Tag: new year

The Last Day of the Year

2023 has been a strange year for me. In many ways it has been productive in creativity as I have seen advances in skills I have been focused on. In other ways it has been limiting, too, when focus is more in one area than another. I am the kind of person who is interested in too many things but who does not seem to excel at any one thing in particular. That can get pretty frustrating.

And then there was The Fall. Breaking my left arm was pretty traumatic in a lot of ways. The esposo is still trying to recover from it because the vacation we had looked forward to, one of relaxing and traveling and visiting new places and seeing old friends, turned into several weeks of taking care of me and schlepping me here and there. His time off never really happened, so there is the mental and emotional repression that ultimately does no one any good. He has taken the next few weeks off, and I hope that will help ease things and take off pressures which are there. At least I can get here and there on my own, although we both fear another fall. I have broken 3 bones in the last 5 years because of falls.

As far as myself, I am really bored with my ongoing fear of falling, and the self-assignment for the next several weeks is to watch YouTube videos about balance and strengthening muscles, taking a “How to Walk” class if possible, and moving into forcing myself to do things that frighten me. I have a dislike of being out of shape and incapable of independence so hopefully this will motivate me into a more active approach to these things. For the first time in my life I have felt old, and normally I am emotionally and intellectually about 12 . . .

Creativity, too, needs some sort of order! I keep saying “schedule yourself” - and by this I mean making deliberate choices for time to do all the different things which interest me. Let’s see what happens! I want to do more photography, travel, sewing, knitting, gardening, and of course drawing, painting, learning. My own personality is set toward doing the daily chores and drudgery before having fun, and that is okay as it weighs me down if I know a pile of something needs to be done. 

For example, since August, I have not really addressed paperwork as I usually do, and that is because my daily life was filled with exercises, occupational therapy appointments, dental appointment, doctor appointments, and home health care appointments. Yesterday, I pulled out all the things I needed to sort through. I sorted them and shredded until the 20+ year old shredder up and died. (New one arrives today.) I logged expenses and so on. Fortunately, it wasn’t a horrible process as I have kept up with the daily stuff quite well, but the paper stuff needed sorting and discarding. It feels good to have that done before 2024 shows up! And I have a bog full of papers still needing shredding, so I can practice on the new shredder, and see if it works. What fun!

And so, it is New Year’s Eve. We will be going to the Descanso Gardens to enjoy the Enchanted Forest of Light. We did it a few years ago, and I thought it a lovely way to end a year. I hope that 2024 is not as rough, and realistically, while tough in many ways for my immediate circle, it is far easier and pleasant than it has been for many. I hope that changes, but sadly, I do not think it will.

The End of a Year

Like most people, I look back over the past year, I look ahead to the new year. New years are like morning – something to anticipate. Yesterday is the past, and so is a past year. There is a bit of melancholy in looking back as awareness of passing time grows more acute each year but, it is always offset by the anticipation of the future. I don’t know if other people feel like that, but to me there is always an element of joyful anticipation even in times of gloom and sadness. I’ve lived long enough to know nothing lasts forever, but the patterns repeat, and therein lives hope. There is enough change and enough consistency. And I prefer to dwell on hope rather than despair – but to avoid it is foolish.

So, what has happened in this past year? For me, the most difficult thing has been the loss of my closest friend on November 30th. I am not lost because of his death, but just feeling a loneliness. On the other hand, I have rekindled a friendship from years ago that could prove to be a pleasant addition to my life. A door closes. A door opens.

I have also learned and realized a lot about my family – my parents in particular. I found two letters, one from my mother, one from my father. The first was a letter written by my mother 6 months before she married my father. The second letter was one written by my father 12 years later. While the contents are personal and private, what was most important was seeing my parents as people in a very different perspective – such different personalities and approaches to life! I think of the grasshopper and the ant in Aesop’s fables – my mother had the gaiety of the grasshopper but lacked foresight, went along for the moment, and my father was the ant, always planning and working toward the future, but often failing to value the moment he was in. (I’m sort of both!)

