Hot and Bothered

Posted September 8th, 2004 by Michelle

When it is over 100 degrees many days in a row, and you don’t have air conditioning, things start to get weird. Which is one of the many reasons why my weekend away from Napa Valley was so terrific! Unfortunately, I didn’t miss the whole heat wave, and it’s really creepy when my cat starts panting.

I spent a simply wonderful weekend in New York up at the farmhouse. I didn’t know I was going until two days before my flight, and I waffled tremendously over whether almost thirty hours of travel were worth forty-eight hours of fun, but I am so darn glad I went. I just love my brothers’ friends, and my brothers’ wives, and I’ll take any chance I can get to share a room with them. Highlights were pool with Ehren, and Block playing his music for us, and a constant supply of cookie batter in the fridge. There were two ugly hours near the end when I thought my cell phone was gone forever, and I was distraught enough to cry in the shower over the $200 it would have cost me for a new one, but then a drunken memory came back to me. I found my phone in a pocket in a jacket that didn’t remotely belong to me. Ahh, blessed day. Everything that was ruined was suddenly addled with sunlight.

Friday night, before my plane flight early Saturday, my organization hosted a major event that was a wild success. Hundreds of people showed up, drank wine, looked at cool art, and some of them whipped out their wallets and bought a few pieces. My friends showed up en masse, and it was such a wonderful thing to be there, with them, with my organization, and with a couple hundred artists and art patrons. I’ll admit to hurting something fierce when I got up at 6 AM for my flight, but I was still able to rally 17 hours later at the pool hall in Great Barrington, MA.

I’m still loving my job, but my optimism is far more guarded than it’s been the last couple of months. We have less than three weeks to raise a substantial amount of money and if we are unsuccessful, everything I’ve done has been largely pointless. We don’t need to raise the whole blahde-blah amount by the end of this month, not by any stretch, but we do need to raise about twenty grand to keep doing all the groundwork so we can work towards the event or the major donors that will bring in the big cash. I know we can do this, I just still don’t know if I know the right people to ask. It’s a little scary, too.

And then there’s my cat. His sutures have healed perfectly, but the incision never closed, so while he was able to get the sutures removed, he now has fresh ones and is STILL in the cone. I’d attach another picture but he looks the same kind of pathetic. Nothing new there.

Ten years ago, and then again five years ago, I said I wanted to marry a carpenter who writes poetry by the midnight oil. Someone who works with his hands but who also is passionate about his art.

I’m just sayin’.