Category: Personal

February Distractions

February is my favorite month. Wait – it is my First Favorite. I also love March and April. In February we can get brilliant sun or cold storms, the green shows up, wildflowers begin, and fruit trees pop into bloom in orchards down the hill. I would like February to have 31 days and August to only have 28. (Just 14 would be fine too.)

February brings distractions.

I’ve been weeding baby poppies, hoping to give them a chance to go bonkers this spring.

A friend requested some help laying artificial turf at one of the vacation rentals that she manages. (This house)

Then a friend let me come by to pick some Mello Gold (super sweet grapefruit looking citrus), I had a package to mail, and a book was FINALLY ready for me at the library. My vacation rental manager friend and I have plans to make some stepping stones for one of her yards, another place needs some ferocious weeding, Trail Guy and I like to take walks, several friends like to come to Three Rivers to go “hiking” with me (they call it that but I don’t take a pack with water or food so it is just a walk), and I have a big knitting project on the needles.

Maybe February needs to be 40 days long.

Sunny Afternoon

Sometimes, I just take time off. In spite of the upcoming art show Still Here rescheduled from January 2022 to April 2021, it was too clear and beautiful to just stay indoors to work one afternoon last week.

Trail Guy and I headed to Lake Kaweah on the lower end of Three Rivers or the upper end of Lemon Cove, which is still very low and not very green. However, it is spacious, outdoors, and not crowded. Sometimes I engage in the pointless mental exercise of trying to decide if it is an ugly beauty or a beautiful ugliness down there.

Across the river there were 3 cowboys on horseback with a dog, all trying to convince a big black bull to get out of the river and go back to his home on the range. I was slow on the shutter so you’ll have to take my word for the bull.

This is Slick Rock.

Mustard in bloom and cockleburs up close; Alta Peak in the distance with new snow.

We often find a peculiar sight or two on the lake bottom.

What? Let’s look a little more closely.

PVC pipes, with holes in them, spray painted with brown and green, with a concrete weight on the bottom. I give up.

If we could tip this upright, you could see it is some sort of a pedestal. There used to be homes and a motel down here, so there are all sorts of leftovers from that era.

Enough! Back to work, Central California Artist.

Lake Kaweah Three Rivers

Goofing Off

I have some very dear longtime friends from the northwest who decided to escape the cold, wet, and gray for a week in January. Well, oops. During their visit, we got the most rain and cold that we’ve had yet this winter. I didn’t work while they were here, and surprisingly, I didn’t take many photos either. My friend (since age 17) and I decided that we look like 10 miles of a bad road, so it didn’t really cross our minds to take a picture together, until we realized that the next time we are together, we will probably look worse.

We found some grapes while poking around the river – sour sour sour!

This little waterway was completely dry 2 weeks ago. Wow, we are so thankful for the precipitation.

It is getting green. I love green.

We got permission to pick oranges in Lemon Cove on their way out of town. That is a privilege I never take for granted or take lightly.

The sun came out the afternoon that they left.

The sun was out the week before they arrived too.

It was a great week of goofing off. Now, I have a show to prepare for.

But wait! There’s more! I suddenly noticed a peculiar sight along the highway. A dinosaur with a Rudolph nose and lights? Why didn’t I notice this in December?

P.S. Nope, not gonna show you the selfie we took together. If I was inclined toward exhibitionism, I’l be on one of those social media sewers.

Learned in January

My friends don’t think of me first as an artist; this means I am not very self-promotional, which can be both a good thing and a not-so-good thing.
Quesadilla Gorilla is not just in Visalia and Three Rivers; it is also in Fresno and Hanford and is raising money to expand by selling bonds. How in the world do people learn how to do this high finance stuff??
Sharpshin hawks are creepy cannibals; one keeps getting other birds right in front of our kitchen window.
Nosocomial means “in hospital”; sometimes illness is spread nosocomial. I hope none of my blog readers ever needs to know this word.
Tucker, my black cat, is a digger. I was burying kitchen waste in the herb garden, so I dug a hole, dumped the stuff in, turned away to rinse out the container, and then when I turned back, Tucker was covering the pile up for me. I actually filmed him doing this, but don’t think it will work on the blog. Besides, there are plenty of cat videos out there on the World Wide Web. (Maybe not one covering up garbage.)
I went 30 days without sugar or sweets. The results: both a sense of accomplishment and one of deprivation.
Horse bangs are called a “forelock”. I wonder why people forelocks are called “bangs” instead of a “forelock”. (A person could bang her head on the wall trying to figure this one out.) In Britain, bangs are called a “fringe”; I learned this back in the days of Princess Diana.
When you have tech troubles, it is helpful to engage in activities that cannot be accomplished with a computer. I had a bad couple of tech trouble days, and was helped immensely by Apple, but still took great comfort in knitting, baking bread, and yardening. Try those things on a computer, you Virtual Digital Techie Robots.
Bears might be able to wear a size 4 in Crocs.

Everything is Hard

Brace yourself for a long post with thoughts about life and how it has changed in my 61 years.

Ever noticed how anything you might want to accomplish is hard? All the possible places for things to get hung up, snagged, delayed, misunderstood, broken, unavailable are endless. It is a wonder any of us get anywhere on time, keep ourselves together, keep moving forward. Look at these examples:

A. We need a new water heater and want to switch from electric to propane. My current favorite contractor said that he could do the job. That was in August. The number of obstacles he has encountered since then would just flatten anyone. I kept calling. When we finally connected and set a date, it didn’t happen. I learned that he was waiting on the plumber, whose truck broke down. And who knows how many obstacles that poor guy encountered? Plumber #2 couldn’t get the right brand of water heater, so on and on it goes.

