It occurred to me last night while I was out with some friends how much I tend to be “one of the boys.” Well, actually, it occurred to me in about the first grade. So let’s just say I was, once again, smacked in the face with that tendency last night. And, no, I’m not about to delve into gender roles in social situations or embark on a feminist rant. Just to prove it, the picture below is what this post is actually about:
Tonight at work, a tweet from the Texas Tribune caught my attention:
http://twitter.com/#!/TexasTribune/status/79044165924700160
Um… huh?! Oh, and when I say “tonight at work,” I mean “tonight, when I was working at the newspaper in the state capital.” Yes, I knew the House was slated to debate a bunch of amendments to Senate Bill 1, which is the reason we’re in a special session. You see, while I was all distracted by other actions in the lege, I missed this one. Before I even got a chance to look up the amendment, I saw this:
http://twitter.com/#!/TexasTribune/status/79047054936121344
I’ll admit, I don’t usually watch the stream of the lege, so I don’t know if this is common behavior. I sincerely hope the Trib posts video of this. Anyway, I looked up the amendment to SB 1, which all the papers just call “the fiscal matters bill.” Amendment 150 — spoiler alert — would have restricted any public college or university from using state money or property to support “a gender and sexuality center or other center focused on gay, lesbian, transgender, gender questioning, or other gender identity issues.” Rep. McClendon‘s right. That is sickening. (And yes, the Trib had a little typo in her name. Two Cs.)
Two bits of background here. Rep. Wayne Christian, who wrote the amendment was on my radar earlier in the day, when he said “I just believe is it wrong…for state dollars to be used for abortions” as the House was taking away my county’s public health care district from contracting with any facility (read: hospital) that provides abortions. Ours is was the only county in the state to do so. He is from WHERE? and he wrote the amendment to Senate Bill 7, a health care bill, which is described as “Relating to the administration, quality, and efficiency of health care, health and human services, and health benefits programs in this state” on the state website. Oh yeah, he’s from Center, Texas. Center is about a five-hour drive from Austin. (Props to Austin’s Rep. Donna Howard, who, when the House adopted the measure, the Statesman reports said in clear exasperation: “You guys just don’t give up, do you?” Howard also managed to pass an amendment to another bill that might get public schools a bit more funding.)
So back to the post-midnight debate. This is the next tweet I see:
http://twitter.com/#!/TexasTribune/status/79047489398906880
It seems a few amendments are being posed to Christian’s amendment, including one from Rep. Marc Veasey, who said Christian’s amendment was blatantly putting discrimination in the law.” The amendment to the amendment (don’t ya just love how simple politics is?) says that a public college or university “may not consider creed, race, color, sex, gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, or national origin of the students proposed to be served” when allotting state money or property to support a “student center or similar facility.” At some point during debate on various amendments, Christian revealed just how sexually repressed he is:
http://twitter.com/#!/TexasTribune/status/79050109618368512
Eventually, a point of order is raised. Hilariously abbreviated on Twitter as “POO,” it was apparently called on calendar items. Points of order are usually technicalities, and they can completely derail a bill. The House Democrats told Christian that if he withdrew his amendment, they would raise the point of order. He eventually conceded:
http://twitter.com/#!/TexasTribune/status/79068564027486208
The House debates other amendments for another hour or so, and then, to applause, finally passes the bill. Rep. Rob Eissler (the House public education chair) had this to say:
http://twitter.com/#!/TexasTribune/status/79081115654160385
Heartwarming. Really, what’s heartwarming is that they finally took a stand. Senator Wendy Davis did it last week, and tonight, House Democrats did it, too. The House (and the Legislature in general) has let a lot of crap slip through — like Christian’s other measure that passed earlier in the day. Christian, actually, when withdrawing his amendment said he was “dumbfounded” that after approving measures such as giving publics schools $4 billion less than they’re owed under current law to cover the sharp growth in the number of students, among others things, that his fellow representatives would put their feet down over “alternative lifestyles.” I had to say, I was a bit surprised, too. Pleasantly, but surprised nonetheless. I just wish Texas Democrats would stop all this waiting until the last minute to rally and do something. The “final straw” should have come months ago.
Senate Bill 1 needs one more House vote before it goes back to the Senate, which will consider the House’s amendments. In the meantime, check out tonight’s Houston Chronicle and Statesman stories.
Updated to add: The Texas Tribune has posted their video of the debate on Christian’s amendment.
y’know that Harry Chapin song? It popped into my head when I stared at a blank screen and thought about a title for this post. Since I thought of the title before writing the post, I will now try to draw a connection from the song to what I sat down to write about. (If you’d prefer to skip over the meandering, scroll down to the bold.)
Since a coworker was teasing me recently for being a young’un and never having played on an Atari or seen a Pinto, I’ll admit that this song is way before my time. Harry Chapin, himself, is before my time; he died four years before I was born. But I kind of grew up with him, or at least his Greatest Stories Live album. It was a standard tape (that’s right, we listened to tapes — I’m not that young) on family road trips. You see, my dad always drove, and the driver got to pick the music. He used to tell me that Harry Chapin wasn’t a musician as much as a storyteller. His songs, particularly “A Better Place to Be” and “Mr. Tanner,” touched me. At an age when I couldn’t really grasp the depth of those songs, I knew on some level that they were bittersweet, and they made me genuinely sad. To this day, when I hear them, I remember being in the back seat of that old, baby blue ford e150 van with blue shag carpeting. (My favorite song on the album as a child, of course, was “30,000 Pounds of Bananas.”)
