Wishing_Moon

IF I HAD A CAPE...

This is a page from my art journal today.

Yesterday I watched SICKO, Michael Moore's docudrama about the pathetic state of health care (or LACK  of it) in the USA. I'm not a big Mike Moore fan but the docudrama moved me and upset me very much, acutally I think my heart  broke a  little bit more. Then last night a friend disclosed that her health insurance is ending July 1. She's been insured through her husband's employment. She has not been able to obtain insurance because of "pre-existing conditions" I know too many children whose parents are working poor making too much to qualify for state medical insurance. I know people my age who are too young for Medicare, and unable to afford insurance. Why do we put up with that? How we treat our poor, and our sick, and the most needy of our society defines the very fiber of our nation. GREED  is NOT good  "Mr. Gekko"! It has no place in democracy. It defies the corner stone of equality that we smugly brag about as a nation.

I am no caped crusader, I am not a super-hero. I'm an aging fat middle class (barely middle class) American who is fed up with the exploitation of the sick, the elderly, and downtrodden.  It's time for me and for YOU if you are AMERICAN and reading this to stand up and declare with me that we're mad as hell and I'm not going to stand for it anymore!  Why are we all so afraid to do that? My youngest sister says often that those of us who were vocal in the 60s have "sold out". SHE'S RIGHT,  we've sold out for comfort and the status quo of greed as usual. There has to be a better way, a better balance between comfort and justice.

I just can't live like that anymore.

In Dreams I Am a Mermaid

 

I had forgotten how much fun blowing paint bubbles could be! :-)

When I was in Fargo last weekend for Ashlyn and Angie's shower I picked up the May/June Artful Blogging at Barnes & Noble. One of the blogs/artists featured was Leah Piken Kolidas www.creativeeveryday.com

On one of her pages in the article she speaks about "letting go" and play as part of that letting go in art. She wrote about blowing paint bubbles to make backgrounds on paper. This was not a new concept to me but it is one I'd forgotten about and hadn't done in a long long time. It was the inspiration (and the play!) that I needed to actually have a journal page to show for the weekend.

I took a small plastic cup (the kind individual fruit cups come prepackaged. We go through a lot of them in this house)
a straw
a little dish detergeant
liquid acrylic craft paint
a little water to thin the paint
mix it all in the cup using the straw then to blow bubbles in the cup.
Brush the bubbles off the cup and onto the page and let them pop and dry. It doesn't take long to dry really. Repeat if there are areas of your paper that you think need more paint. You can use more than one color too. That turns out pretty interesting too. After the paint bubbles pop shapes start to appear. You can speed up drying with a heat gun if you want (not too high) I did some using the heat gun but I actually liked the ones that dried on their own better. The backgrounds seemed to have more defined "bubbles" in the background.

Look for shapes on the background. On this page when I looked at the page, turning it this way and that, a mermaid appeared to me almost immediately. It did to my husband too when I asked him to look at the page and see if he saw any shapes. It's rather like looking for shapes in clouds.

I was intimidated by drawing the mermaid but gave myself permission to make imperfect art. The exercise was about "letting go" after all. I was pleased with how it turned out actually.

I sparingly used a bit of Tim Holtz Distress Stickles to add a bit of light and color. I bought them last weekend too and wanted to try them out. I like them! Just a touch of glitter, but not too thick or coarse. I bought 3 jars of Tim Holtz crackle paint too. Can't wait to try them next chance I get.

Lutheran Church Basement Ladies Swedish Coffee: Good Enough for Jesus Himself!

Here it is, the end of the weekend, almost over...I want more weekend!

