Reading and Wall Washing

 I admit that I’ve spent the pandemic reading a lot of trashy books. With Kindle’s free Unlimited you can get a vast range of---shall we say---writing skills. Some books are just too stupid for words yet they have no trouble stringing a bunch of them together and calling them a book. I never write reviews of those too-stupid-for-words books because I’m quite sure if I’d been born a few decades later than I was some of those hardcopy manuscripts I had stored in the basement and I finally downsized out of my life last summer would have made their way to a self-published book on Amazon Unlimited where no one apparently proof-reads them or edits the content for quality. It takes enormous dedication and guts to get a book written and I'm not about to step on someone else's dream and, yes, I'm one of those people who thinks every little kid deserves a participation ribbon. Time to sort out the winners from the losers when kids are old enough to figure out what they enjoy doing. I sound like my mother. "I don't care what after school class you take, but you WILL keep taking classes until you find something you like doing." She didn't actually say those words but when I was an adult it's what she told me when I asked why she turned me into class-aholic and herself into a chauffeur.

I’ve read that real publishing companies routinely comb the stats at Amazon looking for those writers who know how to promote the heck out of their work and have parlayed themselves into great sales with a track record of favorable reader reviews. Those who can do that eventually land themselves honest-to-goodness book deals. The author of Fifty Shades of Grey comes to mind---barfing my breakfast up on that one---and Andy Weir who wrote one of my all-time favorite books, The Martian, are two examples. The latter of which I read free on Amazon before he made it big and his book was turned into a movie.

Another example of someone who was discovered through Amazon Unlimited was Mike Omer and his mystery, A Killer’s Mind that outsold J.K. Rowling, James Patterson, and Stephen King one summer. Some others who started out as self-published and made it big include: Christopher Paolini (Inheritance Cycle), Lisa Genova (Still Alice) and Amanda Hocking (My Blood Approves). So even though reading Amazon Unlimited books can be a hit and miss thing you can still find some thought provoking stuff. Not so much in the romance genre where I tend to hang out but I’ve come to the conclusion that the genre makes sense for me. 1) I was so boy crazy as a teenager I can hardly stand looking back at those embarrassing years. 2) People watching has long been a favorite hobby of mine and living vicariously through the pages of a book where people fall in love puts me in a better mood than reading a thriller, for example, where I start looking at others as a possible threat to home and body. I admire Stephen King, practically worship his writing prowess but I can't sleep nights with one of his books in bed with me.

Nope, if the pandemic has done anything for me it’s made me come out of the reading closet, no long hiding or being ashamed my preferred reading genre. The last romance I read, for example, was a weirdly engaging book about a famous artist who lost his sight for a year due to a car accident and then he gets eye transplants of eyes from a photographer who was once engaged to a woman the artist couldn’t stop thinking about after they met and who he couldn't stop painting before they met. The whole premise of the story line was that our eyes are the windows to our souls and the soul remembers... Oops, sorry about the spoiler but I doubt anyone reading this will pop over to Amazon to find The Girl in the Painting. And if the title sound familiar it's because I shared a quote from it in my last blog. “She is the red string on my finger. I can’t forget her.”

Change of topics: The project I’m doing this week around the house involves working my way toward staging my house. My library room that used to have two walls lined with book shelves and hundreds of books now has only one wall of empty shelves and the sleeper chair that was sharing a room with my artist easel and arty-farty supplies got moved to my library that is now rebranded as an office/guest room. The son-I-wish-I-had came over to help me move the furniture around including moving an antique Morris chair patent dated in the 1800s and monster size showcase with four sides of glass. They went out to the garage where I’ll try to sell them in the spring. We agreed that transporting the showcase in the winter would be a major problem for a buyer, so there's no point advertising it now. I’ve been busy washing the walls in those two rooms and spreading the art stuff out to take over the whole space. I finished the "room swap/rebranding project" and the photo at the top of my sleeper chair corner in one room and the photo at the bottom is of one end of the other room I call my art room. I'm really proud of those clean walls! And in case you're wondering why I don't have my window blind pulled all the way down  in the office/guest room it's because that's my dog's window to the world of other canines.

