Lift-off June 8, 2010

The moment has arrived <smile>. All things that I know of are packed and stacked on that old couch I mentioned, ready to be organized into our sweet ride.

My middle son, Josh, who will turn 19 while we’re on the road and is heading into the Navy in September, is on his way over for a ‘group hug’ before we pull out.

The fridge is cleaned out (bless Adam, but the lettuce could melt into a pile of goop and he’d be oblivious), the beds are changed — I mean really, who would want to come home,  possibly late at night and tired, and not want to crawl into clean sheets!!!

The weather is being minimally cooperative in that it is not raining… though in general I love the rain, but for driving I like things dry, fair, sunny and comfortably cool. Thus on my scale of optimum today is so far about a 5.0 on a scale of 10.

And so it is now time for me to shut this ‘puter off, check the lights, set the thermostat, make sure the doors are locked and the dogs are fed, give Josh a hug and head out…

T-24 June 7, 2010

Our 2006 Hyundai Tuscon, the chariot for our road-trip!!!

Yesterday — that was Sunday — went to utility.

Major to the to-do list was my participation with the regular monthly meeting of Arkansans for Medical Cannabis. (Please feel free to join us on Facebook!)

Also laundry, cleaning, organizing and check-listing — none of which amounts to a ‘day of rest’ by standard definition, yet was in its own way restful as I always feel energized and refreshed by the activity of getting things done.

Still, maintaining too heady a pace is wearying and so we are planning to pragmatically pace ourselves, aiming to travel 300 miles each day that we are on the road and planning for several stop-over days along the way.

At the moment, Shawna is doing a marvelous job of cleaning the kitchen and laundry room. We both like the idea of coming home to a clean house , however — my dear-darling eldest son, Adam, who is a heavy equipment operator in the mining industry (aka: comes home drenched in dirt, sweat, and industrial grim every day), will be in residence during our absence so the odds of us actually coming home to a neat & tidy domicile – no matter how pristine we leave it — are slim to none !!!

Still, he is a dear lad and we love him. I just pray that he remembers to water my garden and houseplants!!!

The old (circa 1920) divan that sits along the wall of the hallway which connects our entry-parlor to our den while it waits patiently for me to find the time to reupholster it, has become our staging ground. It is there that we have been amalgamating the suitcases, snack-boxes, technology and other accoutrements which shall accompany us.

Once inventoried and catalogued to confirm that we have everything we can think of that we may want or need, these useful items will, before we sleep tonight, be organized into our chariot, ready for bon voyage in the morning.

Beyond that I must get my hair done and a manicure <smile>. And so for now I’d better scoot!

Slow Food… February 4, 2010

Just found this marvelous website for Ozarks Slow Food…. Enjoy!!!

Sunday August 16, 2009

My Studio made marked progress today. Major movement of things to appropriate places. Twenty days (by my agenda) to having the project done, at least in the sense of having all my available resources (tools, supplies, workspace) in good order and having a yard sale of my excess over Labor Day weekend. 

My big project of the moment is figuring out how to get the locker full of refuse that accumulated in the course of cleaning to the local transfer station… which would be a snap if I had a pick-up truck… which (how blessed I am) my eldest son does… but his work schedule is the same as the hours of the transfer station, and thus he cannot do the deed for me. So we have to swap vehicles which hopefully will be tomorrow… but may have to wait until Tuesday.

Beyond that, tomorrow will be another day of modest labor with the objective of starting to organize merchandise for the yard sale, which means that I will be going thru every closet and cubby, winnowing wheat from chaff.  And I must say that I am mildly excited about all of this. It feels good, like the ‘right’ thing to be doing. And it always amazes me how, when I am totally in the groove of doing ‘the right thing’, things so sublimely come together as if by magical grace.

Today, for example, sweet Shawna and I had managed to sort and organize a mish-mash of lawn & garden equipment, household maintenance, plumbing, woodworking, and craft-resource things in a manner to enable us to relocate an old steel-cabinet sink to a place on a different wall where it will (eventually) be hooked up with drain and running water. And just as we were ready to move the beast, two young gentlemen friends of Shawna’s serendipitiously arrived and insisted to do the job for us.

Geeze, I love being a woman (grin). Not that we couldn’t have moved the sink… but it was so much easier for these two strapping young men. Thank God for the difference of the sexes!!!

My Studio August 15, 2009

Day 2 of cleaning and organizing what we have lovingly called ‘the shed’ since relocating to our pastoral premises 5 years ago. Tho it is much more than a shed, actually being a rather wonderful single car garage, set apart from my house by a comfortable yardspace and already having been set-up as some semblance of a workshop when we all moved in.

Five of us stormed this house like a lost tribe, parched from many days in the desert, immersing ourselves in an oasis. And since that day I have had held an image in my mind of what ‘the shed’ would look like when it was organized and set-up the way I envision it, which is as an artisan studio replete with the accoutrement to create mixed-media, involving tools like table and hand saws, drills, glues, putties, fabrics, odd bits of pieces of interesting metals, sometimes melded with computer aided graphcs and always an eye as much to making something useful as to making it art.

In fact as any true artist worth a tube of acrylics knows as an element of artistic gravity, art essentially cannot be made. Art somehow happens when the artisan assembles a variety of shapes, textures and colors in a unique combination.  The art magically emotes.

Also interestingly, the more intently we focus on ‘creating art’, the less likely it is to happen. That is, the magic of pure art must somehow coincidentally be stumbled upon and catching the artist off guard quite by surprize.

