Shifting gears, again…

I’ll share the fabulous conclusion of this year’s Pippin saga below, but my mind is already re-focused on the first of the holiday shows.  The Artisan Guild show at the Convention Center sets up Friday morning.  The fiber, glass and clay guilds come together under one roof, and I’m very excited about participating.  I’ve been working feverishly at advancing two huge new bodies of work that I’ll show this season.  First, I’m pretty excited about the felted tiles I’ve been working on.  

The inspiration for the tiles really comes from visiting the Farmer’s Market on Saturdays.  In my family I’m the really big tomato fan, so fall is the conclusion to my season of my tomato sandwiches.  When I arrive at the farmer’s market I casually conduct a surveillance loop around the market to pick out my one perfect tomato for the week.  My selection has to big, red, ripe and juicy, but not especially pretty.  I love the idea of having one big fat slice of tomato in my sandwich - as thick as the bread slices.  The reality of my weekly search explains the inspiration for the new felted pieces.  I’m trying to capture the essence of that one, big special thing recognized as essential to your life.  For my family, the week the first ripe snap peas appear in boxes on tables is a good example.   

At the Farmer’s Market you suddenly see the rich, green color and the memory about how much you love them kicks in.  We buy a box and eat them raw at the market.  Then we usually buy a couple more boxes and put them in a big bowl at the center of the table to munch on.  Taking an important part of your life and framing it for the wall to help you remember it is important to me.  Of course as soon as I start making one type of vegetable I’m inspired to begin making another.  I have a few big pieces where comfortable combinations of vegetables come together to shape the whole.  I also love the idea of being able to piece together a favorite dish by combining tiles.  You might create a salsa art piece combining tomato, onion and jalapeno tiles.  Or you might think of borscht by mixing beets, onion slices and garlic.  The tiles are like a visual recipe.  Of course some of the tiles do speak volumes standing alone.  There is something seductive about a pile of cherries, which my brain would immediately commit to inclusion in a pie. 

My second new body of work is the collection of felted vessels I’ve been making.  The genesis of these vessels, along with pictures of my first attempts, are featured in earlier blogs.  I now have a collection of felted vessels that I have begun to package to display at the show.  It has been a lot of fun to explore how different materials behave and combine to create new surface textures.  Merino noils, the very short waste merino I picked up several years ago from Sheep Street felts incredibly quickly, but the short fibers result in a bumpy texture.  What I like about the merino is that the finished product is very rigid.  The merino top, which is the longest merino fibers, felts quickly but results in a softer vessel.  If the vessel were created on a larger scale I can imagine that it might collapse in on itself.  I also did some experimenting with some spun horsetail hair.  It has a fascinating texture that I incorporated into one of the vessels.  The contrast of the coarseness of horsetail hair with the soft, fine merino is striking in both texture and color.  I’ve done some additional embellishing on a few of the vessels, adding cute little felted balls to supply even more character and make them more whimsical. 

Another chapter of my life closed this week to make room for my holiday art fair season.  The final production of Pippin was presented on Saturday night and yesterday morning we did the set teardown.  The costumes were divvied up for washing and the parents hauled them away.  The armor and the props were collected, organized and put to bed for now.  Monday morning it all seemed like a dream.  For now, I’m delighted with the amazing number of parents and SOS kids that came together to deconstruct the show—the stage and costume studio were beehives of activity.  The entire set was broken down and put away within three hours.  Thank you again to Gwen, Chris and Nancy and all of the parents and students that made this an amazing experience.  I will forever cherish the memories.   

Right now, though, my calendar shows me that I have a workshop in Crawfordsville on Saturday, November 12 to teach about weaving with reclaimed and recycled materials--please do sign up!  You may contact Jessica Madsen for more details.  The workshops will be capped at 10 people, so signing up sooner is better.  At last check we were at five participants.

And finally, the last Pippin performance also coincided with the end of the first trimester of high school for Jacob, who came through stressed but successful.  Tommie is on autopilot, carving through his curriculum as junior.  Coming up sometime in the near future will be a second degree black belt test for the two boys, who have just about completed their weapons training for their cross-training requirement.  We’ve managed to stay on track with Taekwondo training, voice lessons and hip-hop dance training, but we’re now transitioning into the late fall schedule of boy activities.  This week Jacob and I are looking forward to seeing Sweeney Todd at Ivy Tech, while Tommie and I are excited to be at the home opener for IU men's basketball.  Basically, we just buckling our seat belts until Thanksgiving vacation, because it will be a crazy, busy ride with lots of laughs and pie along the way. Oh, and Jim tried to hide it between loaves of bread, but an apple pie emerged from the oven yesterday morning while I was away breaking down the show!  Best.dessert.this.week!!

Until next week

Martina Celerin

On the eleventh day of Christmas,

The house is ready for guests!  It has been a delightful couple of weeks, with Christmas traditions reaching full force.  Last week the boys had two friends over to make our traditional candy house.  This is a tradition that I adopted from Emily, our neighbor, who figured out that making gingerbread houses is just too much work.  Baking gingerbread and trying to assemble it into a house is difficult enough.  After a couple of weeks no one wants to eat it anyway.  Her mom started making structures out of cardboard and then frosting them.  When the boys were little I started making a cute little house out of cardboard to decorate.  Now that they’re full-fledged creative young installation artists they design and build their own elaborate structures.  I made a quintuple batch of frosting just to cover this one, then turned it back over to them and their friends.  We had a bunch of leftover candy from Halloween that ended up back in the mix, plus a few goodies I picked up for color or textural contrast.  I guess I never take off my artist hat!  

Along about mid December comes Jim’s birthday, which is always the marker that we’re allowed to get a Christmas tree.  We feasted on the shoebox of brownies that Grandma always sends Jim for his birthday (three kinds—black forest, caramel, and seven layer brownies!).  Then we popped out to Bloomingfoods and picked out the biggest tree that would fit in the living room and keep the star under the roof.  We got a delightful, full tree that accommodated every single ornament we had.  The boys also took it on themselves to put up some outside lights this year, so we have a really festive house to great our holiday guests.  Jim’s brother Tim and his wife Bobi will be here, as will Jim’s Mom and Aunt Lois.  Will there be pies?  You bet!  I’m in.  And Stollen, of course!!

My artwork generally takes a back seat at Christmas while I feverishly clean the house for guests and make all the holiday magic happen behind the scenes.  I’ve still been making peppers, though.  Now I’m up to forty-five.  I laid them out on the piece and calculated that I’ll need seventy, so I’ll be on the pepper project for a while. 

The house waits in excited expectation for the guests that will arrive in a few hours.  The presents are wrapped, the beds are made, the wine is in the cellar and nice dishes are washed.  

  We have snow on the ground and more on the way.  We’re still hoping for uneventful travels and a full house tonight!  And did I say there’ll be fresh bread this morning and a peach pie tomorrow?

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Taking a break for Thanksgiving

I got a little bit of a break over the Thanksgiving holiday from my commissions and feverish show preparation.  The long drives did give me many hours to needle felt peppers, and now I have a colorful little mound of them.  I still have many more to make.  Fortunately, I have several meetings this week where I can quietly listen and poke away at peppers.  I just have an internal drive to keep moving the process forward, whatever projects I’m working on. 

During some quiet times in Michigan I also created more sweater petals.  These are for my display at Bloomingfoods and the upcoming Unitarian Universalist Holiday Bazaar and Art Fair.  The ‘UU show’ is the last holiday season show and it starts at 10 am on Friday and runs till 7 pm and then on Saturday from 9 till 5.  After that I go into full commission mode, completing the last two commissions I took on over the summer and fall.  Then I quickly have to switch back into summer art fair mode.  My booth needs a little replenishing after a successful 2012 season.  It’s all good (just busy)!

We had a delightful trip to Michigan.  We arrived in time for the big IU/Georgia basketball game.  Tommie and I stayed up while Jacob and Jim went to bed.  We tried to be quiet—really we did!  It’s hard when IU’s team comes up with some big shots or big plays.  I’m afraid we woke up the sleepers a time or two with our enthusiasm.  At Grandma’s house I noticed that the boys are getting bigger relative to Grandma’s furniture.  I have memories of great pictures when they were little, sitting side by side in Grandpa’s big armchair.  Now, when they want to play computer games together, they can’t fit!  

 Jim and Tommie got in a little fishing time, although no dinners came out of it.  Tommie was trying to do a science project based on comparing fishing variables, but the weather got in the way both times.   

