Places To Go and Things To Do in the ‘Hood

The aim of art is to represent not the outward appearance of things, but their inward significance.
Aristotle

Last week, a group of about 10 of us from The Capitol Center Apartments went on a little excursion (about 3 1/2 blocks) to visit one of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Art Department labs. TASS Matthew Piepenbrok and his students Kristine Karlen, Bao Thao, and Sean Everett gave us an exciting demonstration of glass blowing and patiently answered our questions. It was a lot of fun and very educational.  

The Universtiy of Wisconsin-Madison at the behest of Harvey Littleton was the first college to establish a glass blowing lab in the United States in the ’60s. Above is a view of the furnaces in the present-day lab.  There are four of them and they all have whimsical names because it is easier to tell someone to use Lucy than it is to say the second one from the left.  Lucy and Joe were the ones in use while we were there.

TASS Matthew Piepenbrok (pictured left) is studying to be a professor of art and if his presentation to our group is any indication, he’s going to be an excellent one. He’s a very engaging and personable young man with a great sense of humor and seems to have a profound love of teaching others about his craft.  Examples of his art work can be found at ARTQ.net

In this picture he is showing us the molten glass he has just poured into a cold mold from one of the furnaces. What a card! Wouldn’t it be fun to have a professor like this?

Here he is showing us the hollow stainless steel rod that the liquid glass will be “loaded” onto in preparation for blowing. It was very warm in this lab due to four furnaces that were keeping the molten glass at a temperature of around 2,400 to 2,000*.

The long sleeve on Matthew’s right arm is to protect him from burns as he loads up his glassblowing rod.  According to Matthew and his students glassblowing is a very risky business and not a day goes by when one of them doesn’t get burned as Bao Thao kindly demonstrated for us later in the session! They were very nonchalant about it, treating it as an ordinary part of their day in the lab although you could tell it hurt.

Above Matthew and Kristine Karlen are loading a glob of molten glass onto the rod. In the picture at the right, Matthew is showing us a closer view of the glass after a small amount of air has been blown into it. At right, he is using a pad made from many layers of newspaper to begin shaping the glass. Later on he showed us how the heat from the glass had burned through several layers. 

The whole time the glass is being worked the artist or glassmith must keep the rod turning in order for centrifugal force to keep the glass on the rod or gravity will take effect and the piece will slump and become disfigured.  That’s not so hard at this stage but as they continued to add glass, the piece became heavier and heavier.  We were given a sphere of cooled glass to examine and it is quite heavy. I’d guess between 10 and 15 pounds.

Little by little more molten glass is added to the piece and more air is blown in then more shaping is done to smooth the piece and achieve the desired size and contours. All the while the rod must be kept spinning to keep the glass attached to the rod. The work is painstaking and physically challenging.

The top picture  shows Matthew blowing more air into his  globe of glass. Bao Thao steps in to assist him and Matthew demonstrates other shaping tools glassmiths use to get the effects they want to produce.

Sean Everett steps in to become Matthew’s assistant and things begin to get very dramatic! 

Protruberances were added to the sphere by dropping globs of glass from a rod. To keep the glass at the right temperature, a propane torch was used. Melted glass started dripping onto the cement floor!

At this point they began to let gravity take effect and elongate the round sphere in preparation for the cold mold that had cooled by now to be attached to the piece. It took 3 people to manage that task! Clearly glass art of any complexity is a collaborative effort.

Bao Thao brushes excess sand from the attached cold mold while Kristine Karlen stands by with the propane torch in case heat is needed to keep the glass at the right temperature. The glass can break or crack at any moment if the right temperature is not maintained and in fact, did during this demonstration but fortunately not badly enough to ruin the whole thing so they would have to start all over.

The cold mold has now been attached to a solid stainless steel rod and Matthew, Sean, and Kristine detach the former sphere from the hollow rod. They will begin pulling and twisting the piece into a an elongated horn shape after adding some colored pigment.

Bao and Sean hold the tip of the horn while the piece is being turned and pulled to shape it.

Kristine applies some heat to the tip to refine the shape just before it goes into the cooling tank.  She looks wicked cool with that propane torch!

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Through

Not terribly unique but I’ve been wanting to take these pictures for awhile and have been waiting for the right moment.  Through the window screen on the 16th floor.

Barbara Gavin-Lewellyn 

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Snowy, Snowy Night

Starry, starry night.
Portraits hung in empty halls,
Frameless head on nameless walls,
With eyes that watch the world and can’t forget.
Like the strangers that you’ve met,
The ragged men in the ragged clothes,
The silver thorn of bloody rose,
Lie crushed and broken on the virgin snow.

