The rest of the story, belated pancakes

New readers start here:

March 1 a prescription was delivered to, and stolen from, my step. Police report, pharma report, doctor report. Pharma promised replacement.

Now read on:

This morning I found a pharma package, sealed, on my step. Brought it in, thinking it was the replacement they'd promised.

And found 

No cap, most pills missing. Lengthy attempt to reach a human at the mail order pharmacy, finally did. He said no, not the replacement, which they haven't shipped yet, but evidently the original order.

Evidently the tealeaf who took it brought it back! Who knows why.  Seemingly they'd resealed the package.  Meanwhile the real replacement will arrive Tuesday.  And I informed Officer Joe that I think his case is closed.  

His theory: someone took it, found it was no use to them, tossed it, another person found it and returned it to the address on the label.

This wasn't how I'd planned to spend my time this morning;  my red lentil flatbread will happen tomorrow.

And instead I'm having belated pancakes, forgot all about them on Shrove Tuesday. 

Whole-wheat flour, aqua faba replacing egg

Decisions are needed now: lemon juice and sugar, traditional Yorkshire way, or honey, or molasses, my way? Why not all of them in turn, also my way -- when in doubt do everything. And I still have apple slices in the freezer for dessert pancakes.

Happy day everyone, when in doubt, shout it out. You'll feel better, and surprise the neighbors.

Ted sez 

Great Tuesday! Friends, fun, fiber.

 I really love my Tuesdays. Today started with a routine doctor visit telling me I'm fine, and she thinks she's straightened out my online pharmacy's inability to grasp that I take two different strengths of one medication. 

It adds up to the correct dosage, but they've been repeatedly deleting one in favor of the other, forcing me to split pills to create the dosage while I fight with them. My doctor tells me she had to attest that yes, I needed both together, definitely, before they conceded.

Then Gary returned the gardening scissors vital to my needs, my hands not being strong enough to open regular handheld clippers with one hand. He apologised profusely, been searching for weeks finally unearthed them. I'm so happy to be functional again.

Very nice lunch of fettuccini Alfredo with plums for dessert, then off to the Tuesday Knitting Group, total kindred spirits.

One friend  brought a box of bobbins of silk thread and tiny treasures from her grandmother's stash, such fun to play with! Even the Schraffts chocolate box she'd kept them in is iconic.

Chat ranged from spindle spinning, darning, Opera supertitles, Portugal, an imaginary university, millinery, sheep and wool festivals and more. 

You know you're with friends when you all suddenly decide to create an imaginary university, with a double major in Dance and Darning, a Spurtzleur Department, a Classical Ballet with Embroidery degree, Opera training, and plans of what the buildings will be like. Grounded in reality, since two of our members were professional dancers, one an opera singer and voice coach. I'll be the Spurtzleur Professor of Spinning.

Then home to more fun, with Textiles and Tea, featuring Andrea Alexander, a wonderful, energetic weaver, textile designer and former Marine biologist. I have to find her channel on YouTube, for more. 

She did an internship, while an undergraduate at FIT, in NYC, at Fabscrap, a nonprofit dedicated to saving designer fabric scraps from the landfill, and was a presenter at this year's national handweavers HGA convention, Convergence.

Here's a garment she made from scraps foraged from her internship, a sample book of fibers. She used a heddle loom and clasped wefts, to create this wearable artwork.

Here are computer designs, also using Photoshop in planning the weaving

She adapted images from her Marine biology fish textbook for this design.

And here's a sample of fabric design woven ready to use. She's definitely worth seeing more of.

I've already signed up for the Fabscrap newsletter,  what a source for high end scraps! 

You can shop online with them for mendable clothing, bags of scraps, all kinds of cool fabric stuff. This may be a rabbit hole of biblical proportions.

Now for tea and a read of Pride and Prejudice. 

This was a vintage Tuesday.

Happy day everyone, be safe if you're in Florida, please. Dry out if you're in the UK under water. Or keep rowing, as the case may be.

Good to check. And other precautions.

So early Monday and my  doctor's message system gets back as soon as they open to say no, they never received the rx refill request my online pharmacy claimed to have sent.  This is three times now. But they'll get the request pronto to my doctor and she'll be on it.  

