History of Bad Luck

I have a long history of bad luck with rings. I am sure there were a series of rings when I was a child that disappeared for a variety of reasons. When I was dating my kind and trusting future husband, he had given me a very attractive agate ring he had made with lights and contrasts in it that looked like a horizon line and a sunset. I left it on a public restroom sink when I was washing my hands. There’s one down side of cleanliness. He should have taken a clue at that time, but alas, he didn’t. He gave me a lovely set of rings when we married which were washed down a kitchen drain after 3 years of marriage. It’s possible that I have become more responsible or maybe less clean.

Quite a few years ago, I lost a CTR ring in the dark recesses of a recliner chair, having taken it off and it slipped from my hands, jingling downward, never to be retrieved. I turned the chair up and down a bunch of times, to no avail. I heard it jingle once, never to jingle again. Alas, maybe my inability to choose the right is the reason I have lost so many rings.

The other day, I was beginning to wonder if dark forces were at work. Maybe the prophecy about the last days was occurring, about our possessions being illusive. I also wondered if we had a group of "Borrowers" living in the crawl space under our house. In August I bought a ring at the Petrified Forest which slides over the knuckle of my pinky finger, but which is quite loose. Several times I have thought as I have taken a shower, washed my hands or put on lotion that it could slip off too easily. The other day, I was in the shower getting ready to wash my hair and I was paranoid about it slipping off my hand. So I opened the shower door and gently tossed it out onto the middle of the rug. A thought crossed my mind that I might never see that ring again, being somewhat and at times, very superstitious. A self-fulfilling prophecy could be aided by pixies or gremlins such as the one that lived in the recesses of the recliner and absconded with my CTR ring.

When I got out of the shower, I looked for the ring and sure enough it was nowhere in sight! I shook the rug twice, checked on both sides of the toilet and all along the sides of the walls. I was thinking about trajectory and propulsion and how such an object might bounce or roll, maybe out into the bedroom. I was more than puzzled since I am inclined to be superstitious about disappearing objects and UFO’s and crop circles, etc, etc. I went and got a broom and swept the floor, I thought well enough. I was so baffled, pondering the likelihood of gremlins and Borrowers and prophecies. I made one more perusal around the toilet, in back where there was not a chance that it could have made its way, but voilá! there it was. It had rolled about 3 feet, circling in back of the toilet, landing in a spot so out of sight that I would swear in court that a Borrower had come along hiding it so as to come back for it later. You will be relieved to know that there was a happy ending in my long history of ring incidents.

Red Corn and Blue Buckets

The farmer in the family has brought in some super-duper produce this summer. In particular, I was impressed with these colorful, textured objects in a blue bucket. I like the shapes and lines with a touch of dirt. The bucket added some local color with its worn top that almost resembles a ceramic bowl. (The goofy kitchen towel adds nothing and should have been removed.) It's funny how shapes, color, texture, light and shade wander around the views for our eyes without our recognizing the romantic nature of things.

Then he brought in one of the first jewels of his crop of Indian corn, usually called blue corn, but this one is all red kernals, crowned by the colorful wrapping it came in. Putting the ear of corn in a bowl with onions made a great still life photograph. What nice, aesthetic gifts Heavenly Father provides for us with the help of a diligent farmer.

Picasso's long lost art student

There was an apartment in which our family lived, in Davis California. Shortly after we have moved in, the area of the tub and shower enclosure had a leak and had to be replaced. The replacement surface was wall board with an abstract neutral design which was haunting to me. I could find angular faces in the design, profiles and facial features in various positions and I sketched the impressions as closely as possible. With Picasso in mind, I arranged those positive and negative spaces, lines, planes and angles into an uninspiring finished product which has long since been painted over, relegated to the grave yard of unsuccessful attempts at creating artful masterpieces.

