Friday, October 23, 2015

Plane Air - Q1-into Q4 2015

Last year in preparation for retirement someday, I took a plein air watercolor class. Since then I paint in different urban or native locations and return to one place almost weekly to better understand seasons and try new techniques on what is now familiar. It made sense to me that my new life would include travel with someone or by myself and I'd want to be outside as much as possible,  
This year my travel schedule escalated with new responsibilities for facilitating health care executive roundtable events. In Spring I took a Sketchbook Skool class online which legitimized and empowered my sketching in public. In a quest to fulfill homework responsibilities, I quick sketched the seat across from me on the way out. No one complained. No one told me I couldn't.  I sketched another passenger on my way home and on the next flight out too. Voila'! a habit was born.  
Last night as I zipped away my sketchbook in its special Art Supplies pouch in prep for landing on a flight from Phoenix, the attendant stopped and asked if I was an artist. This, I've learned, is a trick question. I don't sell my work, which is 99% of the time the question behind the question. And, yet, yes I sketch and paint and make art. I clarified and said no to her, and clarified again, and said, yes to me. I am an artist in the making.
   


🆑

Sunday, October 18, 2015

Ideas and Life and Hope

Great ideas, it has been said,
come into the world as gently as doves. Perhaps, then,
if we listen attentively,
we should hear amid the uproar
of empires and nations
a faint flutter of wings,
a gentle stirring of life and hope.

Albert Camus

From Peacemaking: Day by Day 1985 http://paxchristiusa.org/

Saturday, October 17, 2015

Bed Bugs and Rituals

Sleep Tight, Don’t let the bed bugs bite … cruel way to send kids off to bed. I didn’t give it much thought till I read terrifying reports in the news of bed bugs in New York hotels, then my friend's daughter came home with them twice after trips abroad. I remember feeling squeamish as the mom described the arduous task of eradicating them. I sit here writing and wondering if the itch I feel is a new one crawling up my side. 
I arrived in San Diego on Saturday, the guy told me he had a nice room for me. When he described it as a suite looking at water, incredulously, I asked if there was something I should know about it. He said that I needed to know it had a Murphy bed. Looking out, I could see the inviting turquoise hotel swimming pool out and just beyond, a suburb of house-size white yachts docked in view of the Coronado Bridge and to the Pacific. Looking in, the room included a kitchenette and dining room table on one side of the bed hung on the wall and a living room suite to the other. What I couldn’t see were the bugs. I found them twenty-four hours after my first night in the bed. I’ve learned it takes them 24 hours to bed down into your skin. Once they do, they itch. They leave a small welt that feels like it travels… it probably does. And, once they get in your head… I mean, once you think you have them, it doesn’t matter that they attacked your leg. They are everywhere. You feel them in your scalp, crawling in your ears, down your arms, in every crack and crevice. 

When I arrived home, I borrowed my friend’s PackTite, (www.packtite.com) a large canvas container with a shelf, that heats to a 140 degrees, hot enough to kill the bed bugs and filled it twice with clothes and the bag itself. 
Long story shortened… I got through it and learned valuable lessons. I wrote this as a “glimmer”… a writing exercise when it was all over in July 2011. Since then, with my 20 or so trips a year, I’ve used the Packtite twice and now employ military-precision procedures (ok, even I know those words are beyond hyperbole for me.) One lesson learned is that I got the bed bugs from a high-end hotel in San Diego... not a flea-bag hotel in... wherever. And, since then, I've learned that they will travel home with you just from luggage and overhead compartments on planes. They are wanderers.

Now, when I return from a trip, I (usually) come in through the garage, leave my bag right outside the laundry room, immediately strip down and toss all clothes and soft items directly into the washer, or dryer- if they are dry-clean-only. Hard items, like my computer and paper, I look for evidence of bugs and take them into the kitchen or directly to my desk, and I shower. Not long after the San Diego event, I put an offer on a condo and withdrew it when I realized there was no place I could strip down in privacy… a non-starter for that place. An attached garage is high on my criteria for living arrangements.
This brings me to today, when I woke up with my ankles itching. Coming in from Atlanta yesterday morning after only a couple hours of sleep and maybe one too many glasses of wine the night before, I violated my bed bug prevention procedures. I didn’t undress or change my clothes. I took my roller-bag briefcase/suit case directly to my bedroom. I didn’t shower. I had a quick bite with my neighbor and went to the doctor for a routine physical.
As I came to this morning, I used my left foot to scratch my right one. Alerts and alarms went off in my head. My ears itched and my scalp crawled. I jumped out of bed, stripped in the bathroom, showered and dressed then stripped the bed and stuffed bedclothes and everything soft from my bag in the washer or dryer. They are there now clomp, clomp clomping hopefully heating up and shaking the life out of any insects. In the meantime, I dug out the bed bug sprays and fumigated. I have company and will vacuum after the house is awake. I might give them coffee first.
I really don’t know if I brought home bugs and that’s what made my ankles itch. It might be the flu shot I got yesterday. When I wrote about the bugs four years ago, still holds true… Like an amputee who feels a lost limb, I have cell memory of the itching and want to scratch. Hopefully, the bed bugs are physically gone, I still itch when I think of them.

Bed bugs, a fact of life for travelers, have taught me more about the value of ritual than Oprah.

Saturday, October 3, 2015

Webster - 400,000 Words that Frustrate My Word-Finding


I'm  unhinged by the magnitude and efficiency of the 1968 Unabridged, Webster’s New Twentieth Century Dictionary. Did you know that there are twentysix columns of Un