BDT Studio is online

We have been back home on the farm for a while now, and my time has been spent scrambling to bring my internet business enterprises up-to-date before the Christmas shoppers start coming. It occurred to me that this blog is something I could use to help promote my projects. I'll start with my fine art gallery.

I've been using Photoshop for ten years now. It has served me well in many respects, including giving me back something I thought I had lost: painting. Many years ago I was in a chemical accident which left me highly sensitive to certain chemicals, several of which are necessary in the pursuit of fine art. In addition, I currently have no funds for art supplies and no good place in the house to set up a studio. Photoshop allows me to create watercolors, oil paintings, and some images that would be impossible with pigment, all without turpentine, fixatives and other things that would send my sinuses into a tizzy.

Before we moved, I had access to high-end printers and artist-quality papers, and my employee discount made them affordable. I have found an online replacement of sorts in ImageKind.com which allows me to upload my images and offer them for sale to the public, including mat and frame options, at a decent commission. Three of my watercolors are now in my IK Gallery:

This Way to the Beach

Poppy




Magnolia

I have several more to upload. Doing these paintings was one way I found to pass the time and use it constructively, when we were in Minneapolis so long this fall.

Ramblings from Mpls

It was 86 degrees F. yesterday. In Minnesota, in October. This is crazy. We are still in Minneapolis, it will be four weeks tomorrow since we came for a few days. I only brought three changes of clothes, and none of them are shorts. I have depleted the supply of quarters and Tide, doing laundry more than once a week for DH and myself. We have been here so long the residents know us in the halls and say hello. They probably think we live here now.

Mom is home from the hospital, and doing well, so we are now biding our time at my aunt's home until the doctors say Mom can go back to the farm. Meanwhile, we are four family members trying to make the best of being cooped up in a small two-bedroom apartment in a high-rise senior center. The biggest hurdle so far is climate control. Mom (87) and Auntie (91) both have glaucoma and the lower metabolism and circulation that comes with living a long life. They need the windows closed ( too cold, too windy), the shades drawn (too much glare) The ceiling fan makes it too cold, too; forget the air conditioning.

Then, here I am, having hot flashes. I share a bedroom with Mom; she sleeps with extra blankets on, I sleep with all the covers thrown off and a fan blowing on me. Our daytime solution is for me to sit in Auntie's bedroom with the AC on and my computer in my lap. I am sitting in the same rocking chair she has had for years before I was born. I remember sitting snuggled up with her in this chair and hearing her say, "I can't believe you will be starting second grade already." I'm glad she was able to keep this chair when she moved in here.

Our friends here in town have been wonderful. Invitations for home cooked dinners, overnight in a guest room, tickets to the theater. . . Jennifer and Susan, Debbie and John, Carol and Avis, if any of you are reading this, THANK YOU.

I have to say more about the performance we saw last night. If you are in the Twin Cities area, you must go see Amy Salloway in Circumference! She is a one-woman dynamo of entertainment; she blends humor, drama and her personal demons into a monologue which draws you so fully into her world that you are amazed to find yourself in a theater at the end of the performance. If you have ever fought the weight battle, if you were one of those humiliated in 7th grade gym class, you will especially identify with the themes in Circumference. This is a work-in-progress; Amy is still fine-tuning the script but is courageous enough to perform it as such and allow the audience to give her feedback in its development. There are only two more shows currently scheduled; see her web page for details. I also have to say, Amy is as delightful in person as she is on the stage. She is a friend of the friend who took us to the performance and so accepted the invitation to join our group for a late after-theater supper. Thank you, Amy, for sharing bits of your personal life and an insight into how you weave those events into your performance. I was the one down at the end of the table who didn't say much, but as a fledgling writer I was fascinated by your creative process.

Our internet access is sporadic up here. Minneapolis is in the process of being wired for wifi, but the nearest working node is not really close enough, and it does not reach up to the 11th floor very well. I'll try to squeeze in a post here and there if I can.

I have a coffee mug at home that says, "All I want is a normal life." When I ever get home, I am going to start using it.