By early afternoon, refill request noted by doctor and sent. Let's hope this works.

Always good to follow the trail. I learned this when managing many people and projects. Make the request, get the confirmation, then follow up to see if it happened! And be very firm and clear if it didn't. Fireworks.

Every morning I go out before it's too hot, water the flower containers pick a flower or two, just foliage up to now from my seeds, and rearrange my little bouquet.

We had massive downpours Sunday, humidity in high 90s, I don't think watering is needed Monday.

Gary stopped by to ask about a begonia he's started in water, and is worried about when he goes away this week! He's making plant preparations well ahead, but will probably pack in the five minutes before departure.

Louder for the people at the back: my list of funny but true questions was from over forty years ago. As I said. Were you as familiar with these concepts then? 

Unless you were in Florida where they've been a thing since postwar days, I kinda doubt it. Even if you live where they're common now.  

Nowadays you don't get this kind of confused wondering here, either. Back then there seemed to be total confusion about the different ways of property ownership. 

Assisted living was new here then, communes had been a thing. Then there were time shares. Co-ops mainly in the city  (here that means Manhattan). And now condos. I think people assumed they were some kind of amalgam of everything!

Meanwhile back to now, I called and rescheduled my hearing aid fitting. It's now going to happen in late August when I hope the temperatures will be lower than this week. I don't feel safe driving out in this heat.

I texted a local friend who wasn't well the other day because of the heat. She's doing better. It struck me as a funny reversal. They tell you to check on elderly neighbors. Here's the EN checking on younger people.

And here's the new pillow with her handmade friends.

To do the stitching, I slid a cutting board behind the fabric, to avoid stitching front and back together. I used a heavy cotton pillow slip for the base. Then inserted the pillow form.

Happy day, everyone, stay safe, and always

I like this array of good ideas. Permission galore!

Being had to wait on doing

 My plan to just read and be was a bit delayed. I noticed my daily bouquets needed new flowers, so I went out early, picked and added and subtracted and got this 

Then I noticed the downstairs plants were thirsty, so I watered them. This usually means mopping up the spills on tables and floors.

Then I noticed a stitched artwork that could be translated into a pillow. So I took it off the frame, removed the cheesecloth backing, and washed it for reuse, I'm always needing to strain this and that.  And here's the piece, dyed and beaded and stitched, ready for a new life 

Once I construct a pillow, that is. And the empty frame will do well on free cycle, then I thought what about the just being, leave the freecycle for now, girl.

Then I noticed I need to make yogurt, so I did that. Then the mail arrived, medication on the step. And they'd renewed the wrong one. 

I've tried three times to get the website to add my new Rx, which is a smaller dose of another one, but I now need both together to arrive at the right dose. They can't seem to get this concept.

So, urgent message on my doctor portal asking them to be sure the online pharmacy has in fact contacted them, as they claim, for a refill rx.  

At this point I'm having to split pills in the bigger dose to get the additional 50% dosage.  Today I was expecting to get the right size dose. 

 

Then it was lunchtime and I had the rest of the steamed baby potatoes diced and roasted in olive oil and salt, with the last of the tuna salad and mint sauce.

This was definitely good. No complaints here.

Then I agonized for a bit, in view of the renewed heatwave this week, whether to reschedule the hearing aid fitting. I don't think I can handle driving to the next town for a long appointment, then home, in 100°f, which is the previous day, cooling only to the low 90s.

And the house cleaners have been having scheduling problems, so if they show up this week, they'll have to work around me, too hot for me to go out while they work. I don't like this so much, but oh well.

So after all that I finally started reading and doing some being. Well, some pinloom weaving and reading.

 I don't think I'm temperamentally suited to just being. I made a carafe of suntea to keep me going anyway!

Happy day, everyone! Try a bit of just being and see if you can manage it, then explain to me how.

Tradescantia, pedal pushers, and Rx victory

Yesterday finally, after eight days of back and forth and checking and pushing, and my referring eye doctor, not the one who was supposed to call in the Rx,  sternly telling me to keep calm (!) the Rx finally arrived. 

At least two of the three did, one back-ordered. So I can start breathing again. After this the actual procedure will probably be a lot less stressful. Anyway, so far so good. Handsome Son will pick up the stuff. 

