[the good life]

Sorry for the stops and starts here, little honeys!  The Airstream suffered a power slump and it fried my computer…Robert says I may have been running too many machines all at once…I can get a little zealous, I reckon.  I’m just home from the big city where I took my hunk of computer junk to the doctor (he was super nerdy and talked like a robot) and everything is up and running again.  Thank goodness!  Let’s get together tomorrow so I can tell you all about this glorious land of summer.  Ok?  Ok.

Until then.

X

https://www.thenoisyplume.com/blog/2013/06/09/6326/

A Little Like A Gypsy

Inside Miss Maple

I am almost fully functioning in the studio space.
Feels good….kind of like cashing out at the Colorado River Indian Tribe casino after playing the penny slots all night with M.
A little silly.  A little tired.  A little blooming pink in the late night.  Laughter, too.
I love the penny slots.  I love M, too.  But I love M more than the penny slots.  A lot more.
RW strolls past the Airstream and knocks on the windows whenever he gets home from the base at the end of the day.  He says it’s pretty nice to see me working in Miss Maple — it’s a return he’s finally seeing after all his (our) manual labor this winter past.  I love the space.  It glows.  I can’t explain it fully, but the light is serene and divine, no matter the time of day, and it feels really good.  It sounds vague, as I read those words aloud to myself, but I continue to fail to find the perfect description for the space.  After all our moving upheaval and limbo, I feel like we’re settling beautifully and while the dust is falling all around, the mountains are shining white and the rivers are washing everything away.
Gosh…say it with me now:
Life is good.

Cute floors, eh?

This is us perched on a sea foam green/turquoise-esque floor in the Airstream!  In case you forget, this is what our rig looked like inside the day we set out to begin this refurb.

Rob and I both have bed head in this photo.  We had dreadful cases of insomnia last night and felt so foggy this morning we could barely dress ourselves.  I do wish you could all come over and lounge around on our new flooring with us.  The Airstream is such a lovely and tranquil space right now with a delicate echo and the shadows of the Austrian pine filtering in through the skylight.  We still have the plexiglass protective sheeting on the lower walls which we’ll strip off once Rob has the floor molding in place.  Even though that white stuff is still on the walls though, this rig really gleams on the inside.

We have five work days remaining before we shut things down to clean the house, move our boxes and bags into our big silver rig and take off down the highway.  Can you believe it?  I can’t believe it.  It’s taken so much hard work to get our lives ready for this transition and it’s been worth every bead of sweat and every consternating moment with a floppy sheet of aluminum.

—————————————

My camera broke yesterday.  Within an hour I had it in a box on the way to the Canon repair center in California.  The funny thing is, I think I’m grieving for it!  I didn’t realize how much my camera has become an extension of my body.  It makes sense, sometimes I take 400 photos in a day, just for the heck of it.  My camera was a real workhorse.  I hope the Canon center can fix it for me, and soon.  I’m borrowing a friend’s camera at the moment (Thank you J+J!), but it feels funny in my hands and I miss what I know.  Don’t you just sometimes miss what you know?

Duty calls, out in the studio!

x

:::EDIT:::

I just read over this post and I must apologize!  It is, by far, the most scatterbrained thing I have ever written and I’m a tad bit embarrassed of it.  What the heck?  Maybe I had the coffee jitters…

On The Topic of RW

[inside the Airstream, both 15 piece endcaps are up and riveted, now more than half the interior is walled]

Can I take a moment to tell you something?  Robert is incredible.  Not only is he an elite wild land firefighter (and very humble about that fact), but he can pretty much build anything, he’s great at the art of design and his craftsmanship is wonderful and detail oriented.  He loves to garden and is generally very gifted at nurturing and raising animals and plants.  He used to be a fish biologist and it was a pleasure to watch him raise and research the threatened and endangered fish he worked with and become an expert on the topic.  Watching him run a backhoe is like going to the ballet — he performs the most delicate little scoops and pivots you’ve ever seen.  He is skilled at the domestic arts and thinks nothing of whipping up a chocolate cake from scratch at 9PM on a Friday night.  He’s a skilled and ethical sportsman.  He makes careful, patient shots at big game and is always compassionate and quick to end the suffering of an animal — which takes courage.  He is an incredible dog trainer.  Farley hunts at a master hunter level, I know that Tater Tot will too.  I fell in love with him (the first time) when I watched him fly fish in New Zealand shortly after we met — his back-cast never gets snaggled on trees or brush and his passion for trout is unparalleled and contagious.  He can always start a fire when we need it most.  I love the way his eyes squint when he looks over to the horizon.  When he off-roads in our truck, he is sensible and doesn’t tend to cowboy around.  He believes in taking care of things.  Pears are his favorite fruit.  He can burn through a pair of running shoes in two months and has been known to ruin a pair of double kneed Carhartts in just three short weeks.  I like the way his hands look when we’re done bird hunting and he empties his shotgun chamber of shells.  He is mostly patient and always kind.  He has a faint, very faint sort of…lisp.  He dances like a countrified version of Michael Jackson, you’d have to see it to believe it.  Our friends always come to him for advice, he gives it thoughtfully and respectfully.  He is a terrifying debate opponent and argues logically and intelligently.  Children adore him.  He is consistent in his beliefs and is respected for his faith.  He is a best friend to all who meet him and know him.  He does our taxes.  He is honest.  He likes Coors Light.  Our friends say they wish he would run for president of the USA but I don’t ever want to be the First Lady.  His smile is crooked and his eyelashes are like feathers.  He likes big country, clear water, volcanic canyon lands and Idaho.  The Northern Sierra Nevada of California raised him.  He’s an all American boy.  He cares for me.  He’s the best man I have ever met.  I just thought you should know.