Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Weekly Paint Progress: 4/17

This week the Book Cover went from this:

... to this.

I discovered my remaining canvas and the book were the same size, so the only way to go was carbon paper, or, as some might say, cheating.

TWIL: Apollo 1

So, while worrying about space in the early morning, as you do, I wondered if I remembered the names of the Apollo 1 astronauts. (I Googled. Turns out I did.)

Among the other related searches Google recommended was, “What happened to Apollo 2 to 6?”

“Well they were boring,” I thought. “Unmanned.” 

I had no idea, but Apollo 1 wasn’t Apollo 1 until after the tragedy. It was originally just Mission AS-204.  They bumped up the mission name to Apollo 1 to honor the dead astronauts.

Then, because there had been two other missions equivalent to that one, those became imaginary Apollo 2 and 3, until they started up again with the planned unmanned Apollos 4 - 6. 

I mean, I am just gobsmacked I didn't know this. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 4/10

Okay - any further tweaks to the glasses I am keeping to myself.  

Instead, I am assigning myself something easy but odd.

I mentioned before that this book was owned by my teenaged Aunt Dolores.

I'm going to try to paint that portrait (hard, but not Granceil hard) as an oil painting (perhaps less temptation to be exact if it's a different medium). 

Oddly, though I've had it almost all my life (she was gone before I was born), and even though I painted Watercolors for a time, I never tried to paint that. (My teacher would have said that subject wasn't appropriate for watercolors.)

We will see what happens. It is a Walter Foster book, so I will have step-by-step guidance.

Pickles up close and personal

I had to see the 270 /Manchester Road pickles for myself.

There they are in  the purple circle, exactly as promised. They better stay there until they are fully brined.

I run in semi-political circles

Today was election day in St. Louis, and in the tony suburbs where friends live, and in my sleepy burb.

(A brief primer for non-St. Louisans: every suburb surrounding St. Louis is its own city, with its own mayor and police force. There are about 100 of these cities encircling St. Louis city proper. If you ask any resident of those 100 cities where they live they will say "St. Louis." This is usually a convenient lie. Few folks live in St. Louis: it's a wee five-mile square patch. In my work department of  seventy people, only two of them honestly live in Saint Louis.)

Those two friends get to vote for who might be Mayor of St. Louis. This is a big, big deal. I know one is political. I'm certain he's met the mayor or danced with a woman who danced with a man who danced with the mayor. 

On the other hand, when I had dinner last week with Friend #3, she had just come from meeting the candidate for mayor of her city. The population of her city is almost double that of the "Big" City, yet her mayor will have almost no news, scandal, or visits to MSNBC. 

I live in a burb in the other side of a river, and my burb has absolutely no cachet, and technically it isn't even one of the cities surrounding St. Louis, shut up, I still say I live in St. Louis, and so do all my neighbors. I did not get to vote for mayor, but I did vote for the school board. It was particularly sweet because not only have I met them, their friends outbid me for the sex basket I should have won at the fundraising trivia a few months back.

At this point, they seem to be winning.

Credit card

Well, yet another credit card has been compromised. As in the past, the credit card company has alerted me. I get the call, I look at the statement, I see outrageous charges to hotels and florists and lingerie shops. 

I suppose those charges are to find out if I am the type of person who would turn a blind eye to infidelity. Or perhaps I would hire a detective instead of immediately disputing the charge.

This time I found my card is filled up with charges to the cable company I quit two and a half years ago, and charges to restaraunts I haven’t set foot in since 2022. 

I suppose they’re again checking to see how closely I read my credit card statement. I don’t. That’s been Gary’s job since he retired. He says he looks at the statements, but if so he must have been perplexed by the strange one-off charges. Like the one for the Uber. Or the one where I rented a ski lodge for a month. 

Oddly, the credit card company didn’t raise an alert for that one, but when they saw I bought ridiculously high-end sneakers in Los Angeles they got suspicious. 

They weren’t suspicious about the restaurant charhes because all those restaurants are in the community where I grew up. It makes me think there’s an extra physical copy of my card out there. The replacement was supposed to have been delivered two days ago, and it isn’t here. 

