My legs! My legs! My kingdom for new legs!

Ouch. 

That’s my one overwhelming feeling just now. I’m sitting on the couch with a heating pad on my chest and a hand-made blanket covering my poor, tired gams. (“Gams” is an archaic slang term for legs, just so ya know).  The heating pad is because it’s cold in the house and I’m not allowed to turn on the heat. I’m not allowed to turn on the heat because Dad hasn’t cleaned the filters yet and he wouldn’t like it if I did it for him. The blanket is for pure heart-comfort.

On the Brink

I sit. I sat. I shall be sitting.

(And that is how NOT to begin a blog post. It has no hook, no zing, no pep. Blame the late hour because normally I am really very creative.)

I spent a really lovely couple of days on the Olympic Peninsula this past week visiting my best friend and her husband. They’ve just moved into a new house a few streets up from their last place. The greatest feature of said house is an extraordinary closet/tunnel between two of their rooms. I got to sleep at the top of a house surrounded by trees and buried beneath four (count ‘em!) blankets. Oh happy day(s). 

One of the highlights of the trip was having coffee with Stacie’s mother in law- an extraordinary Dutch woman whose generosity is only exceeded by her bravery. Apparently it’s not just my father who gets repeatedly beaten up by “the church”. While the two cases are not the same, they certainly run along parallel lines. I won’t go into either story, as they aren’t my stories to go into, but I found it a wonderful time. Mrs Van de Weghe (the elder) has some really unique and thought-provoking wisdom to share about the role of women in the church and what the Lord really expects from women that is different than the expectations He has for men. For example, we talked about how the Bible tells women to cover their hair during prayer and prophecy. I wish I had her written notes on the subject, since she had studied it extensively and I never have, but it was very provoking. (In a good way.)

Info that has come in handy today

Here is a list of information that I am glad I had ready-to-hand on this day:

The formula for the area of a trapezoid

That “titanium” and “stainless steel” are two different finishes on appliances

Fire ant bites are not deadly (though they are darned painful)

My own e-mail address

How to be a banker for a board game. LIFE is hard to play if you can’t count

How to do long division and how to reduce square roots 

Who Nathan Fillian is

How to safely cross a street in dim lights

How to be thankful when God provides (which He is doing all the time)

Who wrote “Cat Among the Pigeons”

And last but not least… that the episode of Next Generation where Timothy wants to be an android like Data ends well. 

It’s been a good day, and Glory comes tomorrow!

Painting Wish List

When I move to Wilmington I am going to set up a semi permanent studio.  One of my desires that has lately turned into a dream, is to paint in oils. I have a set of oil paints that is very old and of dubious quality. Combine that with a landlord who (while a perfectly marvelous human being) complains about the scent of said oil paints and you me not painting in oil. The whole thing is made tragi-comic by the fact that I use scent-less solvents. It’s the paints themselves that smell. 

Anyway, my desire to paint in oil has spurred something of a wish list in my brain. It’s a list of art supplies that I either want badly or actually need if I am going to be even slightly serious about being a working artist. I though I’d share it with you all, just for fun. 

The List

Water Miscible Oil Paints

Canvases

Easels (at least three, preferably one french easel and two A-frame easels)

Cork board to coat the walls so I can hang my mini art collection, sketches and photo references

A new set of brushes for Oil/Acrylic 

And big windows with southern exposure

Plus there’s about a zillion books that I want, but I’m not planning on expanding my reference book library until I know where I’m going to land for some extended period of time. Moving books is difficult.

So there ya go! Join me while I sit back and watch God provide it all1

The Unreal Day

Sometimes you get to the end of a day and you think “Huh. I wonder if someone wrote this as a piece of fiction and we just got to live it.” 

And honestly, for the kind of day this was I think I handled myself well. Not perfectly- but well. 

Glad it’s over. Glad each day is new. 

Gonna go rub garlic on my face.

Art, Union Hill and back home

I never grew up thinking about art as a way of making a living. At the same time, I cannot and never could, separate my artistic abilities from who I am as a person. Art was breathing. Simple, natural, and essential, but not something I would have thought of as profitable. 

Then I sold a painting. (Thank you God and Chad-in that order). Then I got to go on tour with a bunch of really amazing people because they wanted me to paint during their worship sets. Then I sold 8 more paintings. Then I met Mr McDevitt. (Actually RE-met Mr McDevitt). 