Don Mclean

These pictures taken February 23rd  in the courtyard of the building I live in reminded me of Don McLean’s “Starry Starry Night” and the VanGogh painting.  I love how the big flakes that were falling are visible and the play of the light from the yard lights on the snow.

I’ve been playing around with the tools in my photo manipulation program and this is what happened with these pictures.

The original photo first and then the manipulated version:

I used the photo manipulation program Shotwell bundled with Ubuntu Linux to transform that picture into the following:

I really liked how the colors that are present but not normally seen by the human eye popped out and made this scene almost surrealistic.

I didn’t go for the color in this next shot although there is some.  I just wanted to emphasize the snow on the branches.  I think I might like the original picture better than the manipulated one.

I <3 digital photography.  Wish I could afford a better camera.

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Shirley’s House of Recycled Virgins on Whitewater Avenue

Oh mother tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun

The Animals

[http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6dxNsWMb_E]

Way back in the distant recesses of time when my children were in grade school, we lived in a small HUD Family Housing complex in Fort Atkinson, WI while I was going to college in Whitewater. The horrors of the almost white glove inspections that the female half of a husband and wife management team used to put us single Moms through are responsible for my recent angst and near panic about getting my current apartment ship shape for the yearly inspection. Shirley (names have NOT been changed to protect the guilty) was a bit of a harridan—no, I take that back, she was a full blown harridan.

Shirley never called me by name. Not once in four years. When she talked to me, she called me and the rest of the single Mom’s who lived in her little fiefdom, “you people.” It was pretty obvious that she didn’t have much respect for any of us and openly despised most of us. I think she and her husband saw themselves as the keepers of our flagging morality brought on by the scourge of divorce. The most horrible thing had happened to us. We had no man in our lives to take control of matters.

She was certainly not impressed with our housekeeping skills. As far as I know, none of us ever passed her inspections the first time around with the possible exception of Frankie’s* Mom and she was even scrubbing Frankie down with ammonia. (I’m serious. Frankie’s Mom had issues with germs, the poor lady. More importantly, poor Frankie.) Shirley always gave us a list of things we had to have fixed on her return visit which would be a surprise visit. There could be no dirty laundry, furniture had to be one inch away from the walls, no dishes in the sink waiting to be washed, and even the window channels had to be absolutely spotless.

I personally think that was just an excuse for her to get back into our apartments to find out if we were doing something else she and her husband disapproved of. Specifically, whether or not we had a boyfriend who may or may not have been sleeping over. Shirley and her husband, Dick (a more appropriate name for that jerk could not have been invented), disapproved of boyfriends in no uncertain terms. When she gave me the keys to my apartment, she casually said “Of course you know that you are not allowed to have overnight guests.”

Silly, naive me, gaped in surprise and said something to the effect of “You mean my kids can’t have their friends over to spend the night?” “No,” she snapped, “I mean that you can’t have a man spend the night. Of course your children can have friends over to spend the night.” oh…

I was pretty sure that there were no such rules for HUD housing in general and that Shirley and Shirley’s husband, Dick, couldn’t actually make rules like that for this complex in particular but I was desperate for affordable housing and had no man in my life that I wanted to spend the night with at the moment anyway so I just filed that away for future reference. I did wonder if it would be OK for me to have a female spend the night and if it would matter if I was entertaining a lesbian lover but for once in my life, I opted not to make waves and bit my tongue. Besides, I didn’t have a lesbian lover either. Rebellion would come later.

I made sure I re-read my lease to check if I had been foolish enough to sign something that had put such a ridiculous restrictions on my non-existent love life though. You never knew when I might get a lesbian lover after all. I wanted to be prepared. I hadn’t.

Rebellion came closer not long after I moved in when I realized that Shirley and Dick were cruising the parking lots after 10pm and again before 6am every morning to check for strange cars and asking certain neighbors whose apartment those strange cars were visiting. How did I discover this? Why Shirley asked me about a strange car that was in MY parking lot, that’s how. She TOLD me it had been there at 10pm and still there at 6am.

My reply that I didn’t make it a habit to check whether any of my neighbors was being naughty and had no intention of snitching on them if I did find out they were might have been a bit rebellious. Shirley was not happy. I suspect I went onto the potentially naughty list after that conversation. I Certainly made the not cooperative list.

