Art du Jur 83

Or maybe I should say “art du réveillon de Nouvel an,” which might mean New Year’s Eve art in French, but to be safe, don’t quote me.  These are footprint pictures I did for one of K and C’s bathrooms for Christmas, because my son admired the ones hanging in mine that I did for myself.  Don’t ever admire something in my house unless you really mean it.

The photo was taken at night in not very bright light, so the colours are a little weird, but there’s never a lot of natural light in bathrooms anyway so maybe this is what they’ll look like, except less blurry.  Also I think they would look better hung side by side.

Okay!  My year in review!

Ha ha, sorry to scare you, I’m just kidding.  I survived it and that’s what counts.  If I don’t feel like looking backwards at the things I lived through, I can’t imagine why anyone else would want to.  My life is just not that damned interesting.  Onward and upward to another new start on the road paved with good intentions.  That doesn’t always lead to hell, does it?

Whatever.  I have a plan.  It may sound as if it’s made up of very vague resolutions. Because it is.

1.  Try to blog something every day, even if it’s just a picture or a quote or a weather report.  And once you are disciplined enough to do that, hopefully some of your posts will turn into something better.
2. Share your world fifty-two times!
3. Use your page-a-day calendars for inspiration!
4. Answer some WordPress prompts!  Maybe lay off the exclamation marks!
5. Creating art every day is a pretty lofty goal, so try for twice a week.  And if there’s more than that, well yay!  I mean just yay, with less excitement.

Have you ever been so overwhelmed with all the things you want to do that you just sit down and don’t do anything?  Wow, I hope it’s not just me who does that.  And I hope I’ve gotten that bad habit out of my system for a while with such a slack assed December. Pardon my French.

January, my least favourite month ever, with 31 dreary days, is coming right up.  I would like to fill it with fun.  I have two half bottles of red wine in the fridge to finish up (in five ounce increments per day because that’s what diabetics are allowed) so I need to get right on that before it all goes bad.  I have several art projects on the go, and several more in my head.  Chapters had their calendars on for half price today so I walked down there and bought three of them.

PREPARED is what I am.  Bring it on, 2016, I’m ready for you.

Happy New Year everyone.

Christmas-ish Haiku

Nothing left to do,
Nowhere else I need to be.
I love Christmas Eve.

 

Christmas candle fills

The air with cranberry cheer,

Whatever that is.

 

Happy Holidays,

Merry Christmas, Peace on Earth

Tidings of great joy.

Sharing My World 42

SHARE YOUR WORLD – 2015 WEEK #50

Favourite thing to photograph? Write? Or Cook?

I like to photograph my art work in different lights and mess around editing the colours.  Then I can see things that need fixing.  Isn’t that weird?  You would think flaws would be easier to see in real life rather than on a screen.  I also like to take pictures of the outside from the inside, i.e. my back and front yards through the windows.   That is also weird, but I expect the novelty will wear off soon.  Well let’s hope so anyway.  Lately it’s my jungle themed Christmas.  See above for clarification.  Or consternation, your choice.

Obviously I enjoy writing about myself, I do so much of it, and that probably will never get old for any of us, because what else do we know more about?  Or less about and are still trying to write it all down to figure it out?   Poetry (even if it’s bad) is fun and challenging, but I haven’t written any for a long time.  And short stories are as ambitious as my fiction gets.  I don’t think I have the attention span to write anything longer.

There is nothing I LIKE to cook.  The only reason I do it at all is to keep myself from starving to death.

Did you like swinging as a child? Do you still get excited when you see a swing?

Yes, I loved swinging as a child!  No, I don’t get excited when I see swings these days because they’re never old tires tied to thick ropes dangling from real trees!  Now that’s exciting.  Dad made those for us as well as the kind with big fat board seats.  And here’s another weird thing.  Kids twisting themselves around and around until the swing ropes are super tight and then letting themselves go to spin back in the other direction until they’re so dizzy they could puke.  Best fun ever.  Second best fun for us was going as high as we could go until we were at the peak of the forward swing and then jumping off into nothing but blue sky.  We wanted to see who could travel the greatest distance and marked our landing spots in the dirt with a stick.  My brother always won that one, no contest.  The last time we played it he also broke his arm.

