Sharing My World 56

Haha! Just messing with you.  I know it’s Thursday. Happy early April Fools Day. Unless the world ends before tomorrow, then the joke is on me.

SHARE YOUR WORLD – 2016 WEEK 13

Are you left or right-handed?

I am right-handed but I like to practice doing things with my left hand just in case the right one ever wears out or goes missing.  This is a sign of a great worrier, thinking up obscure and unlikely events and preparing for them.  Or worrying because I’m not prepared for them at all.

If you had only one TV, would you prefer the TV in the living room or another room?

We do have only one TV.  It is in the basement.  I like it there, away from the rest of the house where I can’t hear it.  Most commercials  (and all advertising) drive me nuts.  I am near-sighted and don’t like wearing my glasses, and I don’t hear well.  So I watch TV shows up close on my iPad, with subtitles.  If there was no television in the house I don’t think I’d miss it much.

Have you ever participated in a distance walking, swimming, running, or biking event? Tell your story.

Yes I have!  It was twenty years ago and I walked 15 kilometres for the Children’s Miracle Network, or some such similar worthy cause.  The details are fuzzy after all this time, but I definitely recall the 15 km part vividly.  The choices were to do 5, 7, or 15.  When we got to the 7 km point my coworker (who was the one who decided to do the damned walk in the first place) wanted to stop, but I said what the hell, we’ve come this far, let’s do the whole thing.  Our second mistake was sitting on the ground and taking our shoes off to eat a snack when we made it to the end.  We couldn’t get our shoes back on and we couldn’t get up.  We found it hysterically funny that we might have to crawl to the parking lot and drive home in sock feet.  Physical exhaustion does weird things to your sense of humour.

It didn’t come to that, but there’s a reason I’ve never attempted such a long trek since.  It took days for my muscles to recover.  And there’s a reason why sane people do a lot of training beforehand.  I get it now.

Complete this sentence: Love is… .

Love is hard work and rarely perfect, but worth it anyway.  I don’t think I’ve ever used a bible quote here before, but I quite like this one.

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

I have chosen four colours for my house and not one of them is yellow!  Well, okay, one of them sort of is but it’s called coconut milk so it doesn’t count.  The back entrance is small and poorly lit and needs serious lightening up.  Coconut milk should work.  I’m grateful that we’ve made a start with white ceiling and trim paint too.  Maybe we’ll need sunglasses back there after this.  Instead of a flashlight.

My medical procedures continue (blah) but I’m grateful this last CT scan on Tuesday was at our new local hospital.  What a great place!  Even though it took three people five tries to find a vein for the contrast dye, I’m impressed with the facility.  It’s a ten minute drive from home and beats the hassle of going into the city.  Had my three-month blood work done today and had to explain my bruises but got poked only once this time.  Little things like this make me curiously happy.

As for next week, who knows?  I have lots to keep me busy, but ever fewer excuses to ignore the art room.  Back to that soon I hope.  Meanwhile, this old house continues to endure its facelift.

Yay for April!

Sharing My World 55

On the first day of spring I started to share my world with the normal world but I got seriously sidetracked, much like the girl on the right.  You know, doing extremely important shit.  But look at me now, having put things off but not given up on them entirely and at last, on Spring Day Four, here we go.

SHARE YOUR WORLD – 2016 WEEK 12

Wanting something to quench your thirst, what would you drink?

Like someone I knew a long time ago, you might THINK there is some magic potion other than water which quenches your thirst, but you would be deluded.  My friends choice at the time was Pepsi.  I suggested it satisfied her desire for sugar and caffeine and had very little to do with thirst, but she would not be persuaded.  This happens sometimes, me being incredibly smart and the other person refusing to have a clue. The reason I have held on to this particular memory might simply be because it’s a rare thing of course.  Me being totally right about something.

Anyway, my final answer is water with no weird things added to it.  I mean seriously, does anyone crave coffee in the desert?

What made you feel good this past week?

Being ALONE.  I would not crave aloneness in the desert either,  but I often crave it here in my house.  On Sunday morning W left for Ontario where he will visit his parents for a couple of weeks.  I don’t think he was gone an hour before I had created a colossal mess taking wallpaper off the back door entrance-way and down the basement steps.  I removed trim and nails and a bit of stucco ceiling by mistake and there was nobody looking over my shoulder being helpful or critical or freaked out by the chaos.  It made me happy to stop abruptly at any random point when the mood hit me and wander off to do something else.  Or nothing else.  I have actually been doing a lot of that these past few days with minimum guilt.

