Too Much

My first blog post was April 15, 2008. Since then, I’ve posted over 4000 times, and my “media library” has around 19,000 pictures.

Tech is continually updating, which is just a euphemism for “complications”. Stuff that used to be easy becomes more difficult. Companies that used to sell products (virtual products in this case) outsource their services to other countries, where people can work from home on the phone, while practicing their English. Services that used to come with the virtual products now cost money.

Programs that used to be bought on a disk to get installed in your computer became available only through the interweb airwaves. Then, they became outdated, stopped functioning, and updates started to cost money. Next, you have to subscribe instead of owning the program (now called “apps”, short for “applications”). The price starts out small, but incrementally increases.

The pressure to buy continues to increase, often built on the fear that you might lose your information.

This is happening with my website. I’ve had four or five web designers, and each one either quit working for him/herself* and went to work as an employee of a company that charges 2-3 times as much, or quit to have a baby.

Now I have to pay to get help, pay to protect my information from getting stolen, pay to store my information, and pay to protect from getting invaded by anonymous creeps.

IT’S ALL TOO MUCH!!

So, I am now deleting all my old photos and old posts. Nobody cares, so why am I keeping it stored in some virtual cloud, paying some mysterious company full of advertisers, fear-mongers, pushy sales people, and strangers from even more companies to protect it all?

So, here I go. . . trash, delete, trash, delete.

I wonder if anyone will notice? I wonder if anything will improve on my site? I wonder if I will be able to back it up without getting an error, a message that I don’t have enough space, a warning that my whole site might “crash”, and someone with a difficult-to-understand accent telling me I will need to rebuild my entire website from scratch?

I just came here to be an artist, to depict the things and places that we know and love, and to show and tell you about them.

Okay, back to the virtual dump. . . thanks for showing up today and listening to all this.

*Nope, not going to use a plural pronoun for a singular situation.

Best Wishes for a Happy 2025

No round-up of the year’s accomplishments, best-of lists, goals for next year—just some photos of another walk in Three Rivers. (Captions are a little bonus for you, or perhaps just an annoyance.)

Will this tree ever finish changing to fall colors? This photo was taken on December 21. HEY, FLOWERING PEAR! DONCHA KNOW IT’S WINTER NOW??
One day this Valley Oak (quercus lobata) will fall and go boom.
People decorate for Christmas in ways that defy taste. I guess that’s why some refer to this as “the silly season”.
See what I mean?
When my neighbor was a little girl, she declared in no uncertain terms, “That’s the wrong color for a church!” She also taught us to say “Remorial Building”.

Thank you for continuing with me in this non-eventful, somewhat mundane life as a Central California artist, using pencils, oils and murals to make art people can understand of places and things we love for prices that won’t scare you.

Eleven New Learnings and Odd Thoughts from December

1. Aldi’s paper bag says something about no longer providing plastic bags, which causes me to ask this: Hey Aldi’s, why is all your produce pre-bagged in plastic?

2. To “prate” is to bloviate, to chatter endlessly about inconsequential matters.

3. I learned how to block email addresses of people I’ve never heard of—so many of those advertising emails have a non-working Unsubscribe button; not sure that Unsubscribe does anything even when it is working. It seems that many of those “people” just resubscribe you after awhile, hoping you will change your mind. Or they sell your eddress to another crowd of unethical moneygrubbers. So, I block them as they arrive.

4. GARDENING: sweet potatoes grew in knots, so next year I will make a great big gopher cage instead of using individual cages; all lettuces vanished—both cheater-starts from the nursery and tiny sprouts from seed. I haven’t learned what ate them, only that lettuce is almost impossible to grow. (And the broccoli is alive but appears to be comatose.)

5. TUBING MASCARA: Never heard of it but it definitely sounds like a better cosmetic improvement than fake lashes. Prolly not ever going to buy it, but found it curious.

