The House is Echoing

The POD arrived yesterday--the way it came off the truck was a fascinating bit of engineering. I won't even try to describe it, but if I have my wits about me I'll take some pictures when they pick it up.

There were about 10 of us, with Alec as foreman. Thank you, Katie, for sharing your DH, especially on a Saturday. He did an excellent job putting things in efficiently and tying them up as we went. I was mostly indoors limping around answering questions about which things went, which things stayed, and where the tape dispenser was. Patricia brought her big flask of coffee and some doughnuts. My house is dirty, but I have given up my perfectionism, now haven't I?

A neighbor came by who said she knows about the people that bought my house and she looked very sour-faced. These people have been buying houses in the neighborhood and renting them out. Well, if I had my druthers, the house would go to a family, but my realtor says "their money is green."

I think of how I wont be able to walk in my neighborhood any more and see people who have become part of my life (and their dogs). Last night Buddy and his human came by right when I was taking Princess into the house and I had to quickly put my bags down and make sure she didn't make me hurt my knee again. Buddy is a barker and though his human and I try to have conversations, we never can. There's another person I won't see walking by any more.

I didn't carry much, just limped around, up and down the stairs without bending my knee. I am anxious to find out what the MRI reveals. If I do need surgery, the sooner the better.

When everything was packed that could be packed, we pulled the plastic table into the living room and ate our Boston Market meal.

It is good to have friends. Each day last week someone came and helped me pack, and today, these came and helped put the things into the POD. If I were not half lame, I would have tried to do it all myself.

This is a big relief to have it all packed in. Now to clear out the rest, room by room and clean up the place for the new owners.

The off and on sprinkling didn't interfere with being the work. The grass is long, looks really lush, it's hiding all the weeds! The colors are starting to show up in some of the trees and the acorns are making noises on the roof, but I shall not be raking leaves this year at the condo.

Another neighbor walked through to 'get ideas for her house' which is just like mine. She asked if I were taking all my furniture and I said no, so she told me a couple things she'd like if I didn't take them.

I like my Parish group and I will miss these young people and P and P who have been good friends all this time. This is the first time I've moved somewhere all alone. Even when I went off to college, I roomed with my best friend and 3 girls from our High School were in the next rooms. I'm excited about it all, but it just seems strange.

David Critiquing

Mostly finished painting of David critiquing our art.

A Unique Day

I don't like to call out at work, but I went the the doctor and requested a note saying I must rest, since I stand up all day when I work. I sat on my bed with ice under my knee and ibuprofen in my bloodstream. OK, it seems to help a little. But I cannot bear to leave my people in the lurch on Saturday when everyone and their uncle shows up at the store. So I decide I'll go work. It's not too bad the first few hours but I trip ever so slightly on the entry mat and turn my knee again. Ow. As the night wears on it hurts more and more to walk. I do my closing duties and cannot wait to get home and OFF my knee. Same thing happens in the nursery in church. The tiniest wrinkle in the play rug catches my sandle and there goes my knee again. So I guess stay off means stay off.

One problem: I have a ticket to contest downtown and you are only allowed to reschedule your hearing outside of 5 business days and it's past that deadline. I call for directions and they say 'Oh it's right across the street from the Metro stop.' Yes, it is, but my address number is one numeral off from the one I see on the building, so I think: Maybe it is the one "next door" and I walk down a half city block, go in and find out that the entrance I need is BEHIND the one I just saw across from the Metro, so I ask for directions, the shortest way, please.

My knee hurts very badly. I am thinking I should have just paid it. It's not worth $50.00. This is not worth it.

Meanwhile, it's a Federal Building, you see, so they have taken the blades out of my utility knife which I am embarrassed to discover is in my tote bag. I use it at work and had forgotten in was in the tote. The nice man has his back to me and is fiddling and fussing. What is taking him so long? About 10 minutes go by and apparently he has a problem. I start saying Just keep the knife, I don't need it. Finally I say I need to go to my hearing now and he comes to me with my knife in pieces. Apparently he didn't know how to remove the blade so he unscrewed it and cannot figure out how to put it back together.

The other nice security man told me how to get to the other building going through the hall in the basement. So I go downstairs and proceed down the hall and get about halfway, limping more and more.

Suddenly there is an obstacle. I ask a nice woman how to proceed and she said you can't go through right now because of construction. Are you SURE there is no way through?! She is sure.

So I head back, Ow, Ow, Ow, now I have discovered that it helps to lean against the wall with my hand, taking some of the weight off my right knee.

