9.3.22
So busy, music wise, not much time or energy left for the pencil and brush. To see what I have been doing in August check out my site possumfamilysingers.com. Every weekend has been a gig, a festival, a campout, from Santa Cruz to Santa Rosa. I plan some downtime for September, yessirreee.
8.24.22
The Wood Rats are unrelenting. Weird little people, they chew into tubes of vaseline, olive oil, bottles of silicone 3-in-1 oil, home covid test kit fluid, they secret away dirty sponges, strips chewn off an empty milk bottle, baseballs, tennis balls for nesting, a rubber ducky, a massage ball—chewed all the points off looking for a way in. They chew holes in anything they think will have a viscous fluid inside, chew all the way around a plastic jar lid hoping to get it open. I don’t know what the attraction is. Alternatively there are some rats that eat all the leaves off anything I plant, a camellia was eaten to the ground, a french prune tree was nearly decapitated, a grape vine, a wood betony, tiger lilies, celery, onions, three blueberry bushes were eaten to death. A Winter Banana apple tree was stripped of its fruit and demolished.
They get into the cars. While driving the van once, bits of Kleenex began blowing out of the heater vent, followed by carpet fluff and some colorful threads. When I opened the door a mouse jumped out. I put a bottle of peppermint extract into the utility drawer after I found someone had chewed up a matchbox in there. I later found a nest in the engine compartment comprised of insulation and bits of a chenille blanket.
The best remedy so far seems to be jiffy corn muffin mix and baking soda, just enough sugar to appeal to their discerning taste, plus baking soda to give them gas. They go to their little holms and to bed with indigestion, and wake up demised. Rats can’t burp, a gift from the gods, as they are the only creatures for whom jiffy corn baking soda is lethal.
Another oddity, I suddenly stopped drinking alcohol sometime last summer. I’ve been very careful about what I consume since the possible food poisoning incident early this month–woke up with excruciating kidney pain at 3:30 AM–I dreamed I was herding cats, tigers, leopards, in and out of a cage tied together with plastic shopping bags and string and wire.
There has been a lot of emotional trauma going on in general, and I am very skittish, can’t sleep, too much light, too much noise. I think it is manifesting in my body as sudden pain. Lots of writing in the book of Grrrr, trying to find the new normal. Fun is barely fun, I am disentangling myself from where I am not needed, which is just about anywhere.
Think I’ll have a corn muffin and a bicarb, take a nap and check you later.
7.29.22
when I was a kid there was a corner store with a screen door that had been painted with an ad for orange juice. It was magical to me how you could see through the paint, but also see it as an image floating in space. It lead me to try painting on screen, and to copy a crochet moth with tinted acrylic medium on this 1/2″ hardware cloth.
7.2.22
Hmm. This is all I’ve done this month. in the realm of 2D art.
I have been doing a lot of physical work in the yard, uncovering an old flagstone path, rebuilding the grape arbor, cutting back the wild growth everywhere. I have been hiking about 3 miles every day or so, downtown and back, up to College or Telegraph Avenue, in search of pizza or gelato, and miscellaneous free items on the street. I found a circa 2013 gaming PC with Windows 10 that I named Curby–found it on the curb, had to buy a 19-pin monitor cable, transferring all my old photos and some music via thumb drives. Really fun to have a random project appear, just after I rearranged my office to take advantage of the summer sun.
6.14.22
I started an instagram page quite a while ago, following on my massive output of last summer. I have been remiss, neglected to share them here, until now. Oh deer. Never feer. They are not that square. Oh well, we shall see.
May 26, 2022
What is real? What is fake? I did not get a Birthday Cake.
How amazing that we can hear pictures–other people’s words- thoughts- language. I credit this discovery to the stunning book Proust and the Squid by Maryanne Wolf, which I have read twice.
I write and write- there is a picture here. Seems right to write, to catalog difficulties, to see a pattern of options, of solutions. The failures, the don’t-do-that-agains. Looking for space that is my own.
Chose one survival strategy. Embrace what is raw and vulnerable. Find an ally. Or maybe–Walk away from pain. Come back later, or not. Be sensitive. It’s not a crime.
How do I set boundaries? I “just go” as a defense mechanism. Don’t judge me, I’m Irish. I get overwhelmed. I am drowning. The solution is to swim sideways, out of the current.
What is the “secondary gain” of self-silencing? Bold Creative Non-action. Actually, it seems to be a Primary Gain. What am I hiding from? Anger? Judgement? Mis-characterization? Staying Silent may protect me from facing my own shadows. I seem to have made an Art of it. Don’t reach out. Don’t explain anything. It gets you nowhere. That picture is already stone.
piedras blancas, anza borrego, march 9, 2006, 11:16 AM photo credit Laurie A. Miller
5.4.22
Art wandered the neighborhood today and brought me some flowers that fell into his vicinity.
Don’t know if I posted these critters or not. Sometimes I find things I have photographed twice, but I don’t want to go back and edit pages, so inconvenient and random for my fan(s) out there.
What the heck. Orange trees, undated, painted 20 years apart in the same sketchbook.
A year since I tripped and broke my ankle . . . The jarring peachy yellow was so inappropriate for this redwood circle/compost heap environment. I had thought for months about how to fake a log-cabin effect, then found I had a can of Oxford Brown Acry-Shield exterior paint that was a perfect semi-gloss aged-wood color. I tried several greens that showed up too blue against the warm brown, until I hit upon a tube of Winsor Newton permanent sap green acrylic. I just used a couple of artists brushes, a 1-inch flat, and a #10 round for getting into the corners. I left the side facing the tracks in the original puke-y pink/yellow so as not to alert the neighbors, or be crashed into by the UPS van. I have since painted over the white poetry patches. Still debating what to paint the upper trim boards- green or brown . . . ?
Bonus points to Art for the ramp, help with the foundation, and relocating the extension ladders.
I found this OLD chair on the sidewalk, had to have it. It is the same era and style as the Eastlake hardware in the 1900 house I live in. I had to pull out about 200 tacks, stuffing, ragged fabric, 6 iron springs in a metal frame, to get down to the wood. There was a badly repaired crack which I couldn’t extract the nails from, so I glued and clamped it, and hope it holds. Thanks, Art, for cutting the thin plywood for the seat, snapped into place, and just the right amount of flex. This fake Holstein fabric probably cost as much as an actual cow skin, and the fringe . . . Crazy fun project. I am really satisfied and happy at how it turned out.
I have spent months dithering over the possibility of buying into a local community, a 2-floor, 2 bedroom townhouse to the northwest, where a couple of my friends live. There were yard parties to be had, and a view of Mt Tam from the little shed and an upper window. Things seemed so sketchy here in my tiny abode, and it really would have had many blessings and benefits, not the least of which was a place to put my massive work table and garden tools and westfalia and . . . suchlike. It was a goal, a hobby, to design and plan and discover and ponder, while my ankle healed. Seemed like a good idea to have a flight of stairs to climb on a regular basis. In the end, though, I felt a pressure to comply with too much, with other people’s goals and schedules and beliefs. I just couldn’t shake it loose, there were too many what ifs, and ultimately, my sense of home, privacy, autonomy, is here, right here, where I am now.
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