This type of little euphoric pause in being a responsible functioning adult with normal sleeping and eating patterns doesn’t last long and then I will be happy to have someone around to talk to again.  Meanwhile, alone is very okay.

When you’re alone at home, do you wear shoes, socks, slippers, or go barefoot?

Barefoot was always my choice until my feet started to wear out.  Now I wear neon pink flip-flops until my feet get cold and I am forced to change into gigantic fuzzy socks.  When I go outside, even just to empty the garbage, I try to put on some shoes that are half-assed normal. Or go with my nightgown.  Because, you know, neighbors.

Would you rather live where it is always hot or always cold?

When it’s very hot I am even more lethargic than normal and would probably wilt and die without air conditioning.  When it’s very cold at least there’s the option of gigantic fuzzy clothing to get warmed up.

Either way the “always” part would be hard to like. Variety is nice, like snowfall on the second day of spring or rain in the middle of winter.  I don’t know how else to start a conversation with a stranger unless there’s weird weather on which to comment.

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

My daughter has offered to paint our house, ceilings and all, and I have finally made a decision on where to start.  Soon our house will be paper free!  Taking the wallpaper off in the entryway has made me remember why I put it up there in the first place.  It covered a multitude of wall flaws in a hurry.  Time to repair them properly.

I know that once one area is all cleaned up with a fresh coat of paint it’s impossible to stop until the next room is done, and the next one and the next one…..  I am grateful to have help, with my most important duty being colour selection.  Truthfully, I’m willing to hand that one over to her as well since so far all I’ve been able to pick out is sixteen different shades of yellow.

The best part of all is taking ten decorative things off the walls and then putting only two back up.  I don’t know if I can do it, but I’m going to try.

The funniest thing that happened this week (I am always grateful for funny things) is the furnace maintenance guy doing his yearly check up on our heating system and wondering why we had set the furnace to half heat.  I said I didn’t know what that meant so he explained about dual versus single and completely lost me in furnace-speak.   He thinks someone must have been randomly pushing buttons on the thermostat and he had to reset everything including the clock.  Okay, that part I understand.  And I was able to blame it totally on W because he’s not here to defend himself.  Bonus.  I am never touching the thermostat again.  It will be forever 19 degrees celsius day and night in all seasons until we die.  One less decision to make.

Okay!  Back to the wallpaper!  Although what’s the point now, might as well wait until tomorrow.  Or the weekend.  It’s not going anywhere.

Just Jazzy 319

Paint yourself a beautiful day.

Art du Jour 61

What started out as a serious exploration of watercolour blending quickly turned silly. The left hand side you see here was originally the top, until I held the paper up to let gravity work its magic on the paint flow and this funny sad face appeared. And I found myself enhancing it with a few details.

So if you stand back, it’s just splashes of lovely bright colours. Up close it becomes something which might frighten a small child.

In the many artistic endeavours I’ve come across in the blog world there are some things I really like and some I don’t, and some that don’t particularly move me one way or the other although I can always appreciate the creative process.  Art is a very subjective thing.  And artists are sometimes their own worst critics and very hard on themselves.  Writers are like this too, humbled by what they feel is better work than their own, when it might simply be different – not more or less, not better or worse.

A little humility is a good thing, and working to be better is admirable.  But we should also strive for self-confidence and feeling good about who we are and what we do.  Drawing the line at turning into raving egotistical nut jobs of course.  It’s a fine balance.

All that was a long convoluted way to get to the part where I say positive things about my art. Even when it’s not likely to end up in the Louvre.  Yes, I did just roll my eyes.

I absolutely love these colours, and the hinted at flowers and the splatters of ink.  I love that I’ve learned how too much blending turns into a muddy brown and how I will learn to avoid that in the future.  And I love that I can see faces where they weren’t necessarily meant to be.

Happy Thursday!  I love that I always appear to know what day of the week it is too.  Yay me.

Sharing My World 22

Through the looking-glass in my guest room/library.

 

Share Your World – 2015 Week #11

List 2 things you have to be happy about.

Huh.  Just two?  That’s a pretty short list.  Better make these two things count.

