Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Weekly Paint Progress: 12/31

This week the big peonies went from this:

... to this:

The glazed peony went from this:

... to this:

So, of course I’ve now over-corrected, but that’s okay. It’s been absorbing.

Horns

We have been watching Bridgerton on Nextflix. It’s a period drama — not in all senses of the word, because the female lead does not seem old enough to to have her period, though there are dramatic scenes with missed periods and surprise periods. 

The girl is luminous enough that Gary feels called upon to slight her appearance, specifically a specific  hairstyle choice he just rails on. 

“Horns!” he screams. “Why would she do that? It looks like she has horns!”

So, of course, today he came home to this:

He did scream when he finally looked at me, about fifteen minutes into our evening together.

Wild Bill: a Review

I wanted to watch Wild Bill because I chanced across a promo and it seemed funny. Ron Lowe seemed smug, and local British people seemed over it. British people slapping down smug Americans. Amusing. (She said, smugly.)

I liked the first episode, though there wasn’t quite as much smug-slapping as promised, and I persuaded Gary to watch it too. Gary more than liked it, he loved it. 

Mid-binge, I went to IMDb to find out how many episodes there were, and I read this:

“On Wednesday, 13th November 2019, ITV announced that the police drama would not be returning for a second series. Viewing figures dropped from 5.7 million for episode 1 to 3.2 million by episode 6 and the series received mixed reviews from critics and viewers. In addition, the series struggled to find a U.S. broadcaster.”

“Well, shit,” I thought, “I can’t tell Gary this.”

Gary asked, “How many episodes does it say there are?”

“Ummm ... six.”

“Only six? I hate how they only put a few episodes in each season now.” (This is true, children, back in my day 22 episodes equaled a season.) “How many seasons are there?”

“Ummm... shush. You’re missing stuff on the screen.”

It was like lying to a child about Santa. For the next three hours he would randomly gush about how well-written and delightful it was, and how he loved it, and I had to hold my tongue until we were done and he demanded more. Then I had to confess that it was over, that’s  all they wrote.

He was mad and bereft all at once, plus betrayed, oh my God, betrayed. Not betrayed by me, but by the viewing public for not embracing his favorite show.

Dr. Fauci

I was watching CNN, last week, with the sound off, because it’s what I do, all the time, and Dr. Fauci was answering viewer questions about the vaccine.

I wondered, “Can I even take it? I can only take dead virus vaccines. Is RNA live or dead?”

And just at that moment the closed captioning answered me. Here it is from the transcript.

LEMON: Let me follow up on this, because are there preexisting conditions, Dr. Fauci, that would preclude someone from getting this vaccine?

FAUCI: Well, actually not. I mean, if you -- if you were -- if this were a live, attenuated vaccine, which is one that would replicate a bit in you, you would be concerned that, if someone had an immunosuppressed disease, a disease that either alters and suppresses the immune system or a medication that you were on that suppressed the immune system, you would be reluctant to have someone have a live attenuated vaccine ...

I thought, “Reluctant?  I’m game for anything, but my doctor says I can only get a dead vaccine.”

Dr Fauci, employing his trans-continental psychic abilities, answered me.

... But when you have a vaccine that is essentially a protein, namely, a gene that codes for the particular protein, in this case, the spike protein, an underlying condition might mean you don't get as robust a response, but it's not a contraindication, so that you should not get the vaccine.

I thought, “Well, that’s a little obtuse. Are you saying I can take it, even though it won’t do me that much good?”

GUPTA: And so, for example, someone who's got a weakened immune system or is immunocompromised, is that what you're referring to, Dr. Fauci, that it wouldn't necessarily be unsafe? 

FAUCI: That's -- yes.

GUPTA: They may just not get a -- the same response?

FAUCI: Exactly. Exactly, Sanjay. You have to separate safety and the likelihood that you will get a good response to the vaccine. It is not unsafe for someone who has an immunodeficiency to get vaccinated. They may not, in fact, make as robust an immune response. But, in my mind, it's better than not getting vaccinated at all.

So, now that Dr. Fauci made that decision for me, I thought I should look at when I would be getting my vaccine, and what documentation I might need to bring to prove I’m in the immune-compromised category.