As for me at my age washing walls, I’ve got a special mop with a round head that I use exclusively for washing walls which means I don’t have to get on ladders. Next week, though, I have someone coming out to give me a price on washing the walls in my living room and adjoining dining area. Those walls are too high for my mop and I have too many heavy pieces of art hung for me to wrestle them off and back on the walls. While he was here, the-son-I-wish-I-had and I went over the master plan of what all has to be done to get ready before the house goes up for sale. My 'To Do' list is getting shorter and most of it involves stuff that can't be done until spring or can't be done without some help from others. I'll get there but I'm getting sick of making decisions. Like what color to paint my deck furniture that Tim took with him when he left and dropped off to a body shop where it will get sandblasted and painted with car paint that will outlast me. The vintage chair, side table and foot stool will only cost me $150 to paint and if I had to buy new deck stuff I'd spend that much if not more. But I'm so worn out from decisions and I sometimes need to remind myself why I'm going through all the trouble. Monday, though, it will start feeling real. I have an appointment to go to the construction site where I'll actually get my first look inside my unit. ©

This is the chair that's getting painted "Liquid Jade" (see color chip below). It's a really comfortable chair---rocks a little, the wire mess makes it cool to sit in and the arms make it easy to get out of. The deck siding the chair will go against is a dark gray and I'll get a colorful outdoor rug for the space.

 

This is one end of my art room. I think people will be able to visualize it as a bedroom now.

Since a few people asked, this is my mop... I call it a round headed mop but it really isn't. There's a pump action part on the handle that moves those two rollers down to squeak out the water.

Wrapping up 2018 with Shock and Awe

It’s unusual for Michigan to get all the rain we’re getting now instead of snow in December. It’s also unusual for our Broad-Winged Hawks to hang around this long; they should be well on their way to South America by now but today one of these 14” to 19” birds sat not six feet from my window, on my deck railing eyeballing the ground below my seed cake feeder. I think he was looking to make dinner out of the next small bird that came along. Not wanting to watch the carnage that I sensed was coming I decided it was a good time to run errands. 

The first stop I needed to make was at Pak-Mail to drop off the pet crate I bought for Levi that turned out to be too big. Amazon sure makes returns easy. I printed the label they generated and by the time I got back home I had an e-mail waiting for me from Amazon saying that $79.99 had been refunded to my credit card, and they only deducted $10 off what I originally paid to cover the return shipping. How the heck do they know I didn’t ship them back a box of rocks or an old, worn out crate? At that point in time all Amazon really knew was I slapped the label they generated onto a box and took it to Pak-Mail. They didn’t even weigh or measure it. I was shocked that a company as big as Amazon still trusts society do the right thing and that made me feel good.

The next stop was at Chow Hound to get some pill pockets for Levi. I’m pretty sure I could get the pills down the dog without the pill pocket/treats but who else do I have to spoil except the dust bunnies and I spoil them by letting them live under my bed. I planned my next stop to be at vet’s office to pick up Levi's prescription but I was so close to the Guy Land Cafeteria that I could hear it calling my name and I wondered why because when I first got there, people-watching was as boring as monitoring a shelf of empty canning jars. But it soon picked up when a young woman in skin-tight, capris length yoga pants and a tee-shirt tied just below her breasts came in, her whole midriff showing---35 degrees outside and no winter jacket. She put a baby on the bench seat of a booth across the aisle from a table of six old guys and she bent over to change the baby’s diaper. I was wondering if I was ever that physically fit and trim and the guys were probably wondering what ever they wonder when a woman’s ass is presented in a place where they couldn’t ignore it if they tried. A sense of awe was on a few of their faces.

It was clear she wasn’t wearing underwear, not even that ‘dental floss’ that passes for thongs and her pants came with a patch pocket on her thigh for a cell phone and she was using the pocket for its intended purpose. Can’t young people do an hour’s yoga class without being connected? If I was being charitable I might concede she could have been using the phone to play a guided meditation app. But at the moment I was being surly and thinking if the phone was set on vibrate, and she got a call, her pants were so tight she’s probably get an unintended thrill. And why that doesn't happen just walking around with her "camel toe" showing in the front is a mystery.

My brother and two of his guy friends have been taking Pilates classes for a couple of years and they got a new instructor who is making them want to quit. The problem? She’s been harassing them to get “proper clothing” for classes; they’ve been wearing loose fitting jogging clothes. He says all the women in class wear yoga pants but until I saw this young woman I didn’t understand why the guys were resisting. The day my older brother starts prancing about in yoga leggings is the day I’ll be able to pay him back for all the teasing I took from him growing up.