1.  Being RETIRED!  I’m so happy I have lived long enough to get to this point.  I can go to bed late, do bizarre things in the middle of the night,  nap whenever I want.  Make up my own schedule or simply wing it day-to-day.   It’s like being a kid again but without all the silly rules.

2.  ART!  No, not some random guy.  Drawing, painting, sketching, cutting, ripping, pasting, doodling.  Learning new things.  Letting my creative side loose on the world.  Amassing enough art supplies to last for several lifetimes.  Hey, at least there’ll be that to pass down to my kids.

Do you prefer ketchup or mustard or mayonnaise?

I like all three, in any order, accompanied by relish, sweet or dill.  I also like chili sauce, seafood sauce, guacamole and salsa.  Last week I had a strong craving for hot dogs.  I don’t know why something which isn’t good for you at all should taste so delicious.  White buns, charred mystery meat, and a pile of condiments, including chopped up onions and tomatoes.  Yum.

If you were to paint a picture of your childhood, what colors would you use?

My childhood was pleasant and ordinary.  Of course I had no clue that was the case until I got through it.  There were bits of misery and there were interludes of pure joy.  I would paint sapphire skies with distant black thunderclouds, golden sunshine after blue-grey rain.  A big red barn and a yellow brick house.  Dusty gravel roads.  Maybe some rainbow trees, a sea of turquoise grass waving in the summer breeze and a few purple cows lolling about in a meadow.  That sounds about right.

Do you prefer a bath or a shower?

Well there’s my cue to go off on a rant about how sitting in bath water is really disgusting.  I don’t know when my aversion to bathing started, but it extends to hot tubs and whirl pools, no matter how full of chemicals and disinfectants.  Also public swimming pools, but that’s mostly because of the chlorine and the chance that small children might be urinating.    I have to be thoroughly rinsed or I itch.  Everywhere.  So the short answer is “shower”.  I’ll spare you the long answer because that was merely the introduction.

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

I’m grateful for our beautiful spring-like weather, although it’s supposed to snow again soon.  Winter’s last hurrahs which don’t linger very long at this time of year.  I’m grateful that W hasn’t yet taken the snow tires off my car.  He asked if I could remember when he did it last year and I told him it was the day before a snow and ice storm that had me slipping and sliding all over the place to and from work for two days.  Now that there’s no danger of it being a necessity to drive somewhere, he has finally lost all sense of urgency to get the tires switched around at the first sign of warmer weather.  It’s Murphy’s law that once he does get around to it, there will be freezing rain.

I’m looking forward to doing our income tax.  Thought I’d write that down to see how it sounds, but it’s a blatant lie.  I’m dreading it, as usual.  And putting it off with the snow tires.  Today I’m picking up some mixed media stuff at Michael’s.  I have a list.  It consists of more than two items.

Ask A Silly Question

“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.” ~Rumi

Publicity photo of The Supremes from The Ed Sullivan Show. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Daily Prompt:  When you were 10, what did you want to be when you grew up? What are you now? Are the two connected?

Art class was one of the things I loved most about elementary school, a close runner-up to reading everything I could get my hands on and making up long and involved (very loosely based on reality) stories of my own.  I remember the day our teacher gave us big blank pieces of art paper and told us to paint a picture which illustrated the answer to the question “What do you want to be when you grow up?”

In my short little life so far I had been asked that question about a billion times and was really sick of the people pleasing answers I felt compelled to come up with in response to it.  I usually said whatever I thought was most likely to get the adult harassing me to smile and nod and then go away and pick on somebody else.  It was my experience that grown ups really didn’t care what you wanted to be when you grew up, it was just a thing they asked kids when they couldn’t think of anything else to say.

This art assignment was less structured than normal, almost like being asked to paint whatever popped into our heads. So here’s what popped into mine.

I painted a stage across the bottom and a beautiful sparkly gossamer curtain across the back with lines and lines of flowing folds.  On the stage stood a beautiful blonde woman in a gorgeous white evening gown which looked like a wedding dress without the veil.  So I added a couple of gigantic red roses and a bow for clarification.  In her hands she held a microphone attached to a long black cord that coiled off to one side and out of the picture.  This was back in the day when microphones could be taken off their stands allowing performers to walk around trying not to get tangled up in a bunch of wires.  The lady’s eyes were closed and her mouth was a big round red O taking up half her face. There were musical notes floating around above her head.   It was a beautiful picture and I was incredibly proud of it.  Because that was going to me – drop dead gorgeous, blonde, dressed to kill and singing my heart out on the Ed Sullivan Show.