A recent painting session was going swimmingly, having nothing to do with inspiration from Picasso. I was working on a type of object art which may or may not work. The design on the cover of this looseleaf notebook reminded me of the faces on the shower wall, the creature emerging out of what is supposed to look like a rugged shale-type rock face. You can decide if this is Picasso-esque or merely kindergarten monster art, maybe sort of Harry Potter Monster Book-ish.

I noticed that my paint pallette had some interesting shapes which were easy to identify in shapes you may or may not concur with - maybe a gruesome Raggedy Ann and a blue gorilla.

After all, art is in the eye of the beholder. If you are a Kindergartner, you may say, "sure that looks like a very short alligator.... Maybe it's a green crow laying an already fried egg.

A Rose is a Rose is a Rose

Painting original art work is an experiment, experimenting in composition, in color, in contrast and texture. Sometimes the creativity works, sometimes it is an artistic train wreck. I worked on a project I have had in mind for a while, doing a large portrayal of flowers, a rose in particular. Dan had taken photographs of a couple of beautiful roses. The shape of the flower was appealing, but the color was the first matter for experiment. In the first painting I tried some color combinations that were meant to make the painting look luminescent.

The white background colors didn't seem to work, so I darkened the leaves. Then the whole thing was too abrupt, so I worked on the leaves to be more subtle and impressionistic which improved the background.

I didn't change the blue rose in these first paintings, just the backgrounds, the time of day and the amateur photographing skills.

The new colors of the background didn't jive with the blue tones of the rose. There had to be the consideration of complimentary colors. Color combination rules say that the best combinations are "complimentary" which mean reds and greens go together, blues and oranges, yellows and purples. Each of those duos provide shadow colors for each other. Shadow colors for red should have some green in the shadows, etc. Nature provides its own rules for putting shades of green with every color in the rainbow, but working on a rose that has lots of pink, which is a shade of red, seemed to be the best route to go.

It was an interesting evolution of shape, composition and color. The finished painting is going to be displayed in a local medical clinic, sort of an "elevator" art - the kind of art work that hangs on walls in offices that is non-descript, non-invasive. Hopefully, the rose is a soothing bit of therapy for the clinic.

Sharper than a sword

Remember the last time you nibbled on the inside of your lip or the more elusive parts of the inside of your cheeks. Not a fun way to wake up your senses, to register your personal threshold of pain. Annoyingly it seems to occur in one spot over and over until the particular spot has complained convincingly with a swollen and raised area which is in line for another assault from your menacing array of carnivorous teeth.

That was the case this last week and since I have a nasty cold tormenting my body right now, proper attention wasn’t being paid to my mouth, including my teeth and tongue. I bit a place inside my lip last week and over a period of days, bit the same place again and again. Last night, was the last straw where the wounded area resembled something one would squeeze together, fry and place between such things as handily shaped bread, along with pickles, ketchup, tomato, cheese and lettuce, although it would have been a smaller item than you have normally been accustomed to consuming. And the wounded area was such that it required some OTC Numzit and as recognized today along with my sinus headache and delirium and a wracking cough, that it is still sore and causing me added distress and an increase of whining, poor Dan.

The latest assault gave me pause to wonder how such things occur. Ultimately, one has to admit that the shape and function of the mouth is a wondrous positioning of objects. With so much munching, eating, biting, cud-chewing and more, the percentage of wounding the inner soft tissues of the mouth is minuscule, although the occurrence is so traumatic that the wound appears to have much more importance in the eternal scheme of things. One would have to consider that coordination or the lack thereof is probably an important issue in the process of eating without drawing blood. Teeth have restricted movement and only chew on things placed there for that purpose. The tongue, however moves all over and is well known for getting people in trouble for many reasons.

One of the many quotes about the lethality of the tongue: "The only weapon that becomes sharper with constant use is the tongue." There are Bible passages that compare the tongue to a sword and to snake poison.