So that is the way I have seen ‘my studio’ — as a ‘created space’ in which this quality of imagineering can magically happen – since the day my horde moved in. And throughout that time, as the space was otherwise occuppied for storage or maintenance projects (usually somehow associated with my darling children <smile>), my vision remained and now is coming to life. Whe-e-e-e-e!!!!

Thus with September being my official 5 year anniversary here I am strategizing phase one of my master plan <grin>, which is essentially, as much as possible, develop ways for this house to support itself which, in acccord of my current bank balance, I have 90 days to do.

And so of course I shall too be seeking gainful employment and shall post my preliminary employment application to my LinkedIn profile and also here as a PDF after I’ve given it another read. I did submit it already to a couple of places on Friday, however, as it is necessary for me to seek employment with at least two prospective employers each week in order to be considered eligible for unemployment benefits… if I am ultimately qualified to recieve same… which I will not know for probably a month so I’m just gonna keep on truckin’ with my master plan and see what happens next.

Unemployment August 14, 2009

Yesterday I registered for Unemployment Insurance. This was a new experience for me, having never before in my 40+ years of being a business professional filed for this type of benefit before. And actually — in context of all the blame being slung at government for alleged ineptitude and incompetence as administrator of state & federal benefit programs (ie: proposed ‘single payer’ health care) — the process seemed quite purposeful and well-carried-out. Almost expedient in terms of the staff available and the number of people there to serve.

I waited a very short time (perhaps 20-min?) to meet with the woman who conducted my initial interview, which only took about 10-minutes. She then gave me the option of completing my application on a computer, which was fine with me and I started immediately.

The questions were direct, pertinent to citizenship, residency and work history, and mostly could be answered by clicking  ‘yes’ or ‘no’ from a pull-down menu or typing in contact information and other pertinent data.  It took another 20-min. or so to complete the full application, which was printed out and submitted for my second interview.

This process too was fairly expedient. After waiting only about 10-min., I was called to a private office to meet with a woman who reviewed my full application, gathered additional information from me, explained the coming steps in the qualification process including instructions about how to report my current status weekly online and gave me a handbook and several pamphlets which detail how the whole system works. Again, this took about 20-min.

All in all, from arrival to exit, it took less than two hours, which seems reasonable and appropriate to me. Also, the women who interviewed me were friendly and informative, presented themselves with professional manners and impressed me as conducting their respective tasks with diligence and appropriate authority. If I were their work supervisor, I would be compelled to say ‘good job’.

All the more, I felt like a fish out of water. So nervous that I managed to dump the entire contents of my purse on the floor while extracting my Social Security card from my wallet. Perhaps sub-cognitive meme resistance (see: Virus of the Mind: The New Science of the Meme) to ‘asking for help’? No matter the cause, however, the feelings of being out-of-place were real and there is really nothing one can do about this except ‘notice it’ and move on.

Yet at the same time it is important — at least in terms of personal growth and professional development — to acknowledge the emotional-tugs inherent to any experience, old or new. To notice the subtext of our own (conditioned?) ’knee-jerk reaction’ and observe the effects these innate sensations have on our routine movement thru the world, because until we enable ourselves to examine these subtextural experiences in terms of  our own self-adopted standards of  ‘reasonableness’ we cannot be self-empowered to ‘choose’ how we wish to behave ‘the next time’ similar circumstances come up.

A Stitch In Time… August 12, 2009

A lot of old sayings, no matter their relevance, have lost cognitive meaning in modern society. For example, I grew up with my elders cajoling me: “A stitch in time saves nine.” And I knew what that meant because my elders taught me how to mend and sew… a skill which seemingly today has fallen almost entirely to disuse, at least as my matriarchs practiced it.

Making it easier 'the next time'. By attaching info and tools necessary to 'get the job done' -- so long as whoever uses it keeps things together -- no one will ever have to waste time again 'looking up' or 'finding' what's necessary.

The overarching lesson, of course, was to keep things in good repair; ready to be put to immediate service, because doing so made life (in the big picture) somehow easier.

But the small lessons were multitudinous, coupling abstract dimensions of creative invention with perfected-by-practice mechanical skills — ie: have you ever stitched-up a split crotch?

Today I shared a measure such ‘stitch in time’ reasoning with my youngest daughter, age sixteen. Our task, however, had nothing to do with sewing.

Our weedeater needed a fuel refil. Not a big deal, except neither of us knew the correct mix of oil to add to the gasoline and the person in our household who has routinely attended this duty (my youngest son, age 18) is not in residence with us anymore — thus we now get to learn ‘how to’ <grin>.

And actually, I pretty much know how to do such stuff, at least in the general sense. But I didn’t know the exact oil to fuel ratio to use with this particular piece of equipment, so I called a local dealer of our particular unit and was told the correct mix is 50-to-1.

The oil tells right on the label how much of the product to add to the gas, but the instructions were for 2-gallons of fuel and we have a one-gallon can, so we divided things down to arrive at the fact that we needed to mix 2.6 ounces of oil with one gallon of gas.

So far, this took about half an hour.

Then we looked around the house to find some sort of appropriate ‘scoop’ that was ‘just the right size’ to measure 2.6 ounces and found something that works.

This took another 15 minutes or so.

Finally, we were able to add the oil to the gas, mix it thoroughly,  fill the weedwacker and get done what we set out to do…

But first, by attaching the measuring tool and the mixing instructions to the gas can which contains the fuel-oil-mix, we made sure we would not have to spend our time spinning our wheeels looking things up and finding what we need ‘the next time’ the weedwacker runs out of gas, admirably illustrating the premise that an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure.