Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

What Threw Me Down the Rabbit Hole at 3:30 Last Night

Last night I woke up at 3:30 — that special hour when your brain chemistry dips and your bladder fills and your REM cycle skids off the road. 

When this happens to me I play a crossword and do some light “reading.” Reading so light that it really needs those quotation marks. Not just Facebook light, Cracked magazine listicle Facebook light, where I “read” this:

“Wait what?” I said (because I have no ready vocabulary other than what I read on Cracked). “They found the ruby slippers?” I remembered vaguely that one of the pairs of ruby slippers had been stolen. (If you want a deep dive documentary into the provenance of the four known Ruby Slippers, including the St. Louisian who owned a pair, check out the long documentary The Slippers on Vimeo, or better yet just read this part of the Ruby Slippers Wikipedia article.)

Last night, though, I just went straight to a short (20 minute) documentary, Who Stole the Ruby Slippers, which just left me disappointed, because it wrapped before the sting operation that recovered the shoes.

I didn’t find out about the sting until about 4:30 in the morning, when I found this long wonderful read on the Washington Post. 

I won’t tell you who — allegedly — did the deed, but I can tell you I learned three things from that article:

1) The FBI really needs to take an evening and watch The Sting with Paul Newman and Robert Redford. I’m not sure if they know what a sting is. 

2) Pro tip: I always thought that if a stolen item is eventually found, then the item is returned to the person it was stolen from. Nope, not if an insurance company paid a claim. If found, the item belongs to the insurance company that paid out. 

3) Art extortionist is a terrific job. Evidently, it’s quite an honorable profession, very above board. Really, I want to retire and take up a new career as an art extortionist.

Buried in the long Washington Post link above is the assumed identity of the alleged thieves, but frankly it’s so dull compared with the rest of the story I can see why they buried it.

And that is why I finally fell asleep at dawn. I recommend you read the article above at a reasonable time.

Weekly Paint Progress: 7/9

This week the crypts went from this ...

to this ...

I swear, short of writing a computer program I have done all I can to correct those angles and they are still wrong.

The seascape went from this ...

to this ...

Man, that’s bright. The next step in the book better tone that down.

UPDATED: For Every Bear You See There are Ten Bears You Don’t See

Late on Sunday night:

Evidently a black bear is on his way to my house. They say he’s looking for love with a female black bear, but no bear in Wisconsin or Illinois suited him. Now he’s trundled his way through several states and been spotted in Hannibal, Missouri, and if he continues his southern path he is welcome to eat some peanuts in our backyard. Perhaps he might hook up at Ladies’ Night at the S_____ Peanut Buffet.

They have given him the name Bruno. Evidently Bruno is the default name for lovelorn bears; there was a more dangerous Bruno the brown bear in Europe at one time.

Our Bruno is a harmless, peaceable black bear. However, wildlife experts all agree, “Don’t approach the bear.” No one says, “Tickle his belly, feed him by hand, he likes that.”

*********

[hours later] BREAKING NEWS:

Okay, he really seems to be headed straight for us. I mean - I have driven on Interstate 79, the road he is on. It leads directly to our house. He’s about thirty miles away.

******

[then a few hours after that] BREAKING NEWS:

Okay ... now he’s 19 miles away.

Bruno, Bruno, you’re our bear / Have some peanuts / Please don’t eat us. 

******

[Updated the next morning]

The Internet claims that Bruno, after his long journey south, was intercepted by people from the wildlife department and from the Saint Louis Zoo. Supposedly he was rehydrated, sedated, and relocated to a large lake near Hannibal, which, yes, is back up north where he was at the beginning of this post. 

I am suspicious. This makes no sense. If the bear is looking for love (or as one local paper tweets, Bruno the Bear is DTF), are there willing female black bears at Mark Twain Lake? If not, won’t Bruno just wake up and say, “Damnit, I was just here. I walked in a circle.” Wouldn’t it make far more sense to truck him south of Saint Louis so he just jumps over the dangers of the city?

****** 

[minutes later, after consulting a map]

Aaahhh ... wait. I bet he’s being shipped south to Mark Twain National Forest, not back north to Mark Twain Lake. (We’re a little proud of Mark Twain.) That’s better. The Forest has a lot more going for it, including recent reports of other black bears, plus the largest nearby city is a college town. 

Still, if any Wisconsin bears pledged money for the Bruno walk-a-thon they might argue he cheated.

