Friday, May 30, 2008
On the Move
As of today (thanks, Doug!), this show is moving over to my website, www.kathleenbasi.com. Come visit me there!
Saturday, May 17, 2008
Not like me
Now that I have my little technical difficulty worked out (some Bible site kept coming up. How weird is that?), I just want to say that it is not like me to be up at 11:11 p.m., puzzling over a craft ornament while my husband watches the questionable entertainment available on TV at that time of night.
I have my first assignment from an editor, and I'm very excited about it, but I must say I'm finding it more difficult than working out my own ideas. When the idea comes from within me, I know the seed of the idea and the circumstances that brought it into being. The idea germinates and sprouts organically.
Right now I am brainstorming, trying to feel my way into a central concept, something to pull the article together. I have no doubt that I'll get it, it's just harder than I expected. Which, of course, is why I'm sitting up at 11:00 at night trying to figure out how to make a 3-D diamond-shaped Christmas ornament pattern.
I think I need to call it quits and go to bed. I'm a morning person. I've been up since 5:56 a.m.
I have my first assignment from an editor, and I'm very excited about it, but I must say I'm finding it more difficult than working out my own ideas. When the idea comes from within me, I know the seed of the idea and the circumstances that brought it into being. The idea germinates and sprouts organically.
Right now I am brainstorming, trying to feel my way into a central concept, something to pull the article together. I have no doubt that I'll get it, it's just harder than I expected. Which, of course, is why I'm sitting up at 11:00 at night trying to figure out how to make a 3-D diamond-shaped Christmas ornament pattern.
I think I need to call it quits and go to bed. I'm a morning person. I've been up since 5:56 a.m.
Test post
Something very bizarre is happening tonight as I try to access my blog, so this is nothing more than a test.
Date Night
They’re always better when you don’t have any expectations going in. And it wasn’t an auspicious start, with Alex tearing after me wailing as I went out the door. How do you explain to a three-year-old that Mommy and Daddy will be more fun to be around if they get some time together, time to relax and be friends and lovers?
We drove to the opposite end of town and beyond, out into the country south on Providence Road, chasing a Katy Trail access that we haven’t visited in so long that we never did find it. Instead, we ended up at Cooper’s Landing, which looked enormously different than we remembered. Eventually we remembered that the owner had picked up his two-story building and moved it upriver, so it wasn’t that our memories were faulty; it actually was different. A lot busier, a lot noisier. We walked away from the campground, and set up a picnic blanket on the weedy gravel berm separating the road from the river. There we stayed for an hour, eating our picnic dinner and watching the sunset.
The colors on the Missouri River were like nothing I remember seeing before. I can put on paper that the sun shot an orange-yellow arrow across the river toward us; I can write that to the north, the water swirled in streaky patches of orchid and more shades of blue than I can name—one so pale that it was barely blue, another a dark, vivid royal. The colors on the water changed, deepened, molded and melded. But all of that can’t really communicate what it looked like. I understand now how artists can paint the same scene over and over. To us it looks like multiple pictures of the same scene. But to someone whose eye is trained to color, it must be fulfilling to use a completely different color palate to create the same landscape. I desperately wanted the camera, but unfortunately, between me dropping it off the tram at the Arboretum in Chicago and Christian trying to fix it, we now have no camera. So it lives only in memory. And perhaps it’s better that way.
At last we picked up and walked back to the truck. We decided to re-orient ourselves, so we went driving, looking for Easley, where Cooper’s Landing used to be. And we found it. There is a cave up on the bluff at Easley, which they closed several years ago—placed a boulder across the trail and fenced the entrance, I don’t remember why (vandalism? Bats?). It was amazing to see how quickly nature can obliterate the signs of human presence. That stretch of river bluff has always been overgrown, but we’re not sure we ever saw the cave last night. And the trail is almost indistinguishable now. Someone’s still using it—there’s about a foot-wide bare strip—but it’s definitely returned to the wild. We realized we haven’t been to Easley at least since we’ve been married.
When we got home last night, the kids were asleep. I got Julianna up to nurse. Afterwards, I snuggled with her. She was half asleep, her eyes opening and closing at lazy intervals, and she would give me this silly smile. When I put her down in her crib again, there was no protest. She just conked back out instantly. Then I went into Alex’s room and found him drenched in sweat and curled up in a ball with his face pressed against the ship wheel head board, with every animal he owns wedged against his body.
Ah, life is good.