This is also showing up in the groundcover, lovely spiderwort, aka tradescantia virginiana

Sparks of brilliant blue flowers. It's one of those flowers, like daylilies, you can either spot everywhere growing wild, or buy and plant. It's also one of many discoveries aka thefts, from the New World, made by John Tradescant, here

I love how solemnly they say he's the father of JT jr !  Anyway I'm glad the namers acknowledged Virginia in the name since that's where he plundered it from, back when Europeans thought the Americas were there for their browsing benefit, rather than the native land of ancient peoples.

And yesterday, largely as displacement activity before the arrival of the text about the Rx, I finally did one of those jobs you think about for months, nay, years,  then polish off in twenty minutes.

These are supposedly capris, but on arrival turned out to be more like high waters, brushing the top of my socks. I've been wearing them while planning to fix them.

Simple enough. Cut off several inches, hemmed up, done.  Much more useful now.

Then I finished the second sock of, I think, Pair Seventeen, did the finishing, and started sorting colors for the next. 

These have  shaker stitch tops, and an elastic insert to keep the shape,  so it doesn't stretch out in use.

I always mean to take an interval between pairs but once the needles are vacant suddenly need to fill them again.

A passage from The Autobiography of Alice B Toklas in progress, struck me as so applicable to studying the technique of art

It's about  familiarizing yourself with any artwork in order to really experience it.

I know writers who make a practice of writing out passages of favorite authors just for the insight into how they did it. It's done to learn, not imitate, like playing scales to develop finger expertise.

I've done it by copying Picasso drawings just to get into the vision and it's very demanding. You come away with such respect for the artist. Even copying is demanding, imagine conceptualizing in the first place. 

During the Fischer Spassky chess tournament, the games were published as played and Handsome Partner and I, chess players back then, replayed them as they came out, marveling at the insight and anticipation of each player. We were plumb wore out just replaying, never mind doing the actual original thinking.

Copying art for learning now and then is fine, but not for thinking you're making art. The art, all its life and energy, lies in the maker's original concept.  

Dusting off the teaching soapbox now and retiring it to the corner of the stable where my hobby horses live.

Maybe I'll stitch a bit of my vest while listening to a Mrs Pargeter audiobook today

I love Mrs Pargeter, so funny, and the cast of characters never fails. 

Art also, never fails to keep a person on the rails. Drawing, the guardrail of daily life.

Happy day everyone! Grateful for guardrails and the ability to know they're there.

Birthday drawing and other small things

Yesterday was a lovely day for sitting outside and drawing, cool, cloudy. And the daylilies are coming into bloom. They're a symbol of human and animal life -- each blossom lasts only a day, but there's a succession of them, and the parent plant goes on flourishing indefinitely.

So it seemed right to celebrate Handsome Partner's birthday with a drawing of a daylily he used to know, in my favorite drawing tool, the fine point black Pilot pen.

And while I was out there, to see this visitor on the marigolds

And a bee scoping out the daylily, huge area for him to work

While the self seeded Thai basil seedlings get to work

There's a lot of life in this little space

And while I'm still pursuing the eye doctor to get the Rx called in, hasn't happened yet, a week later,  stress levels high over this, I'm reading this

The cover image, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, is appropriate, since it's described early in the narrative though not by name, but unmistakably.  One of her deliberately naive passages.

I saw this painting many years ago at a joint Picasso/Braque exhibit at the old MOMA, and was stunned by its size and power. The color alone is enough to knock you down. 

In fact I had to go sit down to recover, and wasn't able to take in much of the rest of the huge, significant,  show.  

This is why I like to go to art exhibits alone, so I can leave when I can't take in any more, quite often after seeing only a couple of works, even if it was a long trip to get there. 

I can't wait for the new Princeton art museum building to be finished and opened, short trip to see small and wonderful exhibits, on a campus filled with great outdoor sculptures.

Still reading the Winterson art essays, and with a Maisie Dobbs audiobook to accompany Sock Ministry knitting.

Hoping for Rx success today..

Happy day everyone, press on, push voter registration and help the good guys, applaud the G7's clamping down on Russia's economy to help starve  terrorist Putin's armament funding.