******

[later that morning]

Here’s the official story. It does not mention “Mark Twain” anything, but “Mark Twain”  was referenced enough last night that I’m pretty sure he was taken to Mark Twain National Forest. It will be interesting to see what he does next. What if he backtracks and turns up on the doorstep of the Saint Louis Zoo, DTF?

 

Review: Hamilton

I had no intention of getting yet another streaming service, especially a Disney one, but then Disney offered the filmed Broadway production of Hamilton on Independence Day. 

I had concerns. ”What if they sing too fast for me to understand the words? What if I’m the only person alive who doesn’t love Hamilton? What if I don’t ‘get’ it? What if I’m the old lady who doesn’t like change?”

(That last concern was because yesterday morning we watched Sweeney Todd. I complained that back in my day musicals had chords that progressed, not this rambling Sondheim nonsense, then Gary asked, “isn’t that just like an opera?” So now I have to accept Stephen Sondheim musicals, and now I was forced to accept yet another musical format in the same day.)

Of course, I loved it, just like everyone else in the world. I understood almost every line, even without the closed captioning I rely on for The Pallisers. King George was my favorite character, Lin Manuel Miranda is a genius, it deserved all the Tonys, I share all the popular opinions. 

Independence Day

Feeling fairly dependent this Independence Day. Dependent on the CDC for a vaccine, on Amazon for toilet paper, on the grocery delivery, on the news. 

I don’t mind depending on the government. Were I in a house three miles east over the Missouri River, my local government would have sufficient sense to require that I wear a mask. As it is, I am under the thumb of the Saint Charles government, where we evidently have taxation without education. St. Charles feels its unmasked citizens can be “trusted to do the right thing.” 

Based on the number of masks I’ve seen around, “do the right thing” means “open your maw as wide as possible and infect everyone, and only the holy will survive.”

Perhaps in December I will emerge and find that all the unmasked patriots are dead in the streets. That would be interesting, or at least an education.

New Vacation Options

Now is the time transportation companies should begin to concoct new ways to travel.

Just like everyone in the current circumstances, until there is a vaccine I would only consider traveling domestically by car. I’d be poking along in little-four hour jumps, inching my way to national parks, or Machu Picchu, or the Yukon. It would take time, but I’d get there.

Were I to travel overseas, well, first they’d have to have me. But let’s say they allow the dirty Americans in again. I couldn’t fly there unless we were shuffled in to a gutted plane one by one, told to stand on a x, and they we would have a vacuum tube lowered around us that sealed us in (with our own personal house air in a slow-release canister). 

I could only get on one type of cruise. 1) One that runs at turbo speeds and gets up to Europe in two days. 2) We would sleep in those Japanese hotel drawers, again, with our own imported air, run through tubes up our noses. And we would have to be catheterized as well, I suppose. Price you pay. 3) During the day we would be required to be up on deck in the sunshine. I suppose we could be on deck chairs with our heads in space helmets. 

Well, come to think of it, why don’t we just use space helmets for everything now? Can’t touch your face, can’t contaminate other people. It could have an air conditioning system so you won’t get hot or fog your glasses. So, maybe it’s time for me to invest in Tesla stock: I’m guessing they’ll be making the personal space helmets.

Of course, there will be someone saying, “The government can’t make me wear a space helmet!”  Or the President refuses to wear his space helmet in photos.

Weekly Paint Progress: 7/2

This weeks the crypts went from this ... 

... to this:

It is clear I need to apply tape to this one to keep the lines moving to the vanishing point. It’s wobbly already.

 The beachscape went from this ...

to this:

I don’t quite understand why those grasses are painted in those colors - they get painted over entirely.

Weekly Paint Progress: 6/25

This week the crypts in New Orleans went from this ...

... to this ...

The small painting went from this ...

... to this ...

Some Bad Bunny News

A friend posted that the latest virus plague is (deep breath) Rabbit hemorrhagic Disease Virus serotype 2 (RHDV-2).

At first I was relieved that this particular virus only strikes rabbits. I read a little further and thought, “Perhaps it’s just in Utah,” but then I saw this:

“How can you tell if a rabbit has the disease? Infected wild rabbits may be lethargic and not flee when approached.”

“Oh no,” I thought, “not the chunky bunny.”

I fear that the fearless, chunky rabbit of stone might not be long for the world. Or, potentially, people will creep up on these bold bunnies and capture them and eat them, and then we will have an even more novel coronavirus to deal with (or, in my country, ignore).

