Another Art Walk Just a Memory

One of my favorite things about living in a small town is that simple events are big deals and everyone comes out to support them. We wrapped up our eleventh annual Art Walk this past weekend.
Even in this rural area, every area of art was represented. Five published authors, two musical groups including chamber music, classical piano and down home folk/country, every kind of artist from oil painters to pencil sketchers. Quilters and sculpters, jewelers and actors…everyone respecting and appreciating everyone elses form of art.   Considering this is a town of less than 2,000 people, we have an amazing amount of talent.  Because I just can’t accept such a thing as coincidence, I have a theory for this phenomena that is totally unscientific.  

  This town started out like most other settlements in Ohio as just that, a settlement.  But we were settled by a savvy businessman who quickly started a lumber business, then began working the coal mines and shipped in all those people necessary to keep all that business going.  We are farming on clay here, so it wasn’t long before people were making pottery to exchange for food at the general store.  Pottery so popular it shipped out of here by the train load.  Time marched on, and somebody painted something on a piece of pottery to make it different from his/her neighbors.  That is where the unusually high concentration of artists comes in.  This was a pottery town in it’s prime.  In their boom days they needed many, many decorators so people who had that ability moved here, had families and by the time the potteries began to fail…I’m sure every household either had a painter living there, or had someone with a painters DNA coursing through them.  I imagine that explanation would also work for the abundance of truly beautiful people who populate California.  If you consider that the most beautiful people from every state flocked to the coast during the early days of the movie studios then ultimately failed as actors but stayed, married each other…ta dah, beautiful population. 

That’s my theory, I’m sticking to it.

Unconditional Love

As a mother, I’m familiar with unconditional love.  It is  the stony hearted person that can pick up a newborn baby and not feel like they’d throw themselves into the path of a speeding semi-truck rather than have this tiny child feel one moment of pain or sadness.  But even that all consuming love is trumped by the love of this dog for me and Pap.  Walker is my almost constant companion.  If I feel like sleeping, he’s sleeping.  Should I suddenly decide to take a run around the block, he’s all about it.  He has a basket full of toys, and full run of the house.  But none of that really matters to him.  He just wants us. 

I knew I was over scheduled last week when I came home from an appointment and found him sleeping on my pillow with one of Pap’s shirts between his paws.  Now that is just sad.  The difference between this dog and any one of my kids who may have been missing me is he was more delighted that I was home than mad that I’d been gone.  People are never that forgiving.  We can learn a lot from a dog.

Retirement is not for Sissies

Thanks so much for keeping me in your loop y’all! I’m sorry I dropped off the planet with no notice since March…holy cow, March????? All I can say in my defense is that retirement is not for sissies. 

Updates since then:  Pap managed to land that job he was interviewing for.  I’m still writing for the paper.  The Pirate play was a hit.  I managed to get the garden in, pick up two part time bookkeeping jobs and start writing another play.  Two of my short stories were rejected…this is a weird world nowdays.  I suspect that the editor for one of my stories is barely out of high school.  Her comment on a story about a woman with alzheimers was “ewww, this is creepy”. 

Mother’s Day rocked.  All the kids and grandkids made it home, we had nice weather and tons to eat. 

As you can see, we are girl heavy in the family and yes that is a Christmas wreath still hanging on the house.  Pap and I gave our ladder to one of the kids and we’re both too short to get it down.  The two handsome men in this picture are my one and only son (in the glasses), and my new son (Prince to my Princess) with the hat. 

This weekend is our annual Art Walk downtown.  

Okay, I’m all caught up and I’ll be around to see all of you post haste.

Birthdays and A Little Matchmaking

I have memories of only two birthday parties from my childhood.  Since my birthday is just one week before Christmas, it must have been tough to get such a thing organized.  One was when I was young enough to feel miffed that I couldn’t win any of the games, the other was the year I turned 13 and my parents flew my friends from Maryland in to our new house in Pennsylvania. 

Youngest grandgirl, Ayla, will not suffer such a fate.  Her mom is a kindergarten teacher that waited a very long time for a baby.  At her second birthday there was a bounce house to share with her friends and cousins.  Not to mention her snazzy ensemble honoring her favorite Sesame Street character, Abby Cadabby.  Then there’s that dance thing she got to do with her very cool older half sister.  No birthday would be complete without presents and there were plenty of those too.

Yup, Ayla is one lucky kid, I know because I raised her mother.

Who just happens to be single, by the way.  So if you have sons or grandsons, between 27-32, gainfully employed, must love children and go to church…e-mail me and let’s hook ‘em up. 

I’m kidding Michelle!

(Not really, everyone else)

Some Things Just Shouldn’t Be Repeated

I opened up my e-mail this morning and, like always, scimmed through whatever Yahoo calls news only to find that the Farrelly brothers are remaking The Three Stooges.  With Jim Carey, Sean Penn and Benicio del Toro as Larry, Moe and Curly.  Well isn’t that just a poke in the eye and slap on the head? 