We drove to the opposite end of town and beyond, out into the country south on Providence Road, chasing a Katy Trail access that we haven’t visited in so long that we never did find it. Instead, we ended up at Cooper’s Landing, which looked enormously different than we remembered. Eventually we remembered that the owner had picked up his two-story building and moved it upriver, so it wasn’t that our memories were faulty; it actually was different. A lot busier, a lot noisier. We walked away from the campground, and set up a picnic blanket on the weedy gravel berm separating the road from the river. There we stayed for an hour, eating our picnic dinner and watching the sunset.
The colors on the Missouri River were like nothing I remember seeing before. I can put on paper that the sun shot an orange-yellow arrow across the river toward us; I can write that to the north, the water swirled in streaky patches of orchid and more shades of blue than I can name—one so pale that it was barely blue, another a dark, vivid royal. The colors on the water changed, deepened, molded and melded. But all of that can’t really communicate what it looked like. I understand now how artists can paint the same scene over and over. To us it looks like multiple pictures of the same scene. But to someone whose eye is trained to color, it must be fulfilling to use a completely different color palate to create the same landscape. I desperately wanted the camera, but unfortunately, between me dropping it off the tram at the Arboretum in Chicago and Christian trying to fix it, we now have no camera. So it lives only in memory. And perhaps it’s better that way.
At last we picked up and walked back to the truck. We decided to re-orient ourselves, so we went driving, looking for Easley, where Cooper’s Landing used to be. And we found it. There is a cave up on the bluff at Easley, which they closed several years ago—placed a boulder across the trail and fenced the entrance, I don’t remember why (vandalism? Bats?). It was amazing to see how quickly nature can obliterate the signs of human presence. That stretch of river bluff has always been overgrown, but we’re not sure we ever saw the cave last night. And the trail is almost indistinguishable now. Someone’s still using it—there’s about a foot-wide bare strip—but it’s definitely returned to the wild. We realized we haven’t been to Easley at least since we’ve been married.
When we got home last night, the kids were asleep. I got Julianna up to nurse. Afterwards, I snuggled with her. She was half asleep, her eyes opening and closing at lazy intervals, and she would give me this silly smile. When I put her down in her crib again, there was no protest. She just conked back out instantly. Then I went into Alex’s room and found him drenched in sweat and curled up in a ball with his face pressed against the ship wheel head board, with every animal he owns wedged against his body.
Ah, life is good.
Thursday, May 15, 2008
Random tidbits
I cannot keep up with anything this week, so you get the headlines overview (and perhaps a brief editorial).
JULIANNA IS CRAWLING! Not by herself, but definitely she is driven to move. I can tell that she's going to be a holy pain in Alex's you-know-what once she gets moving. She wants to pull his hair and lick him. He loves it. But then, he can still run away. Or sit on her.
ALEX IS WRITING LETTERS! Not well, and not by himself, and his A begins as an H and then he draws a line across the top. But jeez, he's three!
BASI'S ORGANIZE NEIGHBORHOOD TO OPPOSE TRAIL. We all bought for the gorgeous privacy of a woods and a creek in between our streets, and then we found out that our green space was on the city's list to put a trail through. Part of my last few weeks has been running all over the neighborhood going door to door collecting signatures, sending emails, and writing a letter. And today I hand-delivered it to the city council offices and the project manager. I can't help feeling bad for him. He's a very nice guy. We just don't want this trail in here, and we think we should have been told before we paid...well, a lot of money for our houses.
SALES!!!!!!!!! I have clips in hand now--a personal essay for Family Foundations from CCL, and an article for AIM (World Library, who also publishes my octavos). And I received an email last night asking me to write an article for another magazine. I couldn't get to sleep last night. Plus, in the last two weeks I have found out about two people locally and one on the East Coast who bought my flute collection. So I am very excited.
THE GRASS IS GROWING! Which is good, b/c I'm getting very tired of replanting the patches, and trying to figure out what makes it grow in one spot and not in the one right next to it, which is by all indications completely identical.
Speaking of conditions that change without apparent rhyme or reason...can anyone out there explain to me why I 70, which is a mile south of us, sounds like it's right on the other side of the creek sometimes, and other days we can't hear it at all? I thought it was wind direction, or temperature, or humidity, but after living here almost a year I cannot figure out why I hear it sometimes and not others.
Well, I have a wakey baby. Time to go.
JULIANNA IS CRAWLING! Not by herself, but definitely she is driven to move. I can tell that she's going to be a holy pain in Alex's you-know-what once she gets moving. She wants to pull his hair and lick him. He loves it. But then, he can still run away. Or sit on her.
ALEX IS WRITING LETTERS! Not well, and not by himself, and his A begins as an H and then he draws a line across the top. But jeez, he's three!