It all makes we want to request a new card number every month. I wonder if there’s a way to do that.

TWIL: scrupulosity

I was thinking about the myfitnesspal app I use to track my calories. Some vlogger bragged that she didn’t obsess about it. She didn’t track diet soda or diet jello, for example, or pills. 

“Good Lord, who WOULD,” I thought, and realized, thirteen-year-old me would, absolutely. Because there is safety in the rules. If you don't follow the rules, you are cast out. 

“What religion was I at thirteen,” I wondered, and then realized, it was the worst of all religions for rule-followers. Catholic. At thirteen I was on the cusp of Catholic and Southern Baptist. 

If you know an obsessive who is in a rule-heavy religion, then know this thing I learned this week: there is a website called Scrupulosity that will help you with religious obsessions.

The site says it is multi-denominational. I suppose they might help Catholics with OCD who are trying to stop praying the rosary. Or maybe they might help Muslim thirteen-year-olds. Can you imagine being obsessed with the direction of Mecca at any given moment? (Google’s Qibla Finder will point you straight.)

Review: September 5

I watched September 5, the Oscar-nominated movie about how ABC covered the Munich terrorist attack. It tells a familiar story from decades ago, but still forces you to think about how things have or haven’t changed. 

One thing that remains unchanged are the phrases the reporters use to dance around the truth. In the script the producer says, “We never said it was a fact. We used, ‘As we are hearing.’” Today it’s “Now, these are unconfirmed reports, but ...” 

The newsmen debate if they can broadcast a murder on live television, and decide they can’t. I think that rule is still in place. I distinctly remember times CNN has done a freeze-frame before shots ring out. On the other hand, every September 11th we all watch a replay of the moments when thousands of people die. 

Other details were fascinating as well. I wonder if there were similar squabbles between ABC News and ABC Sports when the World Series earthquake happened. I wonder if the directors feel like they’re choreographing tragedy when they say, “Zoom in on camera three.” And i already found which the character who was a compilation of multiple real people: the one who also serves to remind us the casual sexism of the seventies. 

It was very fast-paced, interesting, thought-provoking. I recommend.

Weekly Paint Progress: 4/3

This week the tumblers went from this:

... to this.

I was just going to start with this value study and then add color later, but you know what? 

I’m just going to stop. It’s good, and if I do anything else it will just go downhill. 

 

April Fools Recap

I was so elated to see a post about the firing of the baseball Cardinal’s manager that I immediately re-posted it to Friend #4, without reading the last few words -- the ones that tagged it as a prank.

One was an added touch of delight on top of a time I had recently been fooled. As I have mentioned before, the Fascinating Horror YouTube channel posts the (seemingly) random spoofs of disaster movies. Turns out it’s an April Fool’s Day tradition. 

But the last one was my favorite. I truly believed that they repainted the giant Amoco sign. This was an article that slowly became more and more outrageous, so I got that feeling of satisfaction when the penny dropped.

That is off-center. They really should re-paint that.

New Word for the Day: Anodyne

Someone at work casually sniffed and described something as “anodyne" and of course I got all excited, because I have never used this word. Another new word? Hit me up.

Anodyne is strange in that there are two definitions, and they seem to have very little in common.

an·o·dyne  /ˈanəˌdīn/  

 

adjective

not likely to provoke dissent or offense; inoffensive, often deliberately so.

"anodyne New Age music"

 

noun

a painkilling drug or medicine.

"she had even refused anodynes"

(Yes, that reference to New Age music is a bit snippy.)

Really going to try to work anodyne into conversation this week. Salience and sinecure are my two most recent new words and they haven't come up at all. Anodyne seems more useful.

TWIL: The return of the pickles

This is actually a callback to a previous TWIL: the one about the pickles on the median.

It's been over a month and a half with no pickles. Yesterday the news dropped on the Facebook site: there's a new jar of pickles in town. 

Reaction is subdued, though. This new jar of pickles seems to be home made. They are ... pale. I don't know, it might be some kind of political statement. 