My Sunday was pleasant in spite of my wanting to be a hermit and stay hme to make  art; not wanting to go to church and then there's my dislike of church potlucks. Church was not so bad, it actually had some really funny moments. I felt so sorry for my young friend,BJ. who was directing the youth choir during special music at yesterday's service. Her infant son exploded (as described by his 5 year old sister) and his diaper could not contain the load. The acolyte, his cousin, also a member of the youth choir, was holding him at the time, dressed in her white acolyte gown. Yup, she had a lap full of poo. The tweens are all gesturing, shoving each other, snickering and laughing uncontrollably; we all know how funny body functions and fluids are to middle schoolers! heh! BJ retrieved the little culprit and carried him at arm's length in front of her from the front of the church all the way out the back door down the steps to go to the wash room in the church basement. Of coures this would be the day she forgot the diaper bag. So baby boy was cleaned up and wrapped in swaddling clothes and laid in his grandmas's lap for the rest of the service while BJ continued to serve as lector for the service, and to referee direct the youth choir who sang during the offering. Somewhere along the line a diaper was fashioned from dishtowels and duct tape, and he was dressed in a hot pink floral shirt 4 sizes to big for him. He slept peacefully through his mother's humiliation! A side note about the acolyte. She stopped coming to confirmation classes declaring herself to be wiccan (her step mother is), but she shows up for potlucks and parties at the church. It surprised me to no end that she agreed to acolyte yesterday! ;-)

The potluck after church yesterday, to mark the last day of Sunday School, was actually better than usual. Someone brought a grill and cooked hot dogs. I don't ordinarily like them all that much but cooked on the grill outdoors and then given the toppings to make cheese and chili dogs, well that was fun! Hadn't had one in years! There lots of lovely summer salads and chocolate treats. It could only have been better with good old fashioned Swedish Lutheran Egg Coffee to wash it all down. But there was copious amounts of coffee poured from the spicket of the big sacred coffee maker. (There are no Lutheran church meals without coffee as I'm sure you know! It would be sacriligious, and if Jesus shows up you know he'd want a cup of Lutheran egg coffee!)

After I got home from church I changed clothes to set the ladies free and then looked at some art books for a while hoping to get inspired but fell asleep and slept away most of the afternoon. After I woke up I mixed up the chicken waldorf salad I've been craving and then read for a while while Tom napped. We played Scrabble after dinner, I soundly trampled him. We watched the Twins baseball game. A very quiet day but nice none the less. Last night about 9:30 I got a call from a former teen client who was caught up in drama and wanted me to tell her mother to let her leave the house after she'd been told she couldn't. Such drama!

Because I wanted to make today a bit special for myself I was up early to put sticky buns in the oven to bake for this morning's breakfast, caramel pecan cinnamon rolls, the house smelled amazing! And boy were they good. (Frozen ready to back, all I had to do was nuke the caramel packet to put in the pan and bake. I added pecans for an extra treat. YUM!!) Tom was off to Memorial Day Services, two of them this morning, one in our little village as well as the smaller village Roosevelt to our west. I am a poor citizen, I did not go. I relished the mornings alone instead.

This morning I woke to rain on the slanted room above my head. It is such a lovely soothing sound and I nearly went back to sleep, pulling the covers higher against the morning chill. What a delicous feeling that was! It was a gray chilly,  damp day today, I don't know if it actually made it to 50 degrees; it is raining again, and the roof is leaking. I think that the guy who is going to fix it is coming this week. I dont' know when for sure At any rate. I am happy to be indoors this chilly wet night, there are severe thunderstorms forecast later this evening. The rain meant that the BBQ for 2 we planned for the evening was moved indoors and the brauts cooked under the broiler instead of on the grill. This afternoon when I planned to sit at the art table I was cold and so covered up with a blanket and sat in my chair to get warm and fell asleep. When I woke up I did work some more on a journal page. I was pretty happy with the way it came out. At least this weekend I have a little something to show for my time off. I have had such a dry spell of late. Maybe this will get me out of my rut.

For those who don't know what Lutheran Church Basement Coffee (Swedish Coffee) tastes like: Some say it's good enough for Jesus Himself!

10-12 cups of water
1 cup coffee (regular grind)
1 egg
1 cup ice cold water

Bring water to a boil and remove from heat. In a small bowl, mix coffee and egg. Add a little hot water to coffee and egg mixture, then pour mixture into hot water. Stir and heat until it comes to a rolling boil. Remove from heat and pour in 1 cup of ice cold water. Let set for 10 minutes before serving. (The egg and grounds settle to the bottom, leaving the coffee a dark honey color.)