Pan

Gary, after decades of hating the cast iron pan, found a steak recipe that calls for cooking a thick steak in an oven then searing it in a cast iron pan. The pan has been brought up from the basement. 

So now, he’s using it, and of course doesn’t know how to clean it (which, as we know, is to not clean it). He’s moved through the stages of cast iron ignorance: from scrubbing it with Brillo, to putting it in the dishwasher, to hand cleaning it with dishwasher soap. He’s not quite as far as my preferred method: scrubbing it with kosher salt.

So I had to spend a day reconditioning it. Shiny! 

I got this pan at an antique store 30 years ago, and until I reconditioned it this last time I don’t think I had tried to date it. The classification of “antique” at this store seemed to be “thirty years old,” so I assumed it was from the 60s. The markings on the back suggest it’s from the 1920s or 30s. 

I confess, Jessica and KC, this pan has been through only mild earthquakes, so it hasn’t been as abused as your cast iron plumbing.

Weekly Paint Progress: 6/18

So here’s the next big project. Mainly grey with some hints of color. Three colors. How hard can that be?

Here’s the start:

For the small painting I have gone through all of the projects in the book that appeal to me, so now on to the others.

I know the drawing below looks skimpy, but that’s all the book tells you to do.

An Old Bad Penny Turns Up

Had I any outstanding debts I would gladly cop to them, but we have none. Still, a debt collection agency named Portfolio Recovery began calling me twice a day this past month. Of course, you can never call them back, because they call from a variety of numbers so that you can’t call them or block them.

I put up with the ringing phone for a month, then finally contacted a free service that TeddyJ provides, and they gave me an actual phone number I could use to speak to a person at Portfolio Recovery.

I did speak to a young woman there. I am afraid I had a tone. I was difficult. I didn’t like giving out the last four numbers of our social security numbers because the first three numbers are some algorithm of the state and year of your birth, and then you have half the number, but I reminded myself I got the phone number from TeddyJ, an esteemed establishment of the highest integrity, so these debt collection people must be somewhat trustworthy.

After I gave her the end of Gary’s SSN she determined that they had a wrong number. 

Long-time readers know who the debt collection agency was looking for. 

Remember DoppleGary from years back?

Gary X. S_____, the owner of a local furniture company. who never paid his debts and was not in the phone book, along with his lovely wife Elaine? We got calls about his debts, and then eventually the process server came to our house after he abandoned a fancy house in Ladue and skipped out of a home on the beach in Florida. He disappeared after that and I assumed he and his new wife Marla went to prison.

Now I feel sorry for Portfolio Recovery, because they are trying to recover DoppleGary’s debt, and they are doomed. All I could do was tell them the man they wanted is a debt-dodging folk hero here in these parts.

Of course, now that we’ve elected an equally shady character as President, I can’t say DoppleGary will ever get his comeuppance. 

Baby Skunks, doo doo do do do doooo

They are best visible on at the beginning of the video, but below you will see why Gary loves the skunks. Sometimes they’re babies.

We have yet to see the money shot: the Baby Glamour skunks (known to the rest of the world as Hooded Skunks, lately of Mexico. They shouldn’t be this far north, but they are probably following the armadillos to our backyard.

Speaking of babies, some raccoons want to drink directly from the mom spigot.

Christmas Ornament

I don’t think I have ever ordered the annual Christmas ornament this early before.

Short of Christ’s return, I’m pretty sure nothing else in 2020 is going to be more significant than this.

(If Christ does return I promise I will buy another ornament. Or a set of Four.)

(If you want a pandemic ornament too, they’re at https://www.onceagainsam.com/)

Weekly Paint Progress: 6/11

This week the cenote was finally “finished.”

It was this...

... and then I took turpentine and “erased” the tree, and left reality behind entirely, and eventually it ended up like this:

... and really, I am calling it. It all looks kind of gaping and hairy now. Kind of ... evocative.  I don’t know where that’s coming from. I forgot the combination of colors I used to mix the blue-green for the water, and that was my favorite part. Now it’s green. Bleh. I want to burn this one.

This where it started. Note there is no hairy gaping void in the original.

On the other hand, the project where I have an end game and a step-by-step guide of how to get there, went from this ...

