I’m very sorry for your family’s loss. I also understand your feelings about not being there, having been in that position myself. I’ve found that things have a way of working themselves out so I’m sure that someone will be there for your husband. In our case it was his aunts. It all works out.

This blogging about day to day life has turned out to be a lot harder than any of us realized, hasn’t it? :)  Post when you can, we will all still be here.

I’ve found the perfect way to make sure my children stay in touch. I just have to ignore my blog for a while and one or the other of them will be hot on my tail letting me know about it. This time it was darling child number two. I got a late night instant message from him to let me know about my oversight. I called him a nag and told him he was like his sister. He shot back with a quick, “I wonder where we got it from?” Yeah, it’s a real love fest around here. Just one big happy family. LOL

This has been a busy week. Sunday evening Recliner Man returned from the cold and wild north (Portland Oregon). He has barely had a chance to get settled in. I think today is the first day all week we haven’t made a trip over to The Boy’s house to work on one project or two. We’ve done a little painting and he has helped The Boy learn a bit about drywall repair and plumbing. He taught the drywall repair just in time because a short trip into the attic turned into a short fall through the garage ceiling for The Boy. He caught himself and there was no damage to the body, just a pretty big hole in the drywall. One more lesson under his belt. He will be a pro at this homeowner stuff in no time

Just because we didn’t go over to The Boy’s house today didn’t mean a day of rest for my long absent hubby. I oh so sweetly pointed out some much needed yard work and he oh so sweetly climbed up into the palm trees to do some trimming. Talk about being a good sport.. he didn’t even complain about missing Sunday Football on TV!

My dear friend, Billie had a birthday this week. She is another example of a good sport. I don’t think any of my friends are very thrilled with me when I turn the camera in their direction, and I can’t blame them at all. Despite not being thrilled she still manages to offer up a beautiful smile for me. This is even more special when you consider the fact that I called her early that morning and woke her up with a cheery “Good Morning Sunshine!” Billie, you are a sunshine and I’m very glad to call you friend. Have a wonderful year, dear one.

I’ve got an easy day set for tomorrow. I plan to make a run to Home Depot and pick up some paint samples for The Boy’s bedroom. After that I want to bake some cookies for my boys. Recliner Man thinks I’m just going to make The Boy’s favorite, Snickerdoodles, but I’m going to surprise him with his favorite, Chocolate Chip Cookies. Guess this won’t be much of a week for the diets.

It’s been one of those days. Actually it has been one of those weeks. Missed appointments, missed roads, misplaced cats. It’s no wonder my art project today wasn’t turning out like I’d planned. This piece started life as a collage of old Hollywood stars. Say hello to Humphrey Bogart in the lower right, Fred Astaire in the purple circle, and Bette Davis at the top.

The problem started with my photocopied images. I was in a rush at the copy center and didn’t notice that I had loaded my originals in the machine sideways, leaving me with only half the images I had wanted to work with. I also failed to notice that they were really poor copies, very dark and blurry. By the time I got to Chris’ house (late) it was too late to go back and try for better copies. Trying to balance the over dark images I ended up with a dark, dull color mix. Actually, I ended up with yuck. So I in added in some brighter and lighter colors and I had double yuck. More paint, more yuck. By the time I’d reached quadruple yuck I decided that this piece was trash and I was no longer trying to save it.

I decided to just start adding colors and shapes and have a good time playing with the paint. I didn’t want to just trash this and start with a new piece of paper because I really prefer to reuse as many things as I can in life. Remember the lamps? Remember your three R’s. Reuse, repurpose, and recycle. Many layers later I abandoned my brushes and began working with my fingers. It was liberating and fun to just play without any concern about the end result.

The finished piece met with polite golf claps from the others but I actually kind of like it. One person told me that the colors were OK but she really didn’t like the words.  I like it, words and all. Considering it was just play done on a trash piece, I’m pretty darn happy with it.

As I was looking at the latest layer of paint the words came to me from a conversation I had with my friend, Jory, last night. Jory is what I call an environmental warrior. He puts himself out on the line trying to nurture the planet and all its inhabitants while fighting to get others to join him. In short, he tries to protect us from ourselves. We were talking about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and he said the following words, “We are nature, while we slowly kill it we also slowly kill ourselves.” His words struck a chord with me and jumped back into my thoughts today, ending up as part of my day’s work.

