The New Me, Swans and Painting-by-Numbers

It seems like a lifetime since I last sat down at the computer to write. I didn’t even take a break from posting when I was in the hospital with broken ribs so this transition from posting twice a week to once a week is going to take some getting used to. Figuring out how to allot my new found time is going to effect the entire rhythm of my life except for Wednesdays. Wednesdays have long been my favorite days in the week because I get to play Mahjong and I get to publish new posts on my blog. I missed you all!

Things that happened since last week’s post:

Eight baby swans have hatched and are now swimming close to their mama in the lake here at continuum care campus. If I had a lake view apartment I’d probably get too invested in their little lives. For the next few weeks those residents who do have the prime views will be alternating between watching the babies grow and watching the snapping turtle pluck them off one by one, then giving the rest of us reports over lunch. Last year I saw one of the babies get pulled under by a dinner plate sized turtle and after that I couldn’t walk down to the lake until after they got too big for the turtles to mess with. The parent swans only got raised two of the seven they started out with last year. 

We have a guy living here who retired from a high ranging position in the Department of Natural Resources who says, “Think what a problem it would be to have that many swans on the lake. It’s the circle of life and the turtles are doing their job.” Back when my brother was a teenager he and his future brother-in-law entered that circle of life one summer and caught some of those huge turtles and cooked them on a hot plate in our backyard at the cottage. My mom wouldn’t let them do it inside and I thought it was cruel to kill them and I wouldn’t try the meat even though I was told it tasted like chicken. Ohmygod, I’ll bet they taste that way because they eat water fowl!

I’ve started taking a painting class here on the campus. It’s four weeks long, (three hours per session) taught by the same woman who micro-taught the one I took over a year ago. The class only costs $10 including the canvas, oil paints, all the other supplies plus the use of the CCC’s good quality brushes. Too cheap to pass up. Some of you may remember the drama that went on during that first class when the instructor said something dump/silly to one of the ladies and Ms Hurt Feelings left and didn’t come back. She threw her canvas in the trash and said she was keeping the #10 filbert brush “…because I should get something for my money.” 

This year’s class we have four of us returning and two newbies. The Scottish singer/resident alcoholic is one of them and he’s as blind as a bat so it should be interesting to see what he does. The other newbie is a lady who has never held a brush before and I talked her into taking the class. She really wanted to but was afraid of making a fool out of herself. I assured her the instructor’s (high-handed) hand-holding teaching methods is perfect for her. There’s no room for individual creativity in her classes but she does teach beginners useful techniques for mixing paints, how to do brush and palette knife strokes and the proper care of brushes, that sort thing. 

No one in the class knows I have a degree in art, or rather that Jean 1.0 has a degree. Jean 2.0 lost her skills, knowledge and confidence. In the dementia circles the experts say we need to meet people where they’re at and so that’s what I’m doing with myself. Yup, the discontinued model of myself couldn’t even finish a simple pasture of cows I started last winter so I’m meeting the Jean 2.0 at the bottom and working my way up. Trying to chase my former self was freezing me up and now I’m hoping to just enjoy the process without the stress of trying to live up to the artist I used to be 30 years ago. She’s gone.

Jean 2.0 even bought three paint-by-number kits to start at the very bottom where Jean 1.0 began as a kid. Two of the paint-by-numbers are customized from photos that I sent to the company. They should arrive this week. I can’t wait to try them. I have relatives who are into Mid-Century Modern decor and no self-respecting home of that era was without a paint-by-number on the wall. I picked photos with them in mind should they turn out well. One thing Jean 1.0 did that I’d like to duplicate is giving away paintings as I finish them. 

The other paint-by-number I’ve already got started on. (photos at the top.) Thankfully, I still have a steady enough hand to paint within the lines and a good magnifying glass to actually see them. (I did a little research online and learned that ‘painting’ with toothpicks in the tiny areas works fantastic.) As a kid I did a lot of paint-by-numbers until my mom found me a couple of after school art classes down at the art museum which must have been a pain for her to drive me to. We only had one car so on those days she’d have to take my dad to work and pick him back up again. He worked nights so that meant he got picked up in a bad neighborhood at midnight. If Mom was still alive I’d thank her for all the things she did for me that I took for granted, then I'd apologize for not living up to the potential she saw in me. Do we all judge ourselves through the eyes of our mothers?

