Category Archives: Life

The Post That Wouldn’t and Other Things

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A gaggle of geese in So California

 

Well, for two days I’ve been working on a post that just will not go right, so I decided to set it aside and dash off an update of sorts. (I thought I had it almost done last night, then realized I’d misread the quote I was commenting on. So back to the drawing board this morning, stripping out all the parts that didn’t apply. I keep rewriting it and seeing something else amiss, wondering if I should just ditch it, but for some reason keep feeling like I should go on.)

Anyway yesterday I pruned the second of the pair of my mother’s roses I brought home last summer. Now I will get to see with my own eyes how the pruning process works (this after all those lessons last fall about God pruning us). Already there are tons of buds on both plants. And in some cases even tiny bunches of leaves. This may not be a good thing on February 1, since if we get another cold spell everything would be killed. But it wouldn’t be the first time. It was 71 here this afternoon, blue skies, wispy clouds…absolutely BEAUTIFUL weather.

When I called the City of Tucson last week, I was told by the recording to leave a message and that someone would call me back as soon as they could. I left a message. They never called me back. I didn’t call them back, either, because later that day I discovered the mail forwarding order for getting my mother’s mail sent to me, and it didn’t expire for a year. So I was able to relax about all that. A couple of days later I got the tax forms I was waiting for. Now there’s just one left.

Also last week I read Dean Koontz’s The Darkest Evening of the Year.  I liked it fairly well. (it’s about dogs) (Golden Retrievers to be exact) (which are so unlike hounds that it’s hard to believe they’re both in the same species) Then I went to Amazon and was amazed at the criticisms people leveled at it. Some I thought were so off base I wondered if they were multi-tasking while trying to read the book. Texting while baking biscuits perhaps… Maybe I’ll do a post on it.

I finished the Don Nardo book, Life in Ancient Rome and still have a few things to say about that — if I can ever complete the post I’ve been stuck on.

And finally —  I may have had a breakthrough on all my struggles with working on the book and routines in the house and interruptions and hindrances and “allowing myself” to be distracted and leaving the details and trusting God for it all… But I want to wait a few days and see what happens.

Estate Taxes and a Photo

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I’ve been working on gathering my mother’s medical expenses so I can have her taxes done and over the weekend realized that while I’d talked with people at her former employer — the City of Tucson — and they knew she had died, and that I was the Personal Representative, and that I had given them my address as her mailing address… that was the retirement department. Not the Tax Forms department. And last week the forwarding order at the Post Office expired (I realized that today) so if they don’t have the correct address (the Social Security Administration didn’t) it won’t get forwarded.

So tomorrow I’m going to have to call the City. Oh, joy. Oh, wonders. Oh happy day.

I already found a number for “Employee Records” in the phone book and that seeming like the appropriate place to call, I dialed it, just to see when they opened. I think it’s a fax line…

I also tried the number of the above mentioned retirement department person. I got a message saying she was no longer with the city.

So that leaves me with “Administration.”  I’m putting it all in the Lord’s hands. Father, do You really want me to spend all day talking to mindless bureaucrats, right hands and left hands that don’t know each other exists?  I shudder to recall when I tried to make headway with the insurance company last summer, passed back and forth between the same two people, who just kept saying, I’m sorry, I can’t help you.

But this is borrowing trouble. And didn’t I just say I’m giving it over to Him?

So I’ll leave off with it, and put up a picture of Quigley taken during our recent trip to Los Angeles. I especially like the way the leash is all in motion. Well Quigley’s pretty cool-looking, too…

Happy 2012!

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Happy New Year everyone!

May 2012 be a year of continued blessing and growth for all of you.

I can hardly believe it’s been over a month since I last posted.

Then again it seems like forever since December began. A lot has happened since then. Last summer, after 30 years of submitting applications, my husband finally drew the single 2011 Desert Bighorn Sheep hunt permit for a unit in the eastern portion of the Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge in southern Arizona. The season began December 1 and ended December 31. Since he will never get another chance to hunt Desert Bighorns,  he has since August been making the four-hour drive out to hike the arid, empty, forbidding lands of the Cabeza Prieta seeking to get a sense of where he might find the sheep.

