Early-ish March isn’t that much different from late February. On an early morning walk, I just wanted to stop time.
This house always grabs my attention, with its quiet simple beauty.
As I walked, I kept smelling something that I couldn’t identify. It was a good smell, and one that I hadn’t noticed before. It was on a route that I only take when my walking partner isn’t with me, chosen because it is shorter than our normal walks. That’s the way I trick myself into going alone.
This is the first time in 26 years that I’ve noticed ceanothus while walking. It is native to this area, and it isn’t very attractive in my book. But I wondered if that was the source of the good smell.
Indeed it was!
With flowering quince and daffodils going gung-ho (that’s a weird word—Chinese origins?**) in my yard, along with mowed weeds that pass for a lawn in spring, I almost felt happy to be alive*.
This one of about nine mailboxes scattered around our extensive yard; they are tool containers so I don’t have to hike a mile for a trowel.
This is flowering quince, not redbud, which is actually pink.
*Fret not. That’s something my dad used to say in his buffoonish way of disseminating wisdom. I was thinking about him a lot in February because that was both his birth and death month.
** Thank you Gnat for sending me that little piece on MentalFloss.com verifying my guess that “gung ho” is Chinese!
Since I learned almost nothing in January, I decided to keep better track in February. I probably learned lots in January, but just didn’t keep track.
There are alternatives to Snopes for checking on “facts” or urban myths. Factcheck.org and That’sNonsense.com. They didn’t seem very easy to use; I couldn’t find anything about microwaved water killing plants. But websites are notoriously difficult to navigate the first time someone tries. This someone, anyway.
2. Duckduckgo is the search engine I use instead of Google, along with Safari, which is the Apple web browser. Now Duckduckgo has a web browser designed for Mac. I tried it. I like it. The whole idea is to not be tracked, and then targeted for ads based on Google’s estimate of your income combined with your interests. (STOP STALKING ME ALREADY!)
3. Clint Black gave a concert in Visalia at the Fox Theater AND I LEARNED ABOUT IT THE NEXT DAY! Yeppers, I would have gone to hear him. Phooey.
4. Amy Grant had open heart surgery?? She is a year younger than me! I saw her at the Visalia Fox Theater about 10 or so years ago.
5. Mike Rowe interviewed Alex Epstein on his podcast, The Way I Heard It, episode 423. I don’t know who this guy is, but he said something that piqued my interest: We didn’t have a perfect and safe planet which we then ruined with fossil fuels; we had a dangerous hostile planet which we made safer and more comfortable with fossil fuels. (I am paraphrasing, since I was pulling weeds while listening, not taking notes.) This is the opposite of the prevalent view of things. He has a couple of books which I am probably not going to wade through, since I only grasped about 1/3 of what he was talking about. Maybe I’ll look up his books on Bookpecker, which summarizes books for lazy people like me.
6. An online friend sent me a recipe to make ranch dressing from scratch. It is very convincing and a nice treat from my usual balsamic vinegar with olive oil.
7. A guy in Canada traded his way from a red paper clip up to a house in 2006. Weird, fun, and here is the link to the article about it. From paper clip to house. (It’s a short article). He has a blog called One Red Paperclip, has written a book by the same title, gave a TED talk, and there is even a cafe called the Paperclip Cottage Cafe in the town where he got the house. Isn’t it weird is that I am hearing of it for the first time almost 20 years later? Now I will check the local library to see if the book is available.
8. I actually CAN draw faces smaller than eggs; sometimes I can capture a likeness, but it is more likely I will be drawing people cousins by accident. (And I learned that I don’t charge enough.) The drawing has been removed from this post because it is meant to be a surprise.
9. Dawn, the excellent blue dish soap, added a terrible fragrance. We kept smelling something perfumey and unpleasant, traced it to the Dawn, and then I looked online and learned that many of their customers are unhappy but they have no plans to return to “Classic Coke”. (Remember that marketing fiasco?) They will be sending me a coupon to try another variety of Dawn. Meanwhile, we will use bargain dishsoap from the local hardware store. (The memory of that horrid smell is haunting me; maybe I’ll buy Dawn again, and maybe I won’t.)