Other Plans

Who was it that said "life is what happens while you are making other plans"? I had plans to get back into regular blogging but life had other ideas. We are in Minneapolis, about 200 miles from home, with very little internet access. We were here for some routine medical appointments when my mother developed a severe headache. It turned out she had fluids pressing on her brain which required surgery to drain out. This is serious business in any case, and more so for someone who is 87. She is still in intensive care but is doing very well, all things considered. There is still a risk of stroke until she has recovered sufficiently to resume her blood thinner meds.

I have some blog ideas that I may be able to post if I can get access again. Maybe life in a senior highrise community, which is where we stay for the duration. I am thankful to have family to stay with until this is over.

Picking up where I left off

I have not made a post in over six months. I'm not sure how that happened, but after doing some catch up reading, on some favorite blogs and some others new to me, I have a renewed determination to revive this one.

I know one cause for the writing gap is that I got caught up in our new life. Mom had surgery for carpal tunnel in March. She is very independent, especially for someone who is 87, but until her hand healed enough, she needed much more assistance with personal things than usual. This was a strange reversal of roles. Every morning for many years when I was a child, she brushed my hair and put it in a ponytail. Here I was, doing the same for her. An inside-out deja vu.

Another factor was, once the snow melted, the farm work commenced. Even thought we no longer have farm animals or field work, there is still much to be done, inside and out. Minnesota has such a short fair-weather season, we have to scurry to achieve all the outdoor projects on our list. I had forgotten how physical effort can burn up your day, and leave you crashed in the recliner with no energy left for intellectual pursuits.

I have to admit, another reason I put off writing here is that I did not want my blog to become too maudlin, or worse, one big long whine. Too many of my posts were about sad things, it seemed to me, and our summer has been filled with more sadness. I wrote about the pain of losing a pet. Since I wrote that post we have lost three more cats, including my beloved Norm, the inside cat, which broke my heart into a million more pieces. Last October we had seven cats, one indoors and six outdoors, and now we are down to one. I might still write more about them, especially Norm. He was such a remarkable creature, his story should be recorded somehow. I will postpone that project until it is balanced with more positive writings, and also until the pain of his loss has healed enough that I can write about him without the tears starting again.

So, I'm back. I look forward to finding time to get back to my blogging friends, whom I was just getting to know, and making new ones.

Lock Your Doors!

This video is making the rounds on blogs. I decided to jump on the bandwagon because it is so important it needs all the publicity it can get. Out here in the rural areas we get careless because we mistakenly think these things only happen in the cities.

Personally I think the best tip of all is not to leave the keys in the ignition. My entire family was nearly killed in a highway accident that would not have happened if a local teenager had not found her neighbor's car with the keys in it.

Please consider either posting this on your blog or directing readers here or to YouTube to see it. And stay safe.

Five things that made me smile

I've been tagged by JTL to write five things that have made me smile this week. After writing the Goodbye post, I need some cheering up. Here goes.

• Finding a recipe for avocado pie and then being told by the grocery man that avocados are going on sale next week for 68 cents each. Avocados are like gold in Minnesota. Anything under $1.50 each is a steal. I am so jealous of folks who can go out in the backyard and pick as many as they wish. I once stayed in a California home where the avocado tree was groaning with fruit. Standing under it was like standing under a money tree. I felt like those were dollar bills hanging down over my head.
  

• Playing Neopets with my eight-year-old niece. Her parents want her to be older before she has her own internet accounts but they are allowing her to play Neopets on an account in my name when she is here visiting, which is every Friday night. This is more interactive for the two of us than it probably sounds. Our only working computer at the moment is the laptop. Lacking a desk, we have to balance the unit on our laps, on top of a piece of wood (for air circulation) and a pillow (for comfort). She just does not have enough "lap" to manage it. So, when she and I play on the computer, I sit in the recliner and hold it all in my lap while she sits on an ottoman at my side and plays her games. In such close quarters, definitely quality time.

