jaeleslie

This morning we cleaned the dining room and I moved all the plants outside for their summer vacation, and then worked over the plants already outside that needed some treatment for waterlogging from their recent showers. The deluge has washed all the hard water buildup from their pots. Mr S tried sweeping a bit while I wasn't watching. After all this activity it occurred to me that I am also anticipating the arrival of parents and brother and new sister-in-law next week.

Whether they are actually attending any parts of WisCon is still a bit of a mystery to me. I've made it very clear that I am going to be busy at the convention, and they don't seem to expect me to be any sort of host, which one might take in several different ways, if one happened to be in some state of diffuse anxiety. I mean I would like to see more of them, but the week they have chosen to come is the worst they could have picked out of these three months, short of one during which I am actually out of town. Which, in fact, they have done in the past. Hmm.

As I mentioned a couple days ago I've been stuck, doing every other thing there is to do in the house to avoid grappling with the artistic problems. Today it was just tortuous to do the next thing on a couple of pieces that I really want to have ready to hang next weekend.

I am not struggling with the lettering or the compositions. Just figuring out that I don't have to also design entirely new ways to approach composition was a big help. Keep it simple! I am trying to do the same kind of pieces I have been doing for years in watercolor, only in acrylic, which presents in a new form the technical problems that I have already licked in watercolor. Acrylic is sturdier, but less reversible when you want to revise. I keep wanting to test every material and procedure before working on these pieces that are supposed to be the tests! And on the other hand I keep throwing in cool things in a couple more media, a little gilding or collage or blockprinting, just because it looks interesting.

Number One Son and I watched a fantasy movie this evening in which: The hero sneaks into the Temple of Doom to battle snakes. The hero is tortured to death by the bad guys, then his friends take him to the wizard who says "He's only partly dead". James Earl Jones intones to the hero, "I am your father". The hero kills the bad guy with the shards of his father's sword.

Guess what movie it was! Give up? ( Read more... )

Now that it is barely a week until WisCon, I am finding a truly remarkable number of things to do instead of working on the stuff I would like to have done for the art show. Of course this is nothing unusual, but I have picked up the pace so as to actually get done the things I want to do in amongst all the other daily household stuff. Fortunately I have arranged things so that apahacking is in this situation avoidance behavior too, and so is writing important emails, and reading library books, when I maybe ought to be painting and laying gold leaf instead.

Making a list of the things I ought to do is not nearly so satisfying as a list of what I have actually done. But I suspect I'm not the only one who also folds the laundry and empties the dishwasher instead of pursuing my favorite creative activities. Maybe it's a little disorganized or contrary of me to practice such mundane priorities, but there it is.

Sorry I can't make this a clicky-thing. But here's my question. Over the last few years I've given up smoking (not that I ever smoked much anyway), cow's milk dairy products (that was hard as I was practically living on cheese), and now coffee (not really so hard, as I still have tea and I do sleep a little better). What bad habit should I give up next? (a) Alcohol (b) Refined sugar (c) Both of the above (d) Meat (e) Other.

We had named the bird "Nelsonbird" that went on and on interminably early in the spring morning with a call resembling the jeer of the unpleasant little boy Nelson in the Simpsons. "Ha-ha!"

I got a recording of bird songs out of the library, and found that was one of the calls of the black-capped chickadee. We see lots of those around here, usually in crowds, in the winter wrestling with the sparrows over rights to the feeders. Lately they have left it all (niger and safflower seed) to the finches.

The big mission today was to acquire a bootscraper/brush for the back door, so we don't track in so much grass and mud. (With a push mower Mr S has to cut the grass more often to keep it in shape -- takes him only twenty minutes back and front -- so we have lots of clippings.) Went to three different garden stores, and came home also with a couple bushy little Blue Wave petunias (trailing growth habit for planters out back), a classic red-orange geranium, and a thing that looks like a junior size trailing petunia but is called a Calibrachoa (color Terra Cotta). Then I went to work putting the herbs and dark blue pansies I had bought previously into planters as well. Wore myself out, and still half a flat of pansies to go, but the yard looks great. After the rain last week everything is twice as tall, including the weeds. The tulips are nearly done but the phlox and alliums are coming on, and masses of daisies are about to pop. In fact it is the best display on the block this year, the back even more than the front. I keep the spring horsies out back, where they won't scandalize passersby on the street, but hope to amuse people walking down the gravel alley in back.

The best thing I have found to do with rutabagas is to put them in beef curry. Tonight there was a bit too much cayenne in Ye Olde Familie Recipe curry for the more Norwegian tastes among us. If they are mild-tasting swedes they are good sliced thin and braised in beef broth, or with some butter. But these root vegetables are often large and there is a limit to how much one can eat at a sitting, in this fat and well-fed time, so you can be carving off of a single one for days on end.

All those suggestions one reads about making a slaw of grated rutabaga or turnip have not worked so far. I am preferring the large napa cabbage for that anyway, the last of winter harvest, which I have been carving slabs from for the last month, still sweet and mild.

It's time for new spinach anyway. The vegetable box today was full of delights in store. I am going out to deadhead all my tulips now while the light holds. This is the first day this week I have had a nice high-pressure relief from the rheumatism. The blue geranium I got from the neighbor's sale last year has grown quite large, and combines well with the pale pink wild geraniums in the oak shade.

Welcome home olivia_circe!

Pushing forward, while taking it easy, very tai chi kind of effort today. This morning I read an article about the collage artist and painter Romare Bearden (took notes, decided not to make copies, that way lies madness), and some other stuff.

Thanks by the way to numbat who recommended The Hard Way to Haparanda by R.P. Lister (no not that Lister) which is great fun. It is a book about his travels in Lapland, back in the day (do you remember? mid-sixties, this had to be dug out of the lower stacks of the library) when anyone who took any exercise at all was looked upon as dangerously eccentric, so the whole first section is rather peculiar as he establishes with great good humor what kind of neurosis it is that possesses him to inflict such suffering on himself as hiking up and down mountains in bad weather carrying a large heavy pack. I read a great deal of the first part aloud. His tone is that of the wryly self-effacing Brit, but he makes many interesting general observations on human nature, and the national characteristics of the other Europeans he encounters, mostly Swedes and Finns...

Then I had lunch with Chris who was on the way outstate to Valley Ridge Studio for a weekend poetry workshop with Ellen Kort (state poet laureate), and with Marcia, who is off tomorrow for three weeks in Holland and Spain. Came home and had a pleasantly stunned afternoon working at this and that, cutting mats, sorting clip art files, setting the bread machine, making soup, and so forth.

I did not attend Number One Son's scheduled rugby game, from which the mud is even now being washed away. That will be more laundry again. Since he has come home in one piece, excuse me while I go check on the latest heroic exploits.

Trying hard to get back on track after my weekend holiday.

The weather is not helping, as however warm it may be the humidity has got me feeling very bad physically. It is very odd: yesterday I was so fatigued I actually fell asleep in the car as we were waiting to pick up Number One Son from school. Then I had the usual workout, even after a week and half of none, even added a set of leg presses (200#). So I'm not weak, on the contrary, I am still quite strong, just dead tired, from morning to night.

Read a couple of books, more about that later. Marcia has given me her Champion juicer, just in time for the organic vegetable season, and I found the entire instruction booklet (with recipes) online, which has occupied me pleasantly for far too much of the morning. Right now I am trying to get out of the house for much-needed grocery shopping. Breakfast? check. Face? check. Shoes? check. Pissing down rain? check.