Marsh Marigolds: Small Town Color

 This is not a great photo, taken with my phone camera. But it makes me smile. The ditches up here are filled with Marsh Marigolds AKA Cowslips. When the shadowed ditches at the edge of the woods fill with their bright yellow it is a declaration that spring has arrived and there is warmer weather on the way.

We went to a graduation party for 3 local high school kids this afternoon. Their families went together to co-host the parties. Graduation from the school in Baudette is tomorrow. Really, you have to LOVE small towns! They moved firetrucks out of the fire hall to move in tables and chairs for guests! The tables were decorated with crepe paper streamers in the school colors, and there were vases of March Marigolds on each table. The food was fun! Tacos in a bag, carved watermelon fruit bowls, and cake. Does it get any better than that? There is a quaint intimacy in wandering through the crowd in small towns that is not found as extensively in urban America. The small town norm finds one turning to be embraced when your name is called, receiving a wordless pat on the back with a nod of the head or the tipping of a baseball cap, a brief touch on the arm that speaks volumes; men grasping hands, pumping arms in enthusiastic handshakes.

We've lived here for 14 years in June. Someday Tom will retire, or he will get a call to another parish. Then we will have to think about moving. That will be so sad, it's home now! But living closer to the kids would be so good. I will not have to think about that right now. For now I'll just revel in the warmth and ease  and color of small town life. Yellow is the color of friendship, it's fitting that the bright yellow of Marsh Marigolds would grace the tables of a gathering of friends and fellow citizens.

Optimism?

This was supposedly published on April 13, but never showed up. I don't know what happened! Im not very happy with Typepad right now. Too many hiccups. LiveJournal (where I have a FREE account) works so much better for me but I will give it a chance here for a while before I give up totally. When you pay for a blog service you expect it to work! APRIL 13, 2009 I think it's going to calm down now. The roller coaster seems to be slowing. I'll spare you the whine of what it's like to be married to a liturgical tradition minister during Lent and Easter in a rural multi-point parish, on top of the normal curves that life throws at all of us. :-) Hopefully relatives are done dying for a spell, and all the babies we were waiting for to get born seem to be born now and doing well. The flooding Red River while still unpredictable, seems to be under control so I am not so worried about John, Angie and Ashlyn in Fargo. So far as I know Angie is recuperating from the scary complications of pregnancy since Ashlyn's birth. My case load has been decreased by a third, the new girl is needing less from me each week, and the other co-worker is returning from maternity leave next month. There is a new boss coming to our agency with some restructuring that will bring some stress and change but I'm not worrying about it until it happens. I had a chance to clean the house a little bit before the kids got here for the weekend and that always makes things feel less chaotic. The mountains of snow on street corners are melting rapidly, and a welcome sight even if means there's an ankle deep muddy moat around our house. (Kay if you're reading this it's even deeper today than it was yesterday!) It seems like maybe, just maybe, things will slow down for me now and I can get back to spending time doing the things I have been missing, like actually watchig the video's and looking at the PDFs from the class I signed up for with Tamara Laporte, whose work I admire and who is just one of the loveliest human beings on earth! More time to once again start making art, writing, reading some good books, blogging, and reading/responding to my friends' blogs, and just plain hanging out watching the clouds move across the sky and the wind swaying the tree branches. Facebook is easier to keep up with than blogging because of its limits on how much text can be posted at one time. I like facebook because I can do it from my blackberry and I get only the nitty gritty that way rather than all the spammy apps that my teen and tween nieces use! (I mean, c'mon, I really don't care "Which Twilight Person Are You?") I do not Twitter anymore, it's too annoying and impersonal. But all is well here. :-) The only thing that would make it better would be to live closer to Ashlyn Rose so I could cuddle her right now! (You have to forgive this first time grandma for my obsession with my gorgeous grandbaby!) Julie got home Friday night and Noah and Kay arrived Saturday night. We had such a great visit when the kids were here! There was lots of laughter in the house! They all left about 2:30 yesterday afternoon and Tom and I collapsed into recliners and tried to watch TV/read but fell asleep. I cooked enough that I probably won't have to cook again until Wed! Most of the house is fairly tidy with the exception of Tom's office and mine. His is hopeless I think! I have new branches of pussywillows that friend Becky picked for me Friday and which were the decorations at a lovely tea party I went to at her house Friday afternoon with my young friends (her daughters and grandaughters) Amy Rose (almost 7,) Sierra (6), Becca (3) and Shea (almost 2) all in sparkly dress up dresses, and grown up friends Becky, Nettie, and Bobby Jo. We had a delicious selection of teacakes, tarts, cookies and finger sandwhiches, flowering teas, linen table cloth, china teacups and candles. I was feeling so busy and stressed by all on my "To Do" list that I almost opted out. I am so glad I went! I had such a grand time! There is nothing like a tea party with children to put it all into perspective! Julie and I went out for lunch and ran some errands in town on Saturday. That was really fun. We had coffee and panini for lunch at The Smiling Moon. It's a great place! I have taken the day off today to just hang out with Tom who is recouping from his weekend. (He had 4 services yesterday, one of which was a cantata in which he had a large part. He's pretty pooped!) I'm going to go finish washing some dishes that have been soaking in the sink and then I'm doing nothing more strenuous than turn some pages on a book. At least that's the plan!