In some ways – perhaps in many ways – 2022 was about re-evaluating life and people. As I move more into retirement and into free time, I am less concerned with the connections -the ongoing desire for connections – with people, but more appreciative of them when they occur. It is so easy to want more from others than is realistic with copious free time, and it takes a bit of effort to rein it in. Once done, though, a bit of disappointment – but again, another door opens, and there are things to look forward to doing and experiencing.

For me, life is always a balancing act. There is sorrow and sadness, there is joy and hope. Reality is a harsh teacher, but if you pay attention, there is much to be learned and the subtle pleasures of little things – like the yellow volunteer flower on my doorstep – remind you that the small individual person, event, critter, plant, in the big, vast world has a whole universe within to be explored.

So, welcome to 2023!

Winter’s Day in the Dunes

There are days which are blustery and cold, the wind whipping through your hair, and a walk on the beach, slogging through sand, and enjoying the wild freshness of the sea is not a bad way to begin a new year!

Wishing you and yours the best in 2022.

New Year Stuff

I am going to hold off on political commentary.  Instead, it seems that this New Year has brought about a couple of changes.  Two are chosen, one is a necessity.

First of all, I added a new set of colors on my watercolor palette.  It’s kind of fun as it mixes things up –  you can get too comfortable with colors you use every day.  I like to shake things up a bit when I get too cosy, so I added things like verrditer blue and returned a least favorite color, viridian, to my palette.  Other colors, too, which I cannot recall right at the moment, but it seems this new palette will get me some brighter colors.  Here is a painting I did with these new ones:

Next, I moved my sewing around.  I had bought a sewing cabinet several months ago, thinking it would work in the studio.  Nope!  Too crowded and claustrophobic.  I closed it up and moved back out to the dining room.  However patient my husband is, the clutter got to me far more than it got to him.  As a result, earlier this month I moved a book case from the bedroom into the studio and placed the cabinet where the book case was.  And, it works!  Yes, I do have to close things down and adjust to having things in different places, but it does the job, and the dining area is not a disaster.

Finally, my computer crapped out on me 2 times this morning.  The first time it froze watching a YouTube video.  Rebooted.  Then, after walking away from my computer for 10 minutes, the monitors were black and nothing would reactivate them except another reboot.  Off to Costco to get a prefabricated Windows computer.  It works great.   Now I have some software installed on the new computer and using it to write this blurb.  Meanwhile, I am copying files, which will take hours, from the old computer to an external hard drive so I can put them on the new critter.  It will take a bit of time to get all cosy again, but c’est la vie.

So there you are.  New Year, new activities.

The Road into Town

Today I put together a new watercolor paint palette, adding some colors I normally don’t have on my main palette, as well as adding ones back that didn’t make it into the first one. This palette forces me to work harder to get greens as I don’t have phthalo green, sap green, or Hooker’s on it as “primary” greens; instead, I have viridian, which is not one I have been fond of in the past. However, it works nicely with cadmium lemon and aureolin to make those crazy spring greens I like. I also added manganese blue, verditer blue, and phthalo blue (green shade). I don’t have any yellow ochre or quinacridone colors, but do have Davy’s Grey and Peach Black. In the red arena I added transparent red oxide in place of light red, and cadmium orange as well. All of the earth tones – burnt and raw sienna and umber – are on this palette.

The result is looking to be a brighter series of colors to work with, at least that is my impression. I tried to use nearly every color in the palette on some level in this painting to see what would happen. As it was, I didn’t use every color! Too many!

The subject matter was also something that I wanted to work on – a small town with a few buildings at the base of a mountain range, and the goal was to have a road leading in to it, sloping down hill, and conveying a bit of depth. It’s a busy scene, one from my travels over the years that I caught on camera. Depth is not easy for me, so I used shadows across the road and landscape to catch a bit of it.

First watercolor of the New Year, and started with a New Year Palette!