I wish I had a copy of a cute poem told to me by a dentist about 35 years ago. He said in cleverly composed words that the tongue is a consummate prevaricator and will identify places in your mouth with terribly faulty precision. Of any irregularity in the mouth, the tongue will make contact and deliver estimates which will always be reported as very much larger, more jagged, and more in need of emergency room attention, than is actually the truth.
(Reverse method for sharpening the tongue>>>>)

Therefore, it seems to me that along with false witness that the tongue seems to purvey, the tongue may be an independent antagonist in the mouth to cause the injuries to the soft tissues and even self-inflicted nips to the tongue for attention. Why would the tongue engage in this kind of subversive affliction - jealousy. The tongue is a jealous piece of meat that wants more stardom in the body process. The solution is to do a lot of talking so the tongue gets enough action and attention as long as it doesn’t become a weapon. That’s my story and I’m talking about it as much as possible. (I like how my Post-holiday diet is working /\)

White Christmas

We finally got our White Christmas!! Oh, wait, it's January 4th. Well, we have been the ONLY place on earth that hasn't gotten snow. We've heard the stories from all the places of people we know. Now we have our snow. Woo hoo! It snowed about 6 AM and again mid-morning. It has fluttered snow all afternoon, gloomy and frosty looking. I thought you would appreciate some aesthetic photos from Happy Snowy Holbrook.

Starting with the porta-potties across the street. Very aesthetic. And the neighbor's yard. It's more interesting than ours. And their dog, Rocko who barks at me every time he sees me, wagging his tail. Since I feed scraps to him, you would think he knows me by now.
We do have artistically arranged items

- a lonely dump truck waiting for grandkids to come play.

And the rusty wheelbarrow
not waiting for any thing at all.


Our back yard is the most uninteresting back yard in all the world. No sledding hills or bank robbers or shifty characters trying to get into it, or fountains or grapefruit trees or greek statues. I wish there weren't any ground squirrels looking for holes in our shed or other carnivores who drag dead birds in the shed to gobble them up, leaving bird feathers all over the place. Did I mention that we cleaned out our shed? At least, we got some snow.

La Navidad Fabulosa

Since I don't have any cute pre-school children brightening my life these days, I have been wondering what to blog about. I can't report on the latest item which clogged the potty and thank goodness I don't have the problem anymore of childhood accidents. Humorous mis-pronunciations and clever turns of words are completely missing from our house.

I saw a fun quote today which I wanted to share. "In wine there is wisdom, in beer there is freedom, in water there is bacteria." -- Ben Franklin -- I found some very fun looking Internet clip art.

There was another quote by Lily Tomlin which was cute: "I always wanted to be somebody, but now I realize I should have been more specific." I thought the bacteria pictures were appropriate.

Then we were playing with my Christmas present this afternoon and I knew that this was the subject to share. The present is a tortilla machine from the Gonzalez Company and it is fabulous! I have been buying fresh tortillas in Snowflake (30 miles away) for a couple of years. They taste soooo much better than the stale, gluey, nasty, preservative-ridden, sugar-laden, propylene glycol-poisoned tortillas which are most of the kinds available in most stores. I have enjoyed the tortillas from El Comal ("The Griddle/Cooker") in Snowflake (no preservatives - only 3 ingredients)but they are not open on Mondays and are frequently out of tortillas and closed in the afternoons. I am not always in Snowflake when El Comal can please my fussy tortilla palate.

Santa Claus brought me my very own tortilla squeezer; the tortillas we made today were just beautiful (Kay was cranking them out and Dan was spatulizing at the stove) and I don't have to worry about making it to El Comal at just the right time. Las tortillas son fabulosas! Santa Dan is my main man!

Advertisement for Window Cleaner

We went to see Grandpa Austin the other night and noticed this impression on his back room glass door. Some bird didn't realize that his door was closed and tried to come in for a visit. Grandpa heard the noise and reverberation, very loud. He checked to see if the poor beast had "bought the farm" so to speak. There wasn't any evidence of birdy demise but the poor thing must have been quite stunned and a bit disoriented as it flew off to find its nestly abode.