.. to this:

I’m supposed to add more details to the bowl and get it really exact, but you know what? I like that bowl exactly how it is and I’m done. (Click to increase to see the glory of the bowl.) I’m not doing anything else to this. I really like two thirds of this and I’m stopping. It’s supposed to be as exact as the one below, but no. Not going there.

I don’t know what the next thing is from the book, but the next big project is a black and white version of the crypts in New Orleans that will be tinted like the original set of teacups. Enough with the loose. Back to the painstaking and layers upon layers.

Weekly Paint Progress: 6/4

This week the cenote went from this ...

...to this ...

I need to work on my trees and bushes, which look utterly stupid and lumpy now. Maybe a little Bob Ross on YouTube. Maybe more yellow in the background. Oh, The only part I like is the stripey ground on the bottom left. I need more of that. Maybe a yellow overhang that circles around the cenote and something to make the bushes look a little less ... intestinal.

Man, “loose” is a pain in the ass.

The copper bowl went from this ...

to this ...

That cluster nearest the bowl is too white, but knowing how these things go I need to fix all the mistakes at the end.

Weekly Paint Progress: 5/28

This week the cenote went from this ...

to this ..

The top of the hole is too straight, and it needs a dappled shadow at the top of the hole, and I took the contrast down too much on the tree. Damn. Will this never end? The most satisfying part is adding the detail, but by the time I get there I am so sick with whatever I’m painting I want it to be over.

I had enough extra paint after I mixed up the ripples to match that I painted a background for something else:

... and the copper bowl went from this .. 

... to this ...

Space Launch

I was trying to get some context around Wednesday’s manned rocket launch. Who is flying? Who made the spacecraft? Where are they going?

(Some of those questions took me down a rabbit trail to the NASA astronaut page, where I read that evidently an astronaut is retiring. This is a strange concept. How can an astronaut retire? I suppose you could stop giving interviews? Your Wikipedia page is still going to say Astronaut.)

It’s confusing that we now have astronauts flying on private Tesla-built spacecraft. They’ll arrive at the launch pad in a Tesla: that’s just worrisome. It’s also worrisome that the NASA spaceflight head just stepped down days ago, but they assure us that it was because of a bad decision that doesn’t affect the mission.

Finally, I tracked down the name of one of the astronauts — seriously, imagine a 60’s child having to “track down” John or Virgil or Buzz or Wally — and it turns out he was born in St. Ann, the same suburb of St. Louis where my grandma lived. He went to Pattonville High School. (He was there a few years too late for me to play Six Degrees of High School Separation, every St. Louisian’s favorite game.)

Godspeed, Robert Behnken, astronaut now and forever.

Halloween Costumes

Halloween this year is going to be ALL about the topical costumes.

• Get a Qtip, cut off one end, and adhere the cut end with spirit gum just inside your nose. You don’t need to tickle your brain to look like you are getting a swab test.

 

• Put flour on your hair and skin, wear white clothes, a red MAGA hat, and be someone who injected bleach because the President suggested that might be a good idea. Or, paint on a fake tan and go as the person who tried to use sunlight to kill the virus. That could be a couples’ costume.

 

• Here’s another couples‘ costume: one person dons a white kitchen trash bag, the other wears pink and fashions a spiky coronavirus out of some old knitted Pussy hats from 2016, and the white blood cell in the trash bag can attack and absorb the pink coronavirus intermittently through the evening.

 

• Take a black t-shirt and some white fabric paint, and paint a pulmonary covid x-ray on the shirt:
  
  
  
• An obvious one for the blond ladies: all you need is a scarf.

• This coverall is just ten bucks at Amazon.

• For those of you with small children, it seems like there could be a child’s hand sanitizer costume cobbled out of one of those big water cooler bottles, but you would have to jam the child’s torso into the water bottle and then fill it partly with gelatin up to waist level. 

This all assumes there will be a Halloween this year.

Weekly Paint Progress; 5/21

This week the cenote went from this...

... to ... 

The shadow is too dark now, and the edge makes no sense, but that’s easy to fix. The tongue that juts out over sinkhole is gone now, because it was making no sense to me, other than it made the shadow. I’m not fixing it anything but the edge of the hole, and I daub some colors on the top right and call it.

I need to select my next practice from the book. I think I’m going to try for the purple flowers in the copper pot - only there’s a ridiculous amount of copper detail, and no explanation of how it’s done. It starts out loose:

... and then gets really delightfully detailed. Look at that bowl!