ARRRGGGH!!!!

I am not liking typepad very much at the moment!

I can not get a post that shows up as published to show up! NONE of the pages and pages of "helpful" facts they give seem to have the answer.  What a PITA!!

Roller Coaster

The past month and a half since my last typepad post has been a roller coaster. To Recap:

Tom's sister Joyce's funeral in Cincinnatti March 1,

The news that my favorite cousin from childhood Jack Doyle died the same week.

Bullshit at work.

The flooding in Fargo, ND where my oldest son and family live, where a colleague lost her home. I worried about my son and DIL and whether the baby would come at a time when I couldn't get there to see her.

Watching our retirement $$ continue to dribble away.

Hearing Friday night (April 3) that they were putting Angie in the hospital that night and beginning to induce Ashlyn's arrival because they were alarmed about some of Angie's labwork. I tried not to worry. AND if John had not told his dad not to tell me what they were really worried about I would have worried lots more about Angie than I did. (But as of last Monday night all seemed well. Ashlyn and Angie got home last Monday night) The emotional experience of the whole day Saturday 4/4/09 and while at the hospital hearing from my sister that my Aunt Eunice had died. I couldn't get back to SW WI  for the funeral as much as I would have liked to. The physical exhaustion of 10 hours in the car and sitting around a hospital for several hours on Saturday caught up with me on Sunday after church and I physically collapsed once I got home. 
 
More bullshit with work mixed in among the days...

But when all is said and done... the only things that really matter are  family and other loved ones, the rest is just framework for what is most beautiful in life. Love...life... new life... "old life" life lived together for a few years or for many...new love, old love, ...love...life...it's all beatiful.

Small Joys...

 

Finding  beauty and small joys in our day can help us recover from disappointment and keep us from becoming hard and embittered.

Disappointment

 

Journal entry about a recent disappointment that hurt me very much.

I've been feeling burnt out. Which means that I avoided blogging because everything I wrote sounded so whiney. The muse has been obnoxiously silent so there has not been any art to show here.

I've taken a week off from work, getting to the end of it, but I'm still whiney.

3 days of my week off left, I do not want to go back to work, I wish I didn't have to. Not much of this week has really been "mine" or much fun, or done much to recharge my batteries so I guess I"m kind of pouty and resentful, probably a bit depressed. I think I wanted some of this week to be about "me". Instead it's been about everyone else. I needed nurturing but was called upon to meet others' needs instead. While sometimes that fills me up too, it hasn't done the trick this week. I just didn't have whatever i needed to be able to nurture myself this time.

Monday we went to Roseau where we both got new phones, that was kind of fun, new toys always are til the novelty wears off. We also bought a new TV and a stand to put it on. I could have lived without the TV, it seemed more important to Tom, he's been looking at them for quite a while.

