a day of rest and the last selfie

I trust everyone who celebrates Christmas had a wonderful day.

I never did feel like I really woke up yesterday. That's usually what happens when my body is telling me to knock it off. Plus I had a pain in my back. So while my brain had a work day scheduled yesterday to fill the 2^nd bowl mold, I could never find the energy or motivation to get up off the couch. Oh, what the hell, I figured, most people in this country and other predominately christian countries are taking a day off so even though this is not a day I celebrate, I did too. Take the day off. Wouldn't have mattered what day it was though, when my body says rest, I rest. So I lounged around all day and finished my book. The only time I got up was to go take care of the cats.

----------

So, the selfies...

My face retained a relatively youthful appearance right up until I turned 60 and then it was like some sort of switch was flipped and the skin got crepey and deep wrinkles appeared. And spots. Either that or the clear mirror and bright florescent lights in the bathroom of the country house illuminated what the small silver stained antique mirror and the dim light in the bathroom of the old city house had disguised.

I was shocked, I tell you, shocked. Dismayed by the image looking back at me. Disturbed that it did not reflect how I feel. Unsettled that I could see the beauty in the aged faces of others but not in my own.

And so the Selfie Project was born. I figured that if I took enough pictures of myself and posted them for all to see I would, if not see the beauty in my own aged face, at least get used to it, accept it.

Well the year is done and the selfies are complete and the only thing I achieved is to realize that I do, indeed, look like the old woman I apparently am.

Sobeit. Not that I mind being 64 years old. I find it kind of amazing actually... to have survived and still have my health intact (so far anyway), to still have the drive, energy, and desire to work...and consider myself lucky.

The smiling selfie as requested, also the best one I could come up with that didn't look like a grimace.

out with the old...

I've made several attempts to write an end of year post while I worked yesterday on cleaning the detritus of the last six months off my drawing table, computer area, and work table.  I don't want to start the new year with the clutter of last year.  

I'm not feeling very philosophical this year like years past.  Maybe it's because I'm busy.  I have already made a list of work related items I need to accomplish the first half week of the new year.

Because...

Because we have a lot of work waiting for us!

This is a far cry from how 2012 started out.  Life has shifted back into the certainty lane, at least for the next six months or so and I have things to focus on.

It's been a challenging year.  By mid-summer, things were looking pretty dismal.  With no work, dwindling personal resources and reducing our expenditures to as little as possible, with the IRS breathing down our necks, we were beginning to wonder if we still had a business, wondering how much longer we could tread water.

Proposals that looked promising languished.  I filed for SS, we taught a workshop, then a windfall from a previous inheritance came, and I had my little part-time job at the antique store.  Income came from varied and unexpected places while the garden kept us fed.

And then in July, everything changed.  I sold a cast piece to an art consultant and we won 1st place at a gallery exhibition with a money prize.  After that, a very large commission was finally funded and other commissions have come in.  We have been very busy since August and the year is ending in abundance.

The Universe took care of us for another year and I am thankful.  

Well, I see I managed a post after all.  

Happy New Year everyone, may it be well and prosperous for us all.

noble house

When we first bought the country house, and even before when we were just contemplating moving, I thought I could never leave my house, the one in the city. So much of my life happened there. I bought that house when I was between, between one marriage and the next, and I was just starting out on my life as an artist. I had already met my real husband when I moved in though we weren't yet living together.

It was a beautiful house in an old inner city neighborhood. An old house, nearly 100 years old on pier and beam but well kept up with it's little porch on the front, it's hardwood floors, it's 10' ceilings, it's diamond pattern double hung windows with weights, it's claw foot tub in one of the bathrooms and the single wide porcelain sink and tile counters in the kitchen, it's deep eaves that shaded us in the summer.

I bought it from the widow of the man whose father had built it way back when. During WWII, she had divided it up into a duplex straight down the middle, turning the one big bathroom into two and making the kitchen smaller in the process and adding another bedroom on the back of one half, off the kitchen. The utility room/mud room became the second kitchen of the smaller side. I had two back doors then. It had been converted back into a single dwelling by the time I bought it.

It had it's charm but it also had it's quirks. Like really old plumbing and really old electrical wiring. It was not uncommon to blow the breaker when I vacuumed if too many other things were on. Like the shiplap and molding that was so old and hard that you couldn't drive a nail into it without drilling a hole first. Like no closets except for a very small one in the most recently added bedroom off the kitchen and a storage closet also off the kitchen. And if you were in the back of the house on one side, you had to go all the way to the front of the house to get to the other side, unless you wanted to go out one back door and in through the other. Oh, and it was drafty in the winter with no insulation. We spent a lot of time huddled around the space heater.

Eventually we made our own changes, enclosing the small back porch to make a hall that connected the two halves of the house in the back. We took out the more modern tub in one bathroom and had it replaced with a tiled stand alone shower. We got rid of the the storage closet, making the boy's room a little bigger and giving him a way in that didn't include having to go through his sister's room. We laid insulation in the attic. We planted the magnolia tree in the front yard.

So much life. So many memories. We got married in that house. We raised our kids in that house. We made art in that house. It was our home and our studio. It sheltered us and our kids and sometimes our friends. We buried our pets there. We loved and fought there and fought for our love there. We welcomed our grandkids there, their other home. It was a sanctuary for all life, a no kill zone inside my fence.

Eventually, the kids grew up and made homes for themselves, the grandkids were growing up and making lives of their own that didn't revolve around us. The neighborhood we knew and loved was changing. And we, we were older and realized that if we were ever going to do something new, something different, now was the time to do it. So we cast about until we found the country house.

