Don't even know where to start

I have been such a negligent blogger as of late - mostly just putting quotes in place so that I can reference them at a future time...  on the bright side my life outside of the internet is lovely.  We played host to University students as they prepared for their Europe term, they are traveling now and our home is much quieter and we miss them dearly.

On the sculpture front we realized in April that the idealism of fall - doing a major outdoor project before May - was naive at best.  We informed the head of the competition that we would still be very interested in participating, but we would be unable to make the end of May deadline as the weather has just not been our friend this year.  I guess growing up in Southern Wisconsin & Ontario gave us a false sense of what spring could be - and this spring here in New Brunswick has been non-existent.  So glad we made that call, and that we have been invited to participate in next years competition - so we will be using the summer months (if we ever really get a summer) to create the sculpture and enter in next years competition.  Good news all around.

I am heading to a 3 day silent retreat tomorrow and really looking forward to it.  It is sponsored by my spiritual director and while I am a bit anxious the idea of silence and solitude, harvesting my journals and being creative without words will be special, maybe even sacred.

We are making good progress on our yard and hope to have the stone patio in place in a few weeks and then we can begin to focus on making the outdoor brick oven we hope to have in place by the end of summer.  So hard to accomplish any of this with all of the yucky weather we've had, but when you look at the flooding, tornadoes and wild fires others are dealing with I guess grey, rainy days should be the least of our worries.

Hope this finds you all well, miss the heydays of blogging we used to have.  But I guess that season helped us all get to where we are now.  Doing a lot of writing off line now...  maybe one day I'll be back to a regular blog, until then I guess it will just be random updates and interactions.  Take care!

Note to self

…gradually you come under the right influences, picking and choosing, and being selective, and then maybe your voice is the combination of 6 or 8 other voices that you have managed to blend in such a way that nobody can recognize your sources. You can learn intimacy from Whitman, you can learn the dash from Emily Dickinson…you can pick a little bit from every writer and you combine them. This allows you to be authentic. That’s one of the paradoxes of the writing life: that the way to originality is through imitation.
 

— Billy Collins, at the White House’s Poetry Workshop

Watch the broadcast Heidi!!!

again from Austin in Austin

Ah - this is so ME!

PHENOMENON: When you read more than you speak, often you don’t pronounce the words properly in your mind when you read. So what you end up with is a new 2 second lag before you figure out how to say certain non phonetic words you lazily read incorrectly all of the time.

— Kelly Oxford (Yes.)

 

Austin (again)