Whose Live Anyway?

Went out last night to watch a live performance at the Factory in Chesterfield.

• The Factory is very airy. I felt very confident that there's no Covid fluttering down into my face.
• The show I watched with Friend #3 and Friend Anne was a live offshoot of the improv show Whose Line Is It Anyway with some of the original improv players and some Canadian faces, plus -- and this is exciting, old folks -- Tim Meadows from Saturday Night Live.
• The evening opened my innocent eyes to what improv is. You know what? Sometimes. when I'd watch the tv show I suspected perhaps they weren't improvising. Or that they'd improvised all day and the best bits got distilled down into a thirty minute show. After watching this I am certain there was some poetic license going on, because this was suspicious.
  
  • They called for people to write dialog suggestions on slips of paper, then integrated those "random" quotes into whatever skit they improvised toward the end. 
    That's odd, I thought, I can almost see that slip of paper and I'm fairly sure what it says doesn't match what he's saying.
  • They would call for suggestions of, say, a TV show. Everyone around me yelled out "Severence". The host cried out, "I heard someone say [forgettable show name]" 
    That's odd, I thought, I didn't hear that and I'm in the cherry seats in row G. Plus with Severence someone could bleat like a goat; that would be funny.
  • At the end I voiced my suspicions to Friends Anne and 3, who essentially said, "Duh."

That said, there was a lot of genuine wit. I had earlier twice clambered over a familiar-looking bearded man at the end of my aisle (shrimp for dinner) and later the host called on him with "Yes, J.D. Vance."  That was clever and clearly off the cuff. 

It was generally very funny, even if it did take the scales from my eyes. 

Alarming change in Ticketmaster

I am going to a show tonight, and for some reason, my eyes landed on the Ticketmaster terms and conditions.

Essentially, it says it’s not their fault if you catch Covid.

It makes me wonder when this showed up and when it will go away.

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/27

Okay - a challenge again. I am up for the glass, and I don't know how I'll do on the ellipses.

Totally using tracing paper and carbon paper. Don't care. 

TWIL: Aniiiiiiimals in spaaaaace

Lots of space news recently, with 50% unsuccessful lunar landings and the stranded shuttle astronauts. I know I take the space program too much to heart -- if anyone wanted to low-key trigger me they could change my Outlook alert to the NASA coms beep -- but it made me think, why do we need to risk people? Robots have been doing the job on the moon and Mars. 

And you know, we weren't always determined to risk human life. I found this article on all the animals who stepped in for humans in the early space programs. 

"Yeah, dead animals," you say, and HAH, you are partially wrong.

Here is a summary of the retired space explorer animals in the article above.

September 20, 1951 (U.S.) A monkey named Yorick and 11 mice were recovered after a missile flight of 236,000 feet at Holloman Air Force Base, New Mexico.

May 22, 1952 (U.S.) Two monkeys, Patricia and Mike, were recovered after a similar missile flight. Pat and Mike eventually died at the National Zoo of natural causes.

August 15, 1951 (Russia) The Soviets sent dogs Dezik and Tsygan (“Gypsy”) into suborbit. They were successfully retrieved. "Shortly afterwards, Smelaya (‘Bold’) and Malyshka (‘Little One’) were launched. Smelaya ran off the day before the launch. The crew was worried that wolves that lived nearby would eat her. She returned a day later and the test flight resumed successfully."

September 15, 1951 (Russia) Another Russian dog nopes out of history. "One of the two dogs, Bobik, escaped and a replacement was found near the local canteen. She was a mutt, given the name ZIB, the Russian acronym for 'Substitute for Missing Dog Bobik.' The two dogs reached 100 kilometers and returned successfully."

November 3, 1957 (Russia) Okay, full disclosure, I'm including a dead dog here: famous first dog in orbit, Laika. I'm including her because the article said she "was hastily trained" and put aboard Sputnik 2. Trained? Trained to do what? Math? Engineering?

May 2, 1959 (U.S.) Monkeys Able and Baker were launched in the nose cone of a rocket to a 300-mile altitude, and both were recovered unharmed. 

