Art is life is art

Gloomy weather at the moment, low energy, but here I am anyway. Nearest I can come to my best self today.  Ninety per cent of life is about showing up.  Also eighty per cent of your agita comes from twenty per cent of the people.  Small business owners will recognize this truth instantly. Likewise eighty per cent of your successful outcomes come from twenty per cent of your projects.  I'm not sure what this means you should do, to be honest.  It's like the old saying that half our marketing is useless, but we don't know which half. Anyway, let's get to a wise person:

wise words from Amanda Gorman.

Today was cleaning day, and my monthly leaving the house to the cleaners to get on with their work in peace.  However, the 24 hour total drenching rain which finally let up during the night wiped out a few of my ideas on where to be this morning, because mud.  Not that I have anything against mud. But I do try not to fall down if I can help it, this being a more serious transaction than it would have been a few years ago.

I did find I needed a new windshield wiper, since the driver's side one, it's always the driver's side one, suddenly was missing a big sweep right in the middle of where I needed to see.  The nice man at the garage would have liked to sell me two, but I pointed out that only one was busted, so he agreed to replace that one.  His buddy came up to supervise and suggested I buy two, whereupon Garage Man One said, no, she said only one.  Garage Man Two looked at me, and thought, oh, it's her,  not arguing with her, nooo.  So it was done speedily, and no labor charges, just the base rate for the wiper blade.  I could have installed it myself, but why not let him do it, he likes to.

Then after a trip to CVS for exciting things such as toilet paper, of which, since our local CVS has become a covid vax site, there are few examples.  They've taken a lot of floor space for the vax clinic, and display shelves have been pretty much denuded. 

One little package of what I thought was tp was snugged among the paper towels.  But the wrapper was all in Spanish, with not a word indicating what the product actually was. Just the maker's name, origin, size, measurements, etc.  I asked my friend Aaron at the checkout what he thought, explaining it's in Spanish, I  wasn't sure.  He examined it and said, hey, this is all in Spanish!  well, yeah, I said that, and he turned it over and over a few times and said I think it might be tp.  Whereupon we decided I'd buy it and see.

After this excitement I needed a decompression period, which consisted of sitting in my car in the parking lot of the nearby park. Whose entrance I missed three times, because I can never remember in what order places come. I know them separately, could have drawn this from memory, but could I find it?  Could I heckaslike. I kept on not going quite far enough and having to make the same uturns.  I got well acquainted with a couple of roads I don't usually drive. This is all within about a mile of home. Yes, I don't have a bump of direction. Finally realized what I was doing wrong, and arrived at the parking lot.  And found to my surprise it has WiFi.  I was able to access email, and various things. 

So here's the truly gripping scenery at Morris Davison Park.  The Davisons must have been local farmers, because there's this park, and there's George Davison Road, and there's Ancil Davison Road.  I'm guessing farmers because of Ancil, which I think is biblical and would fit in. This is about as light as it's going to get today.

And from inside my car, look to the right and see a nice little feature which is good for visibility.  Older drivers will remember the quarter light at the front of old cars, predating air conditioning, which you could open to get air in at speed so the driver could be cool,  without blowing out the rear seat passengers.  These are quarter lights, fixed, but nonetheless giving a nice extra bit of visibility right where you want to have it. A sort of historic touch. I bet a designer's grandma suggested this.

And with me, but I was reading rather than knitting, was my knitting bag, containing the makings of another square. But I didn't knit at all.  I've noticed this often, that unless I'm taking part in one of those Knit in Public or Stitch in Public days, or plein air artwork, where the point is to bring portable work to show people what fun it is to do, I hardly ever actually do it.

I talk big talk about portable work, and I take little sets of drawing paper and pencils and pens and things out with me, and kits of knitting and stitching I've assembled, and rarely remember to do anything about it. There always seem to be other things to watch, or read, or think about.  Indoors seems to trigger my need to make stuff.

So the bag, carefully packed last night with the needful, came home again unopened this morning. The current haul of squares is there. One of the features that will be nice to move around, aside from the blocks of color, is the miters.  They can go in various directions, to create inner patterns.  A bit like quilting, same sort of concept.

And, adding to my reading, I usually have several books going at once, is a rerun, which I've read before and just fancy reading again, yet another Maisie Dobbs

I'm still on Home by Marilynne Robinson, A Sinister Service by Alyssa Maxwell, a sort of slow mystery complete with costume and stately homes, and now I'm embarking again on Maisie. 

I didn't post yesterday, not enough psychic energy, but I did make a nice butternut squash soup, since, when I made yesterday's lunch pasty: potato, chicken, hardboiled egg, onions, the oven was at 400.  So, rather than waste the heat by letting it cool, I put in the squash for half an hour, all pierced, and it baked through nicely.  Butternut Boy Squirrel got the seeds and the leftover rinds. I saw him out there this morning foraging. In between bouts of really exciting activity on top of the fence with his mate, assuring the continuity of his species. No pictures, even a squirrel has privacy concerns.