The boys took me out to dinner tonight at the Elephant Bar.  I love going to the Elephant Bar. Every time I’ve been there the food has been excellent, no matter what I’ve ordered. It is one of the few places where I haven’t found and stuck to one favorite from their menu because everything is so good that I can’t decided what is my favorite.

Something else that happens almost every time that we go there is that I see an older person standing my the parking lot curb waiting from their ride to come pick them up and save them from having to walk across the lot to the car. Tonight was no exception, as I strolled up there was an older gentleman stand at the curb, leaning on his walker. Then I noticed something that I don’t normally see at Elephant Bar.. or anyplace else.

This is where it gets a little gross and unappetizing. Hanging from the top rail of his walker was a nearly filled urine bag with a catheter tube that dropped down to his ankle and back up, disappearing into the leg of his shorts. This was not what I wanted to see just before sitting down to a nice meal. I spent the rest of the night noticing how many of the older gentlemen were wearing shorts and uncontrollably checking to see if they had anything dangling out of their shorts. The image was seared in my brain and had taken me over. Does that make me shallow? I’m not insensitive, I feel for the guy needing this device for health reasons, and I don’t think he should be hidden away in his home. But shorts? And couldn’t he have draped a sweater over the walker and bag, or something?

So, that is what is stuck in my brain this evening. I’d rather have an endless chorus of David Cassidy singing “I think I love You.” Whats in your brain this evening?

I stayed late at The Boy’s house last night helping with the last push to get his place ready to start moving into. We were cleaning kitchen cabinets and putting in shelf liner. We haven’t touched the bedrooms and there is a lot of work to be done there, but he has enough of a start now that he can move in and finish working once he is there. A few short hours later I dragged myself out of bed and had a play day with Billie and Arlynne. We are still doing the paint and texture thing. Thankfully, we all agreed it is high time to move on to something else. The picture at the top is one of the two that I made today. Both pieces turned out to be abstracts. I’ve decided that I enjoy playing with paint. I’m just not sure how I feel about all the texture effects, mostly because they take more effort and a longer dry time.

Every once in a while my daughter pulls herself away from her busy life and sends me an instant message. The message usually goes something like this: “You need to update your blog.”  It’s always so nice to have a conversation with my daughter.

OK, that was laced with a bit of my sarcastic humor. She doesn’t always say that and we have many lovely conversations along the way. But it is true that my last online conversation with her started out just like that. She’s always had a demanding streak in her. You should have seen her when she was a year old and demanding that her father hold her up high enough so that she could touch the moon. Things were really getting ugly that evening.  I’ll stop this now before I dig a deeper hole to fall into.

I haven’t spent a lot of time on the computer lately. I’ve been busy helping The Boy with his new home. The place was a pig sty and we have been cleaning and repairing all week. He decided to remove the popcorn ceiling in the main room and that was a lot of work.. for him since I refuse to do that much work over my head… and a lot of clean up. Today we finished up the latest round of cleaning and tomorrow we will start painting. After that, I should have a bit more time to spend on my own activities.

I did take some time off today and went to play at Billie’s house with she and Arlynne. The plan was that we were going to try out a few texture techniques with gel mediums and paint.

This piece started out as a texture experiment. You can’t see the texture really well in the photo but the blue part on the bottom is loaded with it. It’s a bumpy mess if I do say so myself. It didn’t  take long for me to loose interest in the whole texture thing and I just started doodling with the paints. I must have had trees on my mind because my texture piece soon became a picture of trees reflecting in water. Aw c’mon, if you tilt your head just right and have it in the light just so it does look like trees. I swear it. They are just unique trees, so there. My second piece was the one at the top of this post. It started out with a streaked background that reminded me of a sunset. Then I decided to add some sand dunes and they were a big bust. I thought I could fix them by turning them into green hills. Then I started thinking about wadding it up and throwing it away. It was getting worse by the minute. Then I squirted out some more paint and kept going. Pretty soon it was looking like trees.. and you didn’t even have to tilt your head just right to see them. And then it was back to the clean up chores at The Boy’s house.