As a man who’s always looking for adventure, he found it in spades.  In an area bordered on the south by Mexico and on the north by the Barry M Goldwater Bombing Range he encountered violent thunderstorms, and gale force winds, blazing heat, frigid cold, solitude, bad roads, dust storms, illegal smugglers of people, drugs and guns, the discovery of human remains, A-10 and F-15 fighter jets strafing and bombing the nearby range  in training runs that shook the air and ground for miles, and a never- ending parade of Border Patrol officers wanting to know what he was doing. With his access limited to three roads, each miles from the areas where the sheep were, and camping prohibited throughout most of the refuge, he faced a long walk out at the end of the day, no matter where he was.

And that was just the lead up. He worked his last day of work for 2011 right after Thanksgiving, taking off before opening day to prepare and get settled in his camping area before the season actually started. Five friends met him out there to help.  He was prepared to hunt the entire month if need be. I had no idea if we were even going to be able to do Christmas.

Plus, with my mother gone, my sister decided to stay in New Mexico, and with our son and daughter-in-law due to stay with her family in Tucson for the holiday, even apart from the hunt, Christmas 2011 was certain to be a radical departure from our accustomed traditions.

Since by the weekend of Dec 11th my hubby was still at it, I gave up on the idea of getting a tree, put up a small one in the piano and put Santa hats on the animal mounts we have in our living room.  Here’s our full sized Gould’s turkey with his tiny hat. It makes me laugh…

As it turned out the ram was taken over that same weekend,  and shortly thereafter my kitchen was co-opted for meat processing for about a week.  No Christmas baking to be done then!  Instead I spent the time working on the Christmas letter and ordering presents (first time in a loooong time we had to do so without lists!)

Once the butchering was done, my husband develped a weird staph infection under the skin of one of his fingers, so we were off to Urgent Care two days in a row right before Christmas. The treatment was a shot of antibiotics followed by a 10 day pill regimen of the same along with daily soakings in betadine and epsom salts. It’s better now, but for awhile it was very nasty — swollen, painful and after awhile black. (Which was really just a scab beneath the skin, though we didn’t know it at the time)

We ended up having the kids at our house for Christmas morning, then went over to join Kim’s family for the Christmas dinner that afternoon. It made for a very nice –and festive –holiday after all. I’m thankful they invited us!

Here’s Lily with her new stuffed puppy, which looks — ahem — a lot like Quigley. Imagine that…

Then we left for California to visit my 91-year-old stepmother (and her 92-year-old sister)  for three days and by the time we returned I was exhausted and had picked up a cold — most likely from the seven story hotel in which we stayed (on the seventh floor) (with Quigley) along with about 100 marching band members from Japan and their supporters, all of whom were apparently housed on the third floor!

But! on the way home New Year’s Eve, on the road somewhere between Yuma and Gila Bend around 8:15pm we saw the New Year’s Eve meteor!  It had nothing to do with the Quadrantid meteor shower that was supposed to begin  on the 3rd, but was instead a random meteorite from somewhere out by Jupiter.

It started as a bright light coming at us out of the east. What in the world???Then it sprouted a tail that turned green with red around the edges and we realized it was a meteor. It looked like it was going to crash into the ground right beside the highway, but just before it did, the head vanished and the tail slowly faded. Turns out it wasn’t that close, but streaking low on the horizon, visible to people in New Mexico, Colorado and Arizona. Others also thought it was going to hit the ground or a building, but we were all deceived I guess by how bright and low on the horizon it was. Fantastic experience. We could hardly believe we’d seen it. It’s the first one I’ve ever seen, apart from the little white streaks way way up in the sky from “shooting stars.” If only I’d had the camera out and ready I might have been able to get a shot.

Instead, I’ll have to settle for this picture from Wikipedia that shows what a bolide looks like. It’s very similar to what we saw. Ours had a fatter, greener tail. Still — Very Cool! And it seems symbolic somehow, though I haven’t figured out how, yet.

