Have I mentioned that retirement is the greatest thing in the world besides spaghetti? I knew quite some time ago that I didn’t have the time to go to work. Now that I am blissfully retired, I can see that I was right.
It is late June in Central Texas; a chilly wind blew a storm through yesterday. We had a very pleasant spring, though a little on the humid side, and when you’ve been through years of devastating drought it’s hard to complain about that.
What else can I not complain about? My world is made of flowers.
Even the day lilies keep coming; even ones that have never blossomed before.
The crown of thorns that received a splendid new planter after a wild wind blew its pot to the ground in a storm of potting soil and terra-cotta shards is doing amazing things. Talk about an ill wind that blows no good! In its steel plant stand, it had become so difficult to move that it has spent the past couple of summers outside the master bath window.
While it was nice to see all that refracted color coming through the glass, that’s not my favorite part of the yard to visit. I’ve had this plant since it was a tiny thing – over ten years now – and it has never once been devoid of flowers. Now it is a floral blast by the front door, and I can see it from the front window any old time I want. Not to mention there’s a bistro set right there on the patio (not in my kitchen, you moronic house stager you) where I can drink a beer in the shade at the end of the day.
How did dog feet end up in my photo? I hadn’t even noticed until now. I shouldn’t be surprised, though: Travis is ten times more my shadow now that I’m home so much.
Our part of the world is currently covered in crape myrtle.
Pink, white, dark pink, red, purple – all the colors. Tiny blossoms litter the sidewalks, so you always feel like a bride walking down a petal-strewn aisle.
Okay, well not really. But it is very pleasant.
The sidewalk garden is the same old thing.
Ho-hum.
No big deal.
They’re just flowers.
Before we move on to what I’ve been up to (I can just picture you on the edge of your seat), I’ll remind you that my niece Chris visited recently and we had that Thelma & Louise & Mary trip to west Texas. Then Chris returned to Connecticut for reasons I cannot fully fathom. Being as she is the real Martha Stewart of northwest Connecticut, what used to be known as a bread-and-butter gift soon arrived at our house.
I have visited this farm with Chris; you can read all about it from November 2016 if you want to see a Heaven On Earth For Cows.
The chocolates arrived thoroughly and magnificently attired and cushioned and cooled with cooling packs. Boutique chocolates. Flavored with things like lavender and mint that those cows obviously help to grow. (If you have never had a chocolate mint flavored with real mint leaves, you have never eaten a real chocolate mint. Rather than the sharp intensity of a peppermint patty, these mints arrive like satin in your mouth. I can’t think another way to say it.)
Anyhow, there’s nothing like chocolates that arrive with an “eat by” date to inspire indulgence. Without that imperative, we might have just kept them around to look at forever.
Boy, do I hate going from candy nirvana to the story of my life on the world wide web over the past few weeks.
Being as I am a woman of the 21st century, I thought it might be a good idea to start selling my art online like everybody else on the planet. I thought I might set up a shop using WordPress, since I already use WordPress and no doubt that would simplify things.
I’d be falling out of bed laughing right now if I weren’t afraid of ending up back in surgery.
I’ll just say a couple of things about the So Easy One Click world of setting up an online store. 1.) If you are the type of adventurer who loves arriving in a foreign land where the people speak a language you have never heard before crafted from an alphabet you have never seen, this is your trip of a lifetime.
2.) If you are more of the stay-at-home type but you love nothing better than enormous meditation mazes in which you can meander for hours and lose all track of where you are but it doesn’t matter because you can’t possibly be lost because you have been in this part of the maze 25 times already today, this is a great trip for you, too! See? Something for everyone.
3.) Schoolchildren learn coding for a reason. Go back to third grade and sit in on the coding class.
4.) People who earn mucho plenty bucks galore helping people set up their online shops deserve all the bucks they make. And as soon as the dust settles, I am going to go find me one and see if I can even formulate a cogent question about what the hell am I supposed to do next.
That is all I care to say about that.
In the midst of all this hair-tearing fun, my neighbor the real artist Sherry Steele https://www.sherrysteele.net/ stopped by to tell me about a website that helps you organize and apply for all the arts and crafts shows anywhere you want to go https://www.zapplication.org/event-info.php?ID=7562&fbclid=IwAR0epvMJNw24jJ85OCR8_CEZBNGLxt2yLdRu6k4okKwRK3m0SXumLblP2N0.
Now Sherry is a “fine” artist (fine in every sense of the word, but what I mean here is not a paint thrower like myself), completely self-taught (please click on her link so you can see things people can teach themselves to do). Meaning she is not going to go to a July 4th craft show at an outdoor mall for a couple of hours. But she thought it might be a fun place for me to set off on my road to becoming a millionaire.
There is nothing like an extremely time-consuming and energy-zapping distraction to rescue one from an impossible task like setting up an online store. The deadline for applying was about four days away, and one of the application requirements was a “booth shot.”
Now this was nowhere near as bad as that time when my friend Hillery and myself, having just finished collecting dissertation data for a year, stopped by the IT office for statistics help and the guy said, “Do you have a codebook?” and we said, “What’s a codebook?” and we ended up spending four days and nights writing a codebook to cover 1200 scorable items for each individual in our study (3×52 individuals, if you must know) and then entering those little pieces of data along with our comrade in misery Randy because Hillery and Randy were days away from leaving for internship.
But I certainly did not have a “booth.”
I did have a vision of wood-framed cattle mesh from which to hang my canvases, but there was no time for that now. Pegboard would have to suffice for the application photo, and maybe I could come up with something more suitable if I passed muster and was admitted to the fair.
I’m just going to tell you this once: never even attempt to paint pegboard without your own personal spray booth, a professional paint sprayer, and of course all the respirator stuff you need if you want to be able to breathe afterward. There’s about four hours I’ll never get back.
And if you order a mesh banner from a great place you know will get it to you fast, be sure you have time to let it off-gas outside. Vistaprint, I love you, but the thing smelled like rotten baloney.
There’s no sense saying a thing about wind, because wind is a given. Try not to think about what will happen if you pass the audition and have to set up your tent in a place where you cannot drive stakes into the ground. Because no way can you hoist sandbags. So worry about that later.
There was plenty of wind on audition photo day, I can tell you. It was Keystone Kops, starring yours truly, as I ran around trying to keep the pegboard upright, the canvases sort of level, and the garden posts from tumbling to earth AGAIN. Thank you for that great rack, Floyd.
unrulygardenart may not be ready on the world wide web, but I like outdoors better anyway.