He left quite a dusty impression; you can see wing and other feathery parts, and he was a good sized item. Can you imagine the conversation when he got home to the little wife? "No dinner for me tonight, dear. I have quite a headache and a queasy stomach. I think I will just hit the sack. Well, maybe not HIT the sack, just recline in the sack until I feel better." We hope the birdy holidays improve for that one.

Grandpa has considered getting rid of the glass door on a few occasions. One time in particular was when a grandson came running through the family room at a 9 year old's normal speed when he forgot the door wasn't opened. His head crashed through the glass, shattering it. Fortunately, there was no bodily injury. He didn't have a scratch on him, even on his thin neck as he was cautiously pulled back through a space above which were large menacing shards of glass. He gave the adults in the house a good scare.

I'll bet that unfortunate bird was wondering what hit him.

If you find this blog offensive you need to get a life.

I am thinking of becoming a nudist. Other than a few legalities, frosty winter conditions and the hot summer sun in 6 months, I can’t see any problems with it and may give it a try. I just hate wearing clothes and there doesn’t seem to be any type of clothing that really works. Every article of clothing I have seems to be in the category of "just doesn’t fit any particular shape on the planet!" Why keep trying?

I don’t think I am a drastically weird-shaped person. I can’t remember a time when my clothes fit me well. Maybe I have always chosen the wrong type and maybe I should go seek the advice of an expert from the clothes-fitters union. I understand that Victoria’s Secret will fit customers for their line of apparel with amazing results for astounding prices but that is not exactly what I have in mind.

I know that elastic in very old slips will tend to give up the ghost and will only take up space in one’s very jumbled foundation-wear (using euphemisms to protect the innocent - me) drawer. Is a 35 year old slip too old? It just seems like when one purchases a classic black slip, it ought to be sufficient for the rest of one’s life.

Yesterday I had several visually up-front things to do in church, give a talk, conduct in a meeting, stand up and practice a solo in a choir rehearsal. I had chosen clothes I thought would look okay to be on display just in case someone looked directly at me, such as one of the people on the stand looking at the back of my clothes. I loved the line from Harry Potter III where Hermione says "Is that REALLY what my hair looks like from the back?"

I felt like I was classically dressed, my favorite mauve over-blouse that elicits compliments whenever I wear it, worn over a nice pleated black skirt which I had overhauled from a favorite dress I grew out of. I had sewn some sturdy elastic in the waist so it wouldn’t slip off. Instead it slips UP!

It seems that my clothes chronically slip up or down or sideways(not mentioning body parts for that one). I searched my jumbled foundations drawer for a knee length pair of black socks that haven’t got runs and worn elastic, but only came up with a pair of black socks that come up mid-calf, just a half inch lower than the bottom of the pleated skirt (might not look too good even for the people on the stand looking at my back) OR a desperation-use pair of off-black pantyhose which I hate!

I put on the pantyhose which seemed to fit more snugly across my chubby tummy than I remembered last and found my classic 35 year old black slip with its woosy elastic to use under the pleated black skirt which is a bit see-through/thin fabric. The pleats fold over each other so it makes double fabric. Unfortunately, the classic slip only reaches to my knees (more on that later) so there is a tacky see-through element halfway down the classy pleated skirt.

Well, between my pantyhose which slipped down over my chubby tummy and taking other foundational parts with it, my woosy slip with elastic that slipped down at annoying intervals toward my knees (two times I caught it before it actually hit the floor), the sturdy elastic of my skirt which slips UP over my chubby tummy to reside in an uncomfortable place where it is NOT supposed to reside, AND other straps which will remain nameless which slipped sideways, I was a mess, vowing never to wear that particular combination of wearing apparel again as long as I live. And I must put in my will that I will not allow that combination anywhere near my dead body.

I was tugging up and down and sideways as discreetly as possible all day until I got home and ripped everything off as fast as possible. At one point in choir practice, I stood up by myself to sing my solo, stepping on my skirt which was a down-going skirt instead of the up-going it had been doing all of the rest of the day, nearly embarrassing myself. That may have contributed to the second event of the woosy slip making it almost to my knees, headed to the floor. The day was a wardrobe-malfunction nightmare and I think becoming a nudist would solve all of those issues.