I’m in Phase 1B, so I’m up several weeks after “mid-December,” which seems to me would be today. As for the documentation, Missouri will be using the honor system when it comes to saying you are at risk. Right now I can think of several people who will be lying. 

Christmas Gift

Last week:

“Gary, your hair has grown so much since March. Can I French braid it?”

”No.”

“What about a high pony?”

”No. What is that?”

”Think Sarah Palin.”

”Absolutely not.”

”Can I put you hair in a high pony for my Christmas gift?”

Christmas Events

Does it seem as if there has been a spate of Breaking News Events on Christmas mornings? I remember in recent years there was a tsunami, the airline shoe bomber, a typhoon, and now this Nashville bombing.

It’s eerie how my subconscious looked at the aerial photo only identified as “downtown Nashville” and I said, “That’s the street I walked down the last time we were in Nashville.” My ability to look at a shot of roofs and debris would make more sense if they’d shown the River in the aerial view, but they didn’t. 

Perhaps I looked at a satellite view of that area sometime and then my subconscious stored it for future reference. Weird.

Merry (?) Non-Christmas

We had such success with the Thanksgiving coping technique (Shake Things Up To Spite the Virus) that we are doubling down on it for Christmas.

Or more accurately, maybe tripling or quadrupling down, because instead of picking one tradition to shun, we’re ignoring Christmas entirely. You know, so as not to invite comparisons with Christmas Past. 

Still, no matter what coping techniques you use, I wish you a Merry Christmas.

Weekly Paint Progress: 12/24

Very slow progress this week. The big peonies went from this:

... to this:

... and the glazed small peonies went from this:

... to this:

It looks interesting, but less and less like a flower and more and more like a surgery in progress.

Review: The Lady Vanishes (various versions) (spoilers)

Nothing but spoilers below! 

Once upon a time the was a book titled “The Wheel Spins,” and Alfred Hitchcock adapted it into The Lady Vanishes, and it was entertaining. 

When I saw that there was a BBC adaptation that was closer to the book, I recommended that Friend Anne and I set up an Amazon Watch Party. I hadn’t read the book, and she hadn’t seen the Hitchcock version OR read the book, so it sounded like a good prospect. 

I made the foolish assumption that the book and this new adaptation would have some similarities. The beginning and end are wildly different. So different that 1) I apologized to Anne and we watched the Hitchcock version the next day, and 2) I went to Wikipedia to see what the book said originally happened, and then I found that there are three versions, because the end of the book differs as well.

So, acronyms. TWS = the original book, titled The Wheel Spins (per Wikipedia),  AH = Alfred Hitchcock version, BBC = 2013 BBC version.

The beginning

AH: the heroine is frivolous but plucky.
TWS and BBC: she is frivolous and whiny. Having her be insufferable adds a nuance when she’s demanding that the Nanny has vanished: are people just lying to her to get her to go away?

The middle

In all three versions a woman on a train gets increasingly desperate as she tries to convince people her nanny-like seat-mate has gone missing. There’s a nun.

The end

AH: the Nanny was a spy all along! There’s a coded message! The nun was in disguise! The nun is supposed to dope the heroine, but doesn’t. There’s a chase scene! A shoot-out! The young woman falls in love with the young man who has helped her. No one played cricket! (Key plot point.) 
BBC: no one is a spy, the Nanny just saw too much and gets tied up with the luggage. There is no coded message, no one is in disguise. The hero dopes the heroine, so she semi-rejects him, and no one even mentioned cricket.
TWS: Nanny is disguised as the nun’s patient, the hero dopes the heroine, and she seems perfectly okay with it because she makes plans to travel with him again. It’s all been a fun adventure, even with the roofies.

And guess what. There’s a very poorly reviewed 1979 version, adapted from the Hitchcock version, avowing no knowledge of the book, starring Cyril Shepherd, Elliot Gould, and Angela Lansbury as the Nanny. We’re watching it Christmas night. 

Rewriting the Novel: Exposition

I am in exposition hell. And it’s odd, because I love novels that trickle out the exposition slowly, or else don’t give it at all. Like The Handmaid’s Tale. But I keep thinking of cunning ways to dole it out in chapter one. So I’m 6,000 words into chapter one.

If I were bold I would just ditch chapter one right now and go to the midpoint. It’s not like this is going to be my only draft. Plus, I’ve got an outline. 