Now to clean the place (ugh, that’s going to take a lot of elbow grease) and then to paint.

Congratulations Boy!

To me, John Mellencamp’s song, Little Pink Houses, has always been  about dreams that didn’t pan out quite right.

Lots of drama this week so I figure I’ll give you all an update on The Boy’s home purchase. It hasn’t been all arts and crafts around here.

When the house was listed it not only had a price but an announcement that the buyer would receive 4% back for their closing costs. This is what was written into the offer contract and what was accepted. You can tell that I’m leading up to a big BUT, can’t you? You are such smart readers and you have gotten to know me so well. Ah, but I am straying from the story…

I think it was last Thursday that the first estimate of settlement amounts was sent to The Boy. Right off the bat you could see problems. There were seller expenses placed in the buyers column and amounts were all wrong. The most obvious amount that was wrong was the amount the sellers were paying toward closing costs. It didn’t even come close to the promised 4%. Phone calls were made and the numbers were reworked. Somewhere along the way the words “You can’t get blood from a turnip” were muttered. Turns out that the selling price didn’t provide enough money to cover the 4% back and the sellers didn’t have any money to pay to it. I’m not sure what changes they made but it involved shifting items around, giving the buyer’s agent less than the listing agent and, deducting a sizable sum from each of the agents commissions. In the end The Boy would be paying just a small amount more than he had anticipated, small enough to be acceptable to him.

Today was the signing. Here in AZ you sign all the paperwork and then wait. Hopefully you only have to wait a day or two while the paperwork gets delivered to the lending bank and the funds are dispersed. At that point the escrow company files the deed and the house has officially closed and you can get the keys. Another thing I miss about CT. In CT you show up at a lawyer’s office, sign the papers and pay any amounts due, then walk out the door with your keys. Nice and clean.

I told The Boy he needed a walk though before the final signing so he could make sure they hadn’t destroyed the property or stolen the stove since he had made the offer. The walk through actually took place after the signing but before he paid them any money. Since he hadn’t seen the final settlement figures until the signing he was going to have to go to his bank later and have his funds wired to the escrow company.

OK, pop quiz to see just how well you know me. What am I leading up to here? Any guesses? Read on…

They walk in the house and see that it is dirty and has a lot of garbage in it but what really matters is that they see the sellers have stolen the stove!  Hey, can I call them or what? Buyer’s agent gets on the phone and calls listing agent. Listing agent is there in 10 minutes to see for himself. He seems embarrassed and upset not only about the missing stove but the mess. He says, “I told them they had to leave the stove” in a way that makes it seem as if this had been a sticky point all along. Then he asks what color the stove was and says to give him till 4pm to see what he can do. 4pm came and went and we don’t know what if anything he will do.

More disturbing to me is the fact that the sellers have already moved to California and the house can’t close till they sign a few more papers. Now tell me, if you were getting zero from the sale (this was a short sale) and you had just stolen an appliance, would you be easy to find and eager to sign documents and fax them back?

So the little pink house is sitting empty. Dirty, but empty. Tomorrow the utilities will be turned on and The Boy will be responsible for the cost. Who knows when this will close and he will get the keys. Hopefully before he has to move out of his apartment and into my garage and guest room.

When you last saw the lamps they looked like this. We had added black, then green, then more black. The green had almost faded from view. We were a bit disappointed when it first seemed to fade away but the look grew on us and we were happy with it being nothing more than a subtle undertone.

Today I took them outside to spray on the clear coating and look what happened.

As soon as the clear spray hit it, the green sprang back to life. It was instantly clear that one lamp had more green on it than the other, and it was pretty easy to see how it had been smeared on. Hmmm… It took a little getting use to the look but every time we walked away for a while, we came back to see that we were liking them a bit more as time went by.

Oh, and they won’t have to cower under the shadow of my old shades.

I was at the store today and they just happened to have two perfect shades on the shelf.

Quite a difference, wouldn’t you say?

The Boy is happy.

 Tonight he began working on a matching mirror for the entryway.