The Battle of Hastings, 1066. This is how I remember the date of my father’s birthday.
October was so filled with birthdays of so many friends and family members when I was young that I had to take some extra measures to remember when each one was. My mother (30th), Dad (14th), my best friend in grade school (24th), my best friend in high school (31st), my first boyfriend (29th), my eldest nephew (30th), and another high school friend (16th) all celebrated October birthdays. My dear next door neighbor who lived to be 105 and was like a grandmother to my daughter was born October 7, 1904.
I remembered: 10 – 14, 10 – 66. My dad was not evil so his birthday could not have three sixes associated with it and the birthday I confused with his was a high school friend’s who had a 10/16 birthday. His birthday could not be 10-16 because his birthday was on the anniversary of the Battle of Hastings and if it was the 16th the anniversary would be 10/16, 1066 – three 6s. And growing up in the Bible belt I knew three 6s was bad news. (I so wish I had not grown up with such superstition!) So his birthday must be on 10/14/1915.
Does anyone else in the world use such convoluted memory tools?
My mom would be celebrating her 100th birthday on the 30th. I think she was actually born on Halloween, as her mother always told her she was born 5 minutes before midnight. Midnight would have meant Halloween and thus a questionable alliance via birth with dark forces.
Mom and my friend with the Halloween birthday loved their connection. I guess there was something about being born on a high holiday of the Old Religion that connected them. My friend lived to be 21 and died on Friday the 13th. My mom lived to be 92.
Birthdays of those who have passed on can be odd, especially when the cluster contains more who have died than those alive. But I’m going to have a cake for Mom’s 100th birthday. We celebrated my 50th birthday together a few weeks before she passed on. Dad liked apple pie. I think I will make a pie this weekend. Why not?
Freebie Digital Background Images and Textures
I love playing with graphics. I talk about this love at least once a week it seems. So even though I posted some images yesterday, I want to share some textures I created. Yes, I am working on an Autumn-themed project. I created these images using Gimp, a free to download, open source drawing program. Just call me a frustrated digital artist.
Tiling, Seamless Textures (some repetition evident)
The first two can be scaled, and repeated in an endless pattern where distinct stops and starts cannot be discerned. Perfect for background textures.
This yellow canvas could be used for an autumn or spring digital craft project.
A Halloween or traditional fall fabric.
Abstract Named Images
If these images are tiled or repeated on a background there are easily discerned distinct images. These images were created to capture a feeling, place, or event. The level of abstraction varies greatly from image to image.
Digital Creativity and Artistic Expression
I began creating “companion” textures when I was decorating homes in the virtual world of Second Life®. I didn’t want to spend any money on this game without an objective so I learned how to create the visual representations of material objects and the colors and patterns I wanted to use in the “world.”
In this pursuit of free or low cost self-created digital content I learned quite a bit about 3D modelling and about expressing myself through creation of these “textures.” I wholeheartedly encourage you to try the medium if you have not. I do not do all that much with virtual worlds any longer, but I am continuing to fulfill one of my creative drives in creating digital art. I suspect I will use all my creations in augmented reality ads and information products within a few years.
The Veil Between The Worlds Lifts
A Personal Reflection on All Souls Day
Momma would have been 98 today. My best friend as a teenager / high school, Kim Marie, would have been 56 tomorrow had she not died at age 21. A once good friend who no longer speaks to me because I’m a progressive was 56 yesterday. These personal stories lead me into the darker celebrations of Samhein and Dia de los Muertos which arose out of celebrations of the end of harvest and recognition of the beginning of winter.
All Souls Day, November 1st, is celebrated in the Southwestern U.S. as it is in Mexico, as Dia de los Muertos. Many peoples with a European heritage carry on part of a cultural tradition in which the veil between the worlds was thinnest, the most permeable it is all year. Here in the part of the U.S. that was once Mexico, in La Primeria Alta or the Northern portion of the Sonoran Desert, the day is one where the graves of loved ones are decorated with intricately cut paper (papel picado), depictions of skulls and skeletons, marigolds, sugar skulls, candles, and pictures.