It’s just I’m one scene away from being done with chapter one. 

You know what? I‘m abandoning chapter one. Instead, I’m going to write an exposition checklist. It’ll be everything you need to know, then I’m going to note when the facts come up organically. 

Then again, maybe I won’t. It seems I’m putting a lot of effort into avoiding revisions. Right now I’m heading down Jerry’s path to a good first chapter and a bad conclusion, and I’m sober.

Glasses

Earlier this week I was having trouble reading my work laptop. I adjusted the lighting, changed the font size, it still seemed small and blurry and dark.

That problem lasted from Monday through Tuesday. The work laptop was not a problem on  Wednesday,  but then, Wednesday I was on vacation.

Thursday morning I was getting ready to have a zoom meeting and noticed I wasn’t wearing my glasses. I finally found them in a room I hadn’t been in since the previous weekend. 

It would seem my glasses are so out of sync with my petrifying eyeballs that the glasses don’t correct either my near- or far-sightedness. I just blurringly wander around in my long day’s journey into night, and I only notice the problem when I’m between near and far-sight: on my work laptop. Happily, I can look forward to Gary’s current state - eyeballs that have warped so much that my vision improves for a while.

I could also get new lenses, but then I would have to leave the house and stick my face into that eye-measuring device. That thing has too many nooks and crannies, how could they effectively clean it? I’ll just wander around in a fog, fine with me.

Eyebrows

So, as I said yesterday, I’m feeling a little insecure about my appearance lately. That’s why I was delighted that Amazon chose today to deliver a device that will up my eyebrow game: an eyebrow template.

I have great trouble making my eyebrows symmetrical. I know how they’re supposed to look, and the best I can hope for is for each eyebrow and to look good on its own — but they don’t look like each other. I’ll have a round eyebrow on one side and an angular eyebrow on the other,  or Vice versa.

I narrowed down my Amazon choices to two eyebrow devices:

1. Vaguely gynecological adjustable steampunk eyebrow machine:

2. Plastic strap-on templates:

Both translations were equally bad, but “Step 5: Enjoy your beauty” made me laugh, plus I knew there was a chance that I wouldn’t adjust both sides of the eyebrow speculum the same, and I’d just be where I was when I started.

So here I am, and after reviewing all the templates, most of which expected me to have eyebrows growing up into my hairline, evidently I am a Seagull. It says Seagull Eyebrow right in the middle.

One thing I hadn’t considered, all these devices assume you have eyebrow hairs in generally the same area on both sides of your face. This thing made it obvious that one side of my face has now slid down a good quarter inch lower than the other, and if I wanted eyebrows at the same latitude I would either need to shave one off entirely and draw it in, or go crooked. Sigh.

I would not have vertical symmetry, but I could still aim for horizontal symmetry.

Not too bad. A seagull banking for a curve. Left face says “Really?” and Right face says  “why so judge-y, Left face?”

Makeup

The other day I had to meet with my great-great-grand boss (my boss’s boss’s boss’s boss), and out of sheer nervousness I put off any preparations until the last minute. 

As per usual, I didn’t put on makeup, and I found myself in the same position as before: side-by-side on a Zoom meeting with a young, lovely, perfectly made-up person. It was again like a twisted Before and After, if the Before is a red-faced wispy-haired man-woman, and the After is a gorgeous peach-faced healthy blonde.

This time I did not excuse myself mid-meeting to draw in my eyebrows, I just accused my new great-great-grand boss of not playing fair, and left it at that. The minute the meeting was over, I hopped up and put on FULL makeup, because I was just that demoralized. Then I took a photo of myself and sent it to her.

I was struck by two things as I put on full makeup for the first time in six months.

1. I have totally forgotten all makeup information. Not just how and where to apply it: I had to turn each object around to read what it was for. “This says eye-liner pencil. How does that differ from ‘brow-pencil’ — oh, that’s right, I draw a line beneath my eye lashes for some reason.”
2. Second, I look so much better with makeup. It’s a miracle product. Not so much the eyeshadow, which I just troweled on willy-nilly, or the eye-liner, which had dried up, but the foundation really is effective. It makes me have skin-colored skin again.