6. A friend sent me this quote, amended and paraphrased by me: “We have a candy holiday, followed by a pie holiday, followed by a candy and cookie holiday, followed by a booze holiday, with another candy holiday on its tail. We call this ‘flu season’, but shouldn’t it be called ‘sugar poisoning?'”

7. Three random thoughts from the bathroom: a. It is a good sign if your toilet plunger has spider webs, but not the brush; b. If you think your shower is clean, put on your contact lenses; c. If you get mascara on your bangs, they need to be trimmed.

8. All the reasons that I avoid medical offices were verified in December; the level of incompetence, chaos, and confusion defies all logic and tests the outer limits of human patience. You will be told that an appointment isn’t needed/is needed/isn’t needed/is needed. You will be given wrong addresses/no addresses and wrong fax numbers. You will listen to many robot switchboards run through long spiels in Spanish. Your insurance will be denied and you will be told that a fax about it has been sent multiple times although no fax will ever be received (see previous—wrong fax number) You will drive to Woodlake, Lindsay, Exeter, and Visalia, all to gather information which will lead to many other appointments, phone calls to verify and correct and remind and question. You will wonder if you will be dead before anything is diagnosed and treated. You will be thankful that all the people you have spoken with are very nice.

There is more order in random leaf patterns than in the medical system or in providers of technology.

9. All of the same sort of chaos and confusion and contradictions from the Medical Circus apply if you experience multiple internet/phone/teevee outages and try to get your bill lowered (looking at you, Spectrum). You will be told that you will/will not get a credit, that the credit has/has not been applied, and that you need/don’t need to call back to verify an amount which continually changes depending on which “helpful” person you are speaking to. The people who answer questions with confidence rarely come up with the same numbers as those who read your bill back to you rather than answer questions. Some are smart and quick; some are stupid and slow; all are polite. You may conclude, as I have, that everyone is trained to say what you want to hear while actually doing nothing to credit you for all the outages.

10. A website called “Bored Panda” is an enormous waste of time along with being highly entertaining, if this post is any example. Funny Vintage Costumes Book. I didn’t look any deeper because I was able to exhibit remarkable restraint and self-discipline.

11. Did you know  that there is a Botkin Hospital in Moscow? It was something else until 1920, when it was renamed Botkin Hospital in honor of the founder of the Russian therapeutic school – Sergei Petrovich Botkin. It is the biggest multispeciality hospital in Moscow. The name appeared in some novel I was reading (chewing gum for the mind) called “Our Woman in Moscow” by Beatriz Williams.

Important question: have I been prating at you in this blog post??

Color Grabs My Attention

2025 CALENDARS AVAILABLE HERE.

For the first many years (how many??) of my art career, I only worked in pencil, with occasional forays into colored pencil. The detail, the precision, the accuracy, the requirement of strong contrast and composition—all of these things held my attention. Plus, pencils are easy to transport, use, clean up—simple minimal equipment is all that is required.

Despite my devotion to the humble pencil, I am a self-professing color junkie. Here are a few examples of colors in Three Rivers that recently have grabbed my attention.

Someone’s yard has the most brilliant Japanese maple around.
Those bright trees across the river held on until the last rain.
The enormous flowering pear is starting to color up, while mine at the studio has dropped all its leaves now.

The patterns of leaves against the wet asphalt added to the intrigue. (Easily amused, easily entertained)

I went through my yarn scraps and arranged these in the order that pleases me for a multi-colored scarf— ’twill be a gift for a friend.
Sage is blooming in this fantastic blue-violet color beneath the flowering pear at my studio, with its brilliant leaves now all on the ground.
See that piece of dried mural paint? It is a green which I used to think looked fake. When I dropped it on the ground, I was astonished to see that it is almost the identical color as the new weeds now sprouting, at least when they are in sunlight.

SIMPLY HOME

This might be the painting in the show of which I am the proudest . . . yes, I know that “pride goeth before a fall”. . . I hope this painting falls into the right hands!