The best we could do was baked steelhead for Thanksgiving dinner and a trip to the Oasis with Aunt Lois for perch.  On top of that there was homemade pumpkin pie at Grandma’s—with all the whipping cream you could fit on top.  Now that’s what I call a vacation.

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

Commissions, cows and candy…

This week it was more commission work for me.  My focus was on my pepper-themed piece.  I need to create my own canvases for each piece, which in this case must support peppers across a range of colors and sizes.  For the background layer I combined lots of fall colors, including red, orange, yellow, purple and plenty of green, which will contribute to making it a vibrant piece.  Most of that layer will be covered underneath the peppers, but patches will slip through and enhance the pepper layer.  Because it’s a custom sized piece, I went to my frame maker Tom Bertolacini to put something together for me.  The frame is now finished and I stretched out the background on the frame before I stitch it on.   

Now I need to felt a flat of finely felted peppers (it was too late in the season to pick a peck).  I have all my colored felts picked out to cover the pepper shapes, which I’ve been making out of old men’s wool suits that I collect in my travels.  People probably think they’re selling me a suit that I’ll bring home and make my long-suffering husband wear, unaware that I’ll carve it into little pieces, run them through the dryer and use needles to jam little pieces of colorful felt onto the shapes until they look like peppers.  Bwa ha ha!

My other project has been making more sweater petals.  I have plenty of time to work as I watch my boys do Taekwondo, so I get a lot done during those times.  I have a new display of them up at Bloomingfoods if you want to check out how they are evolving.  I also set up a scarf display for November at the Bloomington Bagel Company.  I’m low on scarves, so I had to pull all my traditional scarves from By Hand Gallery.  I replaced them with a set of my Lion’s Mane scarves, which is a new line I brought out last fall but haven’t displayed much.  This week I’ll launch into a serious scarf-making frenzy to replenish my stocks, but I’m running low on enthusiasm for making a lot more scarves.  This might be the last year they’ll be on display around town. 

This was the week of Halloween, which means I spent one night handing out candy to all the neighborhood kids in my cow costume.  If you can’t imagine me as a laughing cow (no, not a little triangle of cheese) here I am!  I don’t think I scared a lot of kids but I did have a good time.  Fortunately, there is a modest tax for handing out candy all evening, so I rewarded myself with some hundred thousand dollar ‘fun size’ bars, ad libidum.  On Friday night my family went to see the preview of 39 Steps, the latest Cardinal Stage production.  I bought tickets, but I also found one of the free tickets hidden around town.  That meant we could also invite one of the boy’s friends.  We all went to the Runcible Spoon for dinner, over the Blu Boy for a pre-show cookie, then on to the John Waldron for the performance.  As usual, they did a phenomenal job.  With four actors and a limited but highly creative and ever-changing set, the whole story just flowed beautifully and came to life.  Everybody had heard about the plane crash on stage and it was well done.  The character changes were managed beautifully, so hats off to the cast and Randy White for bringing it all off. 

Finally, last night we had friends over for dinner.  Jim made salmon and boca negra, which is a Julia Childs creation of a flourless chocolate cake.  It was amazing!  The best part, though, is that there’s enough left over for dinner tonight!  I can’t wait!

Until next week,

Martina Celerin

And the leaves keep falling.

My intensive weaving season continued over the past two weeks as I moved forward on several commissions that came in over the summer.  I completed the background on another piece that features a path through the woods.  I picked out all of the yarn colors for my pepper piece and warped the loom I’ll need.  I also made more felted balls for my ‘lemons’ piece—I feel like all of those projects are moving along nicely.  I also completed a piece that wasn’t a commission, but one that I started just before the Fourth Street Festival.   

The chaos that the weather brought to this year’s event kept me from completing it before the show.  I probably had the time, but I just couldn’t focus on art creation.  Waiting to complete the piece turned out to be a good thing.  When Grandma was here two weeks ago we collected some gravel from a creek bed that turned out to be perfect in the piece.   

The rocks had been beaten up a little and the edges smoothed by running water in the creek.  The smoothness and the weathering made them perfect for the rocky tip of the peninsula in the piece I was finishing.  If you’d like to see some of my most recent work, come to the first fall show of the season, the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild show opens on November 9^th. 

