friday night I went over to michelle's and drank some beers with her and her roommate chris___ well michelle was drinking wine I guess. it was fun, we just talked and drank and relaxed. I was home fairly early, made some eggs, which I accidently dumped a bunch of pepper into because the lid fell off the shaker, so I scooped what pepper out I could and added more eggs to try to make the proportions more evenly balanced, which helped I suppose, but they were still pretty spicy and too many too eat, so I wrapped the dish with the leftovers in a plastic bag and put them in the fridge and went to bed.

I woke up around four again and my mind was wide awake. I got up and checked my email and found that lucy had made a chess move, so I made a move and then went back to bed. I got to sleep fairly easily by five and then slept for a few hours. I got up and went over to the coffeeshop, found michelle there, tad showed up and then luigi. after coffee I swung by the anya/pesha/maggie yardsale which they had set up over in the electric lodge parking lot. maggie put in a request for hope and courage salt and pepper shakers because it turns out that she'd recently inherited a collection of old s&p shakers and had been adding to the collection with her own acquisitions___ anyway, I went home and made her some because I had the materials on hand... I'll try to explain the background on this sometime, but I'm in a bit of a hurry now. actually, maybe instead of rushing through this I should just finish later.

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alright, so here's the story about the hope and courage shakers:

several years ago, I suppose it must've been the autumn of 2001 because I was working on that group of paintings, I mentioned to my friend tim that I had narrowed down the important things to color, love, hope and time. that sparked a conversation dealing with each of those words/ideas. during the course of the talk, tim asked if I'd ever seen his "hope" sculpture and I said I hadn't. he told me that he had made it when his children were young, it had been created by his having glued a piece of paper with the word "hope" onto a salt shaker, that way as his family had dinner each night, they could sprinkle a bit of hope on their food.

I was really taken by his idea, I loved the idea of being able to sprinkle hope onto our food... as a supplement sort of, an addition to our diet, something to soothe us if we found ourselves with a lack of hope... a curative for an anemia of hope maybe.

sometime later, I decided to make my own salt shakers. I guess it was the following spring. by that point the weekly rudnick family dinners had become firmly established and I attended them religiously. they were rotatingly prepared and anya and I had agreed to make ravioli one week. to accompany the meal I planned to provide shakers for everybody. I went to the store and found cylindrical cardboard disposable shakers, prefilled with salt and pepper. I didn't need the pepper shakers, but they came with the salt and so I wound up with them. it seemed silly to waste the pepper, but I didn't know what label to put on them. I puzzled over it for several days and finally one morning was mentioning my dilemma to a couple of my students (I had begun teaching art at G of A by then). one of the students was grace, who had already proven hersel to me as being brilliant and so I kind of expected her to come up with a good suggestion. the other student, jasmine, was a nice girl but more conventional in her insights and given to superficial and material concerns (both were about 11 years old). anyway, it was jasmine, who surpised and impressed me by without hesitation suggested "courage" as the appropriate label for pepper, and I instantly knew she was exactly right and so, "courage" it was.

I made the shakers and they were well recieved at dinner and I also made a set for jasmine. those original shakers gradually evolved, until the following christmas when I made new sets for everybody, this time glass shakers accompanied by decorative bottles of olive oil and balsamic vinegar which I'd labeled "love" and "tolerance".

when I took the shakers over to maggie, anya mentioned that her friend helen wanted some too, which I'd known before, but have forgotten to ever get around to... so I've got to remember to do that... maybe today. got to get to emily's prints and a letter to harold too.