Journal Entries – Part 2: Pruning

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 1 November 2011 Tuesday

 1:15 pm   Another morning lost. I finally, just a bit ago, admitted I was out of line. I had not focused on my calling, but indulged my whims. Then I tried to guilt myself over having wasted the morning and now I have to PAY. But I reminded myself: He gives to His beloved even in her sleep (Psalm 127:2). So yes, I might have to reap what I’ve sown this morning. Or God might give me some progress anyway…

11pm   And so He did. I moved to page 7 of chapter 4.  Tomorrow I want to get up and get immediately to work…

3 November Thursday

~ 8:00am  I’m feeling anxiety and something like being beaten down. Another day to fail, basically. Another day to have everything go wrong, or all these little things that I’d hoped would be one way, or get done or whatever, not happen. It’s frustrating. And I guess I’ve known that for a time. That part of the feeling I have is frustration, anxiety, discouragement because I can’t seem to get out from under the load of things I have to do.

Just keeping the house on the minimum maintenance and writing and dealing with all the other stuff takes all my time. Except for the time I spend writing about it. Or whatever other weird things suddenly consume me.

11am   Last night in Bible Class Pastor John talked about all the trials being for our benefit. They produce endurance, and we’re to let that endurance have its perfect effect. We’re told to consider and know Him and let endurance work. Or Him work – clearly I am not clear on this matter. What I know is the struggle is familiar and long-standing.

“Consider it all joy when you encounter various trials, knowing that the testing of your faith produces endurance. And let endurance have its perfect result that you may be mature and complete, lacking nothing.” ~ James 1:2-4

I know I’m not supposed to be anxious. And the testing of my faith means “Do you believe what God’s word says? It’s not enough to know the promises and doctrines. Do you believe them?”

So what is all this chaos supposed to lead me to believe? That God’s got it all under control and I don’t have to change my self or fix everything? I don’t even know what to fix! Have I gotten distracted? Or am I being hindered in ways that are not my fault?

I’ve lately recalled that when I’m at peace and relaxed I work at the writing better. And yet I have all these other things to do just to keep the house, laundry, etc, on track.

So on the one hand – “You must get X, Y and Z done so you can cross it off your list and not have to think about it, free to focus on the book, free to be relaxed, to let it come…”

And on the other, “Just get in there and write before you get too tired or distracted!”

I guess I’ve always thought my problem was just simple failure to have self-discipline, but now I’m not so sure. Maybe I just have a kooky idea of what life’s about.

Pastor John talked of God using afflictions to get us to move beyond our simplistic, humanistic and very small ideas of who He is. Some people have a Vending Machine god — you put in your money (prayer) and out comes what you want. Others have the Tit for Tat god — I do this for You, You do that for me. There’s the Short Order Cook god, where you step up to the counter, put in your order and voila! There is is. Or the Mechanical God, where you wind Him up, or plug in the formulas and He does the same thing every time.

I think that’s involved here. I think my idea of god is the Organization Guru god. Or maybe the Drill Sergeant god.  I have an idea of what He want my life to be like: Colonel Thieme’s little outline where you decide your priorities and schedule out your day accordingly, then proceed to execute your plan. That assumes you have the power to control your day…and it also doesn’t need God. It’s me doing it.

If only I could muster the self-discipline to follow my plan.

Except self-discipline is a fruit of the Spirit. So… it can’t be the same as an unbeliever’s self-discipline. I had a lot of self-discipline as an unbeliever. My mother was fantastic at it. But it came out of apprehension and guilt. Whatever you’re to do hangs over you, making you uncomfortable until you do it. Which is not a proper motivation for someone who is in union with Christ.

11:00pm  From today’s Bible Class Pastor John said,  “We don’t want to learn how to get more things done!” How to be more busy.

YES!!

We’re in John 15:1 now and he’s teaching on the True Vine, which is Jesus and the Vinedresser, which is God the Father. We are the branches, and sometimes He has to prune the branches so we will bear more fruit — cutting things out of our lives, challenging misconceptions, molding us day by day into the likeness of His Son.

