miscellania and the way

I still have not started on the rest of the painting though now I have some direction on how to start. Maybe today. I’m feeling sort of in limbo, unmotivated, spending too much time watching streaming or playing games on my phone, not even reading the book I have more than about 30 minutes at a time when I’m not working outside. It’s all mindless. I go to the grocery store, I go to SHARE, I walk the dog, I feed the cats. Wednesday was another overcast wet day with a cold front blowing in so no working outside again. Thursday and today overcast and cold. Winter is back.

We finished watching all five seasons of Eureka on Prime. It’s really very good. The average IQ sheriff in a town of high IQ individuals pushing the limits of science and invention where things inevitably go haywire is the one it falls to to fix things and save the town. Jack always comes up with the idea or solution that the scientists then figure out how to implement. Running for five seasons you get invested in the characters and their relationships and the way they wrapped it up when it was canceled during season 5 was very satisfying.

Now we’re watching the new series Paradise on Hulu. Five of the 8 episodes are out with the remaining three of season 1 being released on Tuesdays. It’s a political murder thriller based in a time after a catastrophic event the 25,000 (previously chosen) survivors of which live in an underground city. The secret service agent in charge of protecting the president finds him murdered and conducts his own investigation when the true power lies about it. We’ve seen all five released episodes so far and it’s very good. It’s planned for three seasons but it remains to be seen if it gets renewed. Most recently we’ve watched 3 episodes of season 1 of Psych on Prime which has 8 seasons about a man trained by his cop father to be extremely observant who passes himself off as a psychic to help the police solve crimes and decides to open his own detective agency with his friend. It’s kind of dumb but entertaining. Cat sprawled across my leg Wednesday night while we watched tv.

My daughter who is the floor manager of Copy.com, a print shop in Houston has one of their people working on converting my selected colored pencil drawings into notecards and prints for framing. The drawings have been scanned, the files cleaned up, the card stock selected, and now we are working on getting the colors and values as close as possible to the originals. So slow progress but progress.

New neighbor update - after meeting them on January 5th, two guys were there working on the house every day for the next two weeks but I haven’t seen anyone over there since the Sunday before the snow, 3 1/2 weeks ago. The contents of the bathroom…vanity, sink, toilet, and bathtub are in the yard outside the back door which faces my house.

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My email inbox is overflowing with newsletters from the various independent media I follow, days worth, all mostly unread. Wednesday morning I just deleted it all, only skimming through a few of them. Politicians, well democrats and independents, and pundits are finally understanding that we are in a constitutional crises and no one seems to know what to do about it. Court orders are being ignored and there is no attempt at enforcement so far. Turns out democracy only works if all parties want it to work and abide by the rules and apparently republicans are content to let the Constitution be shredded despite their oaths to protect and defend. The unelected destructor and his minions thumbing their noses at us, lying to us. Musk slashing/freezing funding, not to end fraud, of which there is very little as these agencies go through regular audits, but to redirect the money into his pocket, hence his new nearly $39M contract to SpaceX granted this week and has either appointed himself in charge of the agency that oversees and places safety regulations on his companies or shut them down. Republicans released a draft budget cutting $2Trillion in social programs slashing healthcare, food assistance, education funding, and tax credits benefiting low income communities even though these programs are very popular, including with republicans, in order to extend the tax cuts for corporations and high income households which will still add trillions to the national debt.

Our only recourse is to just resist, to flood congress with phone calls even when it falls on deaf ears, to protest, to demonstrate, to refuse to obey. If the president and his administration think the law doesn’t apply to them then why should it apply to us? Civil disobedience. Support those groups doing defense in the courts and on the ground. Do not give up, do not give in regardless of how hopeless it seems right now. Groundswells take time to build but eventually they become tsunamis.

As one poster wrote on SM “I’m going to continue living my best life, to laugh, serve, learn, rest, travel, create art, pursue joy. I’m going to joyfully resist. I’ll practice hope. I won’t give the bastards power over my mental health...I’m not going to shut up. I’m going to encourage you to join me, to stand up and speak out…I’m going to agitate the hell out of anyone who tries to normalize this. It’s not normal. It’s not justifiable. It’s not ok.”

This is the way.

horrid cold and horrid day

The cuttings I took of the morning glory bush are sending out roots and still giving me an occasional flower from buds that were already developed enough albeit smaller

and when I watered all the pots indoors Saturday I noticed the Brazilian button (centratherum asteraceae) had burst into bloom. 

