A List of What’s Occupying My Time and Thoughts

Taxes

We haven’t gotten our 1099s from Social Security yet and don’t know if they will come in the mail or if we have to do something impossible online to receive them. As if doing taxes wasn’t abhorrent enough, there are so many obstacles and difficulties just getting stuff ready for the accountant.

Shoes

I walked a hole into the bottom of my hiking Crocs and my new Crocs gave me a blister—how is this possible when I wear the same shoes all the time?

So cute but not Crocs.

Several times I’ve sent a giant expensive heavy box of decent shoes we no longer wear to a place in Montana called Provision International. They gather huge containers of usable shoes and ship them to places where people need shoes.

You can bet your boots that I will NEVER EVER wear shoes like these again.

Watches

After trying for several years to find a watch that I can change the battery on, I finally quit buying Timex and paid big money for a watch that doesn’t need a battery. But what is one supposed to do with old watches? I have five that won’t work, the nicest because something non-battery-related is wrong and 4 because the back cannot/will not/does not come off. The one time I was successful, it was impossible to replace the back. Had to take it to a jeweler who used a special clamp.

I tried to find someone on Etsy who could use them. Nada. Listed on eBay. Nada. Contacted Veterans Watchmaker Initiative several ways. Nada. FINALLY I found a place called WeRecycleOldWatches and THEY REPLIED!! Then, after silence from Veterans Watchmaker Initiative regardless of method of contact, THEY REPLIED THE SAME DAY AS WE-RECYCLE-OLD-WATCHES! Because I think Veterans often get the short end of the stick, I packaged the watches and addressed it to them. Now, to take them to the PO and PAY to send them away. . . WHY do I do all this?

Motivation

What motivates me to do these things? I abhor waste, and it troubles me to just dump things. At the same time, I do NOT want to own things that don’t work or are no longer useful. So it seems that I spend an inordinate amount of time finding the right places and people for an endless supply of things. There is a continual push-and-pull between not wasting and a desire for a simple life.

Wrist

My DeQuervain’s Tenosynovitis is better. Only took 16 months. . . and I don’t completely trust the current state of almost painfree activity, so I wear the brace when doing wristy things. Using Photoshop or Powerpoint are particularly challenging.

Knitting

My yarn stash hasn’t been declining since the DeQuervain’s Tenosynovitis has curtailed my knitting. Yarn.com somehow reactivated my email and I almost succumbed to a sale, buying yarn after successfully being on a severe yarn diet for several years. “Almost succumbed” —saved by the fact that PayPal wouldn’t work with their site. “Try Later” —Nope, you lost a sale.

Rock Fun

My friend and I sometimes look for rocks together. It is so fun to go to the river and just putz around, without a permit, a fee, an application, a user name or a password, the option to hear things in Spanish, or hold “music”. We get dirty and sometimes we fall down while looking at rocks and digging around. Sometimes we find ones we want to keep. Sometimes they are a big project to extract and then to get up near the road where we go back with a vehicle to retrieve them. Don’t tell anyone, okay? I’m sure someone will try to stop us. . .

P.S. None of these drawings are available for sale. HOWEVER, I do accept commissions.

The Building in the Library Mural

Good sunlit photo but before it was quite finished.

When I was designing the Ivanhoe Library mural, I dug around for photos of a building that is cemented in my memory as a beautiful old structure. (Apparently, I’ve loved old buildings all my life.) I found a photo of the Ivanhoe School auditorium in Laura Spalding’s book Ivanhoe—the Town with Three Names: Klink, Venice Hill, Ivanhoe. I was confused that her book identified it as “Ivanhoe Community Hall”, but I recognized it instantly as the building where I learned to play the clarinet*, gave my campaign speech to be the school president**, checked out books, and played the piano for the jazz band.

When I finished painting it, I added “Ivanhoe School Auditorium” and then thought it would be nice to provide the year it was built along with the year it went away.

Like most things in life, that was easier said than done. The librarian called the History Room at the main library branch, and was told it was built in 1932 and demolished in 1948.

Nope and nope. Architecturally speaking, it is clearly older than 1932, and since I graduated from Ivanhoe in 1973, I KNEW it was standing past 1948.

So, I went to Visalia (had to go anyway to retrieve Momscar with its new starter) and visited the History Room. Library Historian Hunter and I pulled three thick folders from a filing cabinet and started flipping through all sorts of old papers.

Like much in life, the building’s dates are complicated, far too complicated to simply put as “19XX – 19??” on the mural.