Rebellion came even closer when one day while I was talking on the phone, I opened my front door for some reason to find Dick standing outside it in an attitude of listening concentration. I can’t remember who I was talking to or what the conversation was about but I certainly remember the guilty look on his face as he scurried away.

At that point, I went and asked my new neighbors what in hell was going on with the management. They knew all about it. They advised me that if I wanted a boyfriend to spend the night I should tell him he needed to park on the street. Preferably a block away. What’s more if I wanted to talk about anything that was happening with my neighbors or some rule I was personally breaking, I should check to be sure Dick was not lurking around somewhere.

It was during one of the get-togethers inspired by my questions that someone (it might have been me) said they felt like they were living in “Shirley’s House of Recycled Virgins.” Soon we (okay, *I*) had composed a song sung to the tune of “The House of the Rising Sun” which has since been lost to many years time and moves to several other apartments. I made it a point to be singing it whenever I noticed Dick lurking about the building trimming hedges he had trimmed less than a week ago. LOUDLY and with gusto.

We plotted about how to bring this matter to a head and prove to Shirley and Dick that treating us like wayward teenage sluts was going to cause them more pain that it was causing us. We began discussing Dick and Shirley when we suspected one of them might be listening, saying the most outrageous things we could think of to say. A couple of us even tried to set Dick up into making a pass at one of us by talking about how hot we thought he was. We were out to make Dick and Shirley’s lives as miserable as they made ours.

I offered to have some guy come over and spend the night a few nights and make it more than obvious that he was at my house but the problem was I didn’t know any guys I wanted to invite for overnight pajama parties. I was such a party girl.

Outright rebellion came the following summer when Shirley finally accused me of having an unauthorized overnight male guest. I must confess that I, in fact, did have a male guest over night. He just happened to be my brother-in-law’s happily married brother-in-law who spent the night at my place with me chaperoned only by my two young children as we were traveling from Florida to Nebraska. We had stopped by to dump off most of the junk I had dragged to Florida with me, buy a new tire since we had had a blow-out somewhere in Georgia and deposit my check into my bank account. And sleep.

The ONLY way she could have known this is that someone tattled. We were traveling in MY car and had arrived at 11pm and left before noon the next day. To add insult to injury she waited three weeks for me to get back from Nebraska to confront me with this indiscretion.

She was also not happy that I had “abandoned” my apartment for three months while I was in Florida and Nebraska visiting relatives and had shut off the refrigerator. Not only that, I hadn’t bothered to put anything away when I made that flying visit to Wisconsin. I had simply unpacked the car and left everything sitting in the middle of the living room. In an untidy pile. I hadn’t even made one of the beds when I left the next day—my son’s bed which only got made when I KNEW Shirley would be there to point out my sloppiness and moral ineptitude and I just wanted to get through the damn inspection without making waves. How could I be such a pig?

AND, and, and how could I afford to go running off to Florida and Nebraska for such a long vacation. She had half a mind to report me to the authorities. That’s when I started laughing

How did she know all this? Because I didn’t answer the door for several days in a row when she came to talk to me about my unauthorized male visitor so she let herself in and investigated and she asked the neighbors where I was since it was obvious someone was watering my plants. By then I had done a little sleuthing and knew she couldn’t legally do what she was doing as far as guys spending the night and a bunch of other crap she and Dick were pulling and was in the process of gearing up to complain to HUD about them.

I gave Shirley a piece of my mind and told her that she couldn’t make the rule about guys spending the night stick and if she ever came into my apartment again for any reason that was not specifically stated on the lease, I would file a complaint to HUD if I didn’t do it based on this particular incident. Furthermore I didn’t give a rat’s ass if she called the welfare office. They couldn’t tell me how to spend my money or where I spent the summer either as long as my kids weren’t being neglected.

She tried to claim she did indeed have the right to ban men from the apartment and that she also had the right to come in for maintenance reasons. I invited her to start eviction proceedings because I intended to have as many male visitors spending the night as possible and maybe even a female lover or two but advised her she better call a lawyer because I intended to own her new car and anything else of value she owned if she tried to do that since I knew it was illegal. I asked her who had complained that something wasn’t working in my apartment or what she was specifically looking at that needed maintaining that wasn’t covered by the yearly inspection and would not require a 24 hour written notice. She glared at me, harrumphed and turned heel to leave. I never heard another word.

I was fed up though and did indeed write that letter of complaint to HUD. It was 3 or 4 pages long and included every egregious bit of crap she and Dick had pulled on any of the residents that I knew about. I also proceeded to go door to door within the complex and got more than half of the 32 tenants to sign it. Within a few weeks HUD sent letters to everyone living there and advised us all that the management had been advised that most of what they were doing was illegal.