“Pruning gets rid of non-essentials, narrowing and simplifying life so you can see clearly the target ahead of you. You have a great rule now as far as what’s important, how you decide what stays and what goes. In the past you didn’t know what you were going to be doing, so you kept all kinds of things you might need. But now you know.”

He talked of how we hear about this idea of “the unnecessary things in our lives and then give ourselves another project: to figure out what’s unnecessary and get rid of it. No! God’s the one who prunes and who identifies and will do what’s needed to make these things perfectly obvious to you and maybe even get rid of them for you.”

This has so much application to my life! I’m just not quite sure how. I keep coming back to the notion of RELAX and let Him do it. Stop trying to be “responsible” and work, work, work, get so many things done. I know I have too many things to do – more than I can do. But I don’t know what to do about it. Let some things go? What things? Declutter my life of areas of responsibility. He’s supposed to do that.

Well… maybe I’ll let Him…

Next: Part 3 – Affliction

Journal Entries — Part 1: The Journey Begins

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Well, it’s been over a week since I last posted. I don’t know where the time goes, just that it goes much too fast. Especially when I’m wrestling with something, which lately I have been.

For awhile I’ve been waking up in a weird mood, sort of down, yucky, discouraged, blue… I struggle to describe it precisely, can’t really find a direct source for it, though I’ve been having lots of dreams where I am trying to accomplish various tasks and keep running into obstacles, distractions, roadblocks, hindrances… A lot like my actual life.

The funny thing about the yucky feeling is that once I am thoroughly awake it goes away.

I read an article on dreams once – I think it might have been in The Smithsonian – that reported the results of a dream study some institution had done. In the study, subjects’ dreams tended to fall into two categories. One was where they dreamt of trying to accomplish something over and over and never succeeded until they woke up. Subjects who’d had this sort of dream tended to feel out of sorts afterward. And often there were elements of unfinished business in their lives that the dreams seemed to be springing from

The other category of dream was where the subject might dream over and over about something they were trying to accomplish until ultimately they succeeded and woke up. They felt much better than the other group of subjects. I think they might not have had the same sort of unfinished business in their lives as the first group of subjects…

At least that’s the way I remember it.

Anyway, it did seem to me that my dreams might indeed be echoing my reality, and that perhaps that was the reason for my waking up with the out of sorts feeling.

So this is where my wrestling began, and over the last two weeks or so has led to a spiritual journey of sorts that I’ve decided to set down here in my blog as a series of posts incorporating excerpts from my journal.

Come back tomorrow for the next installment.

Welcome, Lily

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Well this morning, sometime before 1:36am, my first grandchild was born into this world. I was asleep but my husband took our son’s middle-of-the-night call. He told me first thing when I woke up. Specifically he told me that I was “an old lady now,” having become a grandmother. Well, I don’t feel like an old lady, and anyway, I know people who are 35 and grandmothers and they’re hardly old women.

A few hours later I noticed a message on the answering machine after I’d come in from hanging out the laundry. Instead of it being a new call, though, it turned out to be the one from my son in the middle of the night. As he finished speaking (“Are you guys asleep?”) I could hear Lily’s cooing, quite close to the phone. It sounded like he might have been holding her, because right after the coo I heard his soft, delighted chuckle. Then he spoke again and she started fussing and about that time my husband must have picked up the phone, because it all ended.

Having heard that, of course I had to call immediately to congratulate the new parents. They were still in the birthing center, where they had a room that sounded like a hotel room with a king sized bed and private bathroom and shower… My son is staying there with them and has gotten two weeks off work for the birth.

Things have come a long way since my husband and I were new parents. Because I had to have a C-section I ended up in a hospital room, which I shared with another woman (I think there might have been two in succession — I was there for seven days, whereas most people were not). My hubby didn’t get any time off work, and because our son was in intensive care (on account of being premature) he (DH) had his hands full. He’d come home from a full day of work, take care of our animals — dogs, turkeys, and maybe chickens… I can’t recall when we got rid of the latter.

