of the public can see and that members of Pumping Station: One can be trained to use – and just for the price of a membership, which is only $40 or $70 a month depending on the level of membership you select.
Curious? Check out more at our website, here.
Sorry, folks. My brilliance is on hold on account of I have a cold.
I hate being sick.
Humor is the best medicine, after all.
It is all too easy to succumb to the desire to be liked. Loneliness is a powerful motivator and causes us to lose our nerve, not confront our fear of being ostracized, and thus we step back into the shadows, mute.
If this is you, take heart. The victories that count are the ones that we win with ourselves, that enable us to be more fully the person we are inside and not the one that our parents, our peers, or society want us to be. It is a lonely road, this road to self actualization. But it is worth it.
That is the victory worth having. At the end of our days, when we sit in silence with ourselves and the Beloved, it is not the games we played that will bring us peace. It is the self we shepherded into being, the self born of Spirit and nurtured in Love.
Those of you who have been with me a while know that I’m superstitious about carrying my umbrella everywhere. It hasn’t rained in a while, because our winter was too flippin’ cold for rain, but this week we got our rain forecast. Sure enough, Monday evening it was supposed to rain. Started early, too; around 5:30 instead of 8 like they said on the news (thereby proving my point that the weatherperples don’t know what the buzz they’re talking about, but that’s a different post).
ANYway, so I carry my umbrella, right? Yup. In my backpack with a cute little cover. Glad I had it Monday, on account of it was, you know, raining. For the first time in weeks.
I left the house yesterday, which for you math whizzes means yesterday, and guess what?
I forgotted my umbrellaz! Oh noes!
Just goes to show you. You break your own rules, you end up riding a bike with a baby seat turned upside down on your head. Srsly.
We’re almost to the end of the A-Z Challenge! You still with me? Drink some coffee, walk around the block, jump up and down a bit to get the blood flowing.
There. Better? Thought so.
Today is T for Tailor. I find sewing a fascinating hobby. I read once in a Vogue Sewing Book from 1968 (or was it 86? I can’t remember, to be honest) that it’s like sculpting with fabric. The description stuck with me.
Of course, the word tailor always reminds me of the song, The House of the Rising Sun:
Why am I bringing this up now? My husband is a photographer and is starting a studio, Wolfshead Photography. He’s been sewing costumes for his models, anything from Victorian lingerie to full gowns. I don’t have pictures at the moment, though you can wander through his galleries on the link I gave you. I just wanted to give a shout-out to those of us who can sew and enjoy it. We’d look a lot less cool without clothes and we’d sure be a lot more cold.
Pumping Station: One is a hackerspace located here in Chicago. Part of a growing movement of makerspaces and tech labs, the defining characteristic of a hackerspace isn’t the stuff in it, it’s the community and culture that create it. Simply put, it’s a collaborative community-run workshop where the membership gets to decide the tools, resources, and whatever else is available. PS1 is 250+ individuals committed to the open pursuit of knowledge, as well as the sharing of ideas and resources.
Rachel. My muse, my boss, and my taskmistress. She dragged my ass all over Goose Island, wandering up and down every street twice – but not the Division Street bridge (because that went off the island, see). When I finally did go across the bridge she looked at me, puzzled. “Did you just go over this bridge so you could see where it went?”
Duh. The map might be wrong.
I LOFF MAH WRAY WRAY!
In my weaving class, I am making a quesquemitl, a type of poncho that is made from a continuous piece of fabric – and, thus, a popular choice for handweavers. The photo above is from Wikipedia, of a garment on view at the Museo Popular in Mexico: “Large shawl called a quechquemitl by Margarita Roberta Lucas Garcia from Tenango de Doria, Hidalgo as part of a temporary exhibit of crafts from Hidalgo at the Museo de Arte Popular, Mexico City.”
I love the yarn that I got to use. It’s a rayon with many different colors, as you can see from the spool here; however, from a distance it looks blue.
I haven’t yet sewn the piece, which means that will be my next project. I’m finishing the hand-sewn edge and then will baseball stitch the pieces together.
I don’t know how to baseball stitch yet.
Guess I have my work cut out for me.