That was the beginning of my life long interest in political activism ever since.  I never made my son make his bed again when it was time for inspections. I never found myself a lesbian lover either.

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Life at the Three Threes: HUD Inspections

Life at the Three Threes is ummm…interesting to say the least. I love living in downtown Madison and having the University so near. The energy of so many young people roaming the streets and patronizing the same business establishments I patronize is exhilarating. Living on the 9^th floor of one of the tallest buildings in the city is excellent. I’ve got a view! Having the Senior Center where I volunteer and socialize keeps me from becoming socially isolated. As an extrovert with introvert tendencies I really need and enjoy that outlet.

And then there is the Three Threes (the building street address is 333) itself. This building is HUD Housing meaning the rent I pay is based on my income and the rest is paid by a federal program with the Department of Housing and Urban Development. The residents are either senior citizens or disabled in some way.  The staff here is primo! We couldn’t ask for nicer and better folks in the office or on the maintenance staff. They all have an excellent sense of humor and are kind and helpful to the inmates err…residents.

Jill, in the front office, reigns with a quiet fair-minded benevolence. Gina, the resident activities coordinator and Jill’s assistant is creative and enthusiastic as well as fun to hang with. Erica, the Services Manager (she helps us get the social services we need to stay independent and healthy) is the BEST! I want to hook her up with my son.

The building is extremely well maintained and if you ask for something or there is a problem Vern and Scott are Johnny on the spot. Eldegard (I may have misspelled that—it’s Spanish) keeps the common areas spotless. They are all pleasant and nice folks.

BUT…(you just knew there was a but in there, didn’t you?) there are some things I (and most everyone else here) don’t like about living in HUD housing. Yearly inspections are one of them. A lot of people hate it with a purple passion but I’m generally pretty stoic about it. It forces me to spring clean which is a good thing and I sort of appreciate the push to do what I should be doing anyway.

But I don’t like it. It’s stressful. It takes all the fun out of spring cleaning which is that I do it because I feel like opening and washing the windows and as long as there is fresh air let’s get rid of all those pent up winter smells that accumulate. I’m in the mood and energized. Bring on the Pine Sol!

Besides that, I don’t particularly like young, healthy, physically active people coming in and judging my housekeeping skills. It doesn’t matter how nice they are. It’s unnerving.

Inspections take that away from me for the most part but whatever… I can deal. However, this year I am in the “hating it with a purple passion” camp. I have been incredibly busy for the past 4 weeks running to the chiropractor, the vet, and today I have to go see my GP. My son’s birthday was last Sunday. That may not seem like much but for me, it’s exhausting.

When I got the notice last Friday that they were going to be doing inspections THIS Thursday (that’s tomorrow), I was horrified. I was baking a cake on Saturday. Saturday night I was going out of town until Sunday evening. I had a Chiropractor appt Monday, Bridge on Tuesday, Dr’s appt on Wednesday. I need naps every afternoon. Serious two-three hour naps or I get sick. Just when was I going to find time to clean? Especially since they want the oven, refrigerator, bathroom, and carpet looking good. Oy…

If I fail this inspection then they will put me on horror of horrors quarterly inspections. Good gawd…

Don’t get me wrong, I think I am one of the luckiest people I know to live here in affordable housing that is well taken care of. I try to remember to count my blessings and not bitch a lot. Today I’m bitching.

Bless her heart my daughter is coming over tonight to clean the oven because that always triggers an asthma attack for me and needs its own day all by itself. And I’ve taken on the attitude that what gets done gets done. If they put me on quarterly inspections I’m going straight to Erica and asking her to help me find some housekeeping help. I’ve always wanted a maid.

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MIA/A Prisoner of War

In addition to my other numerous acquaintances, I have one more intimate confidant. My depression is the most faithful mistress I have known — no wonder, then, that I return the love.

Soren Kierkegaard (1813 – 1855)

I’ve been absent from this blog for quite awhile due to a variety of reasons/excuses. Amongst other things it was my PC going kerplunk again. One day shortly after Thanksgiving, I logged on and there was no internet connection log on and no way to create a new one without totally reinstalling the operating system.

Just in time to prevent me from placing my Christmas orders. sigh… It was obvious “the Gremlins” were back. Past experience with a situation such as this meant that even a re-installation wouldn’t even solve the problem so I didn’t even bother trying.