Anyway, he had to take care of them, then rush to the hospital to see me in the maternity ward, then our son in Neonatal Intensive Care, and somehow squeeze in a visit to the hospital cafeteria as well. Years later he told me that every day he had arrived at the hospital dreading bad news, certain that our son was on death’s doorstep. I on the other hand, who got to talk to the doctor and nurses and see DS often, never thought anything of the sort and was surprised and dismayed to learn of DH’s perspective only after the fact when we were reminiscing.

I wouldn’t wish that on anyone and it makes sense for the man to be with his wife and child from the beginning, so I’m happy to hear my son will be able to.

And I’m happy to be a grandmother as well. Can’t wait to see little Miss Lily in person. We’d planned a trip in October but that seems an awful long time to wait…

Thoughts on Sleep Deprivation

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I thought about doing a post on sleep deprivation, seeing as I am. I had to drive my husband to the hospital ER Sunday night so he could have a cut stitched up. We were there all night. Got home around 5:30 am. I went to sleep at 9 am and then woke up three hours later. I thought I might manage to nap in the afternoon, but for the most part I’m not a napper. So Monday I was operating on three hours of sleep.

I did better last night, but I think I’m probably at about 60%  Or I was earlier. The later it gets the more compromised I get. I feel tired. My eyes don’t want to focus on the screen. My brain feels like mush.

But I read a post today about blogging and how important it is to be consistent. You may have noticed my consistency has been lacking for some time now.  Except perhaps in the area of failing to post. I’ve been more consistent in that than anything.

Still, here I am and I am writing something. Unfortunately the article also said one’s posts should be substantive, not just a rambling stream of consciousness thing about what one did today. I fear I am very close to rambling.

I’m starting, though, to get a feel for what I’m like when I’m deprived of sleep:

Calling anyone on the telephone seems a task beyond my capability.

I can’t get my brain to do anything remotely creative… can’t write on the book, or write a blog post or even make a card.

I get irritable. Pessimistic. Self-condemning.

Small problems inflate into monstrous challenges.

I can’t talk. The words, which I know are there, won’t come up (reminds me of my computer while I’m waiting for a website to come up. Or the mail).

I am easily distracted.

I forget things.

I can, though, get on a roll of activity and do chores if I have a list of relatively routine things to do. Anything complicated and forget it.

So I’m probably foolish to even attempt to do a blog post right, now, but I’m also stubborn and there was that warning about being consistent. Besides I read a post today about how to come up with ideas for a post.  The author had a formula:

“What does (EXAMPLE) teach us about (SUBJECT)”.

You’re supposed to fill in the blanks and start writing. Thus,

What does [comparing apples and oranges] teach us about [ … sleep deprivation]?

Um… I have no idea. (I also seem to want to overuse ellipses, tonight…)

I’m not sure I’d have an idea even if I wasn’t sleep deprived. In fact, sitting here, trying to make something out of that, is making me more aware of the fact that my brain seems to have turned into a sock.  And the clock is ticking, bringing me ever closer to bed time and reminding me that I should be preparing for bed, or I’ll get there late, and be even MORE sleep deprived tomorrow.

So there you have it. A sleep-deprived persons “thoughts” on sleep deprivation…

But at least I’m posting again… and yes, I’m off to bed now…

A Baby Shower

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Last Friday morning I flew to San Diego to attend a baby shower for my daughter in law (“DDIL” in Flylady lingo) and soon to be arriving granddaughter (Will she be my DGD, then?  I don’t think I’ve seen that one show up in the digests). I arrived just after lunch, where my DDIL and her mother took me to lunch and then to… the BEACH!

Awesome. The dog beach on Coronado island, to be specific, right by where the Navy SEALS train and all sorts of interesting naval aircraft land… We spent most of the afternoon sitting in the sun and sand, visiting, and sometimes getting up to get wet (they did, not me) or talk a walk along the surf-line (that was me).  I had hoped to go the beach while I was there, but didn’t really think it would work out, given the timing and … it did.