Here’s what we learned in two different places, along with Spalding’s book:

It was built around 1926 as a community hall. Then, maybe in 1932, or maybe 1937, “the community, who being unable to meet the indebtedness gladly disposed of it to the school.” One source says it was moved in 1932, another says it was moved in 1937; a third source says it was moved in spring of 1939.

Nowhere have I found the year that the building was demolished. Maybe demolition records aren’t kept, because the demolishers are embarrassed to be part of destroying history, or maybe because it is viewed as a hazard or junk to be gotten rid of, rather than something old and beautiful that has reached the end of its functional life.

So, the painting of the old school auditorium will not have dates, only its title as I recall it: Ivanhoe School Auditorium.

When I was a regular patron of the Ivanhoe library, sometimes we had to go to the main library in Visalia in order to find enough good material to write a term paper or do a report. What is now the children’s library used to be the entire Visalia library, which I found to be stunning and overwhelming. I also thought the building was beautiful, because it is. The architectural style is like the house my dad grew up in, built in 1932. (The house—the library was completed in 1936, so it was clearly the same era.)

P.S. I drew the library in 1989 before the new one got built.

P.P.S. I also stopped by a retail store in Visalia to see a childhood friend from Ivanhoe who told me the school library wasn’t in the bay window but was in a door off the porch. That’s why I added a hint of a door on the otherwise dark and bland front porch. I sure would like to find more photos of the building, both in and out, but those were the days before everyone carried a camera.

* Nope, can’t play clarinet anymore

** Yeppers, I won.

Exploding Head

Not literally. Figuratively. There is a difference in these two terms despite the language butchering (figurative, not literal) that is commonplace.

Using a template to convert a book from Word to InDesign is supposed to be easy. Sure, if everything works. When does that happen??

Converting the InDesign file to a PDF for proofreading is supposed to be easy. Sure, if everything works. When does that happen?

Getting a 1099 form used to mean waiting for the mail. Now you “just log in and download and print”. Supposed to be easy. Sure, if everything works. When does that happen?

“Go digital” to get your Social Security statements—“It’s Fast, Easy, and Secure”. Easy?? Who are you kidding?

“Get 85 Free Prints A Month” from Photo Affections! It’s fast and easy! Sure, except for all the hidden prompts, tiny clever little tools to guess at, and oh, by the way, only one print per image is allowed for free.

My head is about to explode.

Let’s just look at a few photos and try to regain our balance.

The beginning of spring in my yard: flowering quince, daffodils, germander
Morning light on Comb Rocks
Presbyterian Church: you can bet they never put kraft paper over their windows because they have stained glass with local wildflowers.

Now maybe I’ll go try to balance my checkbook with all those Paypal entanglements, debit cards, and oh, oops, I used the wrong account to pay for business expenses, and what was that automatic deduction for? That’s right, the printing 10-key machine makes illegible numbers, so I’ll clean it. Well, oops, now it won’t print. (Felt great to shove it in the trash, so there.)

Never mind. Today I am painting the mural in Ivanhoe, listening to roosters crow, dogs bark, cats yowl, and cars go past. Nothing on the computer, very very peaceful. I’ll show you all about it on Monday.

Red-Neck Ramblings

I could be oil painting but seem to want to pull weeds, write blog posts, text with a friend about a difficult situation, make yogurt, and write a few letters.

We have a bit of a situation, but as a wise friend has said, “When you have a problem and you have money to fix it, you don’t have a problem; you have an inconvenience.

Prolly a starter. Maybe a fuse. Not the ignition switch or the battery. Thank goodness for the good pick-em-up truck (2003) AND the Botmobile (1986). Thank goodness for AAA, for upping the towing package 2 years ago, for Valero Bros. in Woodlake, and for Foreign Autoworks’ new owner, Frank.

We have a new pastor at church, someone with lots of energy and ideas. He joined the 50% of the congregation who wanted to remove the kraft paper from the front windows and asked a pair of fearless monkey-dudes to help. See if this doesn’t cause your guts to squeeze a bit. . .

Okay, done rambling. Gonna paint now.

Eleven New Learnings in January

  1. Ammonia is the main active ingredient in anti-itch medicine. If you put it on a cotton ball and rub it on bites or rashes, it helps better than those tubes of overpriced placebos. I have no idea what happened to my right foot, but it swelled up like a burrito and I scratched like a crazed animal for days. Ammonia was the only thing that provided some relief. (Nope, not gonna show you a photo.)
A heart rock, because we love to learn here.

Learned from Intern:

2. The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web where people can search through old websites; he found my first website from around 2003 or so.