Should be fun.

Stone Rabbit

While the streets might be dotted with dead deer, the lawns are littered with live rabbits.

A few days ago I stepped out the front door and saw a chunky brown rabbit right outside. I expected it to dart off at my next step, but it just stared dully at me with leaden eyes while I walked within two feet of it. I collected the mail and the paper, and stopped by the rabbit on the way back in.

”Go away, dude.”

He stared. Not a panicked stare. A bored get-off-my-lawn-lady stare.

I opened the door and realized why he hadn’t escaped: I’d blocked his warren access with a large rock in an effort to dry the leaky basement. 

”Just go around the side. Plenty of ways into your warren.” 

He didn’t budge. I went inside and deposited the mail and the paper. I got some coffee. I looked outside again. Still there. I opened the front door to say, “Act like a rabbit, dude,” and he bounded away.

The next day he was in the middle of the back yard, immobile. Gary speculated that He was a She, and she was sitting on a nest. 

The day after that I went to look at the peonies in the side yard. First, I noticed the mulch in the peony bed on my left blocked the warren entrance. And, there on my right, sat the fearless phlegmatic rabbit. I figured I’d see how close I could get, maybe into foot-nudging territory. When I was one step away the rabbit bolted, five bonus rabbits exploded out of the peony bed, and all six vanished into the neighbor’s yard.  

I exclaimed either “Jesus Christ!” or “Fuck!” — I hope it was “Jesus Christ” because I immediately heard my neighbor tell his four year old daughter to “look at all the bunnies, sweetie!” Sweetie and Dad were looking out of their open back door. 

We had a nice talk about how he’s never seen so many rabbits, and he suspects there might be a rabbit nest under his back porch. I didn’t tell him there is a rabbit metropolis extending from his porch to mine, and I had blocked off all the entrances but his. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 5/14

This week the cenote went from this...

... to this ...

...and oh, do I hate it now. When the foreground bush dries it is going back to green-black there, and I don’t know what’s going on with that tongue hanging over the hole.

The teacup went from this ...

to this ...

... and I hate this too. Not a good week for painting. But I’m calling this done. This is what I was aiming for. Not quite right, especially on the teacup, but I’ve got so many layers of white and grey on that thing that I’d have to sandblast to get to a paintable surface.

This Post Brought to You by the Letter U

The entertainment I liked this month has all been on Amazon Prime (perhaps elsewhere too?) and all of it started with the letter U.

First - okay, so do you like funny Barenaked Ladies songs about depression? Do you enjoy the My Favorite Murder podcast? Do you like the contrast of dark subjects and light silliness? If so, check out Buzzfeed’s Unsolved: True Crime and Unsolved: Supernatural on Amazon. The True Crime one is essentially the My Favorite Murder podcast, but with giggly men instead. They include one of my favorite things: they write out some of the dialog onscreen, and somehow writing it out makes it funnier.  (You could have a drinking game with the word “snort”.) In the later seasons there is some clever work with the graphics. (Like everything, the first season and first set of hosts is rocky, so don’t go by that. Season 2 is like the second model year of a new car: they’ve worked the kinks out.)

In the true crime vein, I also watched the documentary Unseen, about a serial killer who preyed on marginalized women. Reviews on IMDB were love/hate. I saw the point of the haters, it was dull in parts — peppered with insanity. The convenience store owner -- what he said? Crazy! The visit to the bathroom? Jesus!

Finally, I think I remember seeing trailers for the series Upload at the movie theater. It’s a funny concept: if your death is imminent you can decide to have your consciousness digitally uploaded. It’s cute and mindless. Kind of a socially satirical rom-com.

Next month I guess it’s on to the V’s.

Not Quite the Blue Angels

So, our city, thankfully, was not hit hard enough by the Covid to qualify for a flyover by the Blue Angels, but we did get a flyover by the dashing, jaunty ... Stealth Bomber.

I felt the Stealth Bomber is an odd choice to honor our essential workers. You want Superman flying overhead to inspire you, you don’t want Batman.

I can attest to its stealth: I was outside at 5:16 and I did not see it or hear it.

Weekly Paint Progress: 5/7

This week the cenote went from this...

... to this:

The teacup went from this ...

to this ...

The left edge of the cup is a mess, because I am not patient enough. I like the table edge, though. I’m not going to do anything else but work on the many problems with the teacup. I’m leaving everything else as is.