December 4, 1959 (U.S.) Monkey Sam took a Mercury capsule (so cool) up 51 miles and then splashed down in the ocean. "He was later returned to the colony in which he trained, where he died in November 1982 and his remains were cremated." Again, what training? 

January 21, 1960 (U.S.) Sam's mate, Miss Sam, did the same and also returned to this mysterious monkey training colony.

January 31, 1961 (U.S.) Ham became the first chimpanzee in space, paving the way for John Glenn. Ham then retired: first to the National Zoo, then he joined fellow chimps at the North Carolina Zoological Park in Asheboro.

There were others (including a French cat) but evidently they couldn't be trained to land lunar modules.  

It's a good article with a sense of humor, and I recommend it. 

But seriously, though, send robots to Mars, have the robots build bigger robots, get all your assembly and exploration done by robots. 

A spoiler-free, and as such, cryptic post

Seriously, this was the best Emmy-worthy acting I've seen in a long time. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/20

This week the Stickybones went from this:

... to this.

Man, that was an academic exercise. It sparked absolutely no joy. I’m calling it done out of boredom.

TWIL: Blind daffodils

Daffodils that have leaves but no bloom are called “blind daffodils”.

Some experts write articles on the causes of “daffodil blindness” but most don’t go that far.

No one says “Why are my daffodils blind?”

My daffodils are fully sighted, thank you, finally.

 

Signs of spring

Not only are the daffodils up and blooming, finally, and not only are all the animals boning, but we have the true harbinger of spring.

The tornadoes* are spiraling.

The biggest outbreak was last night. After a week of threats about the impending bomb cyclone, the news got to report on the actual outbreak. 

At one point we were both in the basement with four devices open, two different stations, and the National Weather Service for the unvarnished facts. To be fair, the facts were that there were two simultaneous tornadoes* and we were sandwiched between the two danger zones.

We came out fine. Just a few limbs down. The Arch is fine too, though one tornado danced around it.

* Plural of tornado? I had to look this up. One tornado, two tornadoes, three tornadoes, four. 

Blood Moon 2025

Once again, I was enticed by the "Blood" moon eclipse, and again I ask, is my blood just a different color than everyone else? I did not see anything resembling blood red, even though I set the alarm and got up at 2 am. 

I saw the same brownish tan moon I saw the last time there was a "blood" moon.

It was not the red I was promised in many animated images. 

NASA, at least, was honest.

Call it an amber moon, or a reddish-brown moon. It's not blood. I mean, we have to standardize this. Is there a Pantone shade called "Blood"? 

[Moments later] Oh good lord, there is.

Top left. See? That's what I was expecting.

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/13

This week the Stickybones went from this:

... to this. 

I am calling it. Daffodil day 2025

Is there an actual flower? No. But I see yellow, that’s all I ask for.  

Finally! Eleven days into March. Never been this late. Ever. 

TWIL: Why my driveway is covered in bird poop

Frankly, I'm no stickler for driveway tidiness, but this is an excessive ratio of bird poop to driveway.

It happened overnight.

I'm fairly certain it's the crows, just because Gary's switched from feeding the crows before the raccoons, instead of the opposite, so we have just an absurd number of crows.

Then I did some research and found the logic behind the poopfest.

1. Crows are territorial, especially if they have found a reliable food source.

2. Crows can mark their territory with poop. 

3. Crows get especially territorial during mating season, which begins in March.

So not only is it skunk fucking season, it is crow boning season. Hence the poopway.

Mouse Detective: Episode Three

The Mouse Detective returned for a follow-up visit. Seriously, I get excited when the doorbell rings and the Rottler van is outside, because I know she'll know where the vermin are and what they had for dinner and what religion they practice.

I was ready for her. "Mouse poop. Fluff is moving. Steel wool is gone. And a dead smell was in the basement, but no traps sprung. Also, there might be a skunk, but it's mating season. The skunk smell goes through the whole house, though. Maybe it lives under the air-conditioner?"

