The Art Class, Rosie The Riveter and a Great Netflix Movie

Happiness comes in many forms and it was delivered this week with an art class that lit a fire under my pot of stagnant creativity. The three part class is being taught by an award winning college professor who is teaching the class as a favor to our resident, retired art professor. This summer the instructor is taking these same workshops to Europe to teach what she calls Handmade Artist's Books. I guess it's a popular fad right now and there is plenty of evidence online to back up her claim. When it's all said and done we'll have a book of abstract art pages that we'll embellish with whatever pleases us and what pleases me is I'm going to turn the pages into a poetry book. Since moving to my continuum care campus I've written fifteen poems about various aspects of living here in my eight's and I've been wanting to do something with them. 

The class was advertised as "experimenting with art materials" so I had no idea we were going to be taking a large sheet of rag paper and act like kindergartners slopping watercolors every which way, then turning it over and doing the same thing on the back side. Our next class we'll be learning to cut and fold the sheet of paper to form a book that opens up accordion-style. The third class will be the embellishment phase, which to me looks more like scrapbooking than art but, of course, those judgments are always in the eyes of the beholder. All I know is that since the first class and now I've also finished up a paint-by-number I started working on last fall and lost interest in and I've stretched a canvas to use for another customized paint-by-number that I promised to my oldest niece. Plus I dug out my folder of poems to print and use as embellishments, along with a few photos from around the campus.

I also took a trip to JoAnn's Fabrics going out-of-business sale, bought some heavy paper I planned to print the poems on and prompted screwed up my printer trying. It took me almost two hours to get it working again because the paper not only got stuck but it caused the ink cartridges not to read anymore and I had to change them, clean the nozzle and preform all the set up/alignment stuff I did when I first got the printer. Won't be trying to put heavy paper through the printer again. Now I have to dream up another project that will use fifteen pieces of great quality scrapbook paper bought at the ridiculously low cost of twenty-five cents each. I have always loved and lusted after good paper. Back in the days when all I thought about was art I had a great collection of handmade paper samples, I even took a papermaking class in college and just now I realized that the blender I donated to Goodwill a month or so again could have been put to use turning my junk mail into homemade paper. Oh well, I don't have time for all the could have/should have ideas that flit through my head.

Change of topic: If you live in Michigan and get a chance to hear a lecture about Rosie the Riveter or the Willow Run Bomber Plant given by Clarre Kirhn Dahl, don't pass it up. She's a retired history educator specializing in Women's Studies who spoke for an hour and a half on our campus without notes or missing a beat. She had us spellbound and laughing and so pumped with pride in the 269,0000 women in our mom's generation who worked in the factories during WWII building planes ships, jeeps, guns, bullets and making uniforms. Many of us had joyful tears in our eyes when she was finished speaking. She's part of Michigan Flight Museum  (an affiliate of the Smithsonian) and is an official 'Tribute Rosie' who dresses in the iconic look made popular by Norman Rockwell magazine cover and she crisscrosses the country to tell the stories of the American home front during the war and along the way she locates and documents as many the still-living Rosie's as she can find. I had an aunt who was a Rosie. Her two kids lived with us and their mom would visit when she could. For a few years I thought I had three brothers instead of just the one.

If you like Women's history another fascinating and inspirational thing I saw this week was a netflix movie that tells the true story of a black unit of the Women's Army Corp during WWII called The Six Triple Eight. Like the Tuskegee Airmen, an all black unit that served during WWII, it took decades to get the recognition they earned and deserved only to have Musk, this week, use his chainsaw crew to remove their records from military archives as being too DEI. Anything related to Black History month got removed. Even famed baseball player, Jackie Robinson's military recorders got scrubbed. Thankfully, there is an effort to restore the damage these clearly unqualified "Musk's DOGE kids" did purging and attempting to white-wash history. History is history! It can be disturbing. It can be inspirational. It can be a lot of things but what it can't be is changed into something it wasn't. And yet here we are….  ©

No Rest for the Wicked

 

There’s no time for lollygagging here in the Daydreamer’s Den. If I was into walking I could have joined the Senior Walking Group at 9:30. But that’s not going to happen for me until spring, if ever, but at 10:30 I went to a meeting called Game Room Orientation where I was hoping (and succeeded) to whip up some interest in a monthly or by-monthly Monopoly game. They’ve already got a Cutthroat Pinochle group started and one called Mexican Train Dominoes plus a Scrabble group which---with my inability to spell without Alexa at my side---would be sheer punishment. I hate that game with a passion. 

After that I grabbed a quick vegetable panini at the cafe` so I could make it to a Gym Equipment Orientation at 12:30 followed by another class called Appliance Training at 2:00. The latter class was by far the most popular. All of us are having trouble learning the ends and outs of the high tech programmable thermostats and the dishwashers that likes to start themselves if you lean against them. Computer savvy person that I am I learned early on how to use the complex’s app to fill out a work order to have a guy come to cancel the program in the thermostat so I now have what is virtually a manual with only a few things to remember: Press plus or minor to change the temperature and mode to get air conditioning, heat or off.

Also today I put in a work order to get my floor cleaned with a power scrubber so I can order my area rug. There’s a foot wide strip across the floor where the drop clothes the workmen used must not have covered and the normal cleaning crew couldn’t get the film off with normal mopping when they prepped the apartment for me to move in. In the meantime I ordered a two by three foot rug in the same pattern and color as the seven by ten rug I need just to make sure it looks good with my wicker and new La-Z-Boy. It’s worth that extra step to know I wouldn’t have to go through the hassle of returning something that big if I don't like it. And it came today. 'Love' is not a strong enough word for how much I like it.

After a full day of back to back classes I felt like I was in college again and just like back in those days one of the ladies invited 5-6 of us in to see her apartment. Everyone raved about her linoleum kitchen floor that looked like cork that she paired with high pile cream, wall-to-wall carpeting in the living room area. It wasn’t an option for the masses but she hates gray and did both floors as an upgrade. She had that same white and stainless steel kitchen as me but with the light cork colored flooring didn’t look all that good in my opinion and where her carpeting started she had a huge, L-shaped creamy white couch with it’s back to the kitchen, a hard division of space. Where my wicker furniture is probably a tad too small in scale for the space her furniture was without a doubt too big for the space. She could seat an entire football team on her disco lounge style couches. A TV and coffee table completed her decor except for a single piece of art on the wall of a dainty bouquet of flowers that looked like it was straight off the walls of a place like Home Goods.

I told her she’s going to hate my apartment because I love gray. My love affair with that color dates way back to the ‘80s when we started painting houses, buying vehicles and dogs in shades of gray and, of course, my husband’s and my hair turned silver. We joked that we were the Gray Family all matchy-matchy grAy with a little grEy thrown in for variety. It’s going to be fun seeing what each of us has done with our similar space. Someone mentioned we need to set up a tour around the holidays. Sign me up.

After being gone most of the day I came back to clean windows and summer screens installed. And we got a promise of pull cords attached to our blinds because no one is tall enough to reach them without a ladder. I don't get how we're supposed to get them back up again without a ladder, but I don't care because I will never put mine up all the way to the ceiling anyway unless drones come peeking in the windows which is a possibility. I saw one today in the green space across from my apartment.

I also learned more about the painting classes that will on campus. It’s not going to the kind I'd hoped for. They’ll be like the Wine & Painting parties you hear about for bridal showers, where you all paint the same picture only this one is designed to complete a painting in three, one hour long classes rather than one three hour class like with the party painting. (one painting per mouth if you keep them up). I hate to be an art snob but it sounds like a step above paint-by-number ‘art’. Still, I signed up just to get a paint brush in my hands again. On the other side of the coin I have a confession to make: when I was a kid I absolutely adored paint-by-number kits and ten years ago I tried another and found it just as appealing---kind of like meditation or doing jigsaw puzzles, even sold that sucker on e-Bay because collecting finished paint-by-numbers was a thing when I was downsizing. So who knows, with enough wine I might become queen of the painting party concept, and yes, we can bring wine if we want. I asked. ©

Life in a Holding Pattern

Everything going on in my life this week will happen in the last half which is a bummer when I have blog posts due on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Well, except for the “running of the bulls” aka the dash to secure RSVPs for all the senior hall events happening in September and October. (I should start calling it the running of the broads, but I’d probably offend someone.) I got my RSVPs in exactly at 9:00 on Monday but it will a few days before I’ll find out if I made it on the list for a fall color tour and in various classes for things like Healthy Legs, Perfect Bra Fitting, Making Soup and Cardio Drumming. The Life Learning Lectures are rarely full so I’ll have those to look forward to for sure---one is titled “Ghost Stories” and the other “Rakish Reeds Lake.” Don’t ask, I have no idea how a lake can be "rakish." Four of us Gathering Girls are trying to get on the same color tour bus, the first time we’ve tried something like that so that put a new twist on the running of the bulls. It’s a gamble, though, because there are four buses and time slots and one of our ladies was only available for one of them…it works better if you’re flexible making your RSVPs. 

The bra class isn’t a class per say but rather a 15 free minute appointment with a company that’s been around town for years. I’ve always wanted to do a fitting with them but I figure I’ll be under less pressure to buy from them this way than by going to their specialty store. I know several people who have gotten fitted there and they love the change a proper fit made in their posture, looks and comfort but it’s a pricy place to buy you undies---they even custom-make bras, if needed. Yes, I will have to get naked on top but I did it for a mammogram last month so I will do it again while trying to keep my mind off why someone would take on a job handling a different person’s boobs every 15 minutes, all day long.

Monday I was going to do re-con mission in preparation for the painting class I’ll start on Wednesday, but I decided to live dangerously and skip it. The woman teaching has a home and studio fifteen minutes north of me, out in the boondocks in between two lakes and anyone who lives in Michigan knows how hard it can be to find houses in "cottage communities." Google Maps wasn’t any help. Their Google satellite shot showed her living in the middle of a giant swamp with no roads in or out, obviously taken before the land was developed. I learned ten years ago not to trust those satellite shots on Google Maps when one identified my neighbor’s house across the street as being mine. The house numbers for the whole street were flipped. I was glad they were nice neighbors otherwise I would have worried about getting raided by the police---not a far-fetched notion. My husband actually witnessed that once where we used to live. A bad-ass, multi-agency swat team took down a large drug ring that lived across street even shot their two, nasty-tempered pit bulls which made all the neighbors happy. Don was tipped off ahead of time when it would happen because he’d been keeping track of license plates coming and going from the house for a month and was calling them in to an undercover cop/friend of his. Can you believe it, they were getting large quantities the cocaine delivered by a UPS truck and supplying half the city! Life is sure full of weirdness and wonder, isn’t it.

In the wonder department, I started back to the YMCA gym this week after not going for two. It wasn’t much of a workout since my chiropractor told me not to do any upper body stuff just yet. Basically all I did was break the ice by going up and down the staircase a million times, walking the treadmill, using the strength training machines for the lower body and wondering why in heck I’m still paying for a membership. I don’t want to be there anymore! I really don’t and it’s not in my DNA to keep doing things that are good for me when there are more fun ways to spend my time. And can you believe it, I dropped five pounds while the UTI and pinched nerve took me out of commission. I’ve never lost that much doing 14 day's worth of workouts. Silver linings, you’ve got to love them. 

Speaking of things you’ve got to love I bought a new landline phone because my old one was getting to the point where it wouldn’t dial out anymore---not a good situation for an old person who worries about dying in middle of the night when stumbling out to the middle of street and yelling “Help!” wouldn’t get me noticed. Oh-my-god, my new Panasonic makes my (four year old) landline look like a dinosaur! It even has a “block caller” button. The best part about the new phone is it doesn’t take an advanced degree in computer coding to program it. So even though I’m in a holding pattern, I’ve still had something to occupy my brain. ©

Politicians, Art and Stupid Computers

The dog let me sleep until 10:00 on this fine Sunday morning and that hasn’t happened in a long time. But alas one of his stuffies had to pee and so Levi shoved the bear in my face until I got up and let the two of them out the back door. I thanked them both for the extra sleep. I really needed it after the busy week I’ve had, a week that included seeing the doctor, dentist and audiologist and going to an art class and a fund raiser.

The class:  Friday I got up before the sun and off I went into the morning mist along the river to go to a one day class at the sculpture garden on using pastels. Actually, a half day class and, boy, did the time go fast. We all worked on the same, cookie cutter landscape which made it easy for the instructor to demonstrate technique. She had some of her own work on display and it was impressive. I liked working with the pastels and I can see me dabbling in the median on long winter days.  After class, I had lunch at the gardens and wandered around the temporary exhibit of sculptures from around the world, none of which I’d like to own except for the fact I could sell one and use the money to pay cash for a luxury car or two.  I don’t know, maybe I’m getting too old to understand ‘cutting edge.’ Ya, I know Michael Angelo has already been there, done that with realism----it’s old school---but I still like his naked marble men better than hunks of metal that look like they were produced by a bunch beer guzzling guys in a junk yard in the wee hours after last call. “You wanna have a welding contest?” “Count me in, Bubba!”

Saturday evening I went to a political fund raiser…nothing fancy. It was a hot dogs and beer affair with a handful of political figures coming in to pitch themselves or another candidate. I went mostly because I’ve been going to these for nearly two decades and I know a lot of the people who organize the event. It was more fun when Don was alive and we stayed to the end but I mostly just put in an appearance this year and picked up a bunch of literature. I don’t drink beer but I took a break from my diet to eat a hot dog, beans and chips and to shake a few hands, hoping none of those hands I shook came in contact with someone with coming down with the flu. I really don’t like shaking hands this time of the year…especially at doctor’s offices. Why do they still do that? I learned from Facebook a few days ago that I’ve already been exposed to highly contagious virus that gives you severe diarrhea.  Oh, goodie. If I get it you can be sure I won’t be posting an SOS on Facebook for someone to bring me Gatorade and toilet paper. That’s what phones are for. Is there nothing too personal for young people to post on Facebook?

Have I mentioned lately that computers drive me nuts? You get one thing working just the way you want it, then a mysterious force comes along and changes your settings or otherwise messes with programs and you have to start all over again. It took me several weeks to get my email working after my month in Computer Hell, now it’s gone again. Then yesterday I wanted to edit some photos and discovered I no longer have an editing program, presumably a victim of having to have Windows wiped off my computer and reinstalled. I don’t remember the name of the program I used and loved and now I have to research photo editing programs…and I can’t get back to my eBay sales until I do. I wanted do a heavy round of auctions leading up to Thanksgiving, then quit for the winter months. That’s not likely to happen now. I also can’t do the photo albums and genealogy books I want to work on over winter until I get the photo editing issue resolved. I’m too old for this! Woo is me! I need a grandchild to work some magic on my keyboard and say, “There, grandma, it’s all working again.”

I promised myself I would manage this coming winter’s expectations better than I did last winter in terms of signing up for too many activities that are subject to cancellations due to bad weather. But then the senior hall newsletter came out for November, December and January and I put in my reservations in for eleven events. Add nine Red Hat Society outings and, oops, I did it again. They are predicating another bad winter for Michigan so expect me to be belly-aching, again, about being too chicken to drive to interesting lectures, luncheons, outings and classes or they get canceled due to the weather. Oh, well, as long as all my petty problems remain first world, middle-class problems I am still one lucky widow lady, aren’t I. But if the day ever comes that I have to stand on the deck with a shot gun to protect the dog and his stuffie from ending up in the neighbor’s soup pot then I reserve the right to complain and be heard!  ©

Not the greatest painting, but I haven't picked up a pastel crayon in 35 years and the set they gave us to work with didn't have all the colors I would have liked to use.....excuses, excuses.  The class did inspire me to try the median again, though. I liked it much better than the color pencils I tried last spring and quickly abandon as too frustrating.