Possibilities, clay collage, wall sculpture by Tammy Vitale

Back from the mountains of West Virginia and an exceptional forum on conservation and the environment that included a lot of workshops (that I picked) on PR and using the web for outreach.  Best forum I’ve ever been to and the surrounding woods and fields and cool but not cold weather (surprise!  November in the mountains) were just what the soul was looking for.  The rooms were the best and the food was too good (I do not own a scale).

But this morning when I went to photograph today’s AEM, I discovered the camera isn’t even working through the viewfinder now.  That could put a crimp in things except husband is bent on getting a new computer, NOW, so I may just join him and get a new camera, NOW, since I feel like I have an arm amputated without it.  So to all you AEM participants, I will catch up as soon as I can. [oh!  husband just put in new batteries!  but I just charged the batteries in it before this weekend…well, at any rate that’s good news.  Viewfinder is working again.   So here are pages 7 (Light the Light) and 8 (Echo:  This was not expected)]

Here’s the verse for "Light the Light" (I can’t get my bold to work):  In the inky cavity, the cricket echoes,/unseeable.  Lightening bounces off carapace,/showers sparks like/stars on lakewater.  Story is shadow/caught in spider’s web.  The key,/a tremblijng moth.  Light the lamp,/we have fumbled too long/in the dark.

This week promises to be very busy.  All the work I had packed away for my Dec 2 show is dwindling.  This is a good and bad thing at the same time (I’m replenishing as well as opening new places).  So this week, whether or not I am in the mood, fish it is.  Today I am gathering work to send back to North Calvert (saves me a trip) along with some screens I’m lending to Bay Arts for their holiday shop.  She’s also dropping work that needs to be fired.  Then there’s the above mentioned shopping that needs doing.

I hear from Joie de Vivre in Cambridge (where I opened last weekend) that Pink sold, along with everything finished in the "bronze" (actually copper) patinea, so I have to scrounge up whatever tiles I have left in that patina and send on down.

So this is a short post.  I would copy my journal from this weekend but I mad a specific decision to allow myself simply to enjoy and learn and not be mental about it.  Absorb it bodily.  So any writing would have to be wrung out of a very relaxed brain.  At the moment I’m not even going to try (I haven’t had my decaf yet this morning, either, and I’m not unpacked).  Re entry is always a challenge.  I could have stayed in the mountains another week.  Part of me wanted to get snowed in, even though I KNOW I would have freaked out with the idea of a 4-hour drive home (or maybe just moved in at the Bavarian Inn until everything cleared up as it was about 10 miles down the road from the Training Center).

thought for the day:  small travels work as good for the soul as long expensive ones.  Change of scenery and new people create new brain synapses.  Who knows what will happen?!