• My current cross stitch project. It is my most ambitious piece so far, and I am pushing to finish it for a friend's birthday party, with less than a week left. With every stitch I picture the look on her face when she opens it. We have known each other for over 30 years, and she has been such a steadfast friend through all our recent difficulties. I will have a progress photo posted later today on that blog. Of course I realize I will now have to start friendship pieces for several other friends who have been just as steadfast and supportive. That's part of the joy of doing cross stitch: giving it away.

• Listening to J playing with the outdoor kitties under my window. He has never been around kittens before. His mother did not allow their family to have any pets when he was growing up. I had a cat when he met me but she was full grown, so this is new to him. He has taken on the task of feeding them every day, which now entails dressing in layers of warm clothes (it has been below zero here for several days now and is expected to stay there for a few more days) and hauling water and catfood to the former chickencoop where the outside cats live. They follow him around like the Pied Piper. He picks up each one in turn and loves them up. It is so sweet to watch. Smitten with kittens. More about the cats here.
  

• This website. I check it every day to see if there is anything new or any new concerts scheduled. If I need cheering up I just browse the photo gallery. I may blog in the future about what this guy has meant to me and how he has changed my life.

Sunday Scribblings - Goodbyes

This week's Sunday Scribblings prompt is goodbyes.

I don't know if I can write this post; I feel the tears starting already. On December 17, 2006, I said goodbye to my house. In doing so, I also said goodbye to my independence, my privacy and a good chunk of my self esteem. And I said goodbye to a lot of my "stuff" that I just could not keep. It wasn't our idea to move. J was unable to work for health reasons and the savings had run out. The house went into foreclosure. Selling was not an option; the house needed a lot of work to make it salable and there was not enough equity left to do it. Our only option was to vacate. I did not want to move but I had to start packing anyway.

This was a very personal and painful process for me. I am the kind of person who wraps her memories around things. Sometimes to the point of ridiculousness. I had unidentified movie ticket stubs and popsicle sticks from the 1960's. I suppose I thought I would make a scrapbook or something. This move forced me to choose what bits and pieces had real meaning and which had to be told goodbye. I gave some precious things to friends who would treasure them as I had done. Our niece who was setting up housekeeping for the first time was the happy recipient of the dishes and silverware I had purchased in my bachelor girl days (and was still using) and even some wedding gifts. I donated useful things to charity, and we took a literal ton of magazines and papers to the recycle lot. No, really. We added up how many grocery bags of paper goods went, in five trips, and their average weight. We topped 2000 pounds of recycling.

We are starting to settle into a routine here, but I have periods of melancholy when I think about our nice little house and our old lifestyle, and how it is all gone. I miss being able to do what I want, when I want. I miss being surrounded by all of my books, magazines, videos and mementos. I feel like a tip of an iceberg, where most of me (i.e., my stuff) is buried out of reach. I suppose time will heal these feelings, but for now, I am still saying goodbye.

Before I posted this, I saved the draft and went around to read other Sunday Scribblings. After reading about the significant losses of others, relationships, family members...I wondered if I should just chuck this post altogether. A part of me said no, grieving is grieving, whether for people, things or intangibles.

The First 30 Days

We have lived here for 30 days now. I'm counting from January 1, after the holidays were over and we could get back to normal, whatever that is going to be.

One month of rural living.

Personally, I missed most of it. I have SAD. The first three weeks in January are the bottom of the black hole. SAD is like having PMS, with one week spread out over three months. The symptoms are so similar, I wouldn't be surprised if they find a connection someday. One would think that the bottom of the cycle would coincide with the shortest day of the year, but I seem to have a delayed reaction. My brain defers the worst of it for mid-January, for which I am thankful, as it would certainly ruin my Christmas even more than it currently does.

The fatigue is the worst, followed by the carb cravings. Left on my own, with no obligations, I would crawl in bed with a big bag of Oreos and not come out until spring. Mom and J suffered through it with me, putting up with my moodiness, not seeing it as a character defect. They know this, too, will pass. J has been by my side through these episodes for many years now, but it was the first time my mother was seeing it first-hand. I think she found it a bit disconcerting, this shift in personality. She understands the nature of it, now, but it took some doing on my part to convince her it is really a disorder and not just laziness on my part.