3. People in Asian countries make vertical emoticons (°-°) instead of sideways :-). I’ve been having fun with this! (*U*)

4. Youth view using a period at the end of a sentence in a text as a method to makes things look really serious. Good grief, I must really scare them when I text.

I don’t care about sportsball, but some of my tens of readers might enjoy this personalized license plate.

5. “Frunk” is a real word, which in itself is a new piece of learning; do you know what it is? I laughed aloud when I heard it and when I saw it. It is the FRont trUNK on a Tesla, a storage place where an engine normally sits under the hood.

Yeppers, a real frunk on a real friend’s real car.

6. Seems as if everywhere I read, the name G. K. Chesterton appears. I finally looked him up and learned a little bit about this great thinker and prolific writer, using this site Who is G.K. Chesterton? I realized that learning about him could involve a great deal of reading. Information overload, so many books, so many sites, so little time; I simply read a few paragraphs, composed this entry, and moved on. Sigh.

Reading Rabbit, AKA Salt & Light, oil painting

7. “Nalbinding” is a needle art I have never heard of before. Here’s a definition: “Nalbinding stitches are created with a single needle, using a series short lengths of yarn (18-36″ pieces) at a time. Each newly formed loop is created when the tail end of the yarn is pulled completely through the added loop, making it unravel-proof. “ It is also called “knotless netting” or “single needle knitting” or “looped-needle netting”. There is a thorough explanation with examples and even video instruction here: nalbinding. (I don’t need any more hobbies that use up my exhausted wrists so I didn’t look too closely.)

Tucker
Hose holder

8. “Dongle” is a little gizmo that goes into a computer to enable a mouse to work with a laptop instead of the trackpad. A friend misplaced hers, and used the word, which made me ask if it was a real word. Yeppers. We looked and looked, and it turned out that it had magnetically adhered to the bottom of her laptop as we were scrambling around with a flashdrive. So the word is new and the fact that it is magnetic is new. These tools and their words. . .!

My tools are much less complex, although it is very easy to misplace an erasing shield.

9. DMSO, or dimethyl sulfoxide was featured on 60 Minutes several decades ago as a potential remedy (or at least a relief provider) for arthritis. It was controversial, but now it can be purchased without a prescription. A friend gave me some, and sure enough, it provides almost instant relief for my wrist (De Quervain’s Tennosynovitis is my diagnosis, not arthritis or Carpal Tunnel Syndrome.) So far it hasn’t done squat for the peripheral neuropathy, and WebMD is rather dismissive of it. However, I am finding it to be helpful. Never mind. It messed up my stomach after 5 days. Go figure—it is applied to skin! But messed up digestion is one of the possible side effects.

Lavender has many uses, but it doesn’t fix wrist pain, in case you were wondering.

10. Remember when I said that intermittent fasting didn’t work to lower my A1C? According to sources (isn’t this how the media gives authenticity to its reports?), I was doing it wrong. Doing it right (as my source says, who is not a medical professional but is a very smart person) is really a hassle, and I don’t feel desperate enough to mess with this method of deprivation and inconvenience.

Always more steps to learning new things. . .

11. WAIT stands for Why Am I Talking? so I will stop now. Thank you, Blog Readers!

Thoughts on Internship

My Intern

Today I am painting, progressing on the mural on the Ivanhoe library. I am writing this post before I have painted today, thinking ahead.

Each day I work on the mural, there are multiple decisions to make. In the past, when I’d get a little stuck, I’d pick a somewhat mindless task, such as taping off an area or applying a base coat. Since having Intern to help, I save those tasks for him.

Sometimes I invite him to step back with me to look at the whole picture. I ask him what he sees, we discuss the next steps, and often I ask him which task he thinks ought to come next. I ask him for 2 reasons: (1) to help him understand the thought necessary in the process of creating such a massive painting and (2) sometimes I have “decision fatigue”, which might be a euphemism for mental laziness.

In anticipation of today’s work, I made a list of the next easy tasks, and in the process, I realized that his role as an active intern on this mural might reach an end today. What remains are tight detailing: the man on the ladder, some smudgepots, the rooster, tighter lettering, the auditorium, a wind machine, and perhaps a couple of surprises.

I wonder if he will still want to hang around while I work on these things. He might, he might not. More will be revealed in the fullness of time.

Someone Else’s Thoughts on Internships or Apprenticeships

The next two paragraphs are taken from Eric Rhoads, the prolific painter, writer, workshop and convention coordinator and leader—the man who led the weeklong plein air retreat in Monterey that I attended in October 2024.