To make it even better —  toward the end of the day two dolphins appeared out just beyond the waves diving in and out of the water… first time I think I’ve ever seen dolphins in the wild. Very cool.

By then my son had gotten off work and we met him at the house they just moved into last month– which has a yard that might actually contain Quigley when we come again to visit. After the tour, I unpacked the stuff I had brought with me for them — including some of my mother’s dishes they wanted but had never come back to Tucson to pick up when we decided to put off our planned memorial for her. I’d wrapped them in bubble wrap and put them in my suitcase but was uncertain if they would make it through the flight intact, but they did. Hooray.

Later we went off to a restaurant for foodies called Alchemy. I had never heard of “foodies” before, though I know I have seen them on the cooking channel my mother used to watch all the time: People who have a compulsion to put all sorts of weird foods together in the quest for something new and different. Folks in search of food adventures, as my son put it.

I had marinated medallions of beef that were very good, served over bok choy with kim chee that was… definitely an adventure in food. I think I don’t like kim chee, which is fermented cabbage with chili pepper flakes in it. I’m not sure about the bok choy. I thought it would taste like chard or spinach, but it had a strange flavor that reminded me of flowers or soap or something — that may have been the kim chee, as well, though.  Before the main course we had some small, sweet red peppers stuffed with pulled pork that were fabulous. And the cranberry bread pudding was excellent, too. All in all, a most excellent adventure.

Then it was off to check into our hotel on the water, where I had a room on the sixth floor overlooking the bay. Fantastic! And totally unexpected. Even though I knew the hotel was on the water there are as many rooms that look away from the water as look at it.

Next day was the shower, held in my DS and DDIL’s back yard under a tree with wonderfully twisty, interwoven branches. We ate chicken salad and spinach salad and watermelon and mixed fruit, with cookies and tortes and some yummy blueberry cake brought by some of the attendees. After that we played games — one involving candy bars smashed and melted in diapers (!) Though many of the participants couldn’t bear to look into the diaper at the stuff, I had no problem with that. Too many years cleaning up after the dogs I guess. My problem was that, though I was able to identify the ingredients of the various candy offerings, it’s been so long since I’ve eaten any candy bars I couldn’t remember any of the names.  Duh…

The shower ended around 3 and an hour later my son drove me to the airport where I flew back to Tucson. Arrived at 7:05 pm and was home by 7:30.

Shortest trip I’ve ever taken by air. But very fun and lots of great memories. I have, however, been pretty tired for the last two days…

Decluttering the Walls

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In my post before Quigley got sick, I mentioned that I had been decluttering my house and had even gotten a bit obsessive about it. I’m not sure that is true exactly, but I did spend a lot of time on it, maybe not because I was obsessed so much as because my house was going to be a gigantic mess until I got it done.

Before we had the liquidator come out and take everything out of my mother’s house, my sister and I went through the last of her things including her stacks of unframed watercolors… My sister had an especially hard time not taking all of them, but all of them would not fit in her car, so she had to decide. She took maybe a quarter of them home. I managed to restrain myself and ended up taking only four of them, one of which I hung immediately.

It’s a half sheet painting. To hang it, I had to take down the nearly-whole sheet painting already hanging in the desired spot and do something with it. It was a painting that had won Honorable Mention in a national show (The Western Federation of  Watercolor Societies Annual Show) so it was a little weird… you have to be weird — or really, really good — to get into those kinds of shows. So while on the one hand, this was my award-winning painting (they even gave me money!) and I wanted to have it up, on the other… I didn’t really enjoy looking at it. And it absolutely didn’t go with my mother’s painting.

So I took it down, moved the other painting  that was on the same wall and put up my mother’s. The larger painting I stuck in my office until I could figure out what to do with it. Then something went through on the Flylady email digest I get about looking at your walls and seeing the clutter there. Do you have too many paintings and decorations? Too much stuff on the walls has the same effect as too much stuff everywhere — it provides too much stimulation and generates tension. Reducing the visual clutter tends to produce peace.

