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Thought for Thursday

“I am so clever that sometimes I don’t understand a single word of what I am saying.” ~Oscar Wilde

I’m Waiting…All Day

I’m at home today. All day. Can’t leave the house, which is fine because I have plenty of things to do around here.

I need to plan my day carefully or it could turn into a nothing day. The telephone repair people are supposed to come and fix my non-existent phone service. Could you imagine that a little thunderstorm could knock out my dial tone? Yeah, me either, but it has.

While talking on the home phone last week I noticed alot of static on the line after a storm. I called in the problem, but they told me the issue was inside my house, not due to that storm. OK. Unplug all the phones and then plug them back in. Did that fix the problem? No. The static was so noisy I could barely hear anyone nor they me. Then Sunday during a call the static got real loud and popped. Now we’re in trouble baby! I tried to dial out, nothing. I called my house from my cell phone, nothing. Dead as a doornail.

Today is the repair date. I am without a house phone since Sunday. Not everyone I know has my cell number so who knows who’s tried to call? There’s nothing I can do about it, so here I am.

What time is the appointment for the repair man? All day, 8A.M. to 5P.M. Did I say all day? Yes. All. Day. Long. Bright side? I’ve got all day. Just think about that for a moment.

It’s kind of nice to know you have All Day to yourself, but only if you chose that option on your own accord. I really don’t like it if someone else tells me I cannot leave my house for any reason All Day.

It’s a dilemma.

But I have a plan. After I get off this computer I’m going to straighten up the house a bit. Then I’ll check my art supplies and straighten up the studio area. That job seems to lead to good things when I do it. The garden painting is waiting for me. I might have to work on it so I can go on to something else I’m thinking of. I thought it was a good idea to have a couple paintings going at once, but then my brain conks out. I can have a painting going, a jewelry project in the works, and knitting on the needles all at once, but don’t ask me to paint two paintings at the same time.

That will get me to midday. Lunch outside with my latest book will be a good break. When that’s done maybe I’ll be ready to start on something new, as long as I got some inspiration in the studio clean-up.

That repair guy better not show up at 5P.M.

M.I.A in Manhattan

Yes, I know. I was M.I.A on Monday. Missing In Action. Actually I was in action, in movement, on the road. This time my sister’s back went out and as she was unable to drive her car to get back to her apartment in New York City, I drove her there on Monday. So, it sort of was and sort of wasn’t an adventure.

Every time I go to Manhattan I call it an adventure. It ‘s no big deal to go there, I just make it seem like that. I make believe I’m doing some big thing, but I’m really not. I’m used to the city. I worked there as a paste-up artist years ago downtown in the 20’s and 5th Avenue.

When we were kids my mother took us into the city plenty of times. She grew up in Manhattan on Columbus Avenue on the West Side. We lived just across the Queens Borough Bridge in Astoria and Manhattan was a bus ride over the bridge for us. Our mom didn’t want us to be country bumpkins and not know how to navigate the city. We had to dress well to visit, or to shop, or to go to the theater. No one was wearing dungarees to Manhattan in the 1960’s! Dungarees, aka jeans, were for weekend wear at home with comfy shoes and a sweater.

Now when we go to the city my mom always remarks on how everyone in the city is dressed like a slob! Here and there you see some high society people, but even they’re not dressed to the nines. What is everyone doing with their expensive designer clothes and shoes? Most times the fancy people are dressed in rags and some regular schmoes are wearing Chanel on the street! East side, west side, doesn’t matter. Even on 5th Avenue or Madison Avenue, no one is really dressed like my mom was used to doing. That time is over!

So anyway, I drove my sister to the West Side for her appointment, which took three hours. But he’s a great chiropractor, so we didn’t care how long it took. When we were done I dropped her off at her building and drove around for a half hour to find a place to park my Mountaineer. Yeah, don’t worry. Everyone in Manhattan is driving an S.U.V! Why? Who knows? More trucks than Audis, BMW’s or Mercedes on the East side. Park a truck in a garage and you have to pay extra! I had to find street parking.

I found a spot, noted where I parked and walked a couple of blocks back to the apartment building. The air was crisp, the sun high and warm, and I had an overall good feeling. A free kind of feeling. No agenda, nothing else to do, just a wonderful walk alone. Head and eyes up and alert, but comfortable.

That’s a good kind of adventure for me.

