H is for Hawaii

Hawaii was my home for almost six years. I had an opportunity to move there just before I turned thirty, and I took it.

For the first four years, I lived about ten blocks up from the shore. I could walk to the closest beach in twenty minutes or bike there in five, and did so a few times a week. I got to know a bunch of the beaches along the Waikiki shore, and once I got a car and was a little more mobile, I visited beaches all over the island regularly.

I worked at a bookstore for the first two years I was there and thus had a retail schedule, so I had a few daytimes free to put my toes in the sand. Once I got my job at the press and had a more “regular” schedule, I might head down for a little bit after work, but my biggest chunk of beach time was on the weekends. I’d usually be headed out by eight in the morning with my book and my chair and my towel. I’d alternate reading with dozing and dipping into the ocean to cool off. By eleven, it was usually starting to get too hot, so I’d pack up and head to Big City Diner for breakfast, back when it was a new little hole in the wall on Waialae Avenue, or grab a smoothie on the way home.

I’d while away the midday running errands or reading a book, then usually head back to the beach late in the afternoon to watch the sunset.

This photo was taken at my favorite weekend beach, Queen’s Beach at the Diamond Head end of Waikiki’s main drag, across from the zoo. Once I moved up into the valley, it was the easiest beach to get to, since there’s a big parking lot and lots of street parking nearby. But it’s also a lovely spot, with beautiful sand and great views. It’s near to the action of Waikiki, but just enough on the edge that it’s not so crowded. It’s a great boogie boarding spot, and this particular afternoon there were a bunch of kids out there boarding.

Other than my friends, the biggest thing I miss about Hawaii is the perfect weather nearly year round. I’m close to a beach here, just a little more than two miles up the road, but I don’t make it there nearly as often as I could during the three months or so it’s nice enough to spend time there. I think it’s a matter of habit; because it’s not something I do regularly through the year, I get out of the habit, and by the time I start to get into the groove of going, the summer is almost over and I regret not spending enough time there as I could have. I’m hoping to change that this year.

G is for garden

Gardening is one of my great joys. My mom was always a gardener, and I must have picked it up from her, although I wasn’t always very good about helping her in the yard when I was younger.

I started with the one postcollege rental house I had on California Avenue in Columbus; the backyard was pretty scruffy, so I turned part of it into a vegetable garden. I grew carrots and beans and peppers, among other things I don’t remember now. In Honolulu, I turned part of both yards there into herb gardens with some flowers.

I started going really crazy with the first house I bought when I moved back to Ohio; I enlarged beds and created new ones, and in the almost five years I was in that house, the gardens filled out quite nicely.

In this house, we have even more gardening space, although much of it is shady, which is different from what I’m used to, and we have tons of deer and chipmunks and other hungry critters, which I haven’t had to deal with much before. It takes a lot of experimenting to find out what they will usually leave alone (lavender, iris, peonies, hellebores, trailing arbutus, creeping thyme, daffodils, tall daisies, coreopsis, lariope, bee balm, lamb’s ear) and what won’t last much more than a day (tulips, crocus, little daisies, solomon’s seal, and a million other attempts).

The photo above is one of my hellebores, the first one to bloom this year, and they’re quickly becoming favorites. I ordered some last year from a mail order place, but they were quite small and will take several years to get up to the size I want them to be, so I decided this year I would simply buy fewer but bigger ones to help fill in the garden outside my office window. I love full gardens, plants that flow together in a natural-looking way, rather than single plants spaced out with open ground between them.

In the summer, I usually spend the equivalent of a full day each week working in the gardens, although that’s usually spread out over the entire week. It’s probably a little more than that earlier in the year too, with mulching and planting and all that.

Do you have a garden?

Have you found something lovely the deer mostly leave alone? 

Do you prefer full, cottage-like garens, or more formal, spaced out gardens? 

F is for Fiona

Fiona is my sweetie pie snuggle kitty. She’s about eleven years old, and quite petite. My niece and nephew helped me pick her out from Berea Animal Rescue just a couple of months after I moved back to Cleveland. I wrote about her adoption story in one of the entries I wrote for Cat Lover’s Daily Companion.

Fiona likes to sit on my lap while I’m working, and she especially loves to sleep on me when I sleep. She’s a big fan of napping in the sun and running around playing with her invisible friends. Unfortunately, she’s not terribly friendly with our other cats; nearly seven years after combining our households and our cats, she still hisses at them and won’t let either of them get too close for too long. Otherwise, she’s very friendly and a great companion.

Fiona has her own profile over on Cute-Fight.com, and has been held her own against some awfully cute cats.

E is for editing

Editing is the main thing I do for a living. (Overall, I spend probably four-fifths of my work time editing, and the other fifth on my creative business, Cleveland Handmade, and other projects.) My clients are mostly publishers, large and small and in between, although I do work for individual authors, too. I work mostly on books and journals, and my projects these days are a nice balance of trade nonfiction, academic nonfiction, and fiction. I work on all kinds of subjects, but seem to called again and again to work on memoirs.

Although I’ve worked on books by some big names most everyone reading this would recognize, I almost never have any direct dealings with them. I did, however, receive a very nice personal note from Heather Donahue, author of Growgirl and actor in The Blair Witch Project, who tracked down me down to thank me for my work. That was especially nice, since it remains one of my favorites of the projects I’ve worked on, and I love her way with language.

I work out of my home office most of the time, although I have been known to decamp to Erie Island in Rocky River or Panera or Starbucks when I need a change of scenery or to be out among the people and I have some work that lends itself to the noisier atmosphere. In the summer, I often work outside on the front porch or back patio.

I am grateful for the success of my freelance business, which lets me make my own schedule and do my work in the way I do it best.

D is for Dovecote

I’m pleased to announce that I have been invited to join Dovecote Work/Display in the Screw Factory at Templar Industrial Park in Lakewood, Ohio. This spring I’ll be joining Kathy Patton, Teresa Crompton, and Sarah Darby in their awesome studio and gallery space up on the third floor of this converted factory — just in time for the Screw Factory Artists Open Studios event on May 4.

While I will continue to maintain my main studio at home, having a share in this space will give me a place to work on more elaborate projects and offer classes on my own, as well as be a permanent gallery home for my work. Cleveland Handmade will also be able to use the space for gatherings and events.

Spring Open Studios will be on May 4 from noon until 7 p.m., and I will have most of my current work there on that day. However, I’m taking a workshop that day over at Small Studio in Westlake (join me?), so I won’t be over at the Screw Factory until the very end.

Thank you, Kathy, Teresa, and Sarah, for asking me to join you.

C is for cabinet

I have a love of shallow drawers. I work with tiny little pieces-parts when I’m creating, and shallow drawers are great for storing all of them. One thing I’ve learned about myself over the years is that I need my supplies to be in at most two layers for me to be efficient and — more important — to be able to put things away properly when I’m done with them. Stuff piled in front of other stuff and tottering piles of boxes are the kiss of death for my already tenuous grip on organization.

A couple of years ago, I lucked into a 50-drawer library card catalog at a ridiculously low price — as in, I thought the price marked on it was for one of the sections, not all three sections plus the pull-out shelves, base, and top. Score! I pulled out all the card rods (stored away in case I ever decide to sell it) and cut foam core to line the bottom of each drawer. All of my beads and related supplies that fit in that drawer size live in there, and those things are always well organized and easily found and returned.

Last Wednesday, that little voice in the back of my head told me I should stop at a couple of antique stores along my errand route. I like to listen to that little voice, because she often has some really good ideas. I explored a couple of shops I hadn’t been in before, then stopped at a few more I hadn’t been to in years. At the last place I went, I found this cute aqua green cabinet.

Isn’t she pretty?

After a little bit of back-and-forth, she was mine, and then the proprietor and I tried to wrestle the cabinet into my car, which is kind of like a clown car in that I can get a lot more stuff in there than anyone might think possible (like the library card catalog — take that, skeptical antique mall guy!). This time, though, even with the help of two orange-haired skateboarders and the guy who parked in front of me, it just wasn’t going to happen.

So, I called my cousin, and he helped me pick it up with his big SUV on Thursday. It took about half a day to clean it up and get the drawers lubricated and put some drawer liners in, but it’s in good shape now.

I spent a bit of time rearranging up in the studio and populating her drawers with tools and supplies that were formerly in plastic boxes on that shelf you can barely see to the right. I’m not sure this will be her final location, since one of my goals this year is complete renovation of my studio, but for now it’s a good spot.

I’m still drooling over printer cabinets, though. I’ve been wanting one for years, but ones that are in good shape tend to be expensive. There’s a gorgeous one on eBay right now that is very, very tempting, even though it’s almost as much as I paid for my sec0nd car.

However, I do other creative work too, and the supplies for some of my other projects aren’t quite so petite. So, I’m thinking I need to recalibrate my drool toward something with some deeper — although still sort of shallow — drawers, now that I have my super-shallow-drawer needs covered. I’d love to get rid of all the plastic boxes and get the open shelving down to a minimum. I have my eye on a piece that just might do the trick, but it’s two days’ drive away, and I’m waiting on a shipping quote to see if it’s worth even thinking about.

B is for blocks

What is it about the blank page, the empty workbench that brings up so many blocks? Here I am, with a free afternoon to get ahead on some posts and a blank page, and my mind goes blank as well. Saturday, when I finished cleaning up my studio and had some time to play, same thing. No clue what to start working on, how to start to create something out of all that void.

(Aren’t these awesome?
They’re from my dear friend Alex’s Etsy vintage shop.
She has some cool stuff — check it out.)

This is why I like these loosely structured challenges: There’s enough structure here to lead to a start, but enough leeway that it doesn’t feel like a chore. That lovely letter B up there is a mark on the page, taking it from blank (another B word!) to started, a nudge along the road to filling it out, adding to it, weaving it into something. (Maybe not something great, or even useful, but something nonetheless.)

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Freedom within structure is the way I arrange my time. I’m self-employed and loving it, primarily for that reason. I have never been very happy within rigid structures, having to certain places at certain times day after day after day. The illogic of having to sit at a desk from eight in the morning until five (or six, or seven, or eight) in the evening, whether or not your work for the day was done, of rewarding the efficient with more work (but no more salary), never made any damn sense to me at all. [Omit long rant about the stupidities of corporate culture. Not that there’s anything wrong with you if you enjoy that sort of thing; I just don’t.]

I start each day, week, and month with a quick review of the things that need to be done, and then, based on what’s on the calendar, how I’m feeling, and what the weather is like, I make a plan. For example, last Thursday, my to-do list looked like this:

• project A: edit chapter 7
• project A: edit chapter 8
• project A: edit chapter 9
• project B: final correx
• pick up library reserve
• bank deposit
• pick up purchase from antique store
• write intro post for A–Z challenge

That’s a normal list for a Thursday. Here’s how the daily processing went in my head:

Okay, the antique store trip is time-dependent, since Cousin Jim is going to bring his truck to help me this afternoon, so that goes in the afternoon at 3 p.m. or so. 

I can knock out the final correx on project B pretty quickly and that project is due tomorrow, so I’ll get those out of the way first, then write the blog post. I don’t want to get behind on the challenge before I’ve even started, and it won’t take long.

After that, I’ll go to the library and the bank, then come home and work on the project A chapters for a while. 

The weather looks to be pretty nice today, and since those stupid early season weeds in the herb garden have been bugging me, when I need a break from editing, I’ll take twenty minutes to go outside and pull those. 

Then back inside to work on more project A chapters until Jim gets here. 

We’ll pick up the cabinet, which should take about an hour. If I have enough done on project A and he has the time, I’ll take him out for an ice cream or a beer (another bonus of self-employment — the boss doesn’t care if you take an ice cream or [small] wine break in the late afternoon). If not, we’ll raincheck it. 

Project A isn’t due until the end of next week, and I’m ahead of where I need to be on that project anyway, so when I get back home, I can fiddle with setting up my new cabinet or just relax until it’s time to start dinner. Or, if I feel like it, I can get even further ahead on project A. Or, do something else entirely. 

That’s pretty close to how it went down, except that I elected to deposit the check into the bank that has the electronic deposit option (love that!) and was in the zone with writing/editing after my blog post, so I plowed right into project A and put off the library until after the antique store outing. (We ended up rainchecking the thank-you.)

See? Flexibility within structure.

How do you structure your days?
Do you like all of your work days to have the same structure?
Or do you go with the flow day to day?

A is for Alchemary

Meet Alchemary.

After ten years of muddling along as a side business with no formal organization and operating under my own name, which I also use for my editing business, my creative business finally has its own name and identity: Alchemary.

Why Alchemary?

The concept of alchemy has always intrigued me. The idea of turning ordinary materials into the extraordinary has drawn the human imagination for centuries. For the most part, I work with humble materials, and I like to think that my creations are more than the sum of their parts when I’m done with them.

My home studio is on the second floor, overlooking a wooded ravine and among the birds. An aerie is a high nest, a place of shelter while at the same time being a place from which one can look out over a vast expanse and drink it all in. I’ve been playing with this word for a while, combining it with different words to find a combination that appealed.

the view from my studio (summer, obviously)

I don’t often have trouble getting to sleep or staying asleep, but one morning this winter I awakened around four (ungodly early for me) and just could not get back to sound sleep. I floated around for a few hours in that place that’s mostly awake but also sort of dozing, playing with words and thoughts and dreams. Formalizing my business had been on my mind, and the last piece I needed before I could start taking action to push it to the next level was a name. I was thinking about the qualities that I want my work to embody, what I want the name to say about my work, and then it struck me: Alchemaerie.

It’s a lovely name, and says exactly what I want it to say.

I fired up the Notes app on my phone and entered it, bleary-eyed and half-asleep.

However.

It’s just about impossible for normal people to spell. Even I kept typoing it, and I work with words for my living. So, into the simplification hopper it went, where the “aerie” came out “ary.” Which still works, because “-ary” as a suffix means “belonging to or connected with.” Perfect.

And I know that the secret (or maybe not-so-secret now) origin of the “ary” is “aerie,” which gives the whole exercise a sense of mystery and a bit of play, which really appeals to me.

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So, that’s the name. I still have quite a bit of work to do: finalizing paperwork, deciding on my logo, opening a bank account and other accounts, updating my sales tax account, finalizing the new website, new business cards, and so on, and so on. But the biggest psychological hurdle is out of the way, so look out, world!