ENTERING WHITE CHIEF, 12×16″, $387

*The show hangs until December 29 at CACHE in Exeter. Their hours are Friday 1:30-4, Saturday 10-4, Sunday noon-4. It includes about 50 paintings, 3 original pencil drawings, calendars, cards, coloring books, The Cabins of Wilsonia books, and a few pencil reproduction prints.

Complaining and Painting

Because this post is full of complaints, I will intersperse the verbal bummerations with nice photos.

We had a week when the internet went out 2 or 3 times a day on 4 days, and one of those days it was down all day long. This meant that neither the cell phone nor the landline worked. We also had an unscheduled half day without electricity and another day without power from 9:30-6:15. All of this took place during the week when I was preparing for my demo/talk How To Draw. In addition, I had people waiting for emails, with proofs, sketches, and price quotes to approve. It was also a week that I had set aside to make multiple phone calls to a tech service in order to repair and understand my wonky website.

Without power or internet, how does one print drawing exercises? or scan things necessary for handouts? or print one’s own notes? or let inquiring customers know you are not a flaky artist? How does one repair a website that one cannot access?

One waits. One uses a yellow legal pad and a pen. One waits some more. One composes emails and puts them in a folder called “Drafts”. One keeps waiting. One works in quiet, without tunes or podcasts. And one waits some more.

When the power came on, the printer wouldn’t print anything in color until I cleaned the heads about 6 times. Then I had to replace the ink, of course. I believe that printers were designed by ink companies. The next one I get will be a laser printer. I don’t know what that actually means, but people who have these say they are very reliable and use less ink. Everything uses less ink. EVERYTHING. (Excuse me, I need to leave this blog and order some more ink while thinking about it.)

Okay, I’m back, $48.70 poorer.

Eventually, I was able to get everything printed and scanned in time for the talk. Eventually, the emails went through. Eventually, I was able to make one phone call to repair one thing on my website. I also got a bit of painting done on one disrupted day before it got too dark to see.

From this:

To this:

To this, when I finally decided it was too cold to leave the door open, but too dark with it closed.

Thus, we end today’s complaint session with a vague sense of productivity and thankfulness for autumn beauty and electricity and internet and telephones.

Simply Home

Alpenglow on Homer’s Nose, 8×16″, $275

CACHE Gallery hours are Fridays 1:30-4:00, Saturdays 10:00-4:00, Sundays noon-4:00.

Learned in September

Because I ran off to Fall Color Week on September 29 – October 6, there was no Learned in September list. After spending an intensive week learning about plein air painting, I couldn’t remember a thing about September. Fortunately, I had already started a list.

September

  1. If you schedule a meeting with someone, perhaps someone at a company to help one choose the best Medicare plan, it is assumed you will be using a cell phone. If you give a landline number because perhaps your cell service is spotty, they will be perplexed as how to help you. It certainly would be helpful if such businesses would say that a cell phone is necessary before one goes to all the trouble to schedule an appointment. (The meeting got cancelled before I learned how the landline would be handled.)
  2. There is a method of healthy* eating called Zoe, a way to learn how to eat for your optimal “gut health, blood sugar, and blood fat”. The website has all sorts of information except it doesn’t tell the price. Nope, you have to “start the quiz” first in order to “choose your plan”. Does that make anyone else nervous? *Who even knows what “healthy” means anymore??
  3. There is too much in the world right now: too many websites, too many opinions, too many podcasts, too many books to read, too much art to see, too many friends to stay current with, too many patterns to knit, too many yarns to try. I cannot keep up, and don’t want to. FOMO is real, but I will NOT cave in to it. (This is not new information, but I feel it strongly right now.)
  4. I read this quote on a site called The Boring Newsletter—Frequently Taxed Questions: “Normal is getting dressed in clothes that you buy for work, driving through traffic in a car that you are still paying for, in order to get to a job that you need so you can pay for the clothes, car and the house that you leave empty all day in order to afford to live in it.” -Ellen Goodman. I don’t know who Ellen Goodman is, but she is right and I am very thankful to be abnormal.
  5. Boring Warning — if you ever need to remove hidden tags on a Word document, there is no way to do them all at once if you have a Mac. Why would anyone need to remove hidden tags? Because Word’s indexing is in combat with Adobe InDesign’s book formatting. They hate each other. They might both hate Mac too. It’s a rough world out there in Puterville.
  6. Mineral King Country, a book by Henry Brown published in 1988, finally landed in my life. I was aware of it but didn’t have a copy. I recently acquired one (thank you, DJ) and read the foreword, preface, and introduction. This book covers Mineral King history between the mining era and the Disney days.
  7. Cerakote cleans foggy car headlights in 3 steps. It is wonderful stuff! Costs about $17 if you are interested. My friend found it at WalMart and I found more on the big A, of course.