Ugh. What will we do with the nasty-smelling dishsoap in this bottle?
10. Do you like “waste, fraud, abuse, and corruption”? I’m not sure anyone does. Unfortunately, the current campaign against such things is wiping away some local jobs. Instead of using a surgical method, there is a broad sweeping arm brushing them off the map in what feels like callous and careless decisions, without regard to whether or not the jobs are wasteful, fraudulent, or an abusive and corrupt use of our tax dollars. I sure wish it was being done with more precision and care. Meanwhile, there is a rumor that the local job loss is due to the administration of our local national park not getting the budget turned in on time. I certainly hope that more will be revealed.
The most learning took place in the shortest month. . . go figure.
P.S. I also learned about Publishers Clearing House from Mike Rowe’s podcast. Fascinating story about something I have never understood.
NEWS FLASH! CLINT BLACK IS COMING TO TULARE ON JUNE 28!
If you live in California or other moderate climates, you can wait until January to plant daffodils. The added bonus is that the bulbs will be on sale. This daff with the narcissus might be from last year. I may even have waited until February to plant all those daffs this year.( If they don’t bloom, I hope I remember to not wait so long next year.)
I found a recipe for streak free glass cleaner on a favorite blog, Everyday Cheapskate. Couldn’t wait to try it on my studio windows; it rained the next day so I didn’t get to fully appreciate the streak freeness—you know, how windows always look their worst when the sun shines directly on them.
Trail Guy feeds the birds daily. These birds are abundant, but I forget their names. I prefer wildflowers to wildbirds. (I know “wildbird” isn’t a single word, but it looks better with “wildflower”.)
Thus we conclude another peek into life in my favorite month of February in Three Rivers.
Photo taken in Clovis by Jane Sorenson. (Used without permission)
One morning when I shuffled carefully down the driveway by flashlight in the dark toward my neighbor waiting with her flashlight, I asked her, “Tell me again: why do we do this?”
She said, “They say it’s supposed to be good for us.”
I asked, “Are ‘they’ the same people who told us margarine was better than butter? Or coffee was good, then bad, then good? Or wine was bad, then good, and now bad again?”
We chose to go the shorter steepest route, because we find it easier when we can’t see how steep it is.
We turn around at the gate which leads to this place because we are cold, it is dark, and my neighbor has to get to work.
As the light increases each day in February, we start dreading the time change. When we were kids, it changed to Daylight Saving in April, and then it changed back to Standard Time in October. Some time in early adulthood years, the changes got moved to March and November, so that Daylight Saving is a now longer stretch than Standard. So “Standard” is more accurately “Nonstandard”, or “Irregular”.
Like with most big issues, we Americans are evenly divided on which time schedule is best. In general, urbanites prefer more light in the evening, and rural folks prefer (and often NEED) more light in the morning. Almost everyone agrees that jerking our internal clocks around is annoying at best, and dangerous at worst. (The dummies think they are somehow tricking Father Time into providing more hours of daylight.)
I expect that in spite of widespread discontent and the adverse consequences of a twice-yearly time change, the People in Charge will do nothing. Politicians are so concerned with retaining votes that they are paralyzed when decisions are a 50/50 proposal, with the unintended consequence of everyone being unhappy. In addition to the elected officials, it is often the bureaucrats who end up interfering in our lives.
I expect to be walking in the dark for the rest of my life.
“You’ll never understand bureaucracies until you understand that for bureaucrats, procedure is everything and outcomes are nothing.” —Thomas Sowell
Have you heard of her? Read any of her books? She writes both fiction and non-fiction and is an odd combination of being very politically liberal and outspoken about her Christian faith. Her thoughts are oh so relatable, shocking, irreverent, vulnerable, infuriating, and at times, highly entertaining.
The books she might be most known for are Bird by Bird, about the writing process and Operating Instructions, about raising her son alone.