But never mind, the Senior Center has Internet Access and since I already knew what I wanted, it didn’t take long to get my order placed and paid for. neener, neener, neener! :^*~~~~ OK, that was childish but it felt good. ;^} Finding ways to work around the Gremlins gives me great pleasure. It’s like playing a game with naughty children.

Then one day I was bored so I decided to reload the operating system and see what happened. It worked. The PC is slow and weird things keep happening. I have to disconnect the internet connection every once in awhile because it just seems to get so clogged down I can’t use it and it just doesn’t function as well as it did before but at least I can get online and read at the the forums. Posting is iffy.

In the meanwhile I started sewing or crocheting while I was watching movies. (I love NetFlix!) More about that later) I made myself a dress and have a matching hat almost done. It’s sleeveless so I’ll needs something to wear over the top of it. The dress has a white background with red and purple flowers, green leaves and mustard butterflies with black accents so I have a lot of colors to choose from. Very retro 60s.

It’s long-below mid calf and an A-Line. It could be uses as a jumper with a blouse underneath and I might consider belting it with black if I wear a black shirt under it. I want to make to make a shrug jacket to wear with it since it’s sleeveless and there is no way I will wear a sleeveless dress even in the warmest weather since I’ll freeze or get a sunburn. I have some red knit and some lightweight mustard wool that matches. I’d love to get some purple. It would make for a very versatile outfit.

Then I started working on a flannel shirt and my sewing machine started acting up. The tension was all screwed up and for the life of me I could not get it fixed. Oh great… It turned out that the bobbin case had been unseated and the timing was off. Simple to fix if you know anything about sewing machines but how in hell did THAT happen? “The Gremlins” again? I don’t know but… Now I have to lock my machine up in the bedroom which is a PITA. <big heavy sigh…>

Then my TV remote disappeared. I’ve scoured the house for it. Turned everything upside down looking for it. There’s just me here to use it and I only sit in one chair when I watch TV. The remote usually gets put on the coffee table or maybe the TV. It’s just gone.

Then my DVD player went kerplunk—or so I thought. It’s an old DVD player handed down from my son-in-law to my son and now to me and half the functions don’t work so it didn’t surprise me it quit working. The problem was that there was a DVD from NetFlix stuck in there. So I had my son take a look at it to see if he could figure out a way to get it out when he came over to take me to get a new one. Lo and behold, the electrical cord in the back had been pulled partway out. I hadn’t moved the damn thing…

There’s more but I won’t bore you with it. Suffice it to say that it’s very tiresome and well, depressing. Things seemed to ramp up when I got Igor. Whenever I leave to take him for a walk, I wonder what will happen next. I worry when I leave him and Patches alone that someone will come in and try to hurt them.

Or maybe it’s been since I filed the restraining order against the suitor who wouldn’t take no for an answer. He hadn’t been on my list of suspects until that incident and the note but I’m still not sure he’s the one who wrote it. He said he didn’t but I wouldn’t cop to doing that either if I was him. Still, I don’t think he has the computer expertise to pull off what is happening with the PCs in this building.

Two more people have told me that they have viruses or trojans that they can’t get rid of with their regular anti-virus software. Damn but that sucks. It happens all too often in this building.

I’m depressed because somehow they managed to get past the $100.00 lock that was guaranteed to be pick proof. It wasn’t guaranteed to be pick pocket proof which is what I think happened. One day I took Igor out and when I came back I couldn’t find my keys. I retraced my steps but they were nowhere to be found so I came up to see if they were in the door just in case I had been foolish enough to do that.

I think my pocket got picked in the elevator but I’m not sure who did it. When I get another lock for this door I’ll have to wear the key around my neck like a precious jewel. <sheesh>

I found them in the lock on the bedroom door. That is not something I would EVER do, I unlock that lock, take off the hasp and relock the lock on the loop so that I have to have the keys in my hand to relock it. That’s to prevent me from locking the keys in the bedroom. But still I could have left them in the door and that pisses me off. I’m angry at myself because I wasn’t careful. If I had stopped to put on a pair of jeans so I could stick them in my jeans pocket rather than running around with them loose in my jacket pocket well… Jesus this sucks

If you are familiar with the movie Gaslight you might have some understanding of what has been happening to me for the past 4 years. FOUR years. I don’t exactly understand why although I have my suspicions. I’ve tried to catch them but everything I’ve tried, including hiding small cameras has failed. I’ve complained to the management and the police and even though they believe that there is something going on, they say there is nothing they can do until I have actually seen someone in my apartment. It’s so frustrating…

Sometimes I feel like a prisoner of war because this never lets up and I want to stay in the house to protect the things I have. And sometimes I get into that mindset and become very isolated. One of the reasons I got Igor was to force myself out of the house. I refuse to sit here paralyzed by fear that some poor sick sociopath is going to invade my space and mess with my stuff, I have to remind myself: IT’S JUST STUFF! ALL OF IT!

Sure there are memories attached to some of the things they have taken–my grandson’s pictures. But you know what? They can’t steal the memories I have of him at those ages. IT’S JUST STUFF! If it makes you feel important to take it, please, help yourself. IT’s JUST STUFF!

People who place so much priority on stuff that they’ll lose their perspective when it gets destroyed or stolen have fucked up priorities in my opinion. STUFF can be replaced or like the rose that got destroyed tonight. Big deal. It was a pretty rose. But I was just thinking the other day that it was getting old and scruffy looking. Time to toss that nasty old thing.

I haven’t given up and even though I get a little depressed sometimes—especially around Christmas which is always a hard time for me anyway. They are not going to win this war. Sometimes it’s hard to sort out how much of the depression belongs to the stress from dealing with “the Gremlins” and how much is just old shit. Sometimes “the Gremlins” trigger old shit.

I found a card at the Community Pharmacy that says “Your Mind Is Burglar-Proof.” I put it up on my bulletin board to remind myself that NO ONE can control how I think, feel, or react. “The Gremlins” whoever they are are probably just sick twisted people who need to do stupid shitty things to people in order to feel like THEY matter and have meaning. What a pity. If truth be known I feel sad for them. What horrible things happened to them that they feel like they need to do things like this to get even in life?

Still, I get depressed when I think I have managed to repel their invasion into my life and once again they foil all of my efforts. I feel helpless sometimes and then the depression takes over. Depression has been something of a fixture in my life. I can’t remember a time when I haven’t been at least a little depressed. Sometimes I retreat into it, that familiar dark place where I let life happen while I watch. Sometimes I trun away into the darkness and refuse to watch. I turn into the darkness and wait, hoping for an end to the pain–death or the light that eventually comes if I wait long enough for the pills to do their thing.

In general, any depression associated with the Gremlins is short-lived because I remember that that MY MIND IS BURGLAR-PROOF and what they are doing is mostly just irritating. Like mosquitoe or fly that keeps buzzing around your ear and won’t go away no matter how much you flap at it. If you ignore it it gets bored and goes off to find someone else to bug eventually.

B

`

 

 

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Internet Window Shopping! Gotta Love It!

Wish I was back in the city
Instead of this old bank of sand,
With the sun beating down over the chimney tops
And the one I love so close at hand.

Bob Dylan

The city is replacing the sewer and water works and presumably the electric and  phone lines under the street out in front of my building.  The construction has been going on since mid-July and it’s created quite an air of grit and grime in my apartment.   I don’t have an air conditioner–don’t need one or want one.  I’m happy as a pig in a wallow when those temperature soar into the 90s.  I’m finally warm.

But that has created a  huge problem this year.  Filth.  I’ve been looking at these sorry off-white vertical blinds hanging at my windows that aren’t so white anymore and thinking about what a pain they are going to be to clean.  And how much I really dislike them.  I’d much rather have horizontal blinds like these MetroWood Blinds I found at GUARANTEED blinds.com.

But I think I could live with these lovely fabric vertical blinds . and they’re on sale. They’re beautiful!   I’d only have to decide which color and fabric to choose and there are plenty of choices!

I don’t get a lot of direct sun.  Barely two to three hours hours in the late afternoon.  Most of the time I don’t even close the blinds because my poor plants need their Vitamin D and so do I.  But when I do I’d like to have something attractive to look at and I want that sun to stay OUT!

GUARANTEED blinds.com even gives you detailed instructions on how to measure your windows to get a custom fit for your blinds.  But if you need a technician to measure and/or install your window blinds all you have to do is plug in your zip code and enter your contact information and someone from GUARANTEED blinds.com will contact you.  Easy peasy!

B

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Plastic Free Patches

Well, that little episode with Patches itchies was quite a revelation.  She got checked out, got her shots for the year, got her teeth cleaned and was sternly admonished to exercise more and eat less (she blinked twice and lay down as if to say “as if”) and pronounced healthy but pudgie.   They don’t use the F word there.