After lunch I stopped at a grocery store I’m not fond of but I go there when I don’t need many things because it’s small and easy to get in and out of in a hurry. Michigan is due to change back to winter soon and I wanted to pick up some stuff for New Year’s Eve in case I have to stay put until after 2019 arrives. Ms. Yoga-Butt-in-Our-Faces had me feeling guilty about putting ice cream in my shopping cart so I picked up a tray of mixed veggies and vegetable dip too, knowing it would put a hex on ice cream calories. I haven’t bought ice cream since last summer even though it’s my favorite food group so I didn’t feel too guilty about wanting to ring in the New Year with Ben and Jerry’s. Should I choose to munch on the vegetables instead I know I can count on Levi to beg for the cauliflower and I'll gladly hand it over. My niece gave me a bottle Red Moscato for Christmas and I may use it to toast in the New Year...if I don’t make wine floats out of it first. I’ve never done that before but, heck, what better night of the year to do something wild and crazy. ©    

The Goldfinch and the Book Club

When I first looked at the novel my monthly Book Club selected I was overwhelmed. It was 771 pages and as I thumbed through the book I felt like I was back in grade school where I often got hopelessly bogged down in the minutia of trying to sound out words. The book was filled with foreign words and art and antique terms that were so far out of my vocabulary that they might have been written in Klingon and I knew I’d struggle too much to read The Goldfinch by Donna Tartt. Perfectly timed to my dilemma, a gift from the gods of Amazon came along---an offer for two free audible books appeared in my email box. I downloaded The Goldfinch so fast I’m surprised my Kindle Fire didn’t squeal like a stuck pig in the process, but I soon figured out that the volume on the device was so low that even with my hearing aids in I had to sit in my La-Z-Boy with the Kindle on a table three feet away. A master at multitasking I thought about knitting something while Kindle read to me, but instead I ended up following along, my eyes touching every single word in the entire book. Wow!  Thirty-two and a half hours of listening and I did it all over five days which should tell you something about how highly I’d rate the book. That's definitely the way to devour books that intimidate you. 

I loved the characters, loved the story line and looked forward to discussing them both in Book Club. The depth of the author’s knowledge and/or research abilities blew me away. The book is being made into a movie coming out next year and out of curiosity I wanted to see how IMDb summed up the plot and can you believe it, they did it in one lousy sentence! “A boy in New York is taken in by a wealthy Upper East Side family after his mother is killed in a bombing at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.” Wikipedia did a better job saying: “The novel is a Bildungsroman told in the first person by Theodore Decker who, at the age of 13, survives a terrorist bombing at an art museum in which his beloved mother dies. Staggering out through the debris, he takes with him a small, Dutch Golden Age painting, The Goldfinch, which will serve as a singular source of hope as he descends into a world of crime. The painting is one of the few surviving works by Rembrandt's most promising pupil, Carel Fabritius; nearly all of Fabritius' oeuvre was destroyed in the Delft explosion of 1654, in which the artist himself was killed.” I dare anyone reading this to tell me what “bildungsroman” means without looking it up. Give up? It’s just a fancy way to say it’s a coming of age story. 

Book Club took place just a few hours before a major snow storm was due to hit the area. All of us showed up with the same plan to stop at the grocery store on the way home so we'd have supplies to hunker down for the weekend weather siege. But no one seemed to be in a hurry to start discussing the book and finally it came out that only four of the twelve us had finishing reading it. What a disappointment! Those of us who read the book spent the rest of the hour answering questions from the others who hadn’t read it wanting to know how this or that aspect of the complicated plot turned out. And for once, I came to club super prepared with my answers to the Readers Guide Questions written out, complete with page numbers to passages like: “Because our secrets define us as opposed to the face we show the world, the painting was the secret that raised me above the surface of life and enabled me to know who I am. And it's there: in my notebooks, every page, even though it's not.” I thought about that passage a lot and I wanted to know if the others in the club agreed with that passage. Am I defined by the secrets I keep? Are you? As much as I’ve written about my life, I still have a few secrets tucked away. 