This is not to say I’m going to go around wearing makeup all the time again, but if I find that I am scheduled to have another one-on-one Zoom call with a young woman I might consider it.

 

Mail

I should not shudder when I get my junk mail.

The Vanguard fund is the oldest and most respectable of the index funds. It was the first, so it came by the name Vanguard legitimately.

But after I watched The Vow and Seduced, I’m a little skeeved out seeing that name. I wonder if the Vanguard people are annoyed — or if they even know — that a sex cult leader went about calling himself Vanguard. (As if he was the first sex cult leader. Please.)

(I bet they know. I bet some Vanguard executive has HBO and has been in a fetal position for the last few months.)

Weekly Paint Progress: 12/17

This week the big painting is this, because I will not let peonies beat me. And I think that I will not do as I was previous advised to: to think of the flower as a sphere — at the start, anyway. I’ll make it more spherical after it’s done instead of at the start.

... and this is the current state. It makes sense to me.

The small glazing project went from this:

... to this:

I don’t hate it. It needs a white wash on top ... maybe? It’s darker than the original but maybe I like that.

Nostradamus

Seriously, Nostradamus, what kind of seer are you?

You accurately tag the Great Fire of London, Napoleon, French Revolution, Hitler, and both World Wars, but then you completely whiff it on the great global pandemic. 

No Quatrain for 2020?

Into all countries comes a deadly flu /

Greeted in the streets with a clanging of pots / 

Wash the hands, Wear the mask, Don’t touch the face /

Many do not believe the learn-ed men.

Not only did Nostradamus whiff it, so did The Generalist. 

More Work on the House

Do you have a basement? Is it leaking? Yet? 

Well, when you get leaks, you have two approaches.

1. Patch the walls, dig up the cement, put in a French drain, and try to relieve the hydrostatic pressure ... this adds up to a large investment. And then, do what the wall-patchers say is your last option: fix your lawn drainage issues for another large investment.
2. Skip the patching and go directly to fixing the drainage issues in the yard. It is an awful amount of money, but supposedly afterward your basement won’t whine and bubble up from underneath when there’s a bad storm. 

We have taken path 1, and I wish we had taken path 2. But here we are. Massive trenches are being dug and garden beds are being razed. Thankfully the great stone wall is not a problem.

At least the trench diggers are suffering too. I found myself listening to snippets of their conversations.

”No, we need just another foot. Can you get another foot?” (They did.)

“Bug spray. Do we have bug spray?” (I don’t know why they would need this. It’s December. Did they find an underground cicada community?)

”That bush needs to come out.” (Great! I hate that bush. But yet, it did not come out. I think the trench is being truncated in favor of taking out the bush.)

They suggested it might be done in a day and a half, now they’re revising that to be three days. I might have to stop working at home so I can eavesdrop all the time. 

Night terrors

A few nights ago I sat up in bed, yelling. I would say I woke up screaming from a nightmare, only none of those things are true. 

I didn’t wake up: I can’t say I was asleep yet. I was in that twilight state when the baby chickens walk around the bedroom.

It wasn’t a nightmare, it was just an image. Specifically an image of Gary slipping and falling at his mother’s house.

I was yelling, not screaming. Specifically I said “Noooooooooo!’ And then I sat up.

”Yeesh,” I said, “That was awful.” Then I dropped off again. 

This time I was standing in the freezing cold snow outside someone’s front door, and they threw a bucket of cold water on me and I froze. 

This time I didn’t yell, I whimpered. But, somehow I dropped off again.

When it happened one more time I called for Gary. 

I whined, “Gary, I’ve had three night terrors in a row. First you slipped and fell at your mom’s, then someone tried to freeze me to death.”

He said, “What was the third one?”

“... Oh. I just fell against the the whiteboard again.”

And it’s true, I don’t know why my subconscious decided that would be the coda to two near-death experiences. I do know that since then I haven’t had a good night’s sleep.

Rewriting the Novel: a Brief Setback

I slogged my way through the resolution for The Novel, and it felt so unnatural that I had to go back to the outline and see how I was going to get the main character from Point A to Point Z.

This was a big job, too big for the iPad. This was a job for the whiteboard. The whiteboard, the dry erase marker, the the yardstick for the straight lines, the index cards, the numbered Ziplock snack bags in which to put the index cards of scenes and imagery to be taped to the right side of the whiteboard to augment the dry-erase notes of the progress of the — not one — but two themes. 