The Vet laughed at me when I told him about the leash but said going up and down stairs a couple of times a day would be good for her.  So I will have to get another collar.  I should walk over to Walgreens for one of those rugged fabric ones  or find another excuse to go out to Shopko.  Maybe I could make one.  Where the hell is she going to go if she gets loose?  We’ll be in the stairwell.  The leash is primarily for managements benefit.

The Vet agreed that it was probably allergies to one of the things that was new and most likely the collar but to let things be for awhile  and then  we could re-introduce one thing at a time to see if she reacted.  I’m thinking why bother with all that?  Not one damn thing was essential.

But OK out of curiosity I’ll see if she breaks out from the Newmans Own.  Just so I can write to Robert Redford and tell him my cat is allergic to it if she is.  Besides, she liked it but ate less of it than she did the Iams.   Now  I wonder why that is?  I have no idea what the caloric count  is on either brand.  I wonder if she would pick the Newmans out of the Iams?  Oooo Kitty torture.

I still think it’s the plastic.  I took away her plastic food bowl too and she is no longer scratching her chin like she used to.  I wonder if that means I have to forbid her from playing with the plastic bags while I’m unpacking groceries.

She does get rather playful then.  She chases them across the floor.  I fill them with air for her like balloons and she kills them for me.  When they are dead I pick them up and put them in a paper bag to save as pooper scoopers for the grand-doggies.  I need to transfer some to my suitcase for the next trip to Edgerton.

Anyway, I’m going to start giving Fatty Patty Newman’s own cat food tomorrow morning.  Stay tuned.

B

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The Shelf Wars Revisited

A nice war is a war where everybody who is heroic is a hero, and everybody more or less is a hero in a nice war.

Gertrude Stein

Gosh, I finally found a way to quote Getrude. The professor I pissed off when I told her I thought Stein was a crock of over ripe manure and not worth reading would be so proud of me. Of course I left out about 5000 words of sheer and utter nonsense and when you come right down to it this is pure BS as well. Alice B. was a saint.

My professor later forgave me when I won second place in a Robert Frost poetry contest with a poem about cowpaths and cows getting their udders ripped open by barbed wire because the grass is always greener on the other side of the fence. It was a femnist poem. She liked that too. <heh>

But back to the shelf wars. Remember when I tried to hang the shelves in my bedroom? Not good.

I was hanging shelves again today in the living room when who should buzz my buzzer but my dearly beloved son. I answered my inside door with my handy dandy ratched screwdriver in hand. My son covets my ratcheted screwdriver with it’s many different interchangeable heads of varying sizes. It’s a newly acquired toy.

He promptly relieved me of my screwdriver and began toying with it. “Whatcha doing, Mom?”

“Where?”

“Over in the corner.” and he goes running over there to see what I had done with my ratcheted screw driver in his hot little hand.

I had just begun to set those plastic doohickeys into the dry wall after having carefully measured everything three times with my retracting tape measurer to be sure that everything was going to be level. He remeasured everything for me and nodded his head wisely. He reminded me so much of his father I had to giggle.

Then he picked up my hammer and the long handled screwdriver I was using as a punch and began driving the rest of the holes to finish the job. Whoa! Wait a minute here, This was my nice little Saturday, I’m writing and I need a diversion every now and then project. I’ll write and when I need to think, I’ll punch a hole or screw in a screw.

But he wants to use my ratcheting screwdriver so bad he can taste it. All in the name of helping out the old lady. His Mom. Nothing can make you fell more ancient and helpless than a son who has just taken possession of your ratcheting screwdriver and your self-suffiency. And dammit I wanted to have the bragging rights of saying I hung those shelves and did it right. The last damn project was a disastor.

Not my fault the wall is cement and I couldn’t get the screws set plus the brackets just won’t stay in the thing-a-ma-jiggie. (Well they will now–Gorilla glue is the duct tape of today! Love that stuff!) But he had to rescue me from that disastor and I AM HANGING THESE SHELVES.

We argue about it a bit until I remember that the hanging Stained Glass Butterfly gadget he got me for Christmas still hasn’t been hung. And it will require me to stand on a chair to do it myself. Not good when you have vertigo. Plus I don’t know for sure what kind of hook to get. Plus he is tall.

I got the guy in to drill the hole into the cement ceiling (yeah… cement. Next time someone says tornado warning and we ought to take cover, I’m telling them we live in a freaking bomb shelter! We’ll be the only building standing after it’s all over. <heh>) I’ve just been waiting for him to show up.! YAY Diversion tactics!

Anyway, I show him that and we take a walk over to Dorn Hardware and pick up a hook and he puts that up but he still wants to play with my screw driver so together we put the first bracket holding strip up. I insist on driving the first screw.