Gary Update / Letter from The Donald

[Gary update: no virus in the swab test, and there was no antibody test - Gary misunderstood what the blood draw was for. They checked his liver numbers for some reason.]

Anyway. So, like all other direct tax depositors, we got a touching letter from Donald Trump letting us know he had sent us lots of money. The letter was definitely from him. Heart attack signature and everything.

I immediately passed it off to Gary, who read the back — which I hadn’t done. “Why is the President writing in Spanish?” he asked. The Spanish translation was on the back.

It surprised me that he would anger his base by admitting he had sent stimulus money to Mexicans. Perhaps he only sent it to the Some He Is Sure Are Good People. 

It reminded me of the Bush Rebate Check skit on Saturday Night Live.  (I have hunted for video, and I can’t find it because it was on a special Thursday Prime Time episode. But I found the transcript.)

President George W. Bush: (Will Farrell) [ holding large check ] I have a check here – that is a big check – made out to the U.S. Taxpayer, for the amount of $1,600, which is the average tax cut for a family of four under my plan. And all I’m asking in return, is you start being cool to me. Ever since I got here, people have had low expectations of the Bushie ... I’m asking you, America, to be my buddy. I’m giving you $1,600 bucks. Al Gore wouldn’t give you any money – he would bore you with one of his lectures, and give the money to a tree. Not me. I’m giving cash, in exchange for us becoming compadres ... Feel free to come down to the Bush White House – that’s 800 Pennsylvania Avenue – where I trade cash for your approval.

They need to revive that skit.

Weekly Paint Progress: 4/30

This week the cenote went from this ...

... to this, which took a lot of work but doesn’t seem that different, unless worse. Essentially I darkened some things and lightened some things and I will no doubt undo all of that. And I drew where a tree will be.

The teacup went from this ...

to this ...

 

Online Concerts

So, yesterday I mentioned online concerts. That’s my new favorite amusement. I’m defining “concert” as any time a musician sits down in front of an iPhone and puts himself out there. So far I’ve attended three of note. 

Barenaked Ladies are not offering concerts as such, they’ve been taping their parts separately (I suppose with a backing track) and submitting them as “selfie-cam jams.” These have been offered everywhere - Facebook, the app, maybe YouTube. They’re pretty polished, but they have some fun with the staging and guest appearances. However, the lead, Ed, does do concerts as a solo act each week and they’re nice and loose. For some reason I thought the first few were taped in his bathroom, probably because he did do a series of songs taped in his bathroom back in the day. He makes the mistakes I live for. I love live things, I love mistakes, I love people putting themselves out there and making it up on the go.

Friend Dave - I have a Facebook friend, Dave, who is a piano teacher / dueling piano player / church service accompanist, until social distancing dried up up much of his income. He’s been using Facebook to have a weekly live stream for 90 minutes in which he peppers the lyrics to rock songs with asides about the virus and shout outs to listeners who comment. (I get call outs often when there’s a key change. I have discovered that I love key changes.) I like the comments and I would like to see them at live concerts in the future. People could comment instead of trying to shout louder than the music.

Speaking of comments, Steven Page did a concert last weekend via Zoom, and about five minutes in the comments took a turn. Some bot filled the comments with racial and anti-Semitic slurs. He claimed to be excited that he was big enough for someone to hack the comments. That concert was very loose. I’m afraid he began with a little — understandable — overconfidence. I’m sure if I had performed The Old Apartment for 20 years that I too would assume the words would be committed to memory, but evidently not. 

Online concerts: some are free, some are Facebook donations, and the Steven Page one was eight dollars. You get the same sense of community you used to get from the applause, only now it comes from the comments. I like it, and in some ways I like it better than standing outside in the summer.

Blue Angels

I am very excited by the news that Thunderbirds are Go, as are the Blue Angels.

Some time in the next two weeks various fighter squads will be flying over major cities. They are scheduled to fly over cities hardest hit by the pandemic.

Only 50 people have died in Saint Louis (I don’t know about the metro region). So, in a way I hope we don’t see them in Saint Louis (Blue Angels of Death). 

Weekly Paint Progress: 4/23

Last week the cenote went from this ...

... to this ...

Now that the bowl of lemons are done, I am moving on to a teacup with lemons from the book:

Wow, the top of that teacup is way too high.

 

American Gods, or What Is Wrong With Me That I Am Not Enjoying the Most Popular Book by The Most Popular Author

Neil Gaiman is an esteemed author. American Gods is his most popular book.