I’d known his kids for years- we were all involved with Village Theatre’s Kidstage program. Only recently did I discover that McDevitt Sr is actually a “real” artist. He went to school for it and made his living at it. At least, he worked for a marketing and advertising company for years and recently “retired” to become a full time painter. His work ranges from watercolour miniatures of ballerinas on the beach to acrylic cows and oil nudes. His studio is large and full of reference material and books and easels and paintings in progress. We sat and talked and looked through his work and through my sketch books. It was one of the most encouraging mornings I have ever experienced art-wise. 

The best part is that Mr McDevitt (Michael McDevitt is his Christian name) is a believer. His family sincerely loves the Lord and we had a good pow-wow about the ramifications of being a Christian who is a fine artist. Of course many people have difficulty with the idea of a Christian painting and drawing the nude figure. Though I have never done true figure drawing myself I have no problem with it and we talked about what the Bible says on the subject and how to walk in purity etc. 

He suggested that I work more on my children’s book idea and gave me a few tips on how to go about it. We discovered a mutual love of whimsy too- his ballerinas on the beach and my tree-men for example. 

I was vastly encouraged and look forward to picking his brain some more in the weeks before I leave. We even kicked around the idea of him doing a commissioned ballerina painting for me which I would actually be the model for! We’ll see how it all turns out. 

In other news I’ve left my oh-so-comfy Union Hill home and have now returned to the Green House. Glad to have my cat back, though I wish she’d stop standing on me while I’M TRYING TO TYPE!!!

It’s almost September. I suppose that means I should pack or something…

Extra love to Jenny and Clayton tonight. You two have been much on my brain.

Thanks for Fridays!

I like Friday nights. I must have some deep cultural awareness that Friday nights mean fun! While for some “fun” means general debauchery, for me it means movies or painting. Sometimes both. Tonight I have been able to paint, watch and old movie and play some Noah’s Ark on popcap games. 

Today we spent most of the day chatting with The Amazing Harris’. (All caps!) Then the necessary nap. This evening my parents are entertaining guests and, while I am certainly welcome downstairs, I usually end up in the office or the bonus room. I painted for a while tonight and have been chilling out ever since. 

I find I have a renewed interest in working on my book. It’s a heavy thing to dive into now since it is SO LONG. I’ve never attempted anything of this scope before and the very newness of it is challenging. 

I’m ready to have my own social circle. It’s getting a bit stale, not having options. Don’t get me wrong, I love my me-time. But when me-time is the only time you have it’s a different story. 

On the up side, I got to listen to two minutes of one of my favorite speakers- and it was LIVE! (Thank you MCarr and your handy dandy cellular telephone!)

Goodnight and good luck.

The Carnival, the Clothing and the Clown

I told Frank Ascanio that I needed a story idea. He obligingly offered me “A bunch of monogrammed clothing, a pier, an elephant and some fireworks”. This little story is dedicated to St. Francis, with affection. 

Sarah Lee Peterson was a woman who disliked suprises. She disliked a great many things, in fact, but surprises brought her a particularly poignant sense of displeasure. 

It is not a great many women who can make it through 72 years on planet earth with no suprise greater than a harsh winter which kills all one’s bulbs. Sarah Lee was not an ordinary woman. 

Top of her list of dislikes, past surprises, were sand, elephants and crowds. You can imagine the exquisite torture, then, of Sarah Lee as she sat on a bench on the pier, watching the fireworks and wishing that her Dastardly Nephew had not forced her to attend the Annual Carnival. 

A loud trumpeting filled the air. Sarah Lee cringed and pulled her maroon knit sweater tightly around her throat. Someone had though bringing an elephant to the carnival would be the perfect touch. Sara Lee thought the idea was idiotic and muttered to herself about it in impotent frustration. She could see her Dastardly Nephew, the town sheriff, purchasing a funnel cake and goggling at the fireworks. 

“I’ll show him!” She thought, “I’ll go back to the car and wait there until he’s done stuffing himself.”

She pushed herself up and toddled off down the pier. Somewhere in the rush of teenagers kissing, filthy elephant noises and spilled ice cream cones she lost her way. Somehow, instead of being in the lighted parking lot on the clean surety of concrete, she was walking ankle deep in sand, parallel to the pier and slightly beneath it. 

Then, suddenly, she wasn’t walking on sand anymore. She paused and wiggled her feet around a little. Nope. Not sand. She bent over with the stiffness of old age and patted the ground near her feet. It felt like… No, it couldn’t be. She grabbed and pulled. It was! It was a man’s polo sweater, monogrammed with the initials J.S. 