I see a room number that matches the one on my paper so I think, Oh here it is and I go in. But I'm wrong. I have confused the street address with this room number. I finally make it to my room. One or two nice gentlemen and a lady have offered to help. Do you have wheelchairs? No, they say.

I sit for maybe 45 minutes and I'm called for my hearing. Of all days to forget my ibuprofen!

I am called several doors down in the other wing. She says take your time, whenever you get there....

Basically it is a problem of giving me 2 tickets for one speeding infraction. The photo is exactly the same and so are the cars in the photo passing me on the other side of the raod. So if these tickets are both accurate, it means I got off the beltway and drove around the block and went by the same camera 10 minutes later and at that exact moment, the two vehicles passed by going the other direction at the exact spot...not likely...

Only the times and speeds are written differently. So I suggest that...I don't know how these things work, but perhaps the person recording it decided he or she made a mistake and wanted to do the ticket over, but failed to delete the first record....I don't know.

She said I'm going to cancel BOTH tickets and refund you the money you already paid for the first one. My mouth drops, Thank you! (MAYBE it was worth coming down here, but I don't know .... to avoid all that pain MIGHT have been worth $150 plus Metro fare, Metro parking and hours of my day.)

I ask for the shortest way back to the Metro and wonder out loud if they sell advil at those little kiosks. She says she has Motrin and she shares two with me. "Bless you!"

Between the exit and the Metro there is a kiosk and I decide to eat a hot dog and chips for lunch. I'm expecting high prices but it's cheap. I guess it's because it's not tourist season. I sit on the stone wall and eat.

I'm thinking of how people do it who are chronically ill. I think refugees being forced to walk long distances, hungry and cold, no bathrooms available. I think of soldiers who must keep marching no matter how badly they are injured. I think I'm not very strong. When I'm sick or injured, these thoughts always come to me. I feel guilty for feeling my pain sometimes. Right now I think that's silly.

[[Once when I had minor surgery I was a young Christian and prayed that I might have more pain so that someone else might have less pain. Now that was downright goofball thinking. But interestingly enough, the anesthesia had not reached part of the area they were working on and I could feel it! Please don't make too much of this theologically.]]

But I have an awareness that God is with me and that He is looking at my life from a higher pinnacle on the mountain range. I am trekking up and down and get a glimpse of a panorama now and then and it takes my breath away. But He can see the whole thing all the time. I am aware that He is aware of me and I am amazed at Him again.

As I leave the parking lot I think I'm in good shape because I have not one but two smart trip passes to pay and get out. But alas, neither has enough money to open the gate so I have to repark, WALK back into the station, put more money on my card and WALK back out to my car. Ow, the pain with every step.

Finally I get out and driving home I just have a sense that this day is significant though I don't see why. I'm wondering if my coach's baby is being born, that would be hugely significant.

I get my ice pack and get on my bed. After 20 minutes of napping, I get my coffee and my paints.

The doorbell.
Uh, oh, I'll bet it's potential buyers. To save steps I open the window and talk to them. Yes it's a realtor with a couple. The wife is saying "I told her I wanted to see the candle house again! The candle house." I guess they've already been here and it must have been the day I knew I'd only be gone a few minutes so I left all the candles burning. I say do you want me to light them for you?

I get the dog leashed and turn on all the lights on my way to the back yard where I sit on my weathered bench and look at my trees. "MY" trees, right. I am grieving giving all this up. It's so beautiful. Why am I doing this again? OH, yes, I need the money and the house takes too much effort and expense...time... I need to spend time painting.

They are on the back porch now; I try not to listen. The realtor comes out and says I'm going to talk them into writing a contract. Well, that sounds great, but I don't let myself get too hopeful because they might change their mind at the next house. They ask a few questions about the roof and the new gutter and the property line. They love the color, not all white like all the others.

So the next day I had a contract and the following day they had my signature on it. And now that I have news from my life coach, I find it interesting that his baby boy was indeed coming into the world that very day!

nearing completion

I tried to get these scans of my painting to come up side by side. At least they are in the same plane this time.
The project is put aside while I finish a book for my friend Faye. I like my painting of Bill Cosby, even though I cannot quite get the expression on his lips.