I enjoy it while I’m actively reading it, but I will put it down for days and have no urge to pick it up again. I’ve had it for over a month and I’m only halfway done. This is very strange for me. Usually I’ll eat up a book in a few days. 

“I just don’t know where this book is going.” I thought. “What is wrong with me? The hero just seems to travel around the country —“

And of course, there’s my problem. I checked, and yes, what we have here is The Hero’s Journey, my very least favorite plot: episodic, wandering, no progression. I don’t like episodic plots. I demand progression even in my pop songs. 

The only hero’s journey I can remember liking in recent memory is 1917, and if you’ve seen it you know it’s a Heroes’ Journey, not a Hero’s Journey, and that’s what made it unique and surprising.

As I say, though, I am right at the midpoint, and that’s where things can often get much more interesting. I’ll keep plugging at it, and if I don’t like it I’ll approach it as if it’s a series of short stories. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 4/16 (free of Covid)

Last week the Mexican sinkhole/cenote looked like this:

... and now it looks like this:

The lemons went from this ..

... to this finished version. I really don’t like my version. I got the blue colors wrong.

Here is what it’s supposed to look like:

See how the lemons are all loose and chunky? I couldn’t do that. I even tried a new version and the lemons still don’t look loose and chunky. I might try just the lemons. They didn’t say to use the transparent colors, but those look transparent to me, or else I need to take the time to let every color dry.

Better idea, though, to move on. I’m doing these copies from the book to have some small successes, and if something isn’t a success, I should move on.

Covid Creatures

Pregnant raccoons show up in the daytime this time of year, looking for food, eating for five.

I was up at dawn and noticed what Gary calls a pregnant DayCoon wandering in the back yard. First, it was odd that she was wandering: usually the DayCoons eat desperately and then run away. She was tooling slowly around an area of the yard where there was no food or water. She was not on her way home, which is through the sewer in the back left corner. She was in the front right corner, by the neighbors’ fence.

She slowly scaled the fence, and instead of jumping down, pivoted at the top and crawled paw over paw back down the other side. I waited until I thought she was down before I raced out to see where she was headed, because she had no business being in that yard.

She was gone. Poof. I honestly thought I might have dreamed it. Then I thought, perhaps she’s gone through a hole in their fence and is in the front, in the street, headed for a different sewer.

No. She was not. A duck was in the middle of the street. A colorful, spectacular, quacking mallard duck. 

“Well, this is messed up,” I thought, and went to wake Gary up so he could see that the Wildlife is emboldened by the lack of traffic and are taking over our street, just like the supposed dolphins in the Venice canals and the elk wandering around New York City.

I threw open the front door to show him the spectacular duck, and saw it had moved to the middle of the driveway across the street, and was strangely less gorgeous. It wasn’t until I saw the male join her from his post in the middle of the street that I realized they were a couple, spectacular male and dowdy female. 

They waddled off down the street, side by side in sync like The Monkees, then they circled back and vanished into the backyard of the house across the street.

The injustice. Does the neighbor where the raccoon went have a yard with a giant pile of nuts? No. I suspect he has a hollow tree with a hole full of baby raccoons, though. Does the neighbor where the ducks went have a heated ground-level bird-bath? No. That neighbor has an in-ground pool. So not fair.

Covid Carbs

Early in the pandemic, on the day I tallied up all our available food, I sent Gary out for yeast packets. He came back with this Huge Bottle O’ Yeast:

It stayed on the shelf. The only thing I did with it was mail some in an envelope to Friend Anne, who was making sourdough because she had no yeast.

Then, eventually, four weeks into the Great Confinement, I made some bread. Such a disappointment. I made the conversion between instant and regular yeast correctly, but I added the extra quarter cup of water at the wrong time.That bread was so gummy and grey it had to be thrown away.

I’ve made yeast bread from scratch plenty of times, but this failure rocked my confidence so badly that I dug my 1990s bread machine out of the basement. 

What a delight to use! I had forgotten about the clunky industrious noises it makes, and the beeps, and the smells, and how it produces a simply perfect loaf of bread. So easy! I had an egg sandwich for breakfast and I will have a peanut butter sandwich for lunch.

I may not put that machine back in the basement ever again. Of course, I will wake up bloated and achy, but I imagine Gary will chew up all the bread before I get much more of it.