All this happened, and then, at nine in the evening I was sitting in the office chair making a final note about the resolution. The big whiteboard was tilted against the wall, the resolution was at the bottom of the whiteboard, and instead of getting of the chair, I just leaned down to make my note at floor level. While I was sitting in an office chair. I don’t know what it is about office chairs that make me forget the fundamentals of physics, but of course as a I leaned my top part over to make a note by my ankle, the chair slid out from under me and I fell forward.

I was fine, the whiteboard was fine, but when I slid down the whiteboard my shoulder wiped out everything from the midpoint to the last plot point. 

Happily, none of it was inspired, and it wasn’t too hard to re-create. Not the early works of Hemingway. Still, it might have been a disaster.

Very Very Soon ...

2020 will be over in 20 days. Then we can start complaining about 2021.  

Top Ten Possible 2021 complaints:  

1. This airplane to Italy is too empty.
2. How did I ever spend an hour in a grocery store?
3. You mean we have to drive to the restaurant?
4. Politics is soooo boring.
5. Why do all these other people have to make so much noise during the concert, and why are they standing between me and the entertainers?
6. These cough drops are stale.
7. I miss my children during the day.
8. I have forgotten how to drive.
9. Boy, the Oscars are slow when everyone has to walk to the podium.
10. My bra hurts.

 

Electoral College

And this is why I voted in person. The President is now harping that mail-in votes are “illegal” and should be thrown out only in the states where he lost. 

He didn’t lose in Missouri, of course, a state as red as the blood of a deer machined-gunned to death by a beet farmer if the deer had hemochromatosis. Trump won by 56% in Missouri. He won by 57% in my particular county (sunburned deer with hemochromatosis). 

Gary said this would happen — pressure on the electoral college — and I thought he was being paranoid. The big concern now is that either Trump will lean on syncophant politicians and win via lawsuit, or else he’ll be a martyr and win in four years. 

Weekly Paint Progress (?): 12/10

This week the peonies went from this:

... to another permutation I won’t even show you, then to this ...

... and then I gave up. Whatever I am trying to do, I’m not ready yet. I painted over it with white. Picture a white rectangle below.

Let’s look at the original and laugh:

The glazed peony went from this:

... to this:

... because I decided one of the many things I did wrong with the pink peonies (many many things) was that I went all sketchy and vague with the pre-paint drawing. This drawing is more exact. That way I won’t need to decide on shape and color at the same time. It will be more like paint-by-numbers. 

So discouraging to take a step back after the success of the sunflowers. Clearly, because I bought a grownup easel, now the gods must slap me down for my hubris.

Further Decor Negotiations

Well, Gary won the battle of the loveseat. I have given up and now every morning I rearrange the living room. I have let it go.

I had to let it go becuase there is a new battle front: the Battle of The Spinning Utensil Holder.

At some point when Gary was cooking he bought this so his spatulas / spatulae would all be in easy reach. Since he got sick, he has taken a giant step back on the food prep, so I decided that since I am the only one using the utensils, I decide where they go.

He had decided to place them  next to the microwave, so when you spin them they bang into the microwave. I took a firm hand and re-prioritized the kitchen. The Sous Vide container in front of the toaster went under the sink, replaced by the spinning spatula thing. Spatula carousel?  Ladle-go-round?

The next morning I woke up and the spatula spinner was no longer where I put it, spinning freely in front of the toaster. Why? “IT BLOCKS THE TOASTER.”

(He hasn’t used the toaster in months. The sous vide blocked the toaster more.)

Quietly in the night I put the toaster in front of the spinny thing, so there is full toaster access and yet the spinny thing still spins.

Even though I thought this was a good compromise, the next morning I woke up to “DON’T THINK YOU'RE FOOLING ME WITH THIS TOASTER THING.”

I haven’t moved it. I’m standing firm.

Impossible

I was visiting the drive through at The Teat, and saw they had an Impossible meatless sandwich. I’ve wanted to try one of the Impossible burgers, preferably a Whopper, preferably next to an original all-meat Whopper so I could do a taste-test and call it a Whopp-off, but that never happened.  But here it was under my nose.