What has surprised you about blogging?

How much I like people!  Well, that came out wrong.  How connected I feel to so many different bloggers from so many different places, who have lives so very different from mine.  And yet we are alike.  It’s a beautiful thing.  So many people with so many stories to tell, so many friends I’ve never met but have come to know and love and look forward to hearing from every day.  And when they’re not around I miss them.

List at least five favorite desserts.

Well what a thing to ask of a newly diagnosed diabetic.  Three months ago if I thought about it at all, I imagined diabetics were people who ate entire cakes for breakfast and a box of donuts for lunch.  I can take or leave desserts and rarely eat them, so it all seemed terribly unfair.  I have learned so much since then.  Like how lucky I am to not crave sweet things.  My body has a hard enough time with potatoes or bananas or toast.

Anyway, yes, I remember desserts!  Chocolate ice cream, brownies, coconut cream pie, carrot cake with cream cheese frosting and chewy oatmeal raisin cookies.  I like those five, but can’t remember the last time I ate any of them.  I think it’s strange how we mess around with fruit making it in to pies and jams and cobblers and tarts.  Just eat the damn raw fruit, it’s fine the way it is.  Said the person who hates to cook.

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

I am grateful that W has not mentioned anything about Christmas music until today.  Wow, the 17th of December.  That’s gotta be a new record.  Normally by the 7th or so I am already having that swing twirling puke-type reaction to anything Jingle Bells related.  Now we have the sat radio on one of the (least offensive to me) Christmas stations.  He set the volume and I turned it down a notch.  See how we compromise and get along?  If he turns it to the country channel we are getting a divorce.

So next week is Christmas!  Wow, that snuck up on us while we weren’t looking.  There will be a turkey dinner but I don’t know yet what day, just that it will be after the 25th this year.  I like to carry on my mother’s tradition of celebrating Christmas on whatever day appears to be the one on which the highest number of people are likely to show up.  The Wing-It Family Christmas.

W’s six-week check up is next week (he will actually be seven weeks post op by then) and he should get the okay to drive, fingers crossed.  The chauffeurs life is not for me and I will gladly give it up.

Have a Happy Thursday and a great rest of the week!

Not Quite Right

 

Hey! It’s the Christmas Witch Doctor!

If I am boring myself enough with all my health related thoughts that I can’t stay awake to write them down, then there isn’t much chance that anyone else will find them gripping.  Or helpful.  Thus my procrastination when it comes to ending this blog-neglect thing I have going on.

But I seriously have NOTHING much else happening in my life just now.

Except maybe for Facebook where I read this little story about a nurse who was bathing her patient when he asked her, “Are my testicles black?”   So she checked them out for him and reassured him that everything looked just fine down there.

“Well, that’s great,” he said, “But what I asked you was ARE MY TEST RESULTS BACK?”

This is a perfect example of how I hear things, all mangled up and misconstrued and just not quite on the money.  W requested the other day from another room that I put play dough on the grocery shopping list.  That’s what I heard.  I think it could have been bagels or maybe Leggo.  I don’t know.

And when I went for more needle biopsies on my neck last week (follow-up from a year ago in case there are changes) the doctor told me when he was finished to keep the band-aid on for fifty hours.  That sounded odd, so I wondered if maybe he meant fifteen hours, but that seemed a strange time frame too.  A few hours??  Then he went on to talk about pain killers and results and another visit and I had to pay attention to all that so I forgot to ask for clarification on the band-aid issue.  I took it off when it started to itch.  I am still alive.

Whenever I ask W to repeat himself he gets annoyed and on my case about getting a hearing aid.  But I don’t want one yet.  And here are some of the reasons why I’m being stubborn about it.