BASI'S ORGANIZE NEIGHBORHOOD TO OPPOSE TRAIL. We all bought for the gorgeous privacy of a woods and a creek in between our streets, and then we found out that our green space was on the city's list to put a trail through. Part of my last few weeks has been running all over the neighborhood going door to door collecting signatures, sending emails, and writing a letter. And today I hand-delivered it to the city council offices and the project manager. I can't help feeling bad for him. He's a very nice guy. We just don't want this trail in here, and we think we should have been told before we paid...well, a lot of money for our houses.
SALES!!!!!!!!! I have clips in hand now--a personal essay for Family Foundations from CCL, and an article for AIM (World Library, who also publishes my octavos). And I received an email last night asking me to write an article for another magazine. I couldn't get to sleep last night. Plus, in the last two weeks I have found out about two people locally and one on the East Coast who bought my flute collection. So I am very excited.
THE GRASS IS GROWING! Which is good, b/c I'm getting very tired of replanting the patches, and trying to figure out what makes it grow in one spot and not in the one right next to it, which is by all indications completely identical.
Speaking of conditions that change without apparent rhyme or reason...can anyone out there explain to me why I 70, which is a mile south of us, sounds like it's right on the other side of the creek sometimes, and other days we can't hear it at all? I thought it was wind direction, or temperature, or humidity, but after living here almost a year I cannot figure out why I hear it sometimes and not others.
Well, I have a wakey baby. Time to go.
Tuesday, May 6, 2008
My sweet baby boy
Oh, my sweet baby boy isn’t a baby anymore.
Being a boy, he’s always been crazy about machinery. Especially big, noisy ones (as long as they are turned off.) About the time his vocabulary was exploding, we were in the hospital with Julianna three times, where he frequently got to watch the helicopter taking off and landing. So he began to connect those two words--he couldn’t pronounce either one. We loved it: “Hec-a-co-te-ter” and “hos-a-popo.” He figured out “helicopter” first, about four months ago. Christian and I sniff-sniffed and shrugged. Oh, well, at least he still says hos-a-po-po.
Last Wednesday, on the way home from choir practice, we passed Ellis Fischel and Alex looked over and said, “Mommy, is that a hospital?”
I wanted to wail.
Alex’s imagination is so vivid now. He’s into Peter Pan, but it’s Captain Hook who haunts his bedtime. These days, we send the tigers after Captain Hook, and then the big tigers sleep in his closet, and the babies on either side of him (along with Fredbird, Ruff-Ruff, Raggedy Andy, and Superman (who is a rattly dog) and the Julianna bear (who is baby blue). And on nights when that fearsome red-coated apparition is not present, Alex likes to lasso the tigers himself and haul them out of his room and down the hallway, stomping barefoot, his legs in a wide stance. It is so stinking funny. Yesterday I sent him to the table with forks, and he said, “Mommy, I’m going to eat my hand! My hand is ice cream!” He proceeds to dig his fork into his hand and then take an imaginary bite to his mouth. “Mmmmmm!”
This morning, I was rushing out the door with both kids, trying to get Alex to day care before I had to be at Mass, and because I was putting Julianna in the car, I wasn’t there to get my goodbye kiss from my husband when Alex got his. “Hey!” I protested, “I want a kiss!” But the front door had already closed. Oh, well. I finished strapping Julianna into the van and went looking for Alex, who was nowhere to be found.
Just as I was preparing to go down in the back looking for him, the front door opened and out came Alex, with Christian right behind. “You want a kiss?” Christian said.
Alex looked very pleased with himself. Man, he is SO SWEET. Please pardon the all caps, but he is SO SWEET!
Being a boy, he’s always been crazy about machinery. Especially big, noisy ones (as long as they are turned off.) About the time his vocabulary was exploding, we were in the hospital with Julianna three times, where he frequently got to watch the helicopter taking off and landing. So he began to connect those two words--he couldn’t pronounce either one. We loved it: “Hec-a-co-te-ter” and “hos-a-popo.” He figured out “helicopter” first, about four months ago. Christian and I sniff-sniffed and shrugged. Oh, well, at least he still says hos-a-po-po.
Last Wednesday, on the way home from choir practice, we passed Ellis Fischel and Alex looked over and said, “Mommy, is that a hospital?”
I wanted to wail.
Alex’s imagination is so vivid now. He’s into Peter Pan, but it’s Captain Hook who haunts his bedtime. These days, we send the tigers after Captain Hook, and then the big tigers sleep in his closet, and the babies on either side of him (along with Fredbird, Ruff-Ruff, Raggedy Andy, and Superman (who is a rattly dog) and the Julianna bear (who is baby blue). And on nights when that fearsome red-coated apparition is not present, Alex likes to lasso the tigers himself and haul them out of his room and down the hallway, stomping barefoot, his legs in a wide stance. It is so stinking funny. Yesterday I sent him to the table with forks, and he said, “Mommy, I’m going to eat my hand! My hand is ice cream!” He proceeds to dig his fork into his hand and then take an imaginary bite to his mouth. “Mmmmmm!”