And here it is, exposed to the world. Unappealing.

“Odd,” I thought, “I read they use beet juice to make it juicy. So that we think it’s medium-rare. That just looks ... grey and unappetizing.”

Then I took a bite, and I noticed it had a vaguely sausagey taste, as if it had gone bad. It had not gone bad, because it was a sausage breakfast sandwich,  but I had to go to the Starbucks website before That became evident.  I certainly didn’t bite in to it and think, “Yum, sausage.”

I palmed it off on Gary. “Yum.”

I then handed him what I had originally intended for him, a flaky bacon cheese sandwich. “UM YUM OH GOD MWAHAH NUMNUMNUM.”

So, disappointing. I am still holding out for cloned beef and now cloned sausage.

Pearl Harbor Day

I did a little research, and by that I mean I did one search in Wikipedia, and it seems obvious that no American holiday is ever discontinued. Each outdated holiday is supplanted by another holiday.

We initially celebrated Armistice Day/ Remembrance Day on 11/11 with the rest of the world, probably even handed out poppies, but then in 1954 we were glad to embrace ALL the wars and rename it Veterans Day.

Then they took Decoration Day and called it Memorial Day, so that the North and South decoration days for all the civil war dead could unite. (Worse, they changed the date in 1970, which still messes me up to this day.)

There seems to be a courtesy delay of 50 years before messing with a holiday. So, what’s the plan for repurposing Pearl Harbor Day? It seems every few years the current President — Clinton, Bush, Obama — re-declares it a National Remembrance Day. It’s hobbling along.

I would hate to think of it, but might it someday be united with September 11 to become a day in which we remember days when we were attacked. Attack Day? Homefront Day?

Vengeance Day?

Bear-poking Day? 

Rewriting the Novel: Resolution

I wrote the first chapter and now I am obediently following the Internet instructions on How To Write a Novel, and they tell me that I am to write the resolution early on. You need to know how your character ends up, and that way you know to start at the opposite end of the spectrum in the beginning, and then you have a spot to aim for and you can pace things correctly.

And damn, it got hard. The resolution has her making a hard and selfish choice, and I don’t like it. First of all, there’s a lot of emotion, and it sounds like a telenovela. Ugh. And I don’t love that  she gets to this point, and that’s sad. I know Jane Eyre got there, too, deciding for self-interest against convention. (It’s not “Jane, guess what, Bertha’s dead,” three times on the wind.) 

Worse, it’s transparently the same choice I would make if I were given the chance to be a fictional person. All the things she says and reasons she gives have been hidden in my mind at some time. Then again, if anyone asks, I can say it was the same decision my mother had to make. That’ll work. Throw my dead mother under the bus.

Well, it’s a first draft, and because she makes a hard decision I can always change it. But it’s not fun. Up until now it’s been a fun challenge, fitting the exposition together with minimal words like a cunning Haiku. Now I have to drag my Mom character through hell.

This is therapeutic , I remind myself.

Gary Update

You may be wondering, has Gary calmed down now that we will have at least four years free of Trump? The answer is: yes, yes he has. But still, no, because he’s just changed the topics he’s yelling about.

He just spent half an hour telling me the plot of a horror novel he is reading. He’s reading Birdbox. 

He said, “It’s about this monster that makes you commit suicide if you look at it.”

[SPOILERS for the three people who did not see Sandra Bullock in the Netflix production two years ago]

”Yes, Gary, I know, we watched the Sandra Bullock production on Netflix two years ago.”

”No, we didn’t. Maybe you did. I never saw this. There’s this mother —“

”Sandra Bullock.”

”No. She takes her two kids out on a boat on a river —“

”Yes, a canoe —“

“NO, they never say what kind of boat it is. Or maybe it’s a dinghy. I think it’s a dinghy.”

”On Netflix it was a canoe, and they float until they find this utopia where —“

”NO, NO, NO, this is a totally different book. I’m halfway through and they don’t know where they’re headed.”

So, still starting every sentence of a conversation with “No,” still stubbornly insisting I have NO idea what I’m talking about, still forgetting that he and I sit right next to each other and watch the same television programs. 

I could be wrong. But, only, I’m not wrong. The difference is that I accept I might be wrong. Still, he gets much less exercised about horror books than he did about politics.