B. Two years ago we switched from Huge & Rude Telephone Company to Spectrum. It took many weeks, many hours on the phone with both companies, and no business telephone for 6 weeks. (In case you are wondering, the internet is great, the teevee selection not as good but the quality of the picture much improved, and the landline okay but it cannot call the cell phone.)

C. A customer requested that I buy Microsoft Word to be better able to help him (I am editing his book). Microsoft’s chat feature didn’t work, and the phone number didn’t reach a real person. I just bought it anyway without getting my concerns addressed, and then I learned that my Mac operating system wouldn’t run it. I had to upgrade my operating system but couldn’t because my computer didn’t have enough available memory. Many calls to Apple (all were quite helpful) eventually said that I had to erase my computer in order to install the new OS. I hoped that the external hard drive where I back up my laptop actually contained the information and wasn’t just a dummy. (Yep, I prayed over that mess.) Now that my system is up to date, neither my scanner nor my printer will work with my computer any more.

These are just a few examples of how complicated our world has gotten. You probably have many examples of your own.

In the olden days these things were true: checks were free from the bank; grocery bags were free at the markets; places that sent a bill would provide an envelope (even stamped, in some cases!); the newspaper kept their opinions to the Opinion Page; everyone was allowed to have a fireplace and a lawn; someone else would put gas in your tank and even wash your windshield; you could walk into an airport, pay for a flight, and board, all within an hour’s time; real people answered the telephone at work and at home; you could actually see people’s faces when out in public.

I am so thankful to be able to just head out to the painting studio, and begin. The only obstacles to getting work done are finding the right reference photos (a large obstacle when doing custom art for people with vague ideas of what they want), the sun too bright or too weak to mix colors correctly, the inability to see my own errors, or Jackson biting my leg because he feels deprived of food. (The neighbor’s barking dog isn’t an obstacle, only a nuisance.)

Let’s just look at a calm photo and try to be thankful for the moments of ease and peace that remain (NO! DO NOT EVEN THINK ABOUT LISTING ALL THAT THE VIRUS HAS STOLEN!!)

We Took a Walk in Three Rivers

Glory, hallelujah, I love what passes for winter here in Three Rivers.

We were not alone.

This is not a Big Foot print; it is a big foot with big toes and claws.

Green has begun, and the sycamore leaves are still present.

Say what?? There was another pile of brush with a less fancy sign that also said Quail Hotel. There is a No Vacancy sign lying at the base of the sign. These look like fires waiting to be lit to this wildfire-conscious Three Rivers resident.

We meandered to a point to see if my mural was visible. Yes, it was, sort of. You had to know where to look. Can you make it out?

Keep coming, rain and snow, because I love the green. (Yes, I know the hills are still brown, but if you squint real hard, you can pick out some baby grasses.)

Three Rivers

11 Things I Learned in December and some jibber-jabber

Happy 2021!

Yeah, yeah, I know about 2020. No complaining here, and no unprecedented overusage of the word “unprecedented”. Just keeping on keeping on. Steady, sort of predictable, finding the good things in life about being a full time artist in Central California, AKA “flyover country” in the Golden State. (We feed the world, and don’t let anyone forget it.)

Have you heard of a “Covid fee”?? I ordered some photographic prints from Shutterfly and there was a “covid fee” added to my order. What in the world for??
Drying persimmons the hoshigaki method is so bizarre but the best dried fruit I’ve ever eaten in my life. A friend is trying this method and sent me this photo. She also sent a photo of some finished ones, but they look rather alarming. I want to try this next year!
Rosemary and Thyme is a lovely thriving gift/clothing/home goods store in downtown Exeter where my studio was for 4 exciting years. The owner is one of the most creative, original and innovative people I’ve ever had the privilege of knowing, and her store is now becoming an online shop. If you like cool stuff, beautiful stuff, good stuff, for yourself or for others, this is the local place to support.
Maeve Binchy really is my favorite novelist. I’ve loved her writing since the 1980s, and with the current difficulties of getting library books, I started rereading her books. She is the only author whose books I automatically bought and kept. (I used to buy Sue Grafton’s books but decided I wasn’t going to reread them so sent them on to unknown bookshelves; also used to buy Barbara Kingsolver’s books but hit a few I didn’t like so that was the end of that.)
There is so much confusion and conflict in trying to discern truth these days. I heard from several sources that there are 21 cases of The Wuhan in our little town and one person has died of it. The truth is that there have been 21 known cases since the thing started and the person who died (a friend and former drawing student), died from heart failure after a surgery that didn’t turn out well for her.
Using “www” before your web address is so last year.
People aspire to riches in order to avoid ugliness.
Ring picking is something I never have heard of. It is a method of picking citrus to a particular size, using a metal ring to measure each piece as you pick. How could I never have heard of this before??
This isn’t anything I’ve learned but maybe something for you to learn about me. I enjoy doing yardwork and occasionally assist a friend with some of her vacation rentals. Sometimes I just can’t resist using the prunings to make a wreath.
This isn’t new information either, but Pippin is just too cute to not keep taking pictures of him.
And final piece of irrelevant jibber-jabber: Persimmons are so beautiful. They taste good when dried the traditional way. (No thanks, I don’t like persimmon cookies.)

Remember, I make art that you can understand of places and things you love at prices that won’t scare you.

Oops. I think I let Pippin into the house.

A Little More Christmas

The reason for some of my apparently pointless posts is simply this: beauty heals. One of my favorite writers* says it this way: “beauty contains within it the promise of restoration.”.