This morning, I was rushing out the door with both kids, trying to get Alex to day care before I had to be at Mass, and because I was putting Julianna in the car, I wasn’t there to get my goodbye kiss from my husband when Alex got his. “Hey!” I protested, “I want a kiss!” But the front door had already closed. Oh, well. I finished strapping Julianna into the van and went looking for Alex, who was nowhere to be found.
Just as I was preparing to go down in the back looking for him, the front door opened and out came Alex, with Christian right behind. “You want a kiss?” Christian said.
Alex looked very pleased with himself. Man, he is SO SWEET. Please pardon the all caps, but he is SO SWEET!
Breakthrough!
You may recall that several weeks ago I had a story rejected by the Magazine of Sci Fi/Fantasy. Well, I overcame my self-loathing and sent it out again, and last night I opened my email to find an acceptance! This is my first short story acceptance, so I’m pretty tickled.
Here is my testimony to all aspiring writers. If your story gets rejected, there may not be anything wrong with it at all. When you think you’re done with it, when you’ve taken into account the differing perspectives of your critique partners, sifted out what is useful from what is not, and incorporated them…then it’s time to have faith in yourself, and in the story you have to tell to the world.
Here is my testimony to all aspiring writers. If your story gets rejected, there may not be anything wrong with it at all. When you think you’re done with it, when you’ve taken into account the differing perspectives of your critique partners, sifted out what is useful from what is not, and incorporated them…then it’s time to have faith in yourself, and in the story you have to tell to the world.
Saturday, May 3, 2008
Pictures
I've been talking a lot lately and not sharing images. So here are three pictures, a little slice of our life.
Alex at the Museum of Transport (St. Louis)--dozens of trains. You do the math. (No comments please, Count. :) Just kidding. I love it when people comment.)
Alex's train cake at his 3rd birthday party
Julianna at Alex's birthday party. She loves it when I "rasberry" her feet as she swings forward to me.
Alex at the Museum of Transport (St. Louis)--dozens of trains. You do the math. (No comments please, Count. :) Just kidding. I love it when people comment.)
Alex's train cake at his 3rd birthday party
Julianna at Alex's birthday party. She loves it when I "rasberry" her feet as she swings forward to me.
Orchestra Concert
Last night I took Alex to his first orchestra concert. Christian thinks he’s too young, and I knew we might have to leave quickly and early if he just couldn’t handle it. But I think that early exposure is the best way to ensure that there is an audience for classical music for generations to come. So we went to see MU’s University Philharmonic.
It’s been eleven years now since I graduated from U Phil, and ten since I played in any orchestra (unless you count the disastrous sub gig with the Missouri Chamber Orchestra, which I’d rather forget). It was hard to be in the audience. I wanted to climb the stairs, re-explore Jesse’s backstage, steal somebody’s flute and sit down behind the violas.
I loved playing in orchestra. At some point in every semester, I’d have to grit my teeth and tolerate every other ensemble I ever participated in, but I never minded the hours spent in orchestra. Part of that was Ed Dolbashian’s charisma. But part of it was just because I love the literature.
It’s not the same to listen to a CD. When you’re in the hall, there’s this shimmer in the air, caused by the friction of bow on string. It’s magical. My body and soul relax whenever the bows first draw across the strings in unison. That ambient noise doesn’t make it onto the recordings.
Well, I think I’m going to quit, because I’m wandering rather than being concise and “teleological,” as another of my music professors used to say. (Go look it up.) Besides, I have bread to bake.
It’s been eleven years now since I graduated from U Phil, and ten since I played in any orchestra (unless you count the disastrous sub gig with the Missouri Chamber Orchestra, which I’d rather forget). It was hard to be in the audience. I wanted to climb the stairs, re-explore Jesse’s backstage, steal somebody’s flute and sit down behind the violas.
I loved playing in orchestra. At some point in every semester, I’d have to grit my teeth and tolerate every other ensemble I ever participated in, but I never minded the hours spent in orchestra. Part of that was Ed Dolbashian’s charisma. But part of it was just because I love the literature.
It’s not the same to listen to a CD. When you’re in the hall, there’s this shimmer in the air, caused by the friction of bow on string. It’s magical. My body and soul relax whenever the bows first draw across the strings in unison. That ambient noise doesn’t make it onto the recordings.
Well, I think I’m going to quit, because I’m wandering rather than being concise and “teleological,” as another of my music professors used to say. (Go look it up.) Besides, I have bread to bake.
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