1.  I have inherited my dads intolerance for noise.  He didn’t like the television or the radio blaring away either.  Or people who shouted when they talked.  Or a lot of different types of racket going on at once.  He liked peace and quiet.  Me too.
2. At night I can still hear clocks ticking and faucets dripping and dogs barking and husbands snoring.  I’d like to get deaf enough to NOT hear those things.  Then we’ll talk.  And I won’t be able to even wildly guess what you’re telling me, so won’t that be fun?
3. When I was an optician I found people in denial about their need for progressive lenses to be the most apt to dislike them and not adapt to wearing their new multi focal glasses.  I’ve heard it’s the same with hearing aids.  I don’t want to spend all that money on something until I’m sure I need it and really want it and will wear it and like it.  The option of being able to turn it off at will is certainly appealing.
4. Part of my hearing “problem” is no doubt my inability to pay attention.  My mind wanders off on tangents.  I zone out.  Teachers often remarked about how much time I spent day dreaming.  I’m still doing it.  Sorry, did you say something?
5. The things I hear are often way funnier than the things actually being said.  Who would want to give that up?

So, how do you like my new lazy Christmas decorating method where you don’t take anything ordinary away but simply add some holiday stuff to the junk you already have lying around?  Whoa, Martha’s got nothing on me.  If you’re disagreeing with that, I can’t hear you.

Nothing says Peace quite like an alien giraffe.

Sharing My World 41

Proof that our winters here are seven months long.

SHARE YOUR WORLD – 2015 WEEK #49

What would be your ideal birthday present, and why?

I would like to have someone deposit a billion dollars in to my bank account with no strings attached, anonymously, tax free.  I believe that would make me deliriously happy.  Even though people say money can’t buy happiness.  Don’t you think it might be fun to test that theory and find out for yourself?  And see how long it would take to give the bulk of it away to people and causes you cared about?

But that’s probably asking for too much.  A gift certificate to Michael’s would be good too.

What color would you like your bedroom to be?

Deep purple with silver stars scattered all over the place.  It would be like sleeping in outer space.  Imagine a realtor trying to sell your house  totally flipping out about it.  At the moment it is a flat and rather boring creamy shade of pale yellow.  My whole house is a tribute to the colour yellow.  I have no idea why exactly, but yellow paint and I have this thing going on.  I pair it up with red, or blue, or orange, or brown, and it takes on all kinds of different characters.

Would you prefer snowy winters, or not, and why?

I do not like snow, never have and never will.  But I have always lived where there is lots of it for months at a time and have never experienced a winter without it so I don’t know if I would prefer it that way or not.  What in the world would I complain about all winter if there wasn’t any snow?

This year, so far, we have very little.  Yesterday it rained.  Christmas without snow will be weird if it happens.  But I have never been one to complain about weird.

Would you rather go a week without bathing, but be able to change your clothes, or a week without a change of clothes, but be able to bathe?

This is one of those crazy “this or that” questions where you don’t want to choose either one, because they are both equally disgusting.  Why must there be only two choices?  Why can’t we play “this, that, or the other thing”?

Okay, never mind, I will play along.  The biggest thing I hate about camping is never feeling clean if there is no way to have a hot shower every day.  I am much nicer to people when I’m clean.  So no change of clothes for a week seems like the lesser evil to me.

Bonus question: What are you grateful for from last week, and what are you looking forward to in the week coming up?

For one reason or another (maybe it’s connected to the lack of snow) there seems to be an amazing absence of pressure about all things Christmas for me this year.  The grandkids will be off skiing.  I’ve had cards on my desk for weeks but no ambition to sign and send them.  We put up a little artificial tree and outside lights on a timer and hung some junk on the doors and put some ornaments around the fireplace. I don’t want to do any Christmas baking because it’s all sugary crap that’s not good for anyone.  My sugars will go berserk if I have too many cranberries with my turkey.  So bah humbug, I guess.

Our house is still upside down until we can get rid of all the post hip surgery stuff that takes up so much room.  I can’t remember a Christmas when we’ve been off to a doctor’s appointment on the 23rd of December, so that will be a first.  Then we are hoping W gets the ok to drive again and we can get back to our version of normal.

And that’s all she wrote for another who knows how many days of relaxing and putting things off and getting very little done.  It’s a good life, even without the billion dollar birthday.