When I got up this morning the predicted low for tomorrow (Tuesday) had dropped from 17˚ to 12˚. I don’t think it has ever gotten that cold here in my life. Now at nearly noon forecast has risen two degrees to 14˚ but still a 91% chance of precipitation, meaning ice or snow for Tuesday. Tonight only 25˚ and I can’t decide if I want to get the cats in the shed tonight or not. Today is cold, windy, and overcast. Whoever has been working on the house next door has been there every day for about the last week and a half but not today. The only thing good about this arctic air is that it will be short lived, really just one terrible day and night with each succeeding day warmer and warmer and nearly 70˚ on Saturday. 

I’m not going to talk about the other terrible thing happening today.

I got my grocery shopping done on Sunday so I shouldn’t have to go out for any reason until Thursday, my SHARE day or to feed the cats. I worked on my painting yesterday, am working on it today. Currently waiting for it to dry and assess where I’m at.

You might remember that my electrophysiologist wanted another TEE (transesophageal echocardiogram) to check on the Watchman device in my heart three months after the first TEE in October after the procedure last August which showed a .2 leak (within the normal range) to see if it continued to heal up. Well, that’s been scheduled for next Monday the 27th and I hope to all the powers that be that this will be the very last time they go poking around the inside of my body.

We finished watching The Outlaws on Prime which we really enjoyed and I highly recommend and wrote about the premise here. Now we’re into the second season of Eureka (also on Prime), a small town of the most brilliant scientists and high IQ individuals doing all sorts of research at Global Dynamics around which the town grew up and in which things go awry with regularity and it’s up to the average IQ sheriff to get things squared away.

Not much else to write about. 

winter activities and the monster came to play

Here’s my annual cuttings of the yellow angel trumpet and the morning glory bush in water to root in case the ones in the ground don’t come back.

And it is cold out. Below freezing when I got up yesterday morning and when I wrote this it had just then creeped up to 33˚, clear blue winter sky and a little windy. My workroom was ablaze with prisms in the morning. Minnie and I ventured out before noon once it hit 40˚ and nothing looked damaged but we had another night a few degrees below freezing coming last night. This morning, obvious signs of damage, some total like the cosmos, others just bit like the fire spike, some still seemingly unaffected like the shrimp plant.

I returned the two books to the library Saturday that I’ve had out for over a month. One went back without even opening the cover and the other, that weird book by Keanu Reeves and China Milville, The Book Of Elsewhere, went back unfinished. After about 80 pages in I decided I was done with it. For one thing I haven’t had any real reading time as we’ve been streaming 6 seasons of (sci-fi) The Expanse and have started watching The Outlaws. Anyway, it’s rare for me to return a book unfinished. Usually I’ll plow through it on general principal even if I’m not invested in the story but the library called wanting their books back. 

Of course I didn’t just take books back, I also checked one out. It’s an anthology, Harlan Ellison’s Greatest Hits. Ellison was a science fiction writer (though hard to categorize his work) and one of my favorite authors back in my late teens and twenties when I read science fiction almost exclusively, before I started delving into the origins of religion and myth, buddhism and taoism, theosophy and new age, Campbell and Jung. Anyway, it’s been a long time since I’ve read Ellison’s works so this will be a little walk down memory lane.

So, The Outlaws. There’s three seasons and we just started season 2. It’s a British crime thriller comedy on Prime. We started watching it because it has Christopher Walken in it so we figured it had to be good. The premise is 7 individuals from completely different walks of life thrown together doing community service instead of jail time for their infractions as they get drawn into some serious crime while trying to save their lives and the lives of their families. 

This little monster came over Sunday and played while her daddy worked across the street in the shop. I was instructed to draw camping and then rain. She colored in my outline of the tent. Also drawn on demand was fire, an octopus, and skipping (a little human figure with wild arms and legs and wild hair) while she drew snakes and many legged octopi that turned into spiders that turned into birds.

The blue leg kicking up is from Paisleigh skipping, the pink is me not skipping and her octopus/spider/bird.

I’ve started on the new painting, putting the first underlying color on the anthers. This first image is very frustrating because it doesn’t look anything like what is actually on the paper. What I have so far is almost consistently a lighter lemon yellow with some overlay of an oranger yellow but still very subtle all done while it was still wet. This picture is more like the direction I’m going to take it as if it’s a future picture, work I haven’t done yet, and no amount of dickering with exposure, shadow, temperature, contrast is getting rid of the intensity or the enhanced color value.