A few repeat photos of Mineral King in September

Simply Home

The Best View, oil on wrapped canvas, 10×20″, $450

CACHE Gallery hours are Fridays 1:30-4:00, Saturdays 10:00-4:00, Sundays noon-4:00.

ONE MORE THING: Tuesday, November 12, 6:30-7:30, I will give a demo/talk called How To Draw at CACHE. Contact me if you are interested, because seating is limited.

Friday: Three Rivers, Not Mineral King

Normally you get to read about Mineral King on Fridays, but I have nothing to show or tell you. Maybe you only look at the pictures anyway. Maybe I am just talking to myself. . .

We went for a bikeride, curious about the firecamp at the Lions’ Roping Arena and the former Three Rivers Airport (more of a strip than a port, and closed for decades now.)

Even the most beautiful yard in Three Rivers looks a bit tired in September. August used to be my worst favorite month, but it has now become September (fires, can’t get to the cabin to get away from the heat, the deer really start chomping down my yard, everything is dusty and smoky, sick of heat, wanting to be home but so tired of heat—waa waa, someone call the wambulance.)

The number of vehicles and equipment and personnel has diminished. They are certainly keeping the gravel road watered and packed, but it is still washboardy on a bicycle.

We stood in the shade of this tree and visited with our friend, who is working security at the second gate.

I was happy to see these little guys are still in residence.

Those trucks are lined up, waiting their turn to get washed. Maybe it is a crew that is leaving.

I wonder what those sleeping trailers are like inside: probably very dark and cool. I think many of the workers choose to stay in local motels.

I don’t know what all the trucks and equipment are busy with or why, but I bet that whoever owns the former airstrip is making bank.

Enough of this fire stuff; off to the airport bridge to check out the river before the uphill ride home. (As a bonus, you now know why it is call the “airport bridge”. When we were kids and drove over it, we were instructed to, “roll up your windows—there are hippies!” I wonder if any of them was my future husband. . .)

Various and Sundry Thoughts on Stuff (both personal and professional)

Pippin likes his people to be at home.

I’m in a bit of a holding pattern, waiting for several things: the Mineral King road to open, a week-long plein air painting trip to Monterey, the indexer to finish repairing the index on the TB book, and my show, Simply Home, to open.

Tucker loves the unmowed lawn, which is part of one of my gardening experiments.

What’s a person to do while waiting? Stuff, both personal and professional. (What word did people use before “stuff” became a ubiquitous filler?)

Oh-oh! Where will Tucker hide now?

Personal stuff: enjoy being home, work in the yard, do some work on the landscaping at church, read, organize some messes, hang out with the cats, you know, just stuff.

Such a sorry excuse for a pomegranate. The tree has not produced a single edible normal sized piece of fruit in over 15 years.

Professional stuff: my art has been retrieved from the Silver City Store and also from the Mural Gallery. This means that I have to change information on my inventory lists, and put card packages away.

Finally, some time to think about and design a calendar for 2025. This will be based on the upcoming show, Simply Home. Yeah, yeah, I KNOW that people care more about Mineral King than my art, but I am trying to earn a living here. (My farmer dad used to say that he “scratched his living out of the dust of the earth”. Maybe I just scratch mine out with pencils, or smear it out with paint. . .) So, because I am an active citizen of Realville, I have ordered fewer calendars than in previous years. This means if you snooze, you lose, unless the demand warrants a second order.