Stress Therapy

Recently I found a very interesting site with unusual photos of water which were some I wanted to save. Opening the file again was a renewed interest in them. Here are some of them.

Also I heard a poem/free verse that was so fun to contemplate. I think everyone oughtta have one.

Something About the Wind by Sidney Hall Jr.

"There's something about the wind coming off the ocean, the waves washing the rocks

that makes a person who is quickly annoyed by cigarette smoke and men putting nails into roofs

forgetful and unconcerned.

If you are easily disturbed you need to get an ocean. "

I think I want one.

Puzzling Remnants

Buying the contents of a storage unit of a delinquent renter has got to be a hazardous gamble, thank you very much. The owner called me to say that there were a bunch of picture frames and art canvases in addition to boxes of assorted stuff/junk. The whole of it was under a thick layer of Holbrook dust so perusal of contents was not something that could be done in a short amount of time. The art equipment appeared to be more than the cost of the sale so I bit! It has been an interesting and intimate view of a perfect stranger and the list grows longer of what perhaps the stranger may be like. The man who has not been reachable by phone or mail is an artist with a web site if anyone is interested.

Besides an inherent artistic nature he seems to be a philosopher and seeker of the purpose of life as we all are. The boxes contained books with a range of topics which include art history and aesthetics, a tattered Bible, books of a zen bent (whatever that might be), incense and burners, the man's personal journals and 3 bars of Palmolive soap. Also a stack of 33-1/3 vinyl records of piano music. We found that his father was an accomplished concert pianist. So much artistic flair in one's genetics - how disturbing!

There was a box labeled "Chinese artifacts" the contents of which is in the first photo. It may be that some of the things are old and mildly valuable. The heavy piece of flowered knick-knack doesn't seem to fit into even miniscule-y valuable but who knows? There are many examples of the man's talents in sketch books and sheets of his work in addition to the canvases with his art upon them. He seems to have leaned toward being a Cezanne type artist since many of them are a late Impressionist style of landscape and portraiture.

One box contained a really odd assortment of faces, Cezanne-y style which could be mildly alluring to some unusual person. It's up for grabs if it grabs your fancy.

The journals have an obscurely themed flavor to them which is wordy and meandering. It makes me ponder on the kinds of impressions which might be left on display as others will be sorting through our leavings and our written items. Do all of us have our own ways of being philosophers and seekers of own purpose for our lives? If nothing else, it has been a bit sobering to sort through some puzzling remnants - like a Hollywood movie with a plot about someone who has died and is caught between dimensions and his ghost has to be set free. Do any rituals or rites come to mind to set the artist's spirit free? Okay, that's probably too crazy.

All Season jaunt

We took a quick trip to Salt Lake City with Laura and 3 little girls, left them there with John to subsequently make the Young's harrowing trip home to Washington. We didn't have nearly as much excitement coming home. The jaunt up through Utah was on a nice, warmish day and I took photos of the colorful cliffs around Green River Utah.

The next day started out very rainy, cloudy, and overcast which then turned into a convincing snow storm. Dan was accomodating to drive us home through Colorado to see some new scenery which was marvelous. Except for the early season storm which made 2 of the mountain passes slick and scary, there was a wonderful array of Autumn color on the hills made more dramatic and interesting by the rain and overcast skies. We were relieved to get past the worst snowy parts and down the other side of the mountains around Grand Junction, headed toward home. It was a beautiful drive.

We caught many glimpses of old mining buildings perched precariously on the sides of hills.

In contrast to the Autumn color of foliage, the run off from the mountains made a yellow stream and the rocks along the stream bed were shades of pinky/red and purple.

The snow, trees and a pond of water were gorgeous along the road before we got into the slickery stuff. We probably would have missed the slickery stuff if I hadn't insisted on all of the stops to capture yet another gorgeous view.