There are treatments for this. Prozac or something similar would help, but I don't want to go that route. I was on Prozac for several years to help with PDD, which is the disorder level of PMS. When I cam out the other side of The Big M, nearly two years ago, the PDD just disappeared on its own, and I weaned myself from the prescription. I didn't like what it did to me, even on what my doctor termed a "teeny, tiny" dose. It gave me a nap attack every day. With the fatigue of the SAD I don't need to feel any sleepier than I already do.

I can't afford the fancy lightbox. I have the full-spectrum lightbulbs; I do feel better when I spend extra time under them in the winter, but this year I have not had time. We have at least 100 boxes to unpack, to assimilate our stuff into the household, and put into storage whatever we can do without. I try to work on it everyday. I have to have it finished before the hot weather arrives, as there are boxes of items in the attic and garage that will be damaged by the heat.

Herbal supplements help. I take ginseng, which helps mental acuity, and maca root, which fights the fatigue from both the SAD and the menopause. Since I have been off Prozac I have gone back to St. John's Wort, which is a mild natural antidepressant that does not cause sleepiness, at least not for me.

So, the first thirty days were spent, when I could get myself out of bed, unpacking and also shopping for supplies to stock a larder than now has to feed three mouths instead of one.

Oh, and I started these blogs. At least I can claim something worthwhile accomplished. I've made a few blogfriends and I hope to meet more. Perhaps the new year isn't off to such a bad start, after all.

A Mixed Blessing

A Mixed Blessing. That's what J calls having farm cats. They are a joy to us but we experience such grief when we lose them. And the loss is inevitable.

My brother felt we needed farm cats, like we had years ago, to keep the rodent population down in the farm buildings. In October he brought over a mama and five 7-week-old kittens given to us by a family that had too many cats.

"Farm cats" are not supposed to be pets, we knew we shouldn't get attached to them, but we are such softies. Even my sister-in-law, who thought she did not like cats, was smitten by these five little bundles of fur. When they came to visit, she would scoop up two or three of them and say "aren't they cute?" J quickly became especially attached to them. His mother allowed no pets when he was growing up; his first experience with being around animals and sharing a home with them was when he married Chloe and me (more about that later.) He has taken on the daily responsibility of going out to the former chicken coop which has been converted to a cat coop, to fill the food and water dishes. Before they go in to eat, they all line up to be picked up and cuddled, one at a time. Butterfly, Butterscotch, Buttercup, Buster Brown, and Ruffles.

In three months we have lost three of the six, and it broke our hearts every time.

We lost the mama within the first week. She came up to the house severely injured, apparently having nearly lost a fight with something vicious. She only lived a few more days. There was nothing we could do. Farm cats generally do not get vet visits; it is too expensive, and they would have just had to expedite what was coming anyway. Thus we found ourselves with five motherless two-month-old kittens. We had planned on supplementing the mothercat's hunted food with commercial catfood, at least until the kittens were old enough to hunt on their own. Now we had to fill that dish every day.

J commented on how fast the food was going down, considering it was for five little kittens. We became suspicious that something else was getting a free lunch, so my brother set up a camera in the coop to catch the culprit on film, and it worked. We found several photos of raccoons helping themselves to the catfood! At least one of the kittens sat and watched, and in one photo, joined them at the dish.

One of the raccoons, his tummy full, decided this was a good place to lie down and have an after dinner nap.

The photos made several things clear. We now knew not only where the catfood was going, but what had attacked the mothercat. She must have been trying to defend the food dish from these intruders. The other clarification was the reason for the strange sound Ruffles had started making. We thought at first she had a respiratory problem, but she seemed to be healthy otherwise. She was making a very loud, chirrupy sound, in addition to her purring, that can be heard way across the yard. After we saw the photos, it hit us: she was making a raccoon sound! We think she is the one in the photos eating at the same dish as the raccoons, as her markings are different than the others. Her name was amended to "Ruffles the Raccoon Cat."

Chicken coops have little chicken-sized doorways, low to the ground; the one used by the kittens now has a board nailed over most of it to make it too small for raccoons to enter.

