Ruled by Twos, Covid and Fine Dining

Since I moved into this complex that I’m officially dubbing Lady Land two people have died, two people have been quarantined with Covid, ambulances have shown up twice and two fire alarms went off---both false alarms. The last one sent us all out to the sidewalk in the early morning, most of us still in our sleepwear. Today it could have gone off at noon and I’d have been caught in my ratty bathrobe and L.L. Bean, long flannel nightgown. Old Sunday-not-go-to-meetings habits are hard to break. Another Sunday habit I've fallen back into is doing my laundry and housework then and, yes, I accomplish a lot in that ratty bathrobe. It's how it got ratty in the first place.

Residents here were trying to figure out who was in quarantine because management wasn’t giving out their names or the building they live in which I presume is because of HEPAA laws. People were scared we’d all get quarantined if anyone else gets sick. Masks are mandatory here as of today 11/19 (and again statewide in public places) and if you refuse to get on-site tested---twice now---you can’t eat in the restaurant or cafe’ or go to any of the classes. Staff is tested daily. We had to show our vaccination cards when we made our final payments, too, before moving in. So this campus feels as safer than any other random place in town.

When the news of the quarantine first broke I had a reservation to eat in the restaurant and I was the only one there for a whole hour which is not normal. At least I didn’t have to worry about being asked to sit with someone I didn’t know well enough to identify them in a lineup. Oh, and the secret of who was in quarantine finally got revealed when I happened to be sitting by the fireplace in the lobby when a woman near-by got a bouquet of flowers delivered to her. "What's the occasion?" someone asked, and she replied, "I just got out of quarantine yesterday." She and her husband both. They'd been vaccinated but still got a mild case of Covid from their grandson, got an infusion of some kind and got over it quickly. She's been wearing a full face plastic shield ever since.

If I was into food blogging the Cider Chicken I ordered that night was yummy and perfect for photo-documenting in a slick-paged food magazine. It had a sauce on it made with walnuts, cranberries, cubes of yams and cider that turned the chicken into a golden thing of beauty. The favor profiles the chef comes up with are so refined but he never serves enough veggies with his entrees. Last week I had lamb chops for the first time ever in my life and they came with nine snow peas. Taste wise and presentation wise it was to die-for but I guess I have pedestrian tastes when it comes to serving food, if you’re going to give me a giant white plate I want an old school balance on that plate of meat, potatoes and vegetables. The “sculptures” made with meat or fish on those giant plates are pretty but I’m going to get scurvy, rickets or malnutrition if I don’t start eating carrots and peas for breakfast.  

Of course, I could order more of the homemade soups in the cafe` or their salads but salads have no appeal to me in cold weather months (nor do soups in the summer). I plan on ordering the soup twice a week to stay within my food allowance. I’ve got it all figured out: Once a month I’ll do the Sunday brunch for $20 and once a week I’ll do the fine dinning restaurant for $12 to $15 a meal, twice a week I’ll do an under $5 choice in the cafe` and the rest of my cafe` meals will be $7. I’d hate to see how far some of my fellow residents are going over they $200 allowances, who eat in the restaurant every time they’re open plus they have wine or cocktails every night and dessert---even in the cafe`. Desserts are the biggest bargain here at $2.50. Award winning recipes, I’m sure, but I can’t stand seeing the bird-like eaters only eating half of their key-lime pie or other featured dessert and not taking the rest back to their apartments in a take-out box. Ya, I know, that’s why they’re skinning and I’m not. But at least I don’t have to live with the guilt of all those kids starving to death in China because I didn’t clean my plate.   

At the top is a photo nabbed off our campus website of our restaurant. Way to the back and behind the glass and navy paneled wall is an area we can reserve for family parties and that's where they set up the Sunday and holiday brunches. To the far right in the back is the bar. This place and the cafe` share a kitchen and the entrances are only ten feet a part in the complex which is how some people get wine or cocktails from the bar, then bring them over to cafe` to go with their cheaper meals. I haven't done that yet. I'm saving my first drinks-with-dinner experience for something special. 

It's been a lot of years since I've had a designated driver so I could do a drink with dinner out. Here, I can just walk home. I'm making friends with the night security guard so I could---in theory---ask him to watch me walk from the main building to my building to make sure I don't face-plant on the sidewalk and died of exposure. Or I could just tag along behind him when he does one of this every few hours walk around the outside of the buildings because he walks right past my door on his rounds.

He's a college kid with cornrows in his hair, studying for a law degree. And I can't help thinking he'd make a great cover model on a romance book. In addition to being great eye candy, he's got that look in his eye like he enjoys people and connects on a deeper level when you let him in. If I was writing a book right now I'd have him meet my fictional granddaughter for a torrid affair that ends with a small wedding down at the lake with swans in the background and me as the maid-of-honor for bringing them together. Why do we have to get old and run out of time to do all the things we can dream up? Maybe next year if I'm still alive and kicking I'll take part in the NaNoWritMo challenge again where you write 50,000 words of a novel in 30 days. I've done it a couple of times and while I didn't make it to 50,000 words I came close once---over 40,000---and it was fun to hang around their message board during those Novembers. In the meantime I could do research on my lovely, fantasy granddaughter and a very real, super-nice security guard. ©

the room we can reserve for family parties

The Honey-Do List

I found the moon last night. I’m on the wrong side of the building to see the morning sun and I thought I’d never see the moon again either. But I can sit at my desk after midnight and the moon looks at me from above the tree line in the distance. Now I know where to go when I’m having a hard time falling asleep and I want to know which phase the moon is in. Funny how little things can make you feel like your life is coming back together again after a major disruption in its flow. So many changes all at once can drive you batty from “where did I decide to put the measuring cups” to getting overwhelmed by so many new people to meet and remember. We finally got name tags we can wear (or not) which has helped. So far, only one person is on my Avoid-at-All-Costs list and another is on my Maybe-You’ll-End-up-There list. As for finding others with a similar sense of humor as mine: one of the Skinny Minnie Twins, a woman in my paining class and one of the other Jean’s on campus all do. Did I mention there are at least five Jeans living here? The weird thing about having other Jeans on campus is we all seem to be attracted to the same kinds of activities.

The maintenance man is a peach. He finally got here to hang a couple of shelves and my Paul Newman as Butch Cassidy signed and numbered print. (It was done for a fund raiser he and western artist James Bama did for the Hole in the Wall Camp that Paul started for kids with serious illnesses, to give them the experience of camping.) I’m nicknaming the maintenance guy M&M because he is so sweet that you want to see more of him like mindlessly popping candy into your mouth and he's the first person to notice my art as something more than furniture store decor`. We worked so well together, me handing him stuff he needed without him needing to ask. It felt like I was working side-by-side with my dad although M&M is young---mid thirties. We bonded over the fact that neither one of us can stand to see a picture on the wall that is hanging crooked. Even if it’s in a public place or a friend’s house we can’t control the urge to nudge it back in place. 

M&M apologized for it taking so long to respond to the work order---a week---and I told him it was quicker than my husband responded to my Honey-Do lists and being a man he felt the need to give my husband an excuse. “He probably didn’t have the right tools to do the job. That’s why most men put things off.” That made me laugh. There wasn’t a tool made that Don didn’t have from those big enough to work on antiquated street cars and those tiny enough to repair pocket watches---modern power tools to antiques. Oh, yes, M&M and my husband were cut from the same clothe---the clothe that says, “I can do ANYTHING if only I had the right tool!” He is going to be one popular man here in Lady Land. (I shouldn’t call this campus Lady Land. Probably 10% of the popular here has outdoor plumbing.) Aside from being someone to give our Honey-Do lists to, he had me at, “Hello---oh you’re an artist!” Said when he walked in the door and got his first view of my space. It was like he read my master plan for the vibe I wanted my place to have: Beach cottage artist’s den.

Aside from finding the moon I still haven’t fallen into enough of a routine yet to feel completely at home and mostly that’s due to not feeling ready to explore the shopping areas off campus yet. That will come after I finally get new a eyeglass prescription in December, weather permitting. I know my way to two grocery stores, both my banks, a hair salon and “doctor row’ where all my doctor’s have offices. It's just seven short minutes away. Before I had to allow 45 minutes to an hour to get to them because I had to go on a highway known for traffic delays at certain times of the day. As my youngest niece recently said, I’m at the right place, at the right time in my life.

By the way, keeping the Newman print was literally a last minute decision. I ran out of time to sell it and the-son-I-wish-I-had had it in the back seat of his truck for him to sell for me. “Are you sure you don’t want it?” he asked before leaving my apartment and just like that I have Paul back again and he looks great over my desk. Its a nice, unplanned nod to my husband's and my past decorating theme. My whole den is.

The photos below are from of my honey-do shelf project in my half bath. The little bookcase full of seashells my dad made for me when I got my first big girl bedroom make over at thirteen.  ©

 I really love the floating shelves you can layer stuff on, an idea I got from The Awkward Widow's blog.

 

The silhouettes are of my mom, done back when I was around 6 or 7 and I have one of me as well that will rotate to this shelf from time to time.

 

I used to have a lot of jewelry made of seashells. I wish I had better photos of those on these shelves. My hands shakes too much to do photography anymore.

The sand toys (except for the pail) on this bottom shelf were mine and my brothers growing up.

Painting Class, the Art Show and Coming Back from Heaven

Painting class is going to be more challenging that I thought but not in the way you might be imagining. On one hand just hearing the instructor talk about what the different brushes are used for got me excited about painting again but on the other hand, when she started telling us precisely how she wanted us to fold pieces of paper towel to wipe our brushes on I started getting the idea she’s going to teach in micro-controlling steps. “When I tell you to clean your brushes,” before changing colors, “this is how I want you to do it,” she said while blotting a brush with the folded paper towel in her hand. Okay, brushes are expensive so I get her point here. I must not beat the crap out of my brushes anymore while trying to clean them. No hard surface should ever touch the bristles in my brushes.

She’s been teaching classes since the ‘70s and when I asked where she taught---because I thought maybe I’d taken one of her classes---it came out that I "painted some back then" and that I've been away from art for a long time. She asked what style I painted in and I replied that I want to develop a new style from what I used years ago similar to the Impressionists, using short dabbing strokes and with less detail than in my past. “You won’t learn that in my class. I will teach you the proper way to make a paint stroke.” Maybe my memory is faulty---it's been 35 years ago since I've taken a serious art course---but I don’t recall an instructor ever saying one type of brush stroke is better or more “proper” than any other. Georges Seurat with his pointillism style would have been sent to the principal’s office for not staying within the lines, so to speak, in this class. 

Okay, I do get it. Again. She wants us all working on the same thing at the same time and we’ll start with the sky during the next class and working our way down from top to bottom. In my college classes we were taught to kind of paint all over the canvas, balancing out the values before getting down to refining the details in any one area and this class is more like advanced paint-by-number. I'm totally okay with that. I need to start some place on the long road back into getting obsessed again with painting.

She had us trace a drawing of a barn on a canvas and mine was too dark, she said. “You’ll have to erase your lines because you won’t be able to cover them with paint.” I didn’t think they were dark at all but then I'd just had eye surgery the day before so what did I know. I figured if we were using watercolors she would have had a valid point but we’re using oils. “I’ll just use thicker paint,” I said without thinking that I was being a cantankerous student who I wouldn't want to be teaching. "That won’t work," she replied. Vincent van Gogh and Jackson Pollock are lucky they were not students of this feisty, elf--- the top of her head lines up with my boobs. They may never have learned to use an impasto technique, laying on thick paint with a palette knife. I really can’t complain, though. The series of classes is only cost $15 with all supplies included and I’m learning (or relearning) useful things about our paints, brushes and canvases. The first three hour class was just an introduction to the supplies and her doing a demonstration. I needed that review.

But I will be challenged not only by her teaching method and my rusty skills but also by my classmates several who talked extensively about going to heaven and coming back and how everything will be revealed at death and there is nothing to fear. I once had an out-of-body experience when I was being rushed to the hospital with a high fever but all I saw while looking down on myself were snakes crawling everywhere. No white light for me to follow. Ohmygod, I really am going to hell, aren’t I! I did not share my experience with the class. I know when to keep my mouth shut.

We've had an art and crafts show on campus already---not from this class. It was organized by the girl in charge of the Enrichment Programs. She is one busy girl! I wasn't sure I wanted to put either one of the only two finished paintings I still have around in the show because I had no idea where I’d stand on the scale of talent on the campus. (I didn't want to be embarrassed, if I didn't measure up.) My dog Jason's portrait is artsy-fartsy better than an old house in other piece. The portrait was done in a true painter’s fashion while the old house was done more like a Bob Ross formula painting.

So instead of a painting I entered a quilt that I knew would wow anyone who sees it. (In the photo up above it wasn't married to a backing yet and I'm too lazy to take a new photo.) I ended helping the organizer set up the show because she had some easels that she didn't know how to work, and at the last minute I went back to my apartment, grabbed the house painting and put that in the show as well because it fit an easel still left.

We have a wide range of talented people living here---an accomplished metal sculptor, two wood workers, several knitters, a weaver, a tailor who made a to-die-for artsy-fartsy jacket, two photographers, five painters and four quilters. Even had an x-florist enter floral arrangements. The instructor of my class brought in a large and lovely winter landscape---nicely done, a real crowd pleaser. Oh and in case I might have left the impression that we get along like oil and water, that isn't true. She's got a sense of humor and we "get" each other. ©