Here are three things that I have copied down from her writing to contemplate and muse over on today’s blog post.
“Everyone is screwed up, broken, clingy and scared.” The older I get, the more I see this is true. Those tailgaters? Yep. Politicians? Yep. Your neighbors with the glaring lights and barking dogs? Yep. The cranky salesperson at a big box store? Yep. Me? Hey, let’s not get personal here, okay?
“Try not to compare your insides to other people’s outsides. It will only make you worse than you already are.” Comparison is a terrible way to live. Just stop it.
“…deteriorating faster than you can lower your standards.” This may apply to many aspects of my life. Let’s not talk about the state of my old car, the cleanliness of my house, the number of weeds in my yard, the unsorted piles in my studio.
*Clutter is the physical manifestation of unmade decisions fueled by procrastination. -Christina Scalise
She also has a list called “Twelve Truths I Learned From Life and Writing”, which is one of my favorite Ted talks of all. I used to listen to those while painting and drawing, but now I seem to be continually trying to catch up on all the excellent podcasts I subscribe to.
About those Twelve Truths: she is oh so very wrong about chocolate with 75% cacao.
What is editing? You mean you get paid to just sit around and read??
… I’m either tending to the logistics and administrative duties of a microscopic art business* or I am editing. IF I am actually working, that is.
Yes but it isn’t the same as reading for escape or to learn. Instead, you read with multiple purposes. An editor’s job is to make sure the reader can flow through the book without tripping over the words.
The reading is something like this:
Why do I keep going back to that paragraph? It might have too many words, but for some reason I am not sure of the author’s intent. Maybe it would be clearer like [try a different way of phrasing].
Wait, wasn’t that guy’s name Jim in the last chapter? Then who is Jack? Better do a Jim/Jack check throughout.
Oh-oh, the author is using the tab key instead of indention for new paragraphs; better make sure all those tabs/extra spaces/extra returns get removed throughout.
Eighteen? I thought she was twenty. Where did it mention her age? Better make a note to find all those references and verify the timeline.
Why does this character start every sentence with “So”? This might need a bit of modification. Not too much, because that is how he talks, but if he gets too boring, we might lose our reader’s attention.
Oops, those paragraphs are ragged right rather than justified; better “select all” and choose “justified” so the entire manuscript is consistent. While I’m at it, better make sure hyphenation is turned off or some words will go wonky.
Hmmm, sometimes that word is spelled with a hyphen and sometimes as a compound word. Seek and replace the wrong version.
What am I supposed to do with this list of bullets beneath the heading? Or the bullets beneath the bullets? Wait, is that a subheading that needs to be indented? Does this need to be a new section, or do those words need to be non-bold? If I am confused as to the main topic, the reader might just skip this section.
Semi colon alert! Better watch more carefully.
What is the point of this paragraph? Can it be deleted?
Meanwhile, I am keeping up with the storyline, making sure that it is moving along at a good clip. A problem with editing is that I get caught up in the story and forget to think all those multi-layered thoughts as I am reading.
Sometimes the day goes quickly, so quickly that when I head home, I am surprised that it is dusk. I would be surprised that the cats were put away for the night if Trail Guy didn’t stick his head in the studio to let me know.
“. . . Of making many books, there is no end, and much study wearies the body.” —Ecclesiastes 12:12b
A dear friend told me that she really enjoys my blog posts when I write about thoughts. Here, this is what she said:
Maybe it’s because I’m a worker of words, but I really enjoy your entries that describe your central valley world, your life in it, and your feelings. The reader responses you receive indicate many others do too. I believe getting to know the artist who produces beautiful views of the world beyond our human angst and cultural foibles is an important part of any sale, and I hope you keep posting such thoughts often! I can see them in a book of your own some day. 🙂
Wow. That was thought-provoking, encouraging, and as always from this friend, very kind.
Late one night I had a mental list of ideas to write about. Instead of writing, I went to bed. Now my head is empty, so let’s just have some photographs today with a little commentary.
That giant flowering pear, the last one to hold its fall color, is also the first one to bloom. I took this picture on February 2.My flowering pear is not quite thinking about blooming yet.
There are no words. Well, there were some words, and those were them.
Look at the black stripes on Jackson’s tail: they get wider as they move toward the tip. Made me think about Perkins’ checkerboard tail.
Both cats came from the same place; well, more accurately, Jackson’s mother came from the same place as Perkins.
Linda’s Barn, pencil and colored pencil, SOLD This barn used to be an excellent source of cats, but alas, the Order of All Things has unfolded and we are developing hard hearts in order to cope with the harsh realities of trying to keep cats alive in Three Rivers. (Tucker, Jackson, and Pippin are all thriving at the time of this blog post—thank you for your concern.)
This is what winter can look like in Three Rivers.
Don’t you wish your computer had scratch-n-sniff so you could fully enjoy this rosemary?
Okay, maybe I’ll just sit here for a pair of minutes and see if any of those great late-night thoughts reassert themselves.
A good friend, mentor, and wise man asked me if I have a relationship with my paintings. I wasn’t sure what he was seeking, so I just told him what goes through my mind while painting. Then I looked at the email conversation and thought, “Hmmm, this might be an interesting blog post”.
Just a typical view on a morning walk in Three Rivers. Nope, not down those steps to the river—just passing by on the road.
When I start a painting, I have photos to look at, and I copy what is there while also trying to improve on it. Move a tree, brighten a color, ignore a tangle of branches, don’t get too weird about making those rocks or cracks in the cliff perfect, increase the contrast, make that insignificant part blurry or leave it out. . . on and on and on, a continual mental conversation about how to depict a scene realistically but cleaner than real life. Real life is pretty messy, and I try to clean it up.
Often I think a painting is finished when it isn’t. It takes awhile of studying it, sometimes a couple of years, before realizing that it can be improved. This isn’t improvement to make it look more like the photo, but improvement to make it more appealing to the viewer.
A very popular place to walk in Exeter—and the way we prefer to drive home when the hills are green. I used to walk this in the olden days when I was training for some very long walks, before my feet were numb.
My method of painting is to layer and layer, over and over, tightening the details, correcting the proportions, remixing the colors with each layer. Usually when I start, it is very sloppy, getting better with each pass over the canvas. This is similar to writing, where you tell yourself the story in the first draft. Then as you edit and rewrite, you refine your words, rearrange your paragraphs, realize that something can be misunderstood so you correct that piece, decide that something sounds foggy or stupid or unnecessary so you delete that sentence or phrase. Then you think it is done, until you look at it the next day or the next week or after you hit “Publish” and WHAM! THERE’S A TYPO! Or you wonder “why did I say that??” Or you think, “Nobody cares, why did I write this?”
A friend and I went boldly trespassing through some orange groves on a walk a week or two ago.
I’ve never thought about it as a relationship with a painting. It is a project, separate from me. I talk myself through it, talking to myself rather than to the painting. Sure, occasionally I’ve said to a painting, “Buddy, you are toast!” just before painting it out entirely.
But the conversation is entirely to myself—“WHAT are you doing?? Stop licking the canvas! Choose the right color, get it carefully on the best brush for the job, and decide what you are doing before you just dab and jab. Okay, that is looking good, so now do it again over here. Your brush is too small and this will take forever. Whoa, I thought that part was finished and it looks really weak. Oh great, now you’ve missed entire pieces of the conversation on the podcast you are listening to because you were trying to mix a better green.”
So now you know what goes through my brain while I am painting.
Contemplating matters of consequence
With drawing, things are much easier, more automatic, and it is easier to talk to other people, or listen to a podcast while drawing. But I don’t feel as if I have a relationship with my drawings either. Many years ago I had to learn to keep emotional distance, to stop viewing them as something fabulous and irreplaceable or it would have been too hard to sell them.
And here is your reward for reading to the end of this very long post.
Some friends went to Mineral King in January and shared this photo with me. Now I am sharing it with you. (Thank you, KC!)
