Blitherings – Page 87 – Ink, Yarn & Beer

Catching My Breath

There are times when everything seems to go south, and even when you know it will work out, it wears you out. Waiting for things to get fixed. Waiting for Monday to call customer service. Waiting to hear from customer service. All the waiting is really pretty boring and aggravating. What do you do in between?

I waited. I made phone calls. I waited for answers. In between I realized that I was making myself crazy. So, some sewing. Shopping. Cleaning out the front flower bed (half way done, but today the wind is blowing and it’s stinking hot). The side patio, for container gardening, got chopped. I filled up the 96-gallon clippings bin with all sorts of things. The patio looks naked. However, it is also ready for next spring. Bulbs are dormant, and new ones will get popped in sometime soon.

I have been making myself a nightgown out of flannel. Sounds cozy, eh? Well, mine is not sweetly flowered flannel. No, it is gaudy and has a whole bunch of sharks swimming around.

Too cute, eh? I still need to put in the placket / casing for the elastic drawstring, pick out unwanted threads, and hem it.

The post office called me twice. Problem solved. (Thank you USPS!) Insurance administrator called. Problem solved. Ummmm, what else? That’s it.

Can you believe all this took a couple of weeks to get settled down?

Inktober 2021: Days 1-9

Inktober comes but once a year, and it is a lot of fun, too. Ink is the focal point – drawing with it, shading with it. Not only is black ink used, but so is colored. It’s a great time to sit down and just draw with ink, or, what I always do, is to draw from a given prompt.

If you go to Instagram and type in #inktober2021, you can find all sorts of responses to the prompts. People are amazingly creative! Sometimes I feel a bit prosaic and dull, but that varies from drawing to drawing, of course.

1: Crystal

2. Suit – as in Law Suit

3. Vessel

4. Knot

5. Raven

6. Spirit

7. Fan

8. Watch

9. Pressure

If you want to see what I added below the images on my painting-drawing blog, head over to Journey By Paper to see more, or my Instagram account. At Journey By Paper you can enjoy boring commentary or doggerel by yours truly, others, as well as good poetry and song.

Stopped by the Plague

We had a 2 week vacation trip planned. And it ended on Day 3. I had thought my sinuses were acting up, but to be careful I decided to have a Covid-19 test. It was a 1-hour quickie. Negative. Okay! Let’s go!

Our first stop was in Independence, CA, along the eastern Sierra Nevada mountains, traveling on Hwy. 395. My husband had a cold, mild, some sniffles and a cough. On Day 3, we left Independence, and continued north. Next stop was to be Virginia City, NV. Well, as we moved further north, the air became cloudy and sooty. The smoke from the fires in NoCal was moving east, and I could smell it. So could Tom and Judy, Josh’s parents. Josh couldn’t. We had mints. We could all taste them – except Josh.

And so the decision was made: return home and have tests. It was the ethical thing to do. Josh’s test came back positive; mine was “presumed positive”, and the antigen tests Tom and Judy had came back negative. Ethical decision made, people and places were called, and now we are self-isolating until our next test on 9/13. Test results will be around 9/15.

So, stopped by the plague . . . and ethics. Neither Josh nor I felt sick other than a tad under the weather. Josh has is sense of taste and smell back about 95%.

We have plenty to do, despite being stuck at home. I have a sketchbook, planned to document the vacation, and so the first drawing is the Winnedumah Hotel, built in 1927 for the film industry back in the days when westerns were shot in the Owens Valley.

Eye Can See Clearly Now . . .

Well, not perfectly, but I got some new glasses a couple of days ago, and the world is a lot sharper than it has been. I got regular ones with progressive lenses, and a pair of gradated (faded) sunglasses where the coloring is darker at top than at bottom. I prefer the sunglasses as they are easier for me to adjust to, which seems weird, but eyes and vision are not perfect . . . and will never be what I would like. Still, I have nothing to complain about.

For the past month, my ability to see has been drastically compromised because, with each eye surgery and lens implant for cataracts, my old glasses failed to work as they did before. The world became brighter and close vision sharper, but I still needed to use +1.0 readers to see, and just accept the world was blurry – but not as blurry as formerly. The change in my vision went from -3.75 or so in both eyes to -0.50 in my left and +0.50 in my right. Just looking through my old glasses made me nauseous. Now my eyes are corrected to 20-20. There are still some retinal issues, but nothing that is serious (i.e. no macular degeneration) – just need monitoring. I am very lucky to have the eye specialists I have.

The glasses took a bit to adjust to. Balance and orientation can be weird with new prescriptions, as anyone who has gotten glasses knows. Sometimes nausea and headaches are side effects. I was a bit off balance just because of my sense of distance for stepping up or down, as an example; however, details are very clear in the distance.

Dog fur on the floor is very clear, too, so time to get that vacuum out today!

Singing a Song

I have a singing voice that sounds more like a bullfrog with laryngitis. Of all the things I wish I could do, singing is it. Particular to my heart is Irish singing, in Gaelic or Irish no less. Music is a big gap in my learning, and while I can read music, I am very unmusical. When my sister and I took piano, the dog would curl up under the piano bench as she practiced; he would go to the back door and whine to be let out when I practiced.

I tumbled across this video on YouTube a few days ago, and I found it to be both educational and entertaining. I never knew what I like so much about Irish singing, and it turns out this video showed me. The way a song is sung varies throughout areas of Ireland (N and S), and vocal embellishments are added to carry the words along. Add to that, the music is so lovely, and in my mind, heaven on aural earth is found.

Outside of the Old World, America has the largest Celtic population. Migration brought traditions, and singing is one. Time, of course, changes the “old” ways and “new” ones become the new “old”! The mountainous areas created their own cultures and traditions. There is a rich heritage here.

The above video is a bit long, but to me it epitomizes much of a culture long gone. My father’s side of the family were “mountain folk” – also called hillbillies (a derogatory term) – from Tennessee.

Besides the Celtic descendants, we also have a rich heritage of Black music, gospel and folk and spirituals. Rhiannon Giddens is a modern singer with wide ranging talents. Above she sings an original song based on an older one, and old traditions.

Gospel music always brings joy – old and new – Aretha Franklin sings “Amazing Grace”, an old Anglican hymn from the 1700s.

Altogether, vocalists are my favorite form of music to listen to. Strong voices, good stories. Mahalia Jackson, Odetta, Bob Dylan, Joan Baez, Billie Holiday.

I could go on forever, but folk music and singing always bring more to me than most instrumental music alone. That is not to say instrumental is not to my liking, but that is for another time and place. Maybe.