(I was excited about my little contribution. Reddit said if the smell is in the whole house it might have come inside through the AC unit. I did look by the air-conditioner outside and saw no evidence of skunks, but still thought it was a good theory.)

“Let’s start with the mice,” she said.

In the basement, she showed me where a mouse had chewed a bit at the poison, and said that while usually poisoned mice just die quietly without making a stink, sometimes ... they do, if it’s a recent death. 

She said, “It got past the steel wool. I’ll go out and replace it. I need to look for the skunk anyway.”

Minutes later she rang the doorbell. She looked both amazed and alarmed.  “You’ve got a skunk!”

“Let me put on my shoes,” I said, and I followed her out to the air-conditioner, where she pointed to an OBVIOUS TRAIL in the grass leading from under the neighbor’s trash can, to right under the air-conditioner, then it followed the foundation until it went into a tiny tunnel under the fence and came up on the other side and vanished in the mint bed.

Also, she pointed at a dark mass and said, “Skunk poop.”

(I realize now I’d imagined this was a male skunk advertising his presence with his smell, like “Here I am, ladies, come lay with me in my mint bed,” but no. This excellent description of skunk boning makes it clear the smells are from an unhappy lady skunk who is tired, damnit, after a long day of masking her smell under a garbage can, and she just wants to get home to her mint bed, but then a male charges out of a tunnel and accosts her and bites her neck.)

“I could trap them,” she offered, “And release them in the woods?”

“Well then they’d come right back. Let them be. It’ll be over soon.” 

And while I wouldn't mind sending all the DTF skunks on a free vacation, because the smell still wakes me up at three-thirty, it’s nicer to think of the smell as an effective squirt of skunk mace to fend off some neck-bitey asshole male. 

Weekly Paint Progress: 3/6

This week the Stickybones went from this:

... to this.

My favorite part of KDHX relocates

Keith Dudding may have been foist from KDHX, but he has a new home on the internet. Same show, interviews, same Keith.

If it is 11:00 am on Saturday morning, and you go to www.rootsfm.org you will see this screen:

If you scroll down through the listings you will will see Keith’s show at its regular time, Saturday 11 am.

If you click Down Yonder you will hear bluegrass, and an all-new show from Keith. Interviews and everything. 

Oscars 2025

My predictions were a bust. I only called  best picture (Anora) and supporting actor (Culkin). (And seriously how much did Kieran call on his relationship with his brother Maccauley for his portrayal? That must be fraught.)

Was the thing with Adam Sandler necessary? 

The bickering couple with the iPhone - did the man chastise the woman, take the phone, and re-read the entire speech from the beginning? 

If I were an actor, I would find Adrien Brody insufferable and refuse to work with him. 

Will Kieran Calkin name the fourth child Oscar? 

Also, how did Ariana Grande sit in that dress? Did she have a little tuffet?

TWIL: Grizzles

I was watching All Creatures Great and Small, and [SPOILERS] there is now a baby, Jimmy.

At one point the closed captioning said:

JIMMY GRIZZLES

I assumed this was some baby term I missed on account of being all childless and happy.

Oddly when I tried to call the closed captioning up on a different TV setup it was “Jimmy babbles.” Not the same as fretful. Or do people just never know? 

 

Oscar Picks

My Oscar picks are based on nothing. I’ve only seen one nominated movie this year, A Real Pain, which is therefore my favorite. 

Let’s see if my gut calls have any luck tomorrow night.

Original Screenplay: September 5. I wanted to see it until the fancy Plaza Frontenac theater shut down.

Costume Design: Nosferatu. It's the most challenging. Conclave? Those outfits are prescribed. 

Documentary Short Film: I am Ready, Warden. If they are creative enough to write that title it must be good. 

Animated Feature Film: Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl. 

Supporting Actress: Cynthia Erivo, so Wicked isn’t shut out.

Supporting Actor: Kieran Culkin from A Real Pain, obviously, even though he wasn’t playing a supporting part. I hope he references that in his speech.

Lead Actress: Isabella Rossellini, because she’s royalty.