But “All My Life’s a Circle” is a simple song. It starts in a bittersweet manner, and then everyone in the band takes turns singing (even the cellist) ending in a joyous chorus:
All my life’s a circle;
Sunrise and sundown;
Moon rolls thru the nighttime;
Till the daybreak comes around.
All my life’s a circle;
But I can’t tell you why;
Season’s spinning round again;
The years keep rollin’ by.
I went through all my Flickr pictures last night. Looked back over just about everything I’ve sewn in the past year and a half. Saw my tastes change, saw a few times when I checked out, disappeared. If there were a Flickr calendar, I could point out weeks or months when I stopped creating. I could also point to certain projects and remember what was going on in my life at the time. The torn pair of pants I patched for an ex just before we split up, for example. A lot changes in 18 months.
No straight lines make up my life;
And all my roads have bends;
There’s no clear-cut beginnings;
And so far no dead-ends.
So life is circular. We’ve all seen the Lion King. But when you’re a kid, when you’re going through something for the first time (or even the first few times), you don’t see that. Everything is life or death. Every love is the one. Every heartache is the worst. Every joy or hardship is the superlative. But at some point, you start to see the circles. You start to know that you can conquer whatever comes your way, because you’ve done it all before to an extent. You’ve encountered myriad situations. You’ve borne hard burdens, and you’ve experienced overwhelming joys.
(Cue awkward, forced transition) I wonder if this is what its like to be in a long-term relationship. For me — seeing the circles in my life — it took more than 20 years. My parents will celebrate their 39th wedding anniversary in a couple of months. I wonder how long it took them to see the circles in their individual lives and then in their life together. They’ve been together almost two-thirds of their lives.
And here’s where I get to the point: So in a year and a couple of months, I plan to give them a king-sized, hand-quilted double-wedding ring quilt. This is partially a request from my mother, who last summer dropped the not-so-subtle “hint” that I was to make them a king-sized quilt for their 40th anniversary. The pattern and quilting method were my idea.
And no, the pictures I’ve been showing are not the beginning of that project! I did a little thinking today and realized that it will take me at least a month to quilt the sucker, and that’s if I do one block a day for a month, with a couple of extra blocks some days. And that’s a tall order. So I’m starting now with a test mini-quilt of sorts. Basically, I’m starting to make blocks, and I’m going to keep going until I get my technique down, just so there aren’t any flubs or mess-ups when it comes time to make the real thing.
These colors aren’t what I would have picked. I’m kind of on a neutrals kick after seeing this on flickr and this on pinterest. But I’m trying to be frugal. I’ve had this stack of fabric languishing on my shelf, and it needs to go! Also, I think these colors may be just what I need right now. I brightened up my themes on tweet deck and gmail this week — the things I look at most on the computer screen, it seems — and just looking at lighter, brighter colors has lifted my mood a bit.
For the background, I had planned to use some buttercream yellow that I picked up at my favorite local fabric shop, the stitch lab (leftover from my mom’s Christmas gift). Then, this morning, I put the arches up against the leftover aqua from this project (that I still need to finish!) and I gotta say, I like it. Cant decide whats better, though. Blue or yellow?
started up on this baby again. I finished the straight lines a few months ago, and it has been lingering. Today, I gave one of the circles arches, which I was hoping would look like petals. Here’s my sketch of the quilting motif:
But once I see it in action, it’s kinda giving me an ice cream cone vibe. Like a bouquet of ice cream cones. Or a pie chart, but with scalloped edges and the sections are all the same size, and they’re ice cream cones. Does anyone else see this? Maybe they’ll look more petal-like once I get them all done. (The idea for the quilting motif came from this lovely Anna Maria Horner Quilt, by the way.)
I also made one of the pillows I talked about in this post. I made the front of the second one, and I would have it too, but in my hubris, I decided I could figure out mitered corners on my own. Well, I most certainly could not. So the time I would have spent finishing the second one was spend re-doing the border on the first one. But I think this one turned out well, and I learned something along the way (with the help of a quick video tutorial.)
These fabrics are from my stash of Jay McCarroll designs that I hunted down and hoarded after using some in a quilting bee (for Cindy)
Tonight, my lovely roommate and I thought “let’s recover these old pillows that don’t really go with the rest of our living room at all.” So we picked some lovely fabrics on the shelf ( and started brainstorming. Once we picked fabrics, my brain instantly went to patchwork. I wanted to create a pattern of a lot of little shapes of varying fabrics. I pictured something like this, maybe? Maybe with diamonds or triangles. Small pieces, nonetheless. Then I looked down to see what my roommate had laid out on the pillow. Beautifully fat strips of fabric.
for the front (left) and the back (right)
Here I was thinking about small shapes, and she busts out divine swaths. I’m excited to make these pillow cases. They’ll be relatively quick, easy and fun. And their design will remind me to thing bigger.
scrambled meggs 