Why is my vitex tree blooming in September? Why is it called “vitex”, which sounds like some sort of nutritional supplement?

Oh that’s right—it is time to design a new Christmas card. Yeah, yeah, I KNOW that fewer people send cards every year, except for those flat ones full of tiny photos of themselves doing glorious things throughout the year. Not me. Each year I design a new card and send them to my drawing students (and a small handful of distant friends), using the United States Postal Service.

And while putting away the paintings that did not have a chance to sell at Silver City, I studied them and decided that they each deserved more attention.

More tomorrow on that.

Final Thoughts on a Trip to Oregon

My sister and brother-in-law hold a big yard sale once every year or two. We work well together “playing store”, and many other people bring their items. It is a tremendous amount of work to make sure all items are in top shape, priced with the seller’s initials, setting up tables (which often get brought from other participants), and working the displays to look the best possible. We create “departments” in our “store”, and work them all day long to keep them orderly and appealing. Talking to people, helping them find what they are seeking, keeping track of the sales so the money goes to the right person, finding a box or bag as needed. . . these were 3 long days of prep and selling.

This is Day 2 with 1/2 as much merchandise.
Toys were the biggest seller; Christmas decor the least desired category.

We tried to fit a walk in around the neighborhood each day I was there, and the yards were so beautiful. It is fascinating to see what people can grow when there aren’t deer or 100+ degree days (although they had a few before I arrived).

My favorite house on our regular walks.

Attending a church with more members than the population of Three Rivers is always a thrill. The staff has more folks than attend my church on any regular Sunday. They actually played a game in the minutes before the service started—Will wonders ever cease for me in the land of Giant Churches?

We picked blueberries one morning. Blueberries are a perfect you-pick crop—no thorns, no bugs, no heat. I only brought home 16 pounds this year since we didn’t bring any husbands or reluctant child laborers with us. I could have picked much longer, but our list of errands that day was extensive.

Everything in Oregon was beautiful, including the areas across the street from the U-Pick Farm (Fordyce).

Leaving was both difficult (I love my Oregon family and friends and only see them once a year) and urgent (I love home). On the previous 2 Oregon driving trips, I stopped at a friend’s place north of Sacramento because it is a chance to be together. However, this year I just felt compelled to get home. It could have been the 2 texts from different friends (in Visalia and Exeter) asking if we were okay because they could see flames up our way. (Turned out to be fine). Or it could have been a delusion that driving 13 hours in one day is no big thing. (It IS a Big Thing.)

If I’d been a passenger, there’d be more scenery photos. So much to paint, but there’s not a lot of market for these images among my tens of followers.

When someone drives the same long route multiple times, there are highlights along the way, specific places and sites to watch for. In Oregon, I used to see a covered bridge on the east side of 5, but it hasn’t shown up for several years and I have forgotten the name in order to look it up on the web.

I saw an enormous number of hubcaps each time the highway made a strong curve, the kind that warns you of your speed and tells you to drop to 50 mph. (No photos of hubcaps because I had both hands firmly placed on the wheel.) In Northern California, Mt. Shasta is a big landmark, nay, A HUGE landmark. Truck Village, south of Weed is fun to see.

South of Red Bluff, it goes flat, so there isn’t much that compels me to take pictures. The shadows on these hills somewhere north of Coalinga/Harris Ranch caught my attention. By then I stopped caring exactly where I was as long as I was heading home.

There were only 2 traffic situations: one was a wreck south of Sacramento that left debris in the road, causing people to crawl along to dodge it. The other was roadwork at dusk, where we got squeezed into one lane and eventually were driving on the paved shoulder. It was interesting to see three CHPs with their flashing lights, present to support CalTrans, I guess. I was completely surrounded by big rigs

Thirteen hours and 10 minutes after leaving Salem, Oregon, I staggered into my own house, stupid tired and happy and relieved.

Trail Guy was happy too, not just to have me home, but also to have our good pick-’em-up truck back.