“. . .that’s exactly how the masters worked. Apprentices would paint backgrounds, grind pigments, even paint entire sections of ‘the master’s’ work. Collaboration wasn’t a buzzword; it was how things got done. Raphael had an entire workshop of apprentices painting from his designs. Was it still “his” work? The Renaissance said yes. Our modern obsession with individual authorship would have confused them.

When I let those kids paint on my canvas, I wasn’t risking ruining it. I was enacting a centuries-old tradition. And more importantly, I was doing what those Renaissance masters did: passing it on. Because here’s the secret they knew and we’ve forgotten — art isn’t about the final product. It’s about the transformation that happens in the making. —From Eric Rhoads

In case you were curious, I kept track of Intern’s hours and paid him last week. I will pay him for his remaining hours of working, but not if he chooses to simply observe. He was shocked by the check, slightly insulted when I asked him if he knew what to do with a check, and felt unworthy, as if he owed me something in return.

I reminded him that he gave me some hours of his life, I gave him the equivalent of green pieces of paper with dead presidents’ faces on it in exchange, and we were even.

I Wonder

How many more Fridays will it take to complete this? Should Intern’s name go on the mural? Will I be able to do all those details without his excellent eye and honest input? Will I be able to help him find a steady job? Will he go on to paint a mural of his own? (He is into videography more than 2-dimensional art.)

Look how far we’ve come in ten days of painting!

The end of Day One:

The end of Day Ten:

Enough bloviating for today. Come back Monday to see how close we are to the end of this most satisfying project.

Goofing Off in Three Rivers

Yeah, yeah, I could be painting sequoia trees. Instead, I’m just lollygagging around. No deadlines, no pressure, just enjoying the season masquerading as winter in Three Rivers. Here are some photos from a recent walk. Yes, I am so boring that a walk passes for fun and goofing off in my life.

The elephant is quite visible: full body, facing right.

The day had high clouds, so the poppies aren’t open. But they are poppies, in JANUARY!!

The bush lupine* are out too, if you know where to look (and I’m not telling, because this is the world wide web, we were trespassing, and if too many people trespass, then even more gates will appear.

A house we passed has bricks painted as books!!

*Is “lupine” the plural of “lupine”, as “deer” is the plural of “deer”? It is in my vocabulary, but should you trust someone who says “tryna” instead of “trying to”, “remorial” for “memorial”, and “prolly” for “probably”?

What Happened, Part Two

Today I will be painting on the Ivanhoe library mural, Lord willing, the Creek, etc. The past two days have been seriously disrupted by many hours on the phone trying to solve the website problem, which also took down my email.

If I was a smoker, it would have been a couple of 2-pack days.

Contemplation

I really contemplated whether or not it is possible to run an art business without a website. Many artists only use Facebook and/or Instagram. Having dabbled in those several years ago, my gut instinct is NO NO NO NO. And NO!

There are no Yellow Pages, direct mail is cost prohibitive and cannot be easily updated, and I’m not inclined to wear an A-frame sign or a weird chicken costume and stand on a street corner. I don’t want to rent public space when I have my most excellent studio and painting workshop here at home, an easy 35-second commute by foot from the house.

So, my inclination is to just relax and recover, and then look into another hosting company. BlueHost used to be based in Arizona, and humans were accessible here in the United States without a robot on the phone to direct you to another country where some poor (but very smart) person with an accent (occasionally accompanied by background children or roosters) would keep reassuring you that they really were sorry for your problem and would do their best to help. It wasn’t until after a series of phone calls that added up to 5 hours (yes, I counted) when I insisted that the case needed to be escalated and stated that I will look for another server/host company that I got an email saying the problem was resolved.

Maybe it is resolved; however, my confidence in BlueHost has taken a hard battering, and there may be a separation in our future.

Techie Details

They upgraded me to an expensive plan, which I declined. They moved me to a more reasonable plan, which included a $199 “migration fee”. Then they neglected to “migrate” my site to the reasonable plan; on one call I was reassured that it had been done, and it worked briefly. Next, the email that is attached to the website ceased functioning, and I was told that it had not been migrated. WELL, MIGRATE ALREADY!

Ugh. Can we talk about something more pleasant? Let’s lift our eyes until the hills. . . from whence does our help come? Not from tech, that’s for sure and for certain!

What Happened??

My website croaked. I called the server? host? platform? something to ask for help on Tuesday morning, January 6. The man on the phone said he could see what happened, fixed it, and it would be fine in about 10 minutes.

It wasn’t.