I’ve been reading a lot of books lately. Some good, more a waste of time. I’m getting better at not finishing those that don’t hold my interest or are riddled with stuff that drives me crazy. I mean come on, if you set a scene in Minnesota on Christmas you don’t have your characters splashing water in a backyard swimming pool! I checked, the author lives in California so maybe she didn’t know that back yard pools get drained in the fall in climates where water freezes in the winters, but that's what Google is for, isn't it? You research what you don't know---but how do you know what you don't know? Oh well, wordsmiths like Donna Tartt who take your breath away and make you think more than make up for the writers who don't. ©

Dialogue from The Goldfinch

Snow, Golf and Growing up Near the Klan

Monday was one of those cold Michigan days where nothing was moving in the neighborhood because the snowplows hadn’t been down the side streets yet. We got eight inches of snow over the weekend and I managed to shovel my sidewalk from the driveway to the front door because Amazon was due to delivery that day and few things keeps them from their appointed rounds---or is that the U.S. Postal Service? I have to admit I’m loving their two day delivery service with Prime. When I got the free introductory month with my new Kindle Fire I didn’t think I would keep the plan but now I’m on the fence about it. If you could see the stack of Amazon boxes in the garage waiting to go to recycling, you’d know I’ve been making good use of the service. 

Can you believe it, I played a game of golf this week! Well, not exactly. It was a game of miniature golf at a new indoor place that uses glow-in-dark balls and probably saves themselves a ton of money on electricity by not having to light up the place. It was fun but the psychedelic colors outlining the course, the busy wall murals that glowed in the dark and the god-awful black carpeting with patches that looked like neon barf gave me a headache and reminded me of bad parties in the ‘70s. It was a senior hall event and I tied for second place in my foursome plus I got to brush up on my billiards geometry doing it. Prior to the game, five of us Gathering Girls had lunch together at a popular café near-by that’s known for their good food. We were laughing so much it’s a wonder we didn’t get kicked out. 

I hate regular golf and, trust me, I tried hard to like the game. My dad was a life-long golfer, started out as a caddie before he hit his teens, even taught the game to high schoolers at one point in time and in retirement he played nearly every day, sometimes twice. My brother, niece and various others in the family play and a guy I dated back in my 20's golfed. I was highly motivated to learn. The boyfriend and I even took lessons offered at a golf course and all I learned was that I REALLY hated golf. If I want to take a nice walk I don't need to chase a little ball I can barely see as it flies down the fairway, assuming I’m lucky enough to hit it straight. 

Still, some of my best memories of my father revolve around the game. I don’t remember if we ever golfed together but my best ever movie experience was taking my dad to see Tin Cup with Kevin Costner and Don Johnson playing the lead characters. There was a scene in the film where Costner's character was in the woods and had an opportunity to cheat, but he didn’t do it even though his caddie was encouraging him to shave some shots off his score. According to Dad no real golfer would ever do that. “It’s a game of honor,” he said. “But wouldn’t the temptation be overpowering,” I asked, “when he could have won the tournament?” “He would know,” my dad answered, “he would know in his heart that he didn’t win fair and square and a hollow victory is no victory at all.” He saw the game of golf as a metaphor for life, a game you play against yourself for self-improvement---facing the challenges, knowing how you handled them are the true lessons and pay-off in a game where there's always room for improvement.

Fast forward to a time when Dad was dying of cancer and Tiger Woods had broken the color barrier in professional golf to go on to win the 1999 PGA Championship. Dad loved Tiger. In his last months, I read him every single magazine article I could find about the young golfer. My father was so proud that he had lived long enough to see America’s race relations change that much over his lifetime and we had many deep conversations about what is now labeled ‘White Privilege.’ Dad grew up in a town in Southern Illinois where grown black men would step off the sidewalk whenever a white adult or child like him passed by. He once hid in the woods watching the KKK hang a black guy and when a storekeeper in town died Dad saw him all decked out in his Klan outfit while lying in his coffin which, according to dad, was the only time Klan members revealed themselves.

My dad saw both sides of prejudism growing up. His father, an immigrant from Italy who worked in the coal mines, was paid less than whites but more than blacks and Irishmen even though they all worked side-by-side doing the same thing. In a museum of racial memorabilia I actually saw a sign like the one my dad described seeing at a coal miners' office. It listed the step-down wages paid to six different nationalities and "Niggers." The push-back against immigrants in this country is nothing new.

It might not seem like it when we’re knee-deep in our struggles to make the world a better place for our descendants but when we view the progress made by the generations that came before us it's easier to see that we are creeping closer and closer to a par game in racial equality. And that game is a game of honor, one where we know in our hearts when we’re not playing fair. ©