Eight Non-Art Things Learned in April (plus one art-ish item)

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1. Dragon Arum is the name of a beautiful black and maroon calla lily in my yard.
2. I asked my trusty mechanic if he would allow his wife to drive my car to Oregon and back (I wasn’t offering my car; I was looking for advice). The answer was immediate: NO WAY. Phooey. 
3. Rocky Hill is 5 miles in circumference; the seeds of wild cucumber make a good binder if you plan to mix it with pigment to paint on rocks (but don’t do this on public property, okay?)
4. Grant applications are crazy hard, and don’t appeal to straight talking commonsense folks like me. However, I had the privilege of helping CACHE do an application, and learned several things, the main one being not wanting to ever apply for a grant on my own. Or possibly at all.*
5. A friend taught me how to grow sweet potatoes, something I’ve been wanting to learn for awhile. She starts them using a potato from the grocery store, similar to growing an avocado from a seed, EXCEPT you don’t plant the potato—you root the individual shoots, and then plant those. She hasn’t had any great crops, but like me, she never gives up trying to be successful at gardening.(Bonus: the leaves are edible, good added raw to salads and taste like spinach, according to my friend.)
6. Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book, Demon Copperhead, might be the best one yet. I found her in the 1980s with The Bean Trees, and her work just gets better and better. The story was hard hard hard, the main character fabulous, too much cussing, tons of sad difficult things, but a decent ending. It is patterned after David Copperfield, something I haven’t read and don’t want to.
7. The one art-related item: There is a new style of drawing, called Zentangle. (The one a friend showed me reminded me of Spirograph designs.) Look it up—very interesting, very different from my style.
8. I learned how to make a QR code; just put it into the search bar and you will find methods. It was shockingly easy.
9. There is a new type of laundry detergent; it comes in thin squares in a small box. There are several brands, mostly called “earth something-or-other”; I bought a brand called Ecos. Instead of a giant heavy box of powder or a giant heavy jug of liquid (prolly mostly water), it weighs nothing. You can get it without scent, and it seems to work just fine. I think it is brilliant: lightweight, small, uses few materials, utter simplicity.

Good grief! I thought I was an artist, a Central California artist, a regionalist from Quaintsville**. Instead, I’m going on about all sorts of things. I hope it scratches your itch to learn new things.

*Cache didn’t get the grant. This reinforces my distaste for the process.

**I use pencils, oil paints, and murals to make art that people can understand of places and things they love for prices that won’t scare them (while I am learning all sorts of random life information and skills).