Twelve hours later, it was back, but nothing after December 30, 2025, appeared on the blog, and the 1/2 price calendar sale also didn’t show.

I found the draft of the Learned List from December, but it only showed nine things instead of the twelve I eventually came up with. I published it immediately as it was.

Now I have to figure out how to get my email working again.

Maybe I’ll rewrite some of the posts from earlier this week, if I can remember what I said.

Maybe I’ll just take up smoking.

Prolly not. Fret not. I’d rather eat dark chocolate. Or complain about tech. (“If sin enticeth thee, consent thou not.” Proverbs 1:10)

Wouldn’t you just know that it croaked the day after I mailed out a newsletter that announced there are a few slots left in the beginning drawing workshop and that the calendars are half-price now? Prolly missed a bunch of sales and signups. Or not, but I won’t know. Now the calendar won’t even appear in my online store.

Oh well. Here’s the flyer about the beginning drawing workshop.

P.S. If you want a calendar, email me at cabinart [zero] [six} at sbcglobal dot net because that email works (trusting that you will be able to decipher it correctly).

P.P.S. A broken website is a nothing-burger in light of what several dear friends are going through: one recently lost her son to suicide; another has cancer in his bones (Dudes, get your PSA checked even if your doctor says it isn’t needed after 70—it’s only a blood test, not a nasty procedure); yesterday I learned that yet another has been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. That’s all Very Very Difficult stuff; a website can be repaired, lost posts can be written, workshops can be given with empty seats, and unsold calendars can be tossed if too much time passes.

P.P.P.S. It was a beautiful day.

Nine New* Things Learned in December

This is a reposting of the December Learned List, one that was still in draft form; the final version disappeared in The Great Website Splat.

Photos accompanying our monthly Learned List are very random this month, sprinkled in to prevent this from looking daunting and TLDR.

  1. Cursive writing is good for your brain, according to The Case for Cursive. (Thank you for the link, Reader Sharon!)
Jackson doesn’t write either cursive or printing.

2. COL might actually stand for “chuckle out loud”, although my friend wrote it as “chuckle out load”, which made me COL. (Thank you, Reader JC!)

3. “Cuco” is the common nickname for “Refugio”. Go figure. (How does “Billy” emerge from “William”, or even weirder, “Jack” from “John”, or perhaps weirdest of all, “Chewy” from “Jesus”?)

4. Dr. Victor Davis Hanson, a professor, historian, and farmer, is the most brilliant person I have ever encountered. I cannot keep up with his podcasts, articles, or books, and much is way over my head. Here is a recent article he wrote on the decline of Western civilization (and for the sake of honesty here, I don’t even know exactly what “Western civilization” means). Can the Dark Ages Return? is a sobering look at what is taking place in our time, and well worth laboring through. (He makes it a little easier by using far more paragraphs than were deemed necessary when we were all learning to write, because he understands that his material is a bit difficult for us lesser minds to digest with our current squirrely attention spans.)

5. I subscribed to something called Tangle, a daily email that breaks down the facts of one major news topic per day. This is what caught my attention from their website: “Most news outlets have biases that are obvious to every American, we are all living in self-curated “news bubbles” where we are spoon-fed beliefs we already have, and if we log onto social media the people we disagree with are caricatured into the worst people possible.” So far, I haven’t made it through a single article, but my intentions remain good. I think I am getting exhausted by current events.

6. After 2 weeks of inconvenience, I found the inner fortitude to stand my ground: when a customer wants a mural but will not provide access to the building, hold to common sense, which is that humans need facilities where they work. (Thus, I will only be painting in Ivanhoe on Fridays when the library is open.)

7. Eighty-Four is the actual name of an actual town in Pennsylvania. Something (a labor union? a lumberyard?) called “84 Lumber” originated there.

8. This large-ish wooden panel of a redwood tree was displayed at Stem & Stone. I stopped by to deliver more notecards and saw that it had developed a problem. Turns out that knotholes in wood contain substance that soaks through paint.

9. Have you ever heard of a Tule elk? I hadn’t, but there is one wandering around Three Rivers. They used to be plentiful in the Central Valley but were a nuisance to cattle ranchers, and the largest ranch in the valley, Miller Lux, may have had a role in mostly eradicating them. (Who knows for sure? I read it on the interwebs. . .)

This photo is an enlargement from my friend’s early morning phone photo.

*Of course they are “new” —otherwise would they be on a list of things learned? Supposedly the Search Engines bring more readers when one includes “new” in a post title. Why do I care? I know my readers, write for them (YOU!) and don’t need a pile of strangers “liking” me in order to feel validated.