Tuesday thru Thursday were a drag with Tom getting ready for tests, sitting around all day waiting to go to the hospital on Wed, then sitting around the hospital 9 hours waiting for him to get in, and then wake up after, during which he was insulting and sarcastic to me coming out from the anesthetic, not fun, I left the room a couple of times so I wouldn't cry or be mean back to him. He couldn't help it, it was the drugs. It was after 10PM when we got home. The test/screening had pretty good outcome. That's a relief. :-)

Thursday I felt cruddy from the tension and drain of the day before, Tom was not feeling great either. We had to pack up movies and knicknacks off of the old entertainment center to get ready for the delivery of the TV on Friday. It stored a lot of stuff. I've no clue what to do with it all now.

Yesterday morning Tom dismantled the big old entertainment center and cleaned up behind it. That was a job! It was too big to move out to clean behind and we've lived here about 14 years now. The TV got delivered and hooked up yesterday morning, it's very nice.

Tom left yesterday afternoon to go to a synod council meeting that started early this morning. He'll be back tonight sometime.  I didn't sleep well. The dogs started carrying on about 1 AM, not just whining and barking, but howling. Very wierd! It wasn't just our dogs, I could hear other dogs around town carrying on too. The howling was the worst! That was just too freaky!

Church stuff tomorrow morning into the afternoon sometime, then we drive to Fargo sometime tomorrow night  so we don't have to get up so early Monday to go to his Dr.'s appointment Monday morning in Fargo. At least I'll get a trip to the bookstore out of the week!

Lest this sound all self pitying and whiney there are some positives that happened this week:

1. The results of Tom's test were good. :-)

2. And on the upside for work, onThursday my boss let me know she hired another MHP to pick up the hours/client caseload that were assumed by me and Anna when Jen left, so maybe I'll eventually be able to actually go back to 3/4 time. I have been getting overtime on my checks at least. since I'm considered hourly on 3/4 time. If I was fulltime I'd be salaried and there would be no overtime for anything over 40 hours. But I also only get 3/4 time benefits while I"m working more than 40 hours. (which means I can only claim 30 PTO  hours for a week off). Anna will be going on maternity leave soon so it will probably be a couple of months until I really work 3/4 time again. Kendra starts March 1st. I'll be expected to do a majority of her training on top of everything else.

3. The smaller TV stand is more attractive than the big old entertainment center, it opens up the living room and makes it seem much brighter and a little bigger. Now we have wall space to put up the beautiful picture frames we got from Noah and Kay for Christmas. They will be PERFECT as they're the same color and the perfect size to put on either side of the TV and stand.

4. The bigger TV is much easier to watch. I did enjoy watching Monk and Psych even more last night.

5. Because I'm home alone I could have leftover taco pizza and cinnamon coffee for breakfast. Cinnamon coffee...YUM!!

6. A really dear former neighbor from when we lived in IL 31 years ago, found me on facebook. the other day.  It's been fun writing back and forth to get caught up.

7. I have been having fun playing with my Crackberry Blackberry phone. It's the most amazing toy ever! (But I can put it down for longer than 10 minutes now)

8. My new phone is only for my personal use and only family and closest friends will have it, no one from work, clients, or church will have it.  I will keep my other phone so long as I need it for work. Thereby allowing some separation from home and work calls.

9. I still have the rest of the day today to try to make some art. The muse has not been impressed wtih my mood so has stayed away. Maybe I can coax her to come play now that I've vented and am feeling a bit better.

10. I can take a nap today if I want to.

11. February ends a week from today, we're creeping closer to spring all the time. (this has been the longest coldest winter! I'm sure that is partially at the root of my mood)

12. My daughter wants to meet halfway for lunch sometime soon.

13. Only about 6 weeks now til our granddaughter arrives! Maybe I should make her a Cabbage Patch or  Raggedy Ann doll. I'll have to pick up the materials on Monday when we are in Fargo. Making a doll for Ashlyn Rose is a happy thought. We love her so much already and we talked to john briefly the other day. He is so cute and excited about being a dad.

14.  Bobby Jo and Donald's baby Christopher Michael is doing well! We were all so scared for him! Prayers get answered!

15. I feel better now having vented.