Mask Couture in Practice

Why look, you CAN make a face mask out of toddler underwear.

I have been assured by my friends that this is a level of creepiness that even they cannot abide, so I won’t be wearing it out and about.

Weekly Paint Progress: 4/9

Time to pick the next thing. I‘m going to try to step away from any exact representations, do something big and really loose based generally on this Mexican sinkhole:

... minus the rusty rail. 
Here’s the start. Loose, I say.

The lemons continue. This is a copy of something that’s already loose, so that makes it easy.

This week the lemons went from this ...

... to this ....

I hope the next thing in the walk through is to darken the lemons. There’s something wrong about the relative darkness of the leaves and the lemons.

 

Update

Late January - Remember back in January, when I thought my brother might have cancer?

Mid February - So, he ended up pursuing this diagnosis at a better hospital. Got a stent. Got an oncologist for his potential cancer.

Late February - Things stalled because he mentioned to the doctor that he now has some condition that makes him terrified when he comes out of anesthesia. That put the kibosh on any forward motion, because the doctor saw my brother’s mental health issues and insisted a psychiatrist sign off on this. Eventually he was convinced otherwise, but that took until mid-March.

Mid March - A new surgeon won’t go in and do the biopsy / duct repair because of the virus.  My brother has all the underlying conditions: heart disease, asthma, diabetes, and whatever the other risk factor is (cancer?), so he wasn’t keen on leaving the house anyway.

Late March - The mid-March virus-fearing surgeon has been replaced by the previous February surgeon who is now going to do surgery on my brother next week. So, is he doing a biopsy? No. Is he doing a duct repair? No. He’s putting in another stent. You know, like he did in February.

No one is saying anything about tumors, or masses, or malignancy. 

I’m baffled by all this. I don’t get this blasé attitude about malignancies. I am telling myself that the reason that the original surgeon is going back in is that he might be able to tell if there is any change or growth.  

And before you ask, yes, I have seen the documentation and this is not a delusion. Eight weeks is a long time, though. Isn’t it?

Weekly Paint Progress: 4/2

This week the lamp finished up. Or at least I have reached peak disgust. It started like this:

... and it ended up like this:

Some things I like, especially the cast shadows on the table, and the water in the vase, and the base of the lamp. I don’t like the tulips at all.

It was originally this:

I much prefer the small lemons, which went from this:

... to this:

 

A Pepy’s Diary Entry for the New Plague

This is the day I usually catalog corporate April Fool’s jokes, but April Fool’s is cancelled this year. Google isn’t even doing anything.

Instead, a most excellent jape for April First: Pepy’s Coronavirus Diary from The Fence.

New Responsibility

Last month my only Facebook responsibility was to announce celebrity deaths.

This month I have an added duty: outing the Coronavirus Task Force Briefing Face-Touchers.

I watch every Coronavirus Task Force Briefing, every day, every minute, and document when a doctor or politico moves their viruses closer to their respiratory systems.

I understand when some people touch their faces. Recently Agriculture secretary Sonny Perdue isn’t a doctor, and I assume he’s the Perdue Chicken Magnate, so even thought he touched his face a record eleven times, I forgive him.

I forgive him. He makes no claims to be a doctor or a President.

Actually the president touches his face, on average, only once per briefing.

He isn’t a doctor, like Secretary Ben Carson, shown here coughing directly into his hand:

The people I look to, the ones I ask the most of, are the doctors. Doctor Scarf (I can’t tell you her real name, it’s something like Biloxi, but I am certain we all know her as Doctor Scarf) and then everyone’s favorite: Doctor “I can’t just wrestle the President to the ground [when he lies]” Fauci.

Doctor Fauci is going to touch his face, and I forgive him, because he owns it.

The one that bothers me is Dr. Scarf. She is the opposite of Dr. Fauci.

And then days later:

“Did I touch my face by accident,” sure. Give me a break.

Of course, so you know who never never ever touches his face? Well, two people, the Surgeon General, who should be in charge, and then the man who is actually in charge, everyones favorite cyborg, Vice President Pence.

(And what happened to the dark doctor? Why isn’t she in the meetings any more? Was it the blinking? She blinked a LOT.)

Pence is on camera every day, and he has not cracked once. This has only served to convince me that in the day the Veep touches his face we will all drop dead in our homes and turn to dust. If I survive I will post, “PENCE TOUCHES FACE IT’S ALL OVER.”