Pulling up my roots was a slow and painful process and set adrift we bounced back and forth for nearly three years. We sorted through all our stuff, took most, left some behind. Now when I go back, when we go back to do the fabrication on jobs, it's depressing. It only contains the left behind stuff and I see how run down the place had become, something that was well hidden when it was full of our life. The paint is stained and peeling inside and out; the wood floors, so beautiful when we moved in, are now worn and dirty. The cords holding the weights in the window frames have all rotted and the weights have fallen so that now the windows need to be propped open. The skirt on the outside of the house, removed when we had it leveled, was never replaced and shows the foundation on the piers. The plumbing is so clogged now in the kitchen it backs up quickly. And termites are slowly eating it up.

This once beautiful house that has stood for over a century is slowly crumbling, fallen into such disrepair. This house that sheltered us from storms and gave us refuge needed more care than we could give it.

getting energised

I have dawdled and procrastinated and languished and frittered the time away. Now I have a job and can't seem to find the time to do it, still have not finished the sketches for the second proposal. And we have another week long workshop coming up in a couple of weeks at a new facility in Houston. Add to that, school is out this week and the g'kids are lining up for their weeks. Ack!

Sunday we went in town to party hearty with our friend Craig, the tunnel rat. I call him that because he lives in a loft in downtown Houston and his building is connected to the underground tunnel system that connects most of the main buildings downtown. I don't know how much he actually uses the tunnels though. There's a whole sub-culture down there and I expect mutants to emerge any day now.

Anyway, Craig, as you might remember, has joined the Flying Saucer beer pub club and has downed another 200 different beers and has won his second level plate. So we joined him for the unveiling. He's already nearly a quarter of the way to his third level plate.

We stayed over last night and today dismantled Marc's desk and my drawing table and the contents of both thereof, loaded up the truck and hauled it all down here. Took us nearly all friggin' day! I finally brought all the rest of my reference books and files and pictures and STUFF so now one major part of my studio is all here, however dismantled it may be. Because I have a job and need to get the art work done.

So tomorrow, I was planning to put my stuff, at least, back together again so that I could get started but no, I have been informed that my activity tomorrow is to take the truck down to the dealership and get it inspected and have them look at the AC which only seems to work full blast. Turn it down and it goes off. Still, though, I might be able to get my drawing table remantled.

Marc is going to be otherwise occupied you see. I mentioned before that the actual construction phase of our new shop had finally begun. He's gotten a lot of the walls done in sections but not erected yet. Next Sunday, we are planning on a barn-raising, getting our son and a friend here to help 'git it up' so to speak. Which means of course that all the walls have to be finished. So the heat is on in more ways than one.

Oh yes and Thursday, I am back in the city because my twin g'girls are graduating from elementary school. They passed all the necessary standardized tests 'with commendation' (that means they only got one or two questions wrong on each test) and have asked me if I was coming.

“You're coming to my graduation, right Granny?”  You betcha honey. 

These are the girls that their whole first year at school did not speak to anyone except each other, barely spoke their second. Their mom split them up after the first year and they have been in separate classes ever since.

So did I mention the heat? It's summer. No denying it. It's hot and humid even though we have been having a nice south wind that helps take the edge off especially if you are in the shade. We've started turning the AC on in the afternoons and then shut if back off when we go to bed. So far the fan is doing us fine at night but I don't see that continuing for very much longer.

Well, I actually do have photos to illustrate this fascinating post and I was going to link to stuff but it's late and I don't feel like messing with it. So...later gators.

adrift

painting by Anne Packard

Being currently unemployed means that I have oodles of time to do whatever I want. The problem is, I have a hard time deciding what I want to do. I function much better with deadlines looming over me. No deadline and I dawdle. I can dawdle a whole day away and accomplish nothing. I can't even seem to focus long enough to file all my nails down at one time.

I am adrift, at sea without a rudder.

tick tock

My friends D&K arranged for D’s elderly mom, R, to go live in a very nice assisted living facility at their expense.  They took her today.  The whole thing was cloaked in subterfuge, carefully not telling R the truth.  The reason for this is because R has become unreasonable about her capabilities, is suffering from some form of dementia mostly related to her memory and is unwilling to cooperate with anything she doesn’t want to do and she can get very ugly about it.  What she wants to do is go back home to NY where she lived alone in a high rise condo downtown up until last year when she fell and dislocated her shoulder.  This isn’t possible due to her failing health and memory.  To tell R that she cannot and may not go home is to make things unbearably unpleasant.  So the story is that this is only a temporary arrangement so she will be looked after while they go to Wisconsin for a family emergency on K’s side (true).  The lie is that it is not a temporary arrangement.

When she first fell and the shoulder would not stay set, R went out to live with one son.  After she burned her bridges there, she came to live with her other son, my friend.  D’s no spring chicken himself and he is worrying himself into another stroke.  All their bedrooms are upstairs and R gets up in the night and goes downstairs into the kitchen.  No one is getting any sleep and K is worried for D and their once active world and activities have basically come to a halt and now revolves around R.  That’s just not healthy.

They feel terribly guilty and they are exhausted, physically and mentally.  I sympathize with them and tell them they are doing the right thing.  It is reminiscent of my mother, when she got to the point of no longer being able to live alone and she, too, was unreasonable, unwilling to cooperate and ugly about it.  

I’m going to be 60 next year and although I expect to have another 20 good years, realistically, what’s the chance?  I never wanted to be like my mother and I have tried hard to NOT be like her.  Still, I see her slipping out now and then.  I hope, when I get to that point, that I will be VERY much not like her and R, that I will have the presence of mind, the wit and wherewithal to recognize when I become a danger to myself and accept it gracefully even if I am not ready for it.