Last and least…at lunch a woman asked if I was signed up for the Mother’s Day Breakfast and I told her I’m not a mother but she insisted that aunts are welcome, too. Didn’t matter, I don’t want to go. I’ve never been to a Mother’s Day event but imagine them to be a place were they compare kids and their accomplishments. Finally, she says,”You’re going!” and she marched over to the concierge's desk and signed me up. When I got back home I hoped on our community app and canceled the reservation. It made me mad that at my age someone would think they can make decisions like that for me, then I proceeded to wonder if that’s what I did to the friend about taking the painting class? After debating with myself I gave myself a pass because she initially expressed an interest in going and she herself called to register. No amount of badgering on my part would have made her call if she didn’t really want to do it. That's my story and I'm sticking to it.

Until next Wednesday….  ©

Trying Something New

Saturday morning I woke up expecting I’d be doing my normal routine of drinking two cups of coffee while reading and replying to comments on my latest blog post. But that didn’t happen because what I discovered (by subscribing to my own blog) is that Mailchimp didn’t send email notices out to any of my subscribers that I had something new posted, thus I only had one comment from someone who wandered in from another source. Long story short the company has recently changed or started enforcing a policy for their free accounts and I’ll either have to start forking over $156 a year or comply with the limitation of sending only 1,000 notices out per month. That translates into me writing six blogs per month instead of the eight I usually do, But it was a choice to make on another day because Sunday I had guests coming which meant I had sinks and floors to clean and party stuff to get ready.

The party was for my brother who is getting harder and harder to take out to restaurants because it takes two of us to walk him in---one to make sure his walker isn’t getting hung up on sidewalk cracks or chair legs and the another person to hold doors open and thank people who step out of the way when he’s about to run into them. So I offered to have my brother’s kids, their spouses and his girlfriend come down to my apartment to a birthday celebration. We only live one building apart, a half a block ride in the courtesy wheelchair. It gave Jerry a change of scenery and us more privacy than doing a gathering in the dinning area in the building where he lives. It’s a common practice with couples on campus where one spouse is living in Assisted Living or Memory Care and the other one is Independent Living. The party worked out perfect; I have ten chairs and I entertained nine people. My building does have a private space with a kitchen that residents can rent for bigger family parties and we can even get parties catered by our restaurant crew.

One of the biggest stress points my brother’s dementia causes for himself and the family is he’s always worried and arguing about not having any money to carry around. But the problem with giving him some is he either losses it, hides it or it gets stolen or a combination of all three. When my dad was in Hospice a night shift worker was stealing money from his wallet that he kept under his pillow each night until I got wise and filled the wallet up with Monopoly money. Dad didn't know the difference. He'd just see the edges of the bills and was at peace that he had plenty of  "walking around money" and I wasn't going broke on a daily basis when Dad asked to bum some cash from me.

For my brother’s birthday one of my nieces found some ‘theater money’ online that looks like the real thing---it fooled me. She told me afterward that it says ‘copy’ on them but with the bills under $20 it’s written in a small font and she doesn’t think her dad will notice. At the party she gave him a wallet with enough “cash” to make him happy. The day after the party I talked to my brother on the phone and he said, “One of the bills doesn’t look right,” and I thought, “Well, that didn’t last long.” But he went on to explain that on one side it says $1 and the other side says $5. I let out the breath I was holding and I told him new money like that sticks together and if that’s not what’s happening it’s a rare error bill like my husband used to collect and I told him I’d look at the next day. 

But the next day when I go there the entire wallet was gone and all the theater money along with it. My niece called the building manager and Jerry’s room got a thorough search and I even patted him down in case he had it in a forgotten pocket. I can only hope if someone did steal it that they get caught trying to spend fake money and they’d have to try to explain to the police where they got it. If they did figure out it wasn’t real money the chances of the wallet showing back up again are pretty high. Stay tuned.

And now for the my decision on what I’m doing about this blog. I like to think I’d write posts even if no one is reading them but that would be a lie. Not having a way to let subscribers know when I publish something new cuts down on my pleasure in keeping a blog and paying to get a subscriber’s list sent out is not going to happen. So, I’ve decided to cut back to posting every Wednesday (4 or 5 posts a month)---drop the Saturday posts. I may experiment with making the Wednesday posts longer in content and/or throwing one or two extra posts out during each month if something special is going on. (I can do six without having to pay to have notices sent to subscribers.) Working out a new rhythm to my life is going to take time but Mailchimp’s curve ball just brought to the surface something I’ve been thinking about doing for a while now. Next Wednesday I’ll tell you all about the painting class I started this week.  ©

Edit to add: Yes, I know this email notice went out on Thursday which was Mailchimp's doing not mine. (It actually got published on time.) But I'm delighted none the less because now I know the day of the month when they roll me over to a batch of 1,000 email notices.

Mystery in the Blogs

Bloggers is doing strange things in my blog. I’ve used this platform since 2012 and recently I noticed they’ve changed the font size on older posts, presumably to save bandwidth. They also dumped a bunch of short comments into my spam folder. I noticed this because in the past I’ve always kept just ten comments in that folder (Repeat offenders I want to remember) and when I’d notice an eleventh I’d know I accidentally sent a good comment there that was meant to go through to public viewing. Last week when I opened my dashboard I had over a hundred comments in the Spam folder and I was almost afraid to open it and see what had grown overnight. 

For them to by-pass the normal path of first going into the 'Waiting Moderation' file for me to manually decide their fate had never happened before so I expected Bloggers had added a new feature, an auto-bot and it threw a bunch of x-rated comments in that file or the guy who plagued older bloggers with his  “I hate Baby Boomers” comments got out of internet jail and was back sending his nasty-ass crap. Or maybe the woman from India who wants to improve our sex lives with a special herb to help our mates grow their penis sizes was hoping one day I'll accidentally send her ads through for public viewing. Finally, I opened the folder and found mostly my own comments like, “LOL” or “So true”----stuff like that and all of it over a year old. (A bandwidth pruning.) So I deleted them and thought that would be the end of it. It wasn’t. 

A week later a few more old and short comments showed up in my Spam folder plus a longer one from an “administrator”(or someone posing as one) written two days earlier who commented that my title didn’t match the content in a particular post. How it got into the Spam folder without being in the 'Waiting Moderation' folder would be a mystery if not for the fact that long ago and faraway I used to be an administrator on a website with a message board, chat room and blog community and I had the power to do all kinds of things on the backside of that place. One of my jobs was pruning older threads when I wasn’t deleting inappropriate topics or monitoring fights between members in case one or both stepped over the line and I needed to put them in internet jail for a couple of days to cool down. I just never thought a place like Bloggers---as big as they must be---would have humans pruning or moderators. Even back when I was doing that kind of work, pruning could be done automatically but I talked my boss into letting me do it in my spare time because mass pruning would have dumped too many still useful-to-our-members topics.

I’ve never had a knack for naming my posts or anything creative for that matter. My husband could. He named most of the art pieces I did for college art shows and all the photographs we entered in contests way back when I stalked little kids with my camera and he stalked wildlife with his. He even named my sister-in-law’s hair salon. Knowing how often editors change titles of articles and books it never bothered me much that I don’t have the skill to name my posts. But if my posts start getting pruned for not having titles that match the content, then I’m going to have learn at the ripe old age of dirt.

Of course there’s the very real possibility that I moved that "Admin" comment to the Spam folder and I’m having short term memory problems and don't have the brain cells to remember dong it and that a real human isn’t messing with me. 

I tried clicking on that commentor’s profile but it took me to a message that read, “The Blogger profile you requested cannot be displayed.” People do that when they have an invitation-only blog. It's like knocking on the door of an old speak-easy. Someone would open a little window in the door and ask you who sent you before admitting you in. I doubt real administrator for Bloggers would have a profile like that. It’s a mystery.

It's also a mystery to ponder why if I did move his/her comment to the Spam folder why would I have done that. I don't make a practice out of not publishing comments that are critical of something I've written. (Case in point, read the comments on the wedding dress post where I was chastised for body shaming the bride.) In fact when I write about certain topics I'm prepared for a little push back. Conflict can is good from time to time. It has the potential to make us grow if all parties involved stays on point and don't disintegrate into name calling which on the website mentioned up above was the tipping point for time outs in internet jail. (Internet jail, if you haven't figured it out by now, is just using a person's IP number to lock them out from getting on a website for set length of time. They can still communicate with the administrators but protesting your time out, just gets you a longer one.)

If I had published the comment I would have replied that sometimes I purposely come up with titles that don't match the content like if the topic contains sexual, money or religious matters. Long time bloggers know better than to put certain words in the title line or first paragraphs because the internet crawlers are looking there for the spammers to dump their stuff in the comment sections. That was not the case with that particular post title and content but I'm just sayin' it's a better excuse than saying I screwed up. ©

 

Added this morning: Is anyone else getting notices from Mailchimp wanting you to buy "additional credits?" I've been on their free plan to notify subscribers but this morning none are getting the notices. I have no clue what "additional credits" are. When I go to their website directly there is no mention of 'credits'.