Cocoon Weekend

While Jim was away in San Francisco this past weekend at the gothic art circus, I sort of cocooned for 72 hours to write. I left the house once, to go to the grocery store, and I did do some nesting-type things, like put up some little stockings and fold some paper stars from a kit from this company (who I love-love-love) -- those are the 8-pointed stars in the pictures. But mostly, it was a real pleasure to have nothing to do but write! I wore a scarf and leg warmers around the house and looked like a hobo clown in my polka-dot fleece pants. When the pizza delivery girl came to the door I took off my knit cap and brushed my hair a little, because when you're home alone for a few days you can let yourself look a little weird, and I didn't want to scare her!

But Jim is home now, with interesting tales of artist models flying overhead on trapezes, and metrosexual pirates philosophizing at microphones -- sounds like a very interesting event!

Now, for lack of anything fascinating to say for myself, I'm swiping a quote from [a}ma {m]iz, who in turn swiped it from Ted Kooser, about revising:

You can learn to love tinkering with drafts of poems till a warm hand from somewhere above you reaches down, unscrews the top of your head, and drops in a solution that blows your ears off. Sure, there are plenty of days when nothing good happens, days when every word you write seems silly and shallow, when your revisions seem to be dragging your poems in the wrong direction. But you need to be there writing and waiting, as a hunter might say, for that hour when at last the ducks come flying in. To say it more simply, in the words of a painter friend, you just need to "show up for work."

Oh, and if you read my last post about the world's tallest man saving the dolphins and wanted to see what the world's tallest man looks like, here you go. He's a herdsman from inner Mongolia. I love the thought of that, I don't know why. I love the image, the words "inner Mongolia," the vision of windswept plains and windswept horsemen.

I hope everyone is having a wonderful week of last-minute shopping, maybe baking, seeing movies, sipping cider, making snow angels, and all good things!