Lead Actor: Ralph Fiennes, so Conclave isn't shut out.

Best Picture: Anora. I heard commentators saying it was magical. No one said Conclave was magical.

Weekly Paint Progress: 2/27

This week Stickybones went from this:

... to this.

It’ll be blue and gold, my favorite color combo.

The intimacy of handwriting

How many people can you identify by their handwriting?

I could look at a letter today and tell you if my mother wrote it - which is odd because she had perfect handwriting. Perfection by definition means conformance. You’d think all the perfect ones would be indistinguishable. But there was something about the weight of her strokes that set her off. 

I could identify if my Dad wrote something, too. He wrote in block letters: small cramped block letters on graph paper for work or listing video titles cross-referenced by number, or big block letters for listing the HOUSE RULES on the back of the lid to the board game. 

My brother’s handwriting was atrocious. My grandfather’s was atrocious but in a different way.

When I taught high school, I could identify which students left their notes behind in class, because I gave them so many writing assignments. There was a time I think I could do the same with my friend’s notes. 

Now, the only living hand I can identify is Gary's. It makes me think there’s a special intimacy in knowing someone by their penmanship. I mean, if you were a woman at work and a man publically said, “Hey, you left your [random, unsigned] shopping list in the cafeteria,” would there be gossip? I think there might be. 

It’s a little like being in possession of a lady’s handkerchief in Victorian times. Something ordinary that implies a scandalous level of intimacy. And so what’s the tell for the next generation? Identifying a beloved’s phone by the sound it makes when it vibrates? 

Today, though, knowing someone’s handwriting is like knowing a birthmark on the back of a thigh.

Daffodil Countdown 2

This is so discouraging. My dadfodils are always up by the end of February.

It’s been a run of 2 days of spring weather.

There is no way I see yellow in three days. No way. Honestly, this has not happened in 36 years.

Review: Still Life

Brief Encounter came up in conversation lately, and I realized, I’ve never seen the original Noel Coward play it was based on: Still Life. Here’s the script. It’s problematic. (Not as problematic as another of his works that was produced at the same time, which was staged once and then never saw daylight again.)

The problem is that it's flat, and for a play about falling in love and passion vs social norms it falls heavily on the social norms side. The last words are "Thank you." (And there's no narration from Laura. Also, if you are wondering, they have been happily boning for ten weeks when the owner of the love nest interrupts them.) 

I saw a few radio adaptions that tried to jazz up the ending. But this one was the best: the ending is chilling.

[SPOILER] There was a new bit about how the Thursdays they spend together are the only "real" part of their lives, and then at the end when she's walking at the train station, she says, in the same rhythm as the train, "Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday, Saturday, Sunday, Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Friday..." 

It’s just heartbreaking. I bet Noel Coward is just kicking himself in the afterlife. 

TWIL: Moon landing in a few days

There’s going to be a moon landing a week from now. I stumbled across a SpaceX launch video, otherwise I would not have known.

It’s a supply payload, but it is going to land on the moon. One thing they’re sending on ahead is a device to suck up samples. It’s called the “PlanetVac”. It saddens me they didn’t call it the “LunarRoomba”. 

I know the U.S. wasn’t the first to land a spacecraft on the moon, or the last, but it’s nice to have another televised lunar event to look forward to.

[SPOILERS] The Fascinating Horror You Tube Channel

I have mentioned this before: my new nightly ritual is to lull myself to sleep with a few episodes of this Fascinating Horror YouTube channel.

It's just so soothing. It's all these stories of disaster, incidents, crashes, and the like delivered in a very factual, pleasant English voice. No drama. Just a soothing gentleman stating things like, "There were no survivors" and "Soon the reactor core had melted."

Last weekend I was transfixed by the short documentary of the Glass Tower, which recounted a dreadful fire in high-rise glass skyscraper. It was the usual format: a) spooky music followed by b) synopsis of the event, then c) historical background, d) disaster, e) aftermath, and f) return of the spooky music.