So how did that work out for me?  Actually, not well.  I can’t sing.  I don’t look so great with blond hair – tried it once and didn’t have any more fun than I’d had as a brunette.  Never in my life have I owned or felt the urge to purchase such elaborate formal wear. Or one of those big poufy wedding dresses either. Red lipstick makes me look weird.  I have never used a microphone or done anything on a stage where I was the center of attention unless you count being handed a diploma. And Ed Sullivan died before I could be discovered.  If he was alive today he’d still be waiting.

Today I work in the medical field and wear a lab coat at work every day.  Hey – it’s white!  So that part of my vision of the future was bang on.  The rest, not so much. Even as the picture took form all those years ago I’m sure I knew it was just a silly dream and simply an excuse to paint a beautiful lady in a stunning dress.

I try to make a point of never, ever, asking a young child what they want to do with their lives.  How can they possibly know?  What a kid does know is what’s fun, what makes them laugh the hardest, what games they like to play, which books are the best to read.  They’ve got years and years to live and so many things to experience and even then their life work decisions may never be carved in stone.

Now I’d answer the question by saying simply that I just want to be happy.  There’s time enough to discover all the ways there are to make that happen.

Camp Log 3

July 07

Camp Log 2006, Part Three

On the Sunday following our arrival it rains all day long.  The guys go fishing because, let’s face it, men in general don’t know enough to come in out of the rain, and Ann and I scrounge around for some fun rainy day indoor stuff to do.  We watch a movie (The 40 Year Old Virgin) on my little battery operated DVD player.  The sound is pretty bad,  so we play it with sub-titles.  Then we decide to paint sun catchers.   Despite the fact that the sun catcher package says adult supervision required, they don’t turn out too bad at all.  We eventually get around to stringing them up with fishing line on a wire hanger.

Very classy addition to the decor.  We both take a solemn oath to never attempt this mind numbingly boring activity again, and both of us, with now severe cases of cabin fever, go out and sit on the deck in the rain.  Where the guys come home to find us, and wonder why we don’t have enough sense to come in out of the rain.

Monday is day one of shingling the roof.  What a production.  The guys haul over scaffolding, the nail gun apparatus, all the shingles and various tools and paraphernalia.  Ann and I wander off until we think we’ve gone a sufficient distance so as to be out of range for being asked to do anything helpful.  We paint rocks.  Rock painting has become a favourite camp activity for me.  There’s nothing but blank canvases everywhere you look, and often when you’re in the process of creating a small masterpiece, people will wander by to see how things are progressing and offer you refreshments.  That’s why I refer to one particular rock as the rum rock, because it took about four rum and cokes originally to complete it.  The paint has all faded, so I decide to give it a facelift.

Hmm.  It ends up looking like some kind of a demented goalie mask.

I also touch up the stick people – four of which are shown above.  There are many many more.  Think “invasion of the stick people” and you’ll have the right idea.  In the next few days we add even more, and gather driftwood for a sign, and put stepping-stones up one of the pathways to the cottage.

YES!  We have gone project crazy!!  And this is turning into a vacation slide-show from hell.  But please open your eyes for just a minute, so you can see our little cat and dog solar glow balls by the steps, and the wind chime way up there at the top of our stairway.   Okay.  You can doze off again.  I was going to add one of W. on the roof with a wet towel tied around his head, with the ends hanging down, so that he looks like a cross between a terrorist and Willie Nelson.  But probably just talking about that will leave you with a disturbing mental image for days.

The roof gets completed (it takes two days), we make plans for the flower beds, and take walks around the island and some pictures of the eagle’s nest.  And Canada Geese families.  And then we paint a big plastic barrel black in preparation for building our outdoor shower.  We declare tomorrow “Sit-On-Your-Ass-And-Do-Dick-All-Day”.  But of course that doesn’t happen.  Because it is W.’s mom’s birthday on Saturday and we have to prepare for our gala barbecue on the deck.  I think I’ll spare you those pictures too – a bunch of drunken friends and relatives sitting around in the sun.  Tomorrow we’re going to Wal-Mart and Canadian Tire!!  And we’re going to stop by the house in town to have REAL showers with ACTUAL HOT WATER!!  Be still my heart.