Rattled

Campfire Quinoa

Great minds, and all that! OK, this is how I’m going to post for a while. If you need or prefer plain text, head over to Paper Route Designs – my sister will be transcribing the text on her site. Just click the “Honey Rock Dawn” tab on her navigation bar. (And give her a day or two after each post to have the text ready. And visit her Etsy Shop – her paper cuts are incredible!)

Snippets

Blogging is really the last thing I want to be doing right now. I’d rather communicate with envelope and stamp. But I’ll keep trying.

Daisy’s milk is so delicious it’s unreal. Like someone poured sugar in it. So sweet and rich.
This mountain grass is good stuff.
This mountain makes cows happy.
This milk deserves to be shared but I’m the only one here to drink it.

My little carnivores drink it, too.
And fully appreciate its sweetness.
They love it here, too. I haven’t seen Eli this content in a very long time.

I miss Mike to a degree that is painful. I know he misses me as hard – does this make me happy, to be so loved? Or sad, because I don’t want him to ache?
Both.

I have the most unattractive tan lines.
Cutoffs + cowboy boots. Don’t try to visuallize, it’s pretty awful.

The Psychedelic Jellybean

A few autumns ago, Mike did a favor for a guy; Mike didn’t need nor expect anything in return, but the guy was so grateful, he wanted to give Mike his camp trailer in trade.

Mike said, “no, really, it’s OK,” but the guy insisted and signed the title over to Mike. When Mike brought it home, he said, “what am I going to do with this?” and I said, “I have a thousand answers to that question,” and he said, “alright, then, it’s yours.”

Before:

I immediately ‘saw’ the psychedelic jellybean it was meant to be but had neither the time nor the reason to do anything about it, and so it sat in mediocrity, not old enough to be retro, not new enough to be nice. Until I decided to spend the summer on the mountain.

Stealing away an hour here and a few hours there, I transformed the camp trailer into the psychedelic jellybean, an exercise in how many colors and patterns I could cram in this space in the least amount of time at the lowest possible cost. In larger living spaces, I prefer a look that is sparse and natural, airy, light. But white + sparse in a small area just seems too much like a cell in a mental ward, so for small spaces, I firmly believe the more color the better.

Work in progress while streaming Pulp Fiction, the ideal background-movie, since the soundtrack and dialogue are the best parts:

Two quarts of paint ~ sky blue and raspberry: $22. The cantaloupe color {which erroneously looks like like ‘radioactive kewpie doll’ in the photo above} was left over from my checkerboard floor. All fabric came from the thrift store and set me back about $20. Oh, how I love vintage fabric:

I tore off the dingy vinyl cushion covers and made new ones, and, if I may brag, did it all without pins or a table:

The trailer ceiling was torn and ugly so I covered it with fabric. I originally thought I’d use adhesive velcro to attach the fabric to the ceiling but my god velcro is expensive! They sell it by the inch! So I stapled it up – just household office staples – and had only one incident of arterial bleeding when I accidentally sent a staple into my finger.

I loved working on this. Even though the majority of my time on the mountain is spent outside, after the challenges of last summer and fall and after giving 9000% of myself to EMT training through the winter, it was just fun to work on something a bit frivolous, something tangible rather than mental, and totally transform this space.