I know that to be especially true for me. And my walls definitely were cluttered because back when I was doing watercolor, trying to sell my paintings and entering shows I had to have framed paintings. The framed paintings had to be stored and I had no room except for my walls. So every room had multiple paintings to the point it looked a bit like an art gallery. Too much stuff.

Having  removed the almost-full sheet painting and replaced it with my mother’s, I reduced by half the number of items sitting on the top of the piano beneath the paintings, took two more paintings off the same wall (there had been four to start with), and then sat down to evaluate the results. Yes!

I began to get ideas for all the walls…

Of course once taken down, I had to deal with the paintings: Unframe them, disassemble and wrap up the frames, deal with the glass or plexiglass they’d been glazed with… all this in a room that was already mounded with stacks of Mother’s dishes waiting for my son and daughter-in-law to claim them, several large boxes of documents waiting to be shredded or discarded. Boxes of Christmas ornaments I’d decided to take from my mother’s collection and a bunch of other stuff. It was a formidable mess.

I looked through my portfolio of paintings and found some I’d done more recently than the framed paintings already hanging in the dining room and decided to change them out… In fact all the paintings on my walls needed to be unframed, cleaned and put back at the very least. But that all was a big project that had to be completed swiftly so I could get all the frames and glass and so forth out of the house before it broke or I ran into it or …

I think I may have spent a couple of weeks on that. And tha work was indeed semi-obsessive. I’d get an idea, then carry it out, to see if it’d work. Then I’d be tired. Maybe it wouldn’t work, and then I’d be really tired… But falling asleep that night, or waking up in the morning or maybe just while I ate breakfast, I’d suddenly get a new idea for what to do and off I’d go again.

Anyway, it’s done now. Largely. I may put one painting back. It’s still waiting for me to decide. I want to get a new corner lamp for the living room before I do.

So. That’s one of the things that has kept me away from blogging  — sometimes quite literally, since with all the stuff in my office I couldn’t use my computer.

Here’s a picture of me and my award-winning painting at the Western Fed Show back in 1999. My painting is the one to my left and was called Driving Thru Utah, based on a page in my sketchbook that I’d made while, er, driving through Utah. I really wish, however, that I’d painted the one behind me, but oh well!

Quigley Update

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Well, I spent the day basically pre-occupied with my dog.

He made it through the night without throwing up or having any more diarrhea. He also didn’t move from his sleeping spot and drank nothing. I gave him his pill this morning and the Fast Balance GI, which he wasn’t excited about. Then he ate a cereal bowl full of rice, chicken and water, along with a small dog biscuit that is part of my husband’s morning departure routine — and that was it for the day.

Except for leaping up to bark ferociously at his nemesis — a large, white male dog who gets walked by our house every morning — Quigley slept in the living room. He didn’t come and wait in the kitchen for us to do tricks. He didn’t come when I got out the cheese to make my lunch (usually he does, hoping for a tiny sliver which he usually gets).  I tried to get him to eat/drink some more rice, but he wasn’t interested. He just lay around and slept.

So I got to spend the day trying not to worry, trying not to make up horrid speculations relative to dehydrated dogs, trying not to call the vet again, all because he wasn’t eating or drinking. My husband wanted to wait til tonight and see how he did, so that’s what I did. But it was hard.  Doubly so because our cooler wasn’t working. When the air coming in was hotter than the air already there, I turned it off. And with the interior of the house at about 86 degrees for much of the afternoon, it was hard to do anything.

Except think about how Quigley wasn’t eating or drinking anything — even though he rarely eats or drinks anything during the day. So that was stupid, in addition to being sinful.

But oh well. At day’s end, Stu came home and Quigley woke up. He ate more dog biscuits (part of the evening return routine). He ate two bowls of rice and chicken. He went for a walk and drank water when he got back… So now I am feeling much more at ease.

Also, the cooler’s been fixed and the air is now cool and much more comfortable. Now I have to go fold the laundry before I can go to bed.