The business side of my life kept me busy too.  Toward the end of the week I got Tom Bertolacini, my photographer, to drop by and capture images of many of my newer pieces.  It had been a very busy summer, and I just didn’t have a chance to capture images of many of my newer pieces.  Some of them sold before I could get a picture, but I’ve resigned myself to that eventuality when the crunch before a show comes. 

 I also negotiated with Bloomingfoods East to display my sweater petals.  The barrier to expanding my display there has always been the expanded footprint in an already packed store.  I had an epiphany when I turned the problem over in my brain—I would just extend my card rack up one story!  The lower level will continue to display cards while the upper story will house the sweater petals.  I built the display out of mostly all reclaimed and recycled materials, except for the dowel I bought new at Kleindorfer’s Hardware.  I’m hoping that the weather cooperates just a little bit to give me a window to paint my creation black to match the rack.  With any luck it will be at Bloomingfood’s East early in the week. 

And yes, the season also features Halloween.  This year Tommie wanted to be a Zombie and buy a Zombie costume.  I usually encourage making costumes (I’m pretty handy with fabric, it turns out).  But he really wanted the costume, so I decided it would be a reward for his excellent first term grades.  Jacob also had a clear idea in mind, taken from one of his favorite books.  He wanted to be the Ranger’s Apprentice.  Fortunately or unfortunately, he came with a clear vision of exactly what the costume should look like.   

He rejected all the green materials in my huge collection for the cloak.  We ended up in the fabric store to find just what he needed.  I sewed the material into the cloak, and he found a button that was perfect as a clasp to define the hood.  He needed a quiver and decided that black leather was the way to go.  I’m actually quite proud of what we were able to create together.  For the arrows, Jacob and Jim went into the garden and cut down dried lily stalks.  They needed sharper points, he decided, so he’s been using Sculptey, an oven bakeable clay, to create them.  They also cut down a curved branch from the maple tree in front for the bow.  He’s been doing some whittling to get the shape right.  I, on the other hand, found the perfect costume on a trip to the Recycle Center.  I can’t wait to wear my cow costume!   

Mary at the Recycle Center suggested that I might want to put a ring through one of the teats, but I could see Jim wincing at the visual.  I’ll have my fun on Wednesday and take it back on Thursday.  It was good that I didn’t upset Jim too much, because he made us a fresh raspberry pie this morning!  We found the last of the season’s berries at the Farmer’s Market.  One batch went into the freezer for a winter pie and one went into a crust this morning.  I had fresh, warm pie with a second cup of espresso!  Perfect!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Life’s path finds its home.

My past few weeks have been a roller coaster ride through a series of art and family events.  My big commission piece, ‘Life’s Path,’ is now complete and hanging in its new location, the Like Law Group’s reception area.  I just love how it looks against the orange background.  A lot of long hours went into completing the piece, which makes it all the more satisfying to see it hanging on the wall. 

 I immediately launched into my next commission, which also features a path.  This time the focus will be on the trees rather than the path.  Because my patron wants to hang it in a hallway it will have to be a flatter piece.  My trees can be a little feisty, and I don’t want them accosting anyone as they walk down the hall.  The challenge will be rely more on color to help create the perception of depth.  Of course the size of the objects in the piece conveys depth, so I’ll incorporate different sized elements such as crinoids to contribute to the depth aspect.  Fortunately, I have an extensive collection of found objects, sorted by size, so I’m already working the fossils into my piece.  As I’m moving this project forward, I’m also preparing for the next commissioned piece.  This is the time of year when I can catch up on requests for pieces I’ve received through all the summer art fairs, so you’ll be seeing these pieces come together over the next few weeks.  

 Next up is a version of my ‘Some Like it Hot’ piece that featured dozens of peppers.  The layout will be different, with the new piece a being narrower, taller version of the original.  The patron requested that I include some purple peppers, so I stopped in to visit the pepper lady at the Bloomington Farmer’s market on Saturday.  I bought a few purple peppers to get the color right.  A couple of days later I visited Yarns Unlimited and found some Corriedale fleece that was just the perfect match to my peppers.  

Along with the actual artwork, I’ve had several other projects to keep moving forward.  I’ve been creating felted balls in the dryer to use for fruits and vegetables, such as the larger peppers and some lemons that will appear in another piece down the road.  When the weather turned warm and clear, that was my signal to start finishing frames for the pieces.  I need to have the temperature above and the humidity below certain thresholds to stain or paint.  I need to get a bunch of frames painted before the cooler, wetter weather of fall blows in.  

The big family news of the week was the visit of Grandma (Jim’s mom) for the long weekend.  Friday was fall break for the school system and IU, so Grandma stopped by to play with us.  She told us the story of her family having raspberry pie for New Year’s Day with fresh whipped cream when she was a child.  While there are still raspberries around at the farmer’s market, we weren’t there early enough to claim a pie-worthy number.  Luckily, Jim froze a batch for pie filling a few weeks back and he baked one on Sunday morning.  Yum!  We’re going to need to get up early on Saturday and scavenge enough for another wintertime pie.   

Grandma went everywhere we did on the weekend, including out collecting fossils with the family.  Tommie is working on an independent study project for his science class, where he wanted to collect geodes from two locations and compare the crystal structures inside.  Of course it’s just a lot of fun to collect geodes and smash them open, so it doesn’t feel like work.  The report is written and the powerpoint presentation is done, we’re told, with two weeks to spare.  We’ll have to inspect it for grammar and completeness, but I’m delighted that he took the initiative and did it all on his own.   

On the collecting trip, we all climbed down into the river bottoms, including Jim’s mom at (very close to) 80.  She was a trouper, helping to find crinoids and small, opened geodes for Martina as Tommie did his thing.  We fed her a nice fish dinner for her troubles.  In fact, we ate pretty well while she was here!

Last, I wanted to mention a delightful adults-only date I had last Saturday.  Jim and I went to the Uptown for a nice dinner with a bottle of wine.  After the show we walked up Walnut to the Bloomington Playwright’s Project to see "Rx."  The staging was really impressive (great job again, Chad!).  Many of the actors were from Ivy Tech, so I even knew some of them.  The best performer was the woman who played the drug company manager.  She truly brought the character to life.  In fact, I’m sure I met her at a scientific conference several years back when I was still a scientist.  The whole evening was delightful.   

The only bad news from the week was the realization that summer is giving way to fall.  My first show comes up on November 9^th, which is the Spinner’s and Weaver’s Guild show at the First United Church onThird Street - yup, it's a picture of my piece, Summer Salad in full colour!!  The Déjà vu and Unitarian Universalist Bazaar shows can’t be far behind.  Yikes!  What did happen to summer!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Holey Nylons!

OK! I’ve had enough with the peppers! With a lot of my pieces, I start off really excited about an idea. It doesn’t always sink in how much work it’s really going to be, even if I’ve done a version of the piece before. It’s a lot like childbirth. When you’re right in the middle of the pushing and the cursing, you swear that’s something you’ll never do again. Then, when you see your little angel sleeping with an expression of the utmost inner peace and security, you think it wasn’t so bad. This week was the childbirth phase of my pepper piece. I was bearing down, pushing them through, doing my best to finish! I put the tops and stems on the last batch last night as the family watched a movie. DVDs haven’t been big in our house lately, which is good, but we needed a quiet evening. Home Alone 3 was the perfect medicine—a little more mature than the first two, but still really funny if you’re a kid. Monday afternoon I plan to attach them to the weaving I created a while ago. Did I say I was delighted to be finished?!

My current project is getting ready for a workshop on Monday. I’m heading over to Stonebelt, where we’ll be wet felting ornaments. I’ve been making the centers this week that my group will be embellishing as their part of the project. The ornaments are all wool, although the centers are wool melting pots. It’s like soup—the kind you make depends on what you happen to have. Some of it is wool fiber that’s been sheared and washed, but has fibers that are too short for spinning. My latest batch of ornament cores is made of chunks of old wool sweaters. Some are scraps that my friend Ruth Rives collected for me, and some are old sweaters that my dear husband unwittingly sent into the dryer. He’s trainable but forgetful, unfortunately. Anyway, I chop them into one-inch squares and pack them into my mother-in-law’s old holey nylons that she saves for me. One trip through the hot cycle in the washer and high heat in the dyer and voila! Felted ball stock. They look good and they’re ready to go into ornaments. Or tomatoes—maybe I could make another tomato piece!

My social calendar has been full this weekend too, which has slowed writing of this week’s essay. We started off at the Edible Lotus fundraiser Friday evening where my jeweled tree on dryer sheets was elegantly twisting above a dinner table. I really love the moment of recognition and disbelief when people realize what they’re looking at. Many thanks to Lee of the Lotus World Music and Art Festival for saving dryer sheets for me! It’s hard to collect enough for a big piece, even if you have a family of four with two (really three) rather messy eaters who inspire lots of laundry. The food was really excellent, and the ability to try all the donated foods was exciting. I loved the spinach paneer from Shanti. The dish can taste like bad seaweed when it isn’t prepared well, but this was great. I came as close as I’ve been to restaurant Tallent when I got to try their feta and red pepper (arrrggghhh, peppers!) creampuffs. They were smooth and delectable. I’ve got to get Jim to open up the wallet and take me there. Oh, and the mousse from Le Petit Café was wonderful, too. We’ll need to stop in for a bit more of that soon!

Saturday started out with the boys at their clay class while Jim and I headed to the Farmer’s Market. Then the boys organized a big Pokemon sale in the front yard that turned into a block party. We had eleven kids ‘running’ the sale at one time or another. That translated into a lot of running around, screaming, lemonade-drinking and fresh-baked cookie consumption. The rascals ate around six dozen cookies. By last night we were ready for the movie, since they had a sleepover at a neighbor’s house the night before and stayed up until eleven talking and poking each other. Today we all dressed up and went to see ‘Little Shop of Horrors’, the Cardinal Stage production at the John Waldron Arts Center. Audrey was ferocious, the dentist was appropriately self-centered and evil, and the performance was excellent. Dinner is about to come out of the oven, so it’s time to reclaim the boys from the neighbor’s yard and sit down to dinner!

Until next week…

Martina Celerin

Salamander Chili?

This week has been a needle-felting fiesta. I created enough felted peppers to make a fine chili, and my ‘Salamander Salsa’ is coming together nicely. The pepper piece needs about fifty peppers of all colors—reds, greens, yellows, and oranges. For the composition, I’m channeling a late-summer basket of peppers from our local CSA. I just have to remember not to rub my eyes after I cut them up. To make the basic pepper shape I’ve been wet-felting merino noils, the same technique I used with the kids in the Creek-Love classroom to create felt balls. I’m using a bamboo mat that I picked up at the recycle center to do the rolling, and the soap is an environmentally friendly dish soap that my thoughtful husband picked up for me. I haven’t checked, but I’m sure the seeds are in there! Anyway, to introduce the color I add roving or fleece onto the surface by needle felting. To get the perfect pepper green I use the amazing green fibers that I bought at the Fiber Event in Greencastle—I especially love the mohair that I found because it’s a rich green and very shiny. I use the drum carder borrowed from the Spinners and Weaver’s guild to get just the right color blend. It’s a fun tool to use, but it looks like an instrument of great pain if some part of you got caught in it. The ability to mix and create specific colors lets me create the perfect green for different types of peppers at different stages of development. I’m up to 34, so I’ve still got a few more to go. This is about the stage where I start wondering what in the world I was thinking when I started this project!

My other major project has involves birthing a few more salamanders. I finished my yellow barred salamander and I set off on making the body of a red striped salamander. He’s waiting for me to add his arms and legs, which is the tedious part. You know, when it comes right down to it, salamander bodies look a lot like peppers! I need to start a new project. The only thing that made the poking palatable on Thursday, which was a big needle felting day, was the fact that there was a marathon of ‘Project Runway’ episodes. I just love the creativity that goes into the compositions. I like the fact that the fashion designs incorporate colors, textures, dimensionality movement and personality. I get great ideas for my own art pieces, and they inspire me to greater heights for next year’s Trashionista fashion show. I can’t wait!

On the home front, the boy’s tested for the purple belt with a black stripe. It’s their seventh belt (ten more to go to black belt!). They’re jumping around like frogs in the spring, spinning like tops, and kicking like, well, like they did when they were in the womb. Now I know what they were practicing for! Afterwards we headed down the sidewalk to Jiffy Treet for a little cool and refreshing reward. Jacob and his dad shared the chocolate lovers sundae, a decadent treat with chocolate ice cream, brownies, hot fudge sauce, whipping cream and nuts. I did get the cherry on top. Tommie and I were much more reserved, each getting a small dish of ice cream. At least half of us show some restraint. It was a delightful end to another fine week.

Until next week…

Martina Celerin