Outage

Last week the cable company cut the cord on me for several hours. It was inconvenient, of course, given that I was working at the time. The only work I could do was attend meetings on the cell phone. I had no internet, no tv signal, no dial tone, and no Alexa.

And so, these vital questions went un-answered:

Google search: “Where are my kidneys?” 
That question went unanswered because even with a bathroom full of medical imagery, I could not find exactly where my kidneys are. I know generally where they are, but I needed to be more precise. (they  are exactly below were I seem to have pulled my back on one side.)

Alexa question: “Alexa, how long to cook chicken thighs?” And “How many tablespoons of juice are in one lemon?
I decided to swap lunch and dinner prep to use this new free time most efficiently, and dinner was Butter Chicken.

What surprised me was  I have a room full of books, and it never occurred to me to go in there and open a book, old style, and look for either answer. I just decided I wouldn’t know until later.  If I forgot this skill, what will happen with Kids Today, who may have never learned it?

 

 

Weekly Paint Progress: 12/3 (with added easel footage)

This week the peonies went from this ...

to this:

I currently hate this. I don’t recall hating the sunflowers like this. I think that’s because I shaded the sunflowers as I went along. Right now I’m in the color blocking stage and this could be in acrylic for all the nuance it has. 

I called time of death of the Orange, and I am now starting this:

And so it begins -

I realize now that one problem with the glazes is that I was supposed to apply gesso to the canvas, let it dry, and then sand it before painting, so that the surface is utterly slick and I don’t get the canvas texture. I am not doing that. No. 

But hey, that’s not the big news! The previous easel is being transitioned into semi-retirement. Say hello to Godzilla on Wheels.

He’s in the low seated position. In the standing position he soars among the rafters. 

You see the problem with the previous easel.

I have probably overcorrected. But I tell myself that if I redecorate it could be a room divider, or if I get a pole I can use it as a vehicle and punt through my subdivision if it gets icy.

Heterogeneous

Well that’s embarrassing. 

A reporter just used the word “heterogeneous” and he pronounced it in a way I never would have imagined.

He said “Hetero-genius,” as if he was describing Einstein’s sexual preference. 

Stupid reporter, I thought, he’s going to get tweets about that. It’s Het-er-AH-Jen-us. 

Then, I remembered the banal facade incidents and I looked it up, and damnit, DAMNit, it’s hetero-genius.

Thankfully, I don’t remember ever saying heterogeneous out loud. But I know I have said homogeneous out loud. And I looked that up and damnit, damnit I have been wrong all my life. It’s homo-genius, not hon-MAH-Jen-us.

But wait, I thought, there is that extra “e” that I attributed to British/American spelling. Maybe hetero/homo-geneous vs genous are entirely different words. 

Oh, Jesus, they are entirely different words with different pronunciations that mean the same thing, but for a nuance. That extra e gives the word a scientific slant. So it’s ho-MAH-Jen-ized milk if you’re in the grocery and ho-mo-geneized milk in the food lab? No. Because homogeneized isn’t a word. 

So you know how I will pronounce heterogeneous/heterogenous in the future? “Di-VERSE.”.

Easel

I want a new easel. I love the easel Gary got me a few years ago, but it’s a French easel, great for travel and watercolors, not great for big oil paintings, at least not great for horizontal 24 inch wide paintings like the last few. It’s delicate, but that means it’s a little spindly, a little wobbly when you try to scoot it out of the way.

So I was looking for a sturdier easel on Cyber Monday, and I found an ideal easel on Amazon for  thirty percent off.

How sturdy is this?

I know! Perfection. I ordered it. Did I check the size? No. Of course I didn’t check the size. I’m an idiot: I never check the size. But at least this time, I checked the size before it shipped.

According to the seller, this thing is close to 100 inches tall. I am writing this in a room that is just 100 inches tall. I am 67 inches tall. Stick figure of me for scale.

This is for giant Chuck Close oil paintings.

I have tried to cancel this order and they are “working on it.”

I don’t know how they can deliver it. Seriously. It won’t fit on my porch. 

Update: I checked the SKU numbers and according to the maker,  it is adjustable, with the maximum at 100 inches, but that isn’t reflected in the Amazon description. If worst comes to worst, honestly, I can take a saw to it.