In Tucson, Dia de los Muertos, and the our unique observation of it on the weekend nearest to that day, has come to be a very special celebration for and by our community to mourn, to heal, and to celebrate lives and memories where they mix. A few years ago, in 1990, a personal remembrance performance began what has now become an All Souls Procession with over 30,000 participants. “Parade” is a term sometimes used to describe the event, but which is far too superficial a description of the procession. It touched the hearts and filled some of the emptiness of souls who are learning how to carry on in this world without the physical presence of loved ones.
Each year the procession grew. And this seems fitting. Tucson, the Old Pueblo, is a special place. People have lived here for thousands of years. In recent history thousand have died in the surrounding deserts as they attempted to migrate to find work. We are a fairly large city, but we were a town and still feel like one. We are a community that has always attracted artists and writers. Tucson is unique. Any person who is sensitive to such things can feel a sense of history and special energy in this beautiful town between several ranges of mountains. It is a place that honors life, history, and cultures.
I wish I could participate in the procession this year, but I cannot. I have several folks I would much like to acknowledge who left the earthly realm this past year. I will have to do something privately.
Cobwebs
The word cobwebs sounds like a word Gertrude Stein could have invented. Inverted it could have been webcobs which could easily be mis-heard as copse. Web copse or web forests sounds spooky and eerily like something that the beings of Middle Earth would encountered beyond the Shire. And we know that spiders are very nasty creatures in Tolkien’s masterful amalgamation of Northern European mythologies. But that is neither here nor there except for Frodo Baggins. That was a fun train of thought digression but a digression none the less.
So what is a cob? There are corncobs but I do not believe that they have anything to do with spiders, dust, or abandoned spaces. Per the etiology of arachnids, coppe is a Middle English word for spider. Over the centuries, coppe transformed to cob. Coppe meant spiders, generically, but not all spiders weave cobwebs as cobs are long irregular strings of spider silk that bear little resemblance to the elegant patterned symmetric creations of a different group of spiders.
Living in Arizona can teach a person about poisons and prickly bits that no one in his or her right mind would ever wish to know about. A cob weaving spider was one of my first unwanted learning experiences in Arizona. A bark scorpion was my first. I was stung by a bark scorpion near a mountain lake at 7000 ft. altitude during the fourth month of my pregnancy. Yikes. It hurt but wasn’t too bad and didn’t seem to hurt my daughter, though she is a tough and feisty one.
The second acquaintance was with Black Widow Spiders that are cob weaving spiders. The southern exterior portions of our home here in Tucson were infested with Black widows when we first moved in. We didn’t discover this until the winter in which we moved in to the house has turned into spring. There were hollow metal columns on our porches and under our awning and there were stringy bits of erratically spun silk that appeared to originate from within the tubes. They are very resistant to most bug and spider sprays. At night, which is when they would come out, Hubby and I would take a broom, a sturdily soled shoe, and a flashlight out at night and hunt them down. Shine the light, find the spider, knock it to the ground with the broom, and kill it with the shoe. We did this for ages but were unable to exterminate the entire population, until we discovered that moth balls, the real toxic form of good old-fashioned moth balls if dropped or rolled down or back into the metal tubes would get rid of them.
Once cobwebs might have evoked a mild response from me with thoughts of attic detritus, barn rafters and wisps of house spider silk long since abandoned and covered with the filmy dust of long forgotten spaces. No longer, though. Now, I know exactly what those stringy and sticky asymmetries can mean, I think of invasion of my living space by lethal crawling creatures toxic enough to kill my babies.
Artificial cobwebs are pervasive this time of year with Halloween approaching. I have to admit that I would much rather observe the Day of the Dead with Marigolds and skulls made of sugar than with fake webs made of stringy fibers that mimic cobwebs. I’ve grown to like Tucson traditions, and cobwebs are not among them.
GBE2.cobwebs.10-14-12
Halloween Themes from Martha Stewart Craft Studio