Even without a mother, the kittens grew and thrived, except for one. We nicknamed Buttercup "Tiny" because she was noticeably smaller than the others. It may have been something congenital. Just before Christmas she just went to sleep next to the food dish and did not wake up. J buried her next to her mama behind the coop. As with the loss of the mothercat, we felt sad but accepted it as part of life on the farm.

The second week of January we found Butterfly. He was the most outgoing, adventurous one, always in the lead no matter what was going on. We think he was starting to go out hunting on his own, but without his mama to teach him to watch out on the road. In his experience, everyone watched out for him. No one told him about the farmers who barrel past here in their grain trucks. We had a much more difficult time accepting this loss. All of us shed tears for him.

The three remaining cats are doing well, and growing fast; none of them can be called kittens anymore.

I worried about their survival during the coldest part of the winter. In the past, when we had farm cats, they lived in the barn with the cows who, frankly, put out a lot of body heat. There are no cows, not even the barn is standing now. These cats have a cavern of hay bales my brother arranged for them inside the coop, and I lined it with the bathroom mats from our old house. It must be enough; even on the bitter cold mornings they come up to the house, alert and playful.

The Cat Goddess must have noted our grief over these losses and sent a stray to boost our diminishing cat population. This week Mom thought she saw a white cat out in the yard. J went out to see if he could get closer. He called “kitty-kitty” and the cat approached him, but so did the Three Mousecateers, and the stray ran back to the edge of the woods. J herded them into their coop and closed off their exit with a piece of plywood, just for a little while. With those three temporarily removed from the situation, the stray came back closer to the house. She hungrily accepted food and water, and then got up in J’s lap for some cuddling.

She was obviously someone’s pet but unlikely to belong to a neighbor. We get visits from neighbor cats who might be looking for a handout but are not hungry like this one. We suspect she is a “drop off.” Around here, people drop off unwanted dogs and cats near farms, in hopes they will find a new home. In this case it worked. She has come back three more days for food, water and snuggles. She seems to be working out a non-aggression treaty with the other three cats.

Mom named her Snowball.

Once again we are saying to each other, “We shouldn’t get attached.”

You Can Be Happy No Matter What

I'm working on some essays, not quite ready to publish, about rural life, etc. and I'm browsing blogs like crazy to get a feel for what bloggers blog about. I came across an interesting idea, a "meme" to write about. I found it on A Spiritual Journey Through Life who got it from GoGo on a Page who got it from Beansprout who got it from Step away from the cake ...and the links go on but I followed them far enough to understand what the "tag" part is about. I'm such a noob at this, I don't know anyone to tap and say, "tag, you're it." So if you have actually found this blog and read this far, please consider yourself tagged, if you wish.

This is how it works:
1. Find the nearest book.
2. Name the book & the author.
3. Turn to page 123.
4. Go to the fifth sentence on the page. Copy out the next three sentences and post to your blog.
5. Tag three more folks.


You Can Be Happy No Matter What by Richard Carlson
Subchapter heading: Happiness Lies In The Present Moment

Excessive thinking about your past and your problems will convince you that you do, in fact, have good reasons to be upset and unhappy. But you don't want to be unhappy. And your past is over. It is a harmless memory, carried through time, through your own thinking. It was real then, but it isn't now.

[Some of those sentences were so short, let's cheat and finish the paragraph] You can learn from your past, but it is a mistake to continually go into your past or overanalyze life in a search for happiness. If this worked, you'd be happy already!

****************
I purchased this book nearly ten years ago and, typically for me, it languished in one of my many TBR piles until we moved. When it was time to start unpacking, I grabbed a random box of books and this one jumped out at me. With all the hassles and sadness of the last year, I know I have had a bad habit of doing exactly what is described above. Isn't it interesting how a book will come into your life, or in this case, reclaim your attention, just when you need it? This one was propping up the laptop which has been overheating and shutting down, in an effort to allow more air to circulate to the fans underneath. Thus it was "the nearest book." I think I'll be up late reading tonight.