I’m going to have to get that boy one of those screwdrivers for Christmas. And maybe one of those nifty ratcheted socket sets they have. I wish I needed sockets because they sure are cool. I love hardware stores. Dorn’s is really cool because they have cool people who work there.

B

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I Know Where the Circle Is, I Just Thought It Was Too Tight For Me So I Took It Off in 1970 Along With My Panty Girdle Somewhere on I-95 In Michigan Some Trucker Is Probably Still Driving Around With It Stuck To His Windshield Like a Trophy!

There is all the difference in the world between departure from recognised rules by one who has learned to obey them, and neglect of them through want of training or want of skill or want of understanding. Before you can be eccentric you must know where the circle is.

Ellen Terry (1847-1928), British actor. Ellen Terry’s Memoirs, 2nd. ed., ch. 5 (1932).

MerlinsDad, my cyber friend in Atlanta, and I were discussing eccentricity as in me being eccentric. I think people probably see me as being eccentric. I know my children think I’m eccentric. Quirky. That’s a good word. I’m quirky.

My kids think I talk too much to too many people. I probably do. I’ve never really met a stranger, just someone I haven’t been introduced to yet. I also have a tendency to talk to myself if there is no one else to talk to. I have wonderful conversations with myself!

Then there is the matter of my verbiage. I hhave a huge vocabulary of $64 words that I can even usually spell correctly but I curse too much. I use the eff word with abandon. I say damn this and damn that and oh shit with every stumble. I have a potty mouth and I don’t give a damn. I come off sounding like the very well educated redneck that I am. I can control this tendency when I want to and I do until i get to know the people I’m getting to know and then I shock the living hell out of them when I loosen up.

I have a tendency to dress eccentrically too, like an aging hippie in tie dye clothes and long skirts or jeans that are worn out. At the age of 56 I have long hair that I wear long and loose in the winter or in a bun like Tyne Daly in the summer. It’s graying beautifully if I do say so myself. My daughter wants to cut it short and stylish and hates it long. She has training as a beautician and takes it personally when I don’t follow her advice.

My neighbor Max told me I project this Earth Mother, feel good, it’s a sunshiney day persona that draws everyone into my circle. I don’t believe that’s true because I apparently have plenty of enemies and besides, there are people I definitely don’t want in my circle which has caused more than a few awkward and some decidedly ugly moments.

The reason MerlinsDad and I got into this conversation is because I said I preferred to hang out with the people in the apartment complex that the so-called nomal people would consider eccentric and it was going to seal my eccentric label. But that’s OK because I’ve known, admired, and loved a great many eccentric people, many of them in my own family. One of my very favorite eccentric relatives was my Mother’s eldest sister Cleo Fate Flleschner (I cannot for the life of me think of her married name but she was married to my Aunt Christine Gavin’s husband’s second or third cousin twice removed. It will come to me,  See I told you it would come to me.  It took a couple of hours or more but I rmembered eventually.)

My Aunt Cleo spent all of her life on a farm until Uncle John died and left her with a reasonable sum of money at her disposal. She wisely turned this principal over to a broker and told him to invest it as he saw fit and told him to send her the dividends to live on.Then she went to work at the truck stop in Sutton Nebraska as a dish washer and bus girl on the third shift at the age of 56 and began living like a teenager. Before we knew it she was dating truck drivers and going on long haul drives with them. Why, she was having sexual relationships with them! Men she hardly knew! Men none of us knew!  She was getting a reputation!

All of the relatives were flabbergasted! All of her relatives were horrified! All of them except me. I was tickled pink for her. She was my favoritedAunt and she had worked hard all those years. It was good to see her having fun. It was fun to see her happy and excited! Her children tried to get her committed to the looney bin. That pissed me off. I wrote to her eldest son who was a preacher and told him off in no uncertain terms. He never answered me.

I was living here in Wisconsin while all of this was going on but when I went home for a visit I got a chance to tell Aunt Cleo in person that I was on her side and Hurray for her for having the guts to live her life to its fullest measure. We were standing out by her car as she was getting ready to leave and I told her not to let anyone tell her she was crazy because she wasn’t, she was beautiful and full of joy. She was still young and she should enjoy what remained of her life not sit down and get ready to die.

She cried when I told her that and said it meant everything for someone in her family to support her and she wished she had a daughter like me. Funny, I wished she was my mother instead of the disapproving wretch who sat in the house hoping no one had noticed her eldest sister had been in town.

B

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