She stuffed the polo into her capacious handbag. Not for any real reason but more from long habit. Everything went into that purse. (She didn’t know it but her Dastardly Nephew, who’s real name was John, called her purse “The Black Hole”)

She kept walking along next to the pier, her feet scrunching along in the sand. Her goal was still the parking lot but the fireworks confused her. Were they over the water or on land? Which was was she going? She squinted but couldn’t quite tell. 

Then it happened. Instead of the proper sandy scrunch her feet found a softly yielding substance. This time when she retrieved it she made it out to be a woman’s blouse, monogrammed K.L.

Just keep swimming, swimming, swimming…

The highlight of today was definitely NOT laying on an ugly green plastic-covered couch with one arm flung out having blood forcefully sucked out of my body. However, being me I was a huge hit with the woman who was kindly drawing the blood. The fact that she found a vein was cause for a wise-crack, the vial of blood she drew got a couple weak jokes and then it was over. Don’t worry, nothing major is going on, it is a simple food-allergy test. Believe it or not, having blood drawn is actually a great deal less painful that the normal poke-em-to-death allergy test. 

Over the past week I have settled on roommates for life in Wilmington, lost the house we were hoping to rent, and made a wish-list for our prospective house. I don’t know if it’s an encouraging sign that my roommates have begun the new house-hunt on Craig’s List. Luckily we have a good Papa who wants His daughters to have really nice stuff. 

Earlier tonight I had the realization that someday I actually will be making movies. It hurt my brain a little. 

Seriously though guys. I’m sorry for the lack of good posts. In my mind you all enjoy the really meaty here-is-what-life-is-really like posts and the little stories that I write. Wishing to have my brain attached to my spinal column won’t make it happen, though. The direct result of my lack of wheat, dairy, soy, nuts and eggs is a lack of creative juices. My most productive times are given over to a sort of lay-on-my-back-and-watch-a-movie torpor. (I mean of course theoretically productive times since they have been distinctly unproductive over the last seven days.) The one exception is that tonight I started a commissioned painting for my friend Hilary. The energy to do this I lay at the feet (er…crumbs) of a chocolate chip cookie that I ate. I broke my dietary restrictions but since I’ll have a definite answer about my food allergies tomorrow I didn’t think it much mattered. {Side note to Michael- You are right. Food does taste different and cookies are no longer delicious. It is a sick and twisted world that I have slipped into. How have you born it all this time?!}

Tonight I almost started work on my book again. Then I didn’t and wrote this instead. (If my best-selling book doesn’t get published for years and I starve you all better send me boxes of delicious foods!)

The sunset was really pretty tonight. Mom and I went on a walk and I felt like my neck would break from staring at the solid-gold clouds. 

Incidentally, I was hoping that with Erin safely married my brain would switch out of wedding mode. It doesn’t seem to have done so as completely as I had hoped. It’s quite annoying for a non-day-dreamer to suddenly slip off into “I hate white dresses and how can you get married in someone’s back yard in winter… perhaps a tent?” Really. I think it’s a sickness and if anyone can suggest a cure I would be MOST grateful. 

The most-viewed post on this site is still the one I wrote about goats. 

I’m going to live on Union Hill for a while next week. Looking forward to being close to the Mansours and the Prayer Room. 

Wish I could stop babbling and go to sleep but no such luck. I took a three hour nap today on accident. I’m pulling the plug, though. 

Goodnight!

Why?

Why is it that, in old movies, the girl always has ample time to do her hair, get dressed, put on heels, refresh her lipstick and drive to wherever the boy is in less time than it takes to sing one song?

Why do my wrists crack when the weather changes?

Why does my cat think that sticking her nose in my ear is a good idea?

Why don’t more people commit to one another and mean it?

Why are laugh lines so completely wonderful?

Why do I miss performing so much it hurts?

Why can some people raise one eyebrow, while others look like their are having an epileptic fit every time they try to do so?

Why do bridesmaids almost always look awful even when the bride’s intentions are good?

Why do some folks like staying up late, while others prefer early mornings?

Why do night owls marry early birds? 

Why not wear more color?

Why do Americans love pre-packaged food?

Why not admit that a life of convenience is as stale as three year old  saltines?

Why not just have a good cry?

All these questions and more… open to any answers that people want to submit.