Photos for Friday- A Drive Through Queens, NY

Thought for Thursday

I am so busy doing nothing… that the idea of doing anything – which as you know, always leads to something – cuts into the nothing and then forces me to have to drop everything. ~Jerry Seinfeld, comedian

Word for Wednesday is Wow

So, with the idea to tweak these photos from a lovely commenter from yesterday’s post, here they are. This is the way the hydrangeas were meant to be seen! And yes the word is WOW!

I forgot all about the image adjusting program on the computer and was relying on the camera. I guess I just felt like ranting. Sometimes I think my monitor is not calibrated correctly and my photos might be too dark. But hey, who cares? Right now I am in heaven looking at the color of these petals! Yes, sir. This is how they’re supposed to look.

Ideas are running through my head now. Which to paint first? Yippee!

Fun with Photos, Not

There he is again. The yellow goldfinch that likes to come by my pink coneflowers, or echinacea, flew in yesterday afternoon to eat some seeds. These birds are so skittish they won’t let me peek at them from my kitchen door. I grabbed my camera soon as I saw this one and snapped this picture from the kitchen window, through the screen. It’s the best I could do to capture the bird. The Mr. gets so excited to hear these birds were here. He raises finches and canaries, but this one is special. What a beautiful color he is!

Yesterday I had to clip these huge hydrangea because some animal must have fallen on the branches and many were broken. I gathered some and arranged then in a vase on my patio table. They are stunning. This morning as I was writing my Morning Pages, yes I’m still doing that, don’t ask anything else, I had the impulse to take a couple of photos to remember the deep blue color. The edges of the petals were trimmed in a teal green and were very striking.

This photo looks nothing like the flowers! I couldn’t get the camera to darken so the true blue could show. Nope, nothing I do would allow me to capture the colors of these flowers. Ok, whatever. I tried every angle and the automatic camera kept lightening the picture. Thanks alot.

This is not what the hydrangea look like at all. I guess it’s going to be a fun day so far if this is how my morning started out.

Day at the Beach with Traffic

Living on Long Island, in lower New York State, affords those of us who enjoy the seashore, the wonderful opportunity to visit on a whim. We live a fifteen minutes drive from the Atlantic Ocean and try to be on the water once a week in the summer.

Don’t ask me how many miles the ocean is from my house, I have no idea. Here we measure distance by time of travel. In fact, signs have recently been posted on our parkways that give a digital readout for drivers how many minutes it will take to get to a destination.

I’ve visited upstate New York many times and no one there ever says how long it takes to get anywhere. They tell you the miles and when I’d ask the minutes they’d look at me as if I had two heads. Well, there’s no traffic upstate, unless you’re stuck behind a tractor or cows are crossing the road.

On Long Island there’s traffic. Serious traffic. Parking lot traffic. You can be stuck in traffic that, if you wanted you could get out of your car and talk to the driver behind you. They could be passing out drinks and hors d’oeuvrs and having a party kind of traffic. So many people descend on Long Island in the summer heading to the beaches that the fifteen minutes it usually takes me could turn into an hour of travel time.

Sometimes it gets crazy. Sometimes the drivers get crazier than they usually are. People start flipping out. No one wants to be in any kind of traffic here. Drivers can barely wait for the lousy red stop light to turn to green, how can they handle traffic? Thing is, they can’t!

The alternative to taking the parkway to the beach is to use the local streets. It’s nice, but that takes time too, but you sort of think it’s quicker. It’s really not. There’s lights, local people doing their every day thing, more cars than usual because they’re going to the beach too, but they live close enough to go locally. And on the days that traffic is crazy on the parkway, all those same crazy people start getting off the parkway to use the streets. Same craziness, same hour travel time.

We had a little bit of traffic this week on our way to Pt. Lookout beach. Backed up for miles, I was trying to decide: Stay on the parkway or use the streets? I felt that the cars were moving a bit, enough to decide to just stay on and take my chances.

Why was the traffic backed up? Was the drawbridge up for a tall ship to go under? No. Was there police activity (that could be horrendous)? Nope. Could be a huge pile-up, which did happen this week with tragic results which closed the Meadowbrook Parkway to the beach for hours. Not this day. No. Two cars of drivers had pulled over the side of the road to consult their map. Every car on the road slowed to stop and look at them. What are they looking at? Did everyone think they knew these people? Did they think they were celebrities, which happens now and then? What? What’s with that? What, or who, did they think they were going to see rubbernecking like that?

That’s Long Islanders, and New Yorkers, for you. Gotta see what’s going on!