I didn’t like the three stooges the first time around, why in the world would someone think that sad old slapstick nonsense should be resurrected?   More importantly, all that slapping, poking and injuring is no longer politically correct…take it out and there really wasn’t any story left behind.  Sean Penn????

Zombified

Have you ever had one of those days where you can see that someone is talking to you but the stuff coming out of their mouth just sounds like wordless bleating?  A night when your body keeps moving but your head is still getting over what you did before lunch?  Have you ever stared blankly at an object you’ve used every day of your life and failed repeatedly to come up with its name?  Or…I just love when this happens…spent an hour searching for something that’s on your head or in your hand?  Yup, that’s where I am tonight, a resident of zombi land.

Happy Dance!

What an exciting weekend.  First, we had warm weather – with sun.  Then there was a grand girls birthday party and then Princess announced her engagement to long time boyfriend, Ernie.  If you’ve been visiting here long, you know Princess is my youngest daughter and we already loved Ernie like a son. 

More good news this morning.  It looks like my Pap has finally got a job interview.  That’s amazing good news, I know he’s tired of running around doing odd jobs while we watch the money in our bank account disappear like smoke. 

Scary to put in print, but is it possible we’re finally exiting that long, dark, tunnel?

Brain Damaged

I think I burned out several hundred brain cells today writing.  Did I tell you I started a new job for a newspaper?  I didn’t?  Imagine that….Well, I wasn’t supposed to start until April first, but the correspondent who’s place I’m taking has stopped writing, so my editor asked me to move up a week.  Holy cow!  I spent Monday and Tuesday chasing down leads and doing interviews.  I spent all…day….today writing the stories.  I’m exhausted.  What I hate most, is that with such a short deadline it isn’t my best writing.  Ugh.

Girl Scout Controversy

I love the Girl Scout program, but this breaking news made me a little cranky this morning:

A girl needs to sell enough cookies to get herself to camp.  She tries going door to door, but she’s running out of time and hasn’t sold near enough to pay her way.  She puts up  a beautiful website and in days has sold and shipped 700 boxes of cookies.  That’s when the Girl Scout Council stepped in and ordered her to take the website down claiming “the cookie sale is meant to be a face to face experience.”

(Insert raspberry sound here)  Come on!  I haven’t had a real scout knock on my door in 20 years.  I’ve had plenty of parents handing me sheets to order cookies at work or church.  You can drop into any factory in America during the cookie sale time and find order sheets tacked to the bulletin board.  I’ve seen mothers (sometimes with a couple of Scouts running around the parking lot) selling boxes of cookies in front of Walmart. 

Whatever “skills” the Girl Scout Council intended the girls to learn in the beginning went right out the window when they added a competitive element to the program and set quotas by troop. 

 It irritates me on another level too.  We’ve stood calmly by while this generation of kids has been provided with computers, ipods, cell phones and other communication devices.  We’ve said nothing when they started networking socially through these electronic means instead of hanging out at the local diner.  Of course they’re going to rely on this network to sell their cookies. 

I applaud the Girl Scout Council for attempting to create a program forcing the girls personly interact, but the cookie sale is no longer the place for it.  Not when this sale is the primary revenue stream for most troop activities.

Mysterious Noises

The house was dark except for the glow of my computer screen.  That’s my favorite way to write, the fewer the distractions the easier it is to slip into my story.  Last night all the stars had aligned.  The office was the perfect temperature, not too warm, not too cool.  The dog, cat and Pap were sound asleep but not yet snoring loud enough to disturb me.  I was smokin’ through the bothersome middle of a particularly complicated short story I’m writing when I heard squeaking from the laundry room . 

Our miniature laundry room is just behind the wall of my computer.  I tried to ignore the sound, it was windy last night, so I really tried to assign that annoying sound to something inanimate.  But it kept up, that keening, screech I couldn’t readily identify.  The hair started to bristle on the back of my neck.  Could be a mouse, a rat, a snake in from the field biting a mouse.  A mole, a squirrel… and then there was a brushing sound added to the squeaking and I gave up all hope of finishing that story. 

I carefully opened the door and flipped on the light.  Nothing on the floor, but the sound was really loud in there and when I looked up at the ceiling, the dryer vent was bulging, something black or brown visible through the thin white skin of the vent.  I slammed the door and woke up Pap, which woke up Walker, who then woke up the cat.  All four of us trooped back to the laundry room, Pap opened the door, said a very bad word and then turned on the dryer. 

That caused all kinds of rucus in the vent.  “Bird.”  He said. 

This morning we went outside and found that the stupid black birds have chipped away at the vent guard and were trying to make a nest in there.  Stupid things.