Working from a photograph

There is so much in the way of subject matter to paint up there in Maine. On the day at John's, several classmates painted a ship that was being worked on near John's. I wanted to paint it too, but I wanted to paint water that day, so I took lots of pictures intending to paint the ship when I returned home.
Once I had the photos, I chose the one to work from that had the most interesting composition.
The thing I've noticed is that the contrast is very strong in my photos. The dark buildings are all one value and I keep having to hold the photo up to the light to see the details within the dark shapes. I know this would look totally different if I were sitting right there. This is both an advantage and a disadvantage. You want to be able to see the lights and darks, which is harder to do in person. But you also want to be able to see subltle colors inside the shapes to use in your color balancing act.
Oh my, I have so much to learn.
I spoke with a friend a church who told me she is taking a photography class and she said you can control that and she kindly sent me a copy of notes about aperture settings and I need to learn how to use my manual setting on my camera and get photos that bring up the colors in the shadows.
It is a perfect fall day and the hawks are announcing that school has started. Some one is showing the house this afternoon.

Tuumble might be interested

I have been painting a picture of the ship at John's for about 2 weeks. See two halves above and good luck connecting them with your eye. It's too big to scan. The copy above is from a few days ago.

I've decided it may help to write about trying to make it work. Within the first couple days I wanted to quit. I didn't like it. But David said finish the painting. So I stayed on the project.
It is two ramshackled buildings on the Maine coast with a ship in the background between them.

I saw improvement when I painted in the dark behind the fence which links the two buildings. That gave me the architectural footprint I meant to start out with but
got distracted from.
The fence became a challenge which I did not draw correctly and had to go back and erase and repaint parts. Then there was the window with the odd post in front of it.
The ship looked nice in the background but I didn't like the surface of the two buildings.
I wanted color and shape balance, but all I could see was a lot of gobbledy gook and tons of fussy details. Fussy is not one of my values in painting though lots of average people love fussy details in watercolor and would pay for it.
Once I had a significant amount of fuss in the painting, I decided I could not hurt it by finishing it with more fuss.
Now it is almost done and it's too big to scan. Actually I can scan about half of it at a time and I did at a certain point.
I would have liked it better had I stopped and not put in more lines and wires going to and from the ship.
Soluntiions:
The red building looked awful. It had a dark green accent on it which made it great fodder for a painting, but the paint job I had done looked sloppy and flat and boring. I added dark shadow under the eaves. I kept looking at the photo. Finally I decided to try putting in the details of the boards that made up the side of the building. What have I got to lose. So I mixed up more red brick colored paint and took a flat brush and made strokes leaving a tiny lighter space between strokes. When that was dry I put some dark marks where the boards met the corner of the building. Then I did the same with the wider boards of the open door. It is looking more realistic all the time. If I cannot finish it in suggestive shapes and balanced color, I may as well finish it in fussy detail. At least it will get finished.
My pallet looks a mess and my paints keeps trying to dry up on me because I keep jumping up to do this and that (eat lunch, let the dog out, let the dog in, make coffee, answer the phone, go to the bathroom).
There is dog hair everywhere including in my paints. She lies at the end of the bed and often takes my spot when I get up to do an errand. She wants to know why we haven't been out for a walk for a week. I tell her I'm sorry but I hurt my knee and doctor says rest.
There are places where the edges are crisp and the detail is correct. And there are places where I had to much paint on my brush and the lines are wobbley. There are place where I erased by lifting pigment with water and paper towel.
I have a post card sized version of this scene and I like it a lot, but I have not been looking at it for several days. Yesterday I found my online copy of it and doctored it up -- experimenting with lines, paintbrushes, erasers and airbrush. I saw some interesting effects and tried to save it but it did not save.
I want to get out books and look at landscapes and find what I could do to my painting that would redeem it.
I darkened the fence with cerullian and Verditer blues to tone it down. It was too white for a rainy day and a dirty old fence. The blue tied it in with the blue of the window in the red building.
Then there is that white board in the front and center. Would the picture be better if I totally painted it out? It is interesting to me that the paint I put down was minimal, but now I can tell it's a dirty old white board hinged to the fence.
What's next? What do I need to do to finish it? If the texture of boards helped the red building, then will texture help the green roof on the left side? Again it can't hurt to try because this painting was long since given over to fussy detail.
I keep thinking of the critique at which Christy said "I am trying to dig myself out of a very deep hole." I did not see what the hole was that she was digging out of, but I observed that though she did not like what she had started in her painting, she was staying with it and finishing it.
I just know that the average joe might look at this work and like it BECAUSE of the fussy detail. It does not hurt me to practice this skill of accurate copying of what I see. This makes me remember again my teacher's words: Every once in a while you have to draw really well. He said that a few times this year in class.
I know he's not referring to fussing, but still I need to be able to draw really well, so on we go, finishing this painting with realistic touches. At the same time, I keep looking for color balance and I think I need another master class or two to understand how David does it. I look forward to finishing this picture and not having to look at it any more. I think it will look better framed and on the wall.
10 a.m. Time to get back to it.