I was deep into the disaster, and I had just gotten past the point in which the poor souls in the tower were down to just one means of escape (such as it always is) when intrepid firefighters set off explosions that broke the water towers on the roof and doused the flames.

"That is amazing!" I thought. "I bet that heroism probably helped inspire that movie in the seventies. What was it? 'The Towering Inferno.'" I paused YouTube and searched for more information about the infamous Glass Tower disaster.  

Wikipedia routed me right to the plot synopsis of The Towering Inferno, of course, because that's exactly what he'd been recounting. Then I looked at the title of piece:

The Glass Tower: A Short "Documentary" 

Yes. Quotation marks. All the other ones don't use quotes. They weren't on the title card, but they were there in the YouTube listing.

He even said celebrities like Paul Newman and Fred Astaire were in attendance at the event that started the fire. All done with a straight, matter-of-fact tone.

I'd been had. I loved it.

I'm back to the real disasters now. I'm in the middle of the Isla Nublar Incident, where a company builds an island resort and stocks it with cloned animals. It sounds like a bad idea to me, for some reason.

Daffodil Countdown

The maintenance man just arrived at the house and announced, "It's stupid cold."

I disagree. It's seven degrees. I don't get mad about the cold until it's below zero. You've got seven; be glad about that.

You know who should be mad? The daffodils. This is the time of year I report on  the daffodil progress. Last year the blooms were up by now. 

It’s looking pretty sad for the daffodils right now. 

 

Granted that's about five inches of snow. And maybe the one on the left is a bud.  But I don't think they’ll be up by March.

Weekly Paint Progress: 2/20

Okay - Here's the next study: the Stickybones.

... and I'm not doing a photo to compare it to. Just not doing it. That's what made me crazy with this one (I made a few tweaks that aren't dry).

Air Flip

I was all set to get things done on Monday, and then the story about the plane flipping over and lying on its back on the Toronto runway trapped me on the couch all evening.

I want to know all the details. First, I want a digitally enhanced video that shows exactly what happened when it flipped, because what I have is too snowy. 

Next, I want to see the other side of the plane. Not the side with the exit doors. The other side, which I imagine suffered all the fire damage, because something caused that big black cloud of smoke (that I misinterpreted as a copse of trees the first twenty times I saw it).

I haven’t seen the news since I started in on work. It was never clear on yeterday’s news reports how many wings popped off. Dropping the wings was by design, they said Monday. Now they say one wing vanished. Is there a wing in the other side of the plane? Let’s see it.

Finally, the article above may have been updated since I saw it, but how are they having trouble finding the black boxes? Are they stored in the wing that's missing or something?

As you know I have just come off a binge of watching these historic disaster videos where all the answers are served up in less than ten minutes. I find the lack of detail frustrating.

TWIL: Skunk season

Five days ago, I was awakened between three and four a.m. by a skunk just outside my bedroom window. The smell woke me.  It wasn’t a fresh skunk spray: I could still breathe. It was just the smell that says a skunk is nearby.

The smell was accompanied by the sound of an animal scrabbling at the foundation of the house. 

“Ah well,” I thought, “You won’t get far tunneling into the basement.”

The next night, again, awakened between three and four by the smell, but this time no scrabbling. And the next and the next. I resigned myself to two weeks of sleeping six feet from the Skunk Family, because that’s how long skunks stay in a den.  

Two nights ago the stench was particularly bad. Gary happened to be up. He weighed in. “ELLEN YOU ARE CRAZY THERE’S NO SKUNK WHAT YOU SMELL IS THE DEAD MICE IN THE BASEMENT,” followed ten minutes later by, “I CAN’T BREATHE ELLEN THE SKUNK SMELL IS EVERYWHERE.”

I investigated “WHY IS THIS HAPPENING THIS HAS NEVER HAPPENED BEFORE,” and that’s when I learned that February to March is Skunk Mating Season. (They didn’t take advantage of the assonance and call it Skunk Fucking Season. I bet they wanted to.)

So we might be saddled with wee skunklets for over a month. Last night a dog barked right outside the window, and it snowed, so I will check tomorrow to see if I see any animal tracks.