Puff Puff Puff...
Getting the cards out as I just got overwhelmed with all the things that I had to do. I wrote down 10 cards, each with most of the lines filled with ToDo items. No wonder I was feeling overwhelmed.
I blasted through a lot in the last three days, but my writing has really gone by the wayside because of everything else.
And I *still* managed to get sidetracked by having two people mention Dreamwidth as an alternative journal, as it has a policy of no outside advertising.
You know what I really, really hate, though? They're using a .org for their site, and they're NOT a non-profit. Not in any sense of that word, and having worked for non-profits and being a really old-fashioned net-type, I really, really hate that they're exploiting that part of the domain name. I really, really hate that they're only offering permanent accounts during the beta period (for $200) and are saying 'never again', and are limiting access through invites (of which I have none). But, you know, $3 can buy you a month and your user id, basically. *rolls eyes* I do wonder if the main draw there right now is because you can get the permanent "seed" accounts right now so that those that didn't get them on LJ do so there.
*shrugs* I'm not going. I'm staying here, as I love the people here immensely; but enough people were getting id's as backups that I thought I'd do it, too.
There. Sidetracked.
One thing I'm doing is consulting for a seventy-something artist. She's a lady at my church that, like me, would have been surprised to have ever been caught alive in a church, as she was raised strictly Catholic.
She's been doing art her whole life. Now, she's an art therapist, regularly shows in galleries, and makes a pretty good living selling her art. She got tired of being afraid of computers, so she hired me to help her out. We started at $10 an hour because neither of us was sure that we'd fit. I can be pretty arrogant, and she wasn't sure if I could accommodate her methods of learning; but it's worked out really well.
Seems that my communication knack really can bend all the computerese into artistese, and makes it so that I can translate everything she need to learn into a list of things she can do and repeat. My Development knack seems to take a great deal of pride and joy in watching her become more and more at ease with her computer. So we have moved on to $15 an hour now that both of us feel like she's getting her money's worth out of me. I don't tell her I used to get $100 an hour consultation fees, as at this rate she does cool things by letting me to help her glue postcards to make note cards to sell at her next show. *giggles* I really loved getting out the glue sticks and feeling like a kid again.
It's been really worth it for me, too.
She talks about life and art and people... and her extra thirty years experience is rich and wonderful and really teaches me stuff about people each time. I was surprised as all get out when she pointed out some art by another artist and said, "I could never do that, she draws so realistically, and I have never been able to do that, as much as I'd sometimes like to."
Her stuff is so sophisticated, in my eyes, rich with meaning and symbols and shapes and textures that I never really noticed that before. And this is a lady that sells single pieces for many hundreds of dollars and encourages everyone around her to create what they can. She's the one that organized a silk painting studio for six of the ladies in the church to do banners for the interior of the church.
I also loved it when she said, "I really hate it when people praise me for my talent, not so much as a way of complimenting me, but as a way to get out of even TRYING..." And that a lot of her art she learned by just doing it, the way she's now learning computers at an age when most people have just thrown up their hands at the mere concept.
We've been doing once every two weeks, and now there will be an extra session next week as we get her web site ready for her next art show on Friday of next week. It's nice to feel connected to someone real.
The other thing that I've been doing a lot more of lately has been gardening. My vegetable garden is now yielding big bunches of spinach and lots of rolly polly radishes, crisp and sharply hot. The green onions get cut every time we need some, and they're doing so well that we're not quite keeping up with them. I might have to make scallion pancakes, soon just to behead a bunch of them before they even think of seeding again. The seeds spread really well when the ground was still frozen underneath, and the baby green onions now cover a two foot by four foot section of garden and they're all coming up.
The sugar snap peas seem to be in a huge hurry, I see three or four inches of growth a day, and I keep retangling the tendrils with the climbing supports. The raspberries have gone all thick and green, and I've now planted basil, more carrots, onions, and Jet planted his Indian corn. I have zucchini I want to get into the ground, even though we might still have frosts for the next week and a half. They'll do okay, plus there's plenty of seeds. The tomato plants are all good and hardened off outside, though the winds were pretty fierce today. I'm now spending half an hour every morning hand watering and weeding, and I think it all does better because of the attention. I really failed at both last spring, and my yields really showed it. Heck... I stopped doing the OUR center garden, and now I am going to have to think about maybe helping again, as they went down to only 1000 pounds of produce from the garden last year from the 3000 when I was really working it. I hate to say it, but eyelessgame really was right, it needed a liralen to make it grow the way it did that year.
Jet had a half-day on Wednesday, so as part of our morning activities, he helped me repot all my seed starts into newspaper pots he'd folded. I should put up a step-by-step of how to fold one. But he folded all the pots while I stuffed dirt and plants into his creations. In just the two days since, the plants look like they've doubled in size, and the ones that stayed in the seeding trays haven't had nearly the development. So I need to get the rest done, but the first batch took me a good two hours to put together.
