Robin procrastinates on Art, Craft, and Work by tending a vegetable garden that's bigger than her house, taking care of lots of dogs and cats and rabbits and chickiedoos, and playing around in the kitchen with all that produce she grows. Every now and then she gets to spend a few minutes with her handy husband. One Sheep Hill is where Robin lives and works. Petunia, created by Andrew Draper, is her steadfast sheep, stoically braving the elements and curious kids while presiding over her hill. Although she would be ideal if she could produce wool, Petunia is the perfect care-free sheep for this little hill north of Los Angeles.
Robin blogs about Art and Craft and Play and sometimes Work at robindodge.livejournal.com, syndicated below.
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Everyone likes to be invited.
Those who have stuck with this blog through the knitting and the handspun yarn and the etsy shops and the cooking and the gardening and the art and all the gazillion other things I do to stay occupied 25 hours a day know that I don't like to talk shop much around here. But every now and then there's more to say than will fit in a facebook status update, and mulling it over here helps me figure out a solution, so bear with me while I get all librarianish for a moment.
I'm halfway through my year as President-Elect of the Southern California Chapter of the Special Libraries Association and I'm having the time of my life. It's not an easy job, being tasked with planning all of the events for the chapter for the year, and I've had my moments when I wanted to just quit and walk away from the whole thing. But it's SO MUCH FUN and so rewarding and I can't believe how much progress I'm making personally and professionally because of this little volunteer position.
My biggest challenge is figuring out how to get everyone as excited as I am about the SLA and about professional networking. Several years ago I was active in our chapter and I basically dropped out because it was stodgy and clique-ish. So I understand on a very personal level what it takes to make people feel welcome. People like to be invited. They like to be given something to do, they want to feel like they can make a contribution, and that they can get something in return, and very simply they like to feel a personal connection. This is all simple enough to do at a networking lunch or happy hour, but how do I get ahold of those hundreds of people who belong to the chapter and never show up to events?
I'm constantly surprised at how small the library world is. Seven degrees of separation is more like one in this industry. So there must be a way to leverage all those connections to get to EVERYONE and to make every single chapter member feel INVITED. Getting key people to help with this task is the challenge, especially since everyone is so damn busy these days (well-connected professionals even more so). But it has to be possible, and I'm not going to give up on this little quest. At least not until December when I'll have to trade in the event-planning and act all Presidential or something.
Or maybe I'll just make a motion to offer free food at all our events. Works for our library events every time.
Fri, 23 Jul 2010 02:16:40 GMT
Around the farm in June.
The garden is off to a slow start this year. A cool spring + earwig infestation + nitrogen difficiencies + worn-out dripper hoses does not equal a thriving garden. The fact that I work all the time and never have a chance to do regular maintenance doesn't help either. And to top it all off, the mulch guy at the local dump closed down, leaving me without a source for good cheap soil or mulch, hence the nitrogen-defficient (and expensive) soil from the only company around, whose bragging rights are that they work with CalTrans. But, it is still my little paradise, and I will squeeze some produce out of it this year if it kills me.
I will at least get tomatoes, and tomatoes are all that really matters.
We've had a lot of volunteers this year, although the cool spring set them back a bit. I always get volunteer sunflowers. One year I planted Russian Giants, which are a hybrid, and I let them go to seed. Russian Giants grow to about 8 or 9 feet, and have one huge flower on the end. One of the open-pollinated sources must have been a tall sunflower that flowers all the way up the stalk, and they must carry the dominant genes, because that's what I get now. I like these better than the Russian Giants so I let them seed themselves every year.
My tomatillos got killed by the gopher last year, and this year they never sprouted. I was getting worried about a tomatillo shortage until I saw all these "weeds" coming up in the corn. Those tall ones are all tomatillos (there's some tomato volunteers in there too but they're hard to see). This is a really good reason to procrastinate on weeding.
These things are sprouting all over the onion bed and they baffled me for quite awhile. And then finally, as they got bigger, I could see it. Grapes. When we crushed the grapes for our wine, we dumped the skins and seeds in our compost pile. Our pile doesn't get warm enough to kill seeds, and I used the resulting compost in this bed. Too bad you can't actually grow grapes from seed. It does make me want to start that hillside vineyard we've been talking about, but that's a whole other project, for a whole other lifetime. I might let these grow for the season and use them in pickling, but wine grapes will have to wait.
We actually have a few artichokes still standing. Usually by this time in the year, the gophers have wiped them all out, even chewing through the gopher cages I bury them in to get at those tasty roots. Home-grown artichokes are heavenly. Even more heavenly: Greg doesn't like artichokes so I get to eat them all myself. And now that I posted this picture I've jinxed myself and the gopher will take this out tonight.
And let's not forget our girls. A new coop is in the works, and our meat-chicken experiment is about to get underway. But here's what I'm keeping my fingers crossed for:
Peaches has gone broody. Broodiness, or the desire to hatch eggs, has been bred out of most modern chickens. For some reason banties are more likely to go broody, so I always suspected Peaches would be the most likely to do it. We're going to leave about 4 or 5 eggs with her and see what she does with them (the one she's on right now is a fake that encourages them to lay). Whatever she hatches will be either banties or banty-crosses, since our rooster is a banty, and we're not actually sure if anything will hatch since he has a bit of trouble getting it on with some of our bigger girls. Fingers crossed for baby chicks though. Peaches is a tough little girl, so if anyone can will baby chicks into existence out of this motley crew, she can.
Fri, 18 Jun 2010 19:39:33 GMT
I was busy last night.
It was one of those dreams that makes you so very grateful for your current situation. In a series of dreams, that I kept falling into even after waking several times, I was forced to go back to college. Start the whole thing over at my ripe old age of 33. I was forced to live in the dorms with a really awful roommate and I was really upset that I couldn't cook for myself. My attempts to get all the books I needed for my classes kept being thwarted by one thing or another, and I couldn't find time to study. I got into a fight with a bum who peed on my car, and a friend kept following me around and wouldn't shut up about how to find the nearest Coffee Bean on her iphone mapping app.
College wasn't really such a nightmare, but I'm so glad I'm not 18 (or 33 and starting all over). And I'm really, really glad that nobody had iphones back in my college days.
Mon, 07 Jun 2010 19:12:56 GMT
It's a good thing I'm supposed to be dead.
I actually didn't intend for us to look quite so dead, which doesn't bode well for ever trying to do portraits of living people. But here it is, the final assignment, a self-portrait at the moment of my death.
I hope I don't look that wonky in real life, and I know for sure that there's something not quite right about Greg's likeness, and someday I really need to learn how to draw fabric, but I have to declare this assignment done. At a certain point the fiddling just makes things worse, and it's at that point. Not bad for my very first self-portrait I guess. Well, first self-portrait that included my face. I'm getting pretty good at vague suggestions of boobs.
I'm more sad than relieved that this final is done. It means the class is over, and another epic drawering journey is at an end. Painting starts tomorrow.
Mon, 07 Jun 2010 18:51:18 GMT
A little piece of my heart lives here.
Finally finished another very overdue assignment. This one was to create a sense of place. It had to include some kind of perspective, and we were supposed to combine at least two elements from different photo references into one drawering. I may or may not have followed that last part of the assignment, but maybe she'll never know.
I think I've been looking at it too long because I'm really not thrilled with it. It's just kindof... boring. And overworked, and far too fussy. Oh well, it's getting turned in anyway. I'm ready to move on to the final.
Sat, 22 May 2010 01:34:56 GMT
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