Frustrating Monday

Walnut's Monday face.

I really thought that not working would mean Mondays were just like any other day -- no students grumpy about coming back to school after the weekend, no walking into the classroom to find my desks and chairs inexplicably rearranged by the football team using it as a lunchroom before the Saturday night game, no early morning meeting where the principal reads to us from a powerpoint instead of just sending out a memo -- but no, Mondays are Mondays are Mondays.

Here's a list of things that went wrong:

1. Ants invaded the apartment, again. We have a count going on our house whiteboard, like the kind they have at construction sites saying "days without an accident," and our board has been at zero since Friday. I spent all morning and a good part of the afternoon killing, cleaning up after, rediscovering, killing, and cleaning up again. 
2. When I finally got to sit down at my machine, I discovered that the tension is still messed up. The original repair cost almost as much as the original machine, and now I have another week of no sewing. 
3. I started making proofs of my linocuts, but as soon as I spread out the fabric paint, Walnut jumped up onto the desk. This meant cat hair in all of my subsequent prints. At least his dainty cat feet just missed landing in the paint, so no cat-paw printed carpet. 
4. The brayer I have isn't working for fabric printing, so I need to get a new one. 
5. After cleaning up the printing, I got to sit through an hour of traffic (to travel three miles!) to get to campus for a Joint Ventures barbeque. 

Monday wasn't all bad though; my husband was super sweet, and Walnut is super cute. The proofs turned out okay, considering I had the wrong brayer.

First try: not so good, especially on the larger mushroom block.

It's tricky to get the whole block printed evenly.

Getting better at it.

Started running out of paint when I got to the ship.