John took on the organization of the rose garden crews for church, but he decided he'd only do it if I volunteered to do some of the work as well, as he doesn't really think of himself as a gardener.
So I am now very, very sore. We went through the whole church rose garden yesterday, as the die off had been pretty bad from this winter, and we went through and hacked down all the dead branches, chopped all but the bottom foot of all the live branches, and then dug them out from a good four inches of mulch and leaves that had been put down in the fall. I reflexively pulled every week I saw, especially the ones that were nearly a foot tall. John did his half of the garden, I did mine, but when I was two-thirds of the way through I was just panting like mad for air.
I'd had my allergy shots earlier in the day, and the doctor sat me down and told me about the policy changes they'd put in place because of my 'episode' two weeks ago. Turned out that one of the temporary nurses had been filling in, and had only a vague understanding of dosages when a person was being 'ramped up' after a new bottle, and nearly no experience with someone as problematic as I was. She nearly doubled the doses on two of my shots. I was lucky I hadn't gone into a anaphylactic shock, but they had an Epi pen just in case. I've had that before, it's not fun... I'm glad I didn't have to repeat that experience.
So he proceeded to lay out all the changes they'd made to their shot therapy systems, what he was now having the nurses do with each patient to be sure they not only understood, but had a chance to object to a shot before it was given, and how they thought it might help them avoid that mistake again. I made two suggestions that he looked startled about, but then wrote down.
They gave me my old dosage on the shots. I didn't have any problems. I feel a little odd to be the cause of changes in their standard procedures, but I'm glad that they're not going to do it again.
I don't think I was panting because of my shots, really, but I took the time to makes sure. *laughs* I think I'm just out of shape for gardening as all those muscles are just dead sore today. I managed to finish my half, cursing every plant I came into contact with. The nastiest bits were when I'd cut off a branch and toss it towards the refuse pile and a thorn would catch a bit on my glove and swing the rest of it into the cotton back of my gloves. Getting hit by some of the bigger branches felt like getting hit with a mace as the thorns were just so thick. Yes, I gave my fair measure of blood.
Sometimes I wonder if roses were invented by vampires just so that humanity would associate beauty with pain and blood-giving.
That evening, when we went to the CU graduation to cheer on the 20-something son of a friend of ours, they had the alcohol hand-cleaner in all the bathrooms, and I put it on, unthinking. OUCH... it stung like hell in every single rose bite I had.
Yeah. We went to a dinner with his family and the graduation, which went well past Jet's bedtime. Jet was great at all of it.
One of the funny things about yesterday was that before the rose garden I'd been doing all kinds of errands between my shots, getting my meds at Target, and deciding that since I was brave enough to go and GET shots after the previous thing that I deserved a treat and bought myself a liter of blanche absinthe. I had just half an hour before I had to be at the garden so I went to Santiago's, a little burrito kitchen that is a local chain with their own sinus searing green chile. The most lovely part about getting 3/4 mild and 1/4 hot is that that 1/4 hot make little grenades of make-you-cough-and-cry heat throughout the smothered burrito. I found myself really craving a chicharron and bean burrito. Chicharron are basically Mexican deep-fried pork rinds. Bacon take a back seat. *laughs* It's just a bit of meaty richness that makes the beans amazing and they're only served at the really, really tasty Mexican places in town. I'd been looking forward to it through the last two errands.
Just as I walked up to the place I hear this whistle, and John rides up on his electric scooter. He'd been at the OUR center all morning, and had exactly the same idea I had... and we'd shown up at exactly the same time.
You know you've been married a really really long time when things like that happen. *laughs* Turns out that the graduate and his family was at Exactly The Same Place as well. *laughs even harder* So we sat down and ate with them.
And today, I finally just threw my hands up. I'm retired so that I *don't* have to work at anything I damned well don't want to do. So John and I went and saw Wolverine while we still can watch movies that aren't just for kids. Summer will be different, though Jet's now signed up for enough camps that we'll have at least three weeks when he's just busy.
We enjoyed it. A lot.
It's likely been at least a decade since I've picked up a Marvel comic. But I remember various versions of Wolverine. Kitty's mentor, the old X-Men Wolverine that I always thought Jean *should* have gone out with, who wants the good boy anyway? *laughs*
Plenty of good eye candy, lots of FX, some nice action sequences right at the get go, and a better understanding of why I enjoy the character. It's not complex, at all, but it's fun and he makes sense to *me*.
I loved the story of the Moon.
And yes, it was worth staying through all the credits. Especially through the first set of credits. Brought closure to one plot point really well.
So there. Hopefully the rest of May won't be quite *this* crazy...
I blasted through a lot in the last three days, but my writing has really gone by the wayside because of everything else.
And I *still* managed to get sidetracked by having two people mention Dreamwidth as an alternative journal, as it has a policy of no outside advertising.
You know what I really, really hate, though? They're using a .org for their site, and they're NOT a non-profit. Not in any sense of that word, and having worked for non-profits and being a really old-fashioned net-type, I really, really hate that they're exploiting that part of the domain name. I really, really hate that they're only offering permanent accounts during the beta period (for $200) and are saying 'never again', and are limiting access through invites (of which I have none). But, you know, $3 can buy you a month and your user id, basically. *rolls eyes* I do wonder if the main draw there right now is because you can get the permanent "seed" accounts right now so that those that didn't get them on LJ do so there.
*shrugs* I'm not going. I'm staying here, as I love the people here immensely; but enough people were getting id's as backups that I thought I'd do it, too.
There. Sidetracked.
One thing I'm doing is consulting for a seventy-something artist. She's a lady at my church that, like me, would have been surprised to have ever been caught alive in a church, as she was raised strictly Catholic.
She's been doing art her whole life. Now, she's an art therapist, regularly shows in galleries, and makes a pretty good living selling her art. She got tired of being afraid of computers, so she hired me to help her out. We started at $10 an hour because neither of us was sure that we'd fit. I can be pretty arrogant, and she wasn't sure if I could accommodate her methods of learning; but it's worked out really well.
Seems that my communication knack really can bend all the computerese into artistese, and makes it so that I can translate everything she need to learn into a list of things she can do and repeat. My Development knack seems to take a great deal of pride and joy in watching her become more and more at ease with her computer. So we have moved on to $15 an hour now that both of us feel like she's getting her money's worth out of me. I don't tell her I used to get $100 an hour consultation fees, as at this rate she does cool things by letting me to help her glue postcards to make note cards to sell at her next show. *giggles* I really loved getting out the glue sticks and feeling like a kid again.
It's been really worth it for me, too.
She talks about life and art and people... and her extra thirty years experience is rich and wonderful and really teaches me stuff about people each time. I was surprised as all get out when she pointed out some art by another artist and said, "I could never do that, she draws so realistically, and I have never been able to do that, as much as I'd sometimes like to."
Her stuff is so sophisticated, in my eyes, rich with meaning and symbols and shapes and textures that I never really noticed that before. And this is a lady that sells single pieces for many hundreds of dollars and encourages everyone around her to create what they can. She's the one that organized a silk painting studio for six of the ladies in the church to do banners for the interior of the church.
I also loved it when she said, "I really hate it when people praise me for my talent, not so much as a way of complimenting me, but as a way to get out of even TRYING..." And that a lot of her art she learned by just doing it, the way she's now learning computers at an age when most people have just thrown up their hands at the mere concept.
We've been doing once every two weeks, and now there will be an extra session next week as we get her web site ready for her next art show on Friday of next week. It's nice to feel connected to someone real.
The other thing that I've been doing a lot more of lately has been gardening. My vegetable garden is now yielding big bunches of spinach and lots of rolly polly radishes, crisp and sharply hot. The green onions get cut every time we need some, and they're doing so well that we're not quite keeping up with them. I might have to make scallion pancakes, soon just to behead a bunch of them before they even think of seeding again. The seeds spread really well when the ground was still frozen underneath, and the baby green onions now cover a two foot by four foot section of garden and they're all coming up.
The sugar snap peas seem to be in a huge hurry, I see three or four inches of growth a day, and I keep retangling the tendrils with the climbing supports. The raspberries have gone all thick and green, and I've now planted basil, more carrots, onions, and Jet planted his Indian corn. I have zucchini I want to get into the ground, even though we might still have frosts for the next week and a half. They'll do okay, plus there's plenty of seeds. The tomato plants are all good and hardened off outside, though the winds were pretty fierce today. I'm now spending half an hour every morning hand watering and weeding, and I think it all does better because of the attention. I really failed at both last spring, and my yields really showed it. Heck... I stopped doing the OUR center garden, and now I am going to have to think about maybe helping again, as they went down to only 1000 pounds of produce from the garden last year from the 3000 when I was really working it. I hate to say it, but eyelessgame really was right, it needed a liralen to make it grow the way it did that year.
Jet had a half-day on Wednesday, so as part of our morning activities, he helped me repot all my seed starts into newspaper pots he'd folded. I should put up a step-by-step of how to fold one. But he folded all the pots while I stuffed dirt and plants into his creations. In just the two days since, the plants look like they've doubled in size, and the ones that stayed in the seeding trays haven't had nearly the development. So I need to get the rest done, but the first batch took me a good two hours to put together.
John took on the organization of the rose garden crews for church, but he decided he'd only do it if I volunteered to do some of the work as well, as he doesn't really think of himself as a gardener.
So I am now very, very sore. We went through the whole church rose garden yesterday, as the die off had been pretty bad from this winter, and we went through and hacked down all the dead branches, chopped all but the bottom foot of all the live branches, and then dug them out from a good four inches of mulch and leaves that had been put down in the fall. I reflexively pulled every week I saw, especially the ones that were nearly a foot tall. John did his half of the garden, I did mine, but when I was two-thirds of the way through I was just panting like mad for air.
I'd had my allergy shots earlier in the day, and the doctor sat me down and told me about the policy changes they'd put in place because of my 'episode' two weeks ago. Turned out that one of the temporary nurses had been filling in, and had only a vague understanding of dosages when a person was being 'ramped up' after a new bottle, and nearly no experience with someone as problematic as I was. She nearly doubled the doses on two of my shots. I was lucky I hadn't gone into a anaphylactic shock, but they had an Epi pen just in case. I've had that before, it's not fun... I'm glad I didn't have to repeat that experience.
So he proceeded to lay out all the changes they'd made to their shot therapy systems, what he was now having the nurses do with each patient to be sure they not only understood, but had a chance to object to a shot before it was given, and how they thought it might help them avoid that mistake again. I made two suggestions that he looked startled about, but then wrote down.
They gave me my old dosage on the shots. I didn't have any problems. I feel a little odd to be the cause of changes in their standard procedures, but I'm glad that they're not going to do it again.
I don't think I was panting because of my shots, really, but I took the time to makes sure. *laughs* I think I'm just out of shape for gardening as all those muscles are just dead sore today. I managed to finish my half, cursing every plant I came into contact with. The nastiest bits were when I'd cut off a branch and toss it towards the refuse pile and a thorn would catch a bit on my glove and swing the rest of it into the cotton back of my gloves. Getting hit by some of the bigger branches felt like getting hit with a mace as the thorns were just so thick. Yes, I gave my fair measure of blood.
Sometimes I wonder if roses were invented by vampires just so that humanity would associate beauty with pain and blood-giving.
That evening, when we went to the CU graduation to cheer on the 20-something son of a friend of ours, they had the alcohol hand-cleaner in all the bathrooms, and I put it on, unthinking. OUCH... it stung like hell in every single rose bite I had.
Yeah. We went to a dinner with his family and the graduation, which went well past Jet's bedtime. Jet was great at all of it.
One of the funny things about yesterday was that before the rose garden I'd been doing all kinds of errands between my shots, getting my meds at Target, and deciding that since I was brave enough to go and GET shots after the previous thing that I deserved a treat and bought myself a liter of blanche absinthe. I had just half an hour before I had to be at the garden so I went to Santiago's, a little burrito kitchen that is a local chain with their own sinus searing green chile. The most lovely part about getting 3/4 mild and 1/4 hot is that that 1/4 hot make little grenades of make-you-cough-and-cry heat throughout the smothered burrito. I found myself really craving a chicharron and bean burrito. Chicharron are basically Mexican deep-fried pork rinds. Bacon take a back seat. *laughs* It's just a bit of meaty richness that makes the beans amazing and they're only served at the really, really tasty Mexican places in town. I'd been looking forward to it through the last two errands.
Just as I walked up to the place I hear this whistle, and John rides up on his electric scooter. He'd been at the OUR center all morning, and had exactly the same idea I had... and we'd shown up at exactly the same time.
You know you've been married a really really long time when things like that happen. *laughs* Turns out that the graduate and his family was at Exactly The Same Place as well. *laughs even harder* So we sat down and ate with them.
And today, I finally just threw my hands up. I'm retired so that I *don't* have to work at anything I damned well don't want to do. So John and I went and saw Wolverine while we still can watch movies that aren't just for kids. Summer will be different, though Jet's now signed up for enough camps that we'll have at least three weeks when he's just busy.
We enjoyed it. A lot.
It's likely been at least a decade since I've picked up a Marvel comic. But I remember various versions of Wolverine. Kitty's mentor, the old X-Men Wolverine that I always thought Jean *should* have gone out with, who wants the good boy anyway? *laughs*
Plenty of good eye candy, lots of FX, some nice action sequences right at the get go, and a better understanding of why I enjoy the character. It's not complex, at all, but it's fun and he makes sense to *me*.
I loved the story of the Moon.
And yes, it was worth staying through all the credits. Especially through the first set of credits. Brought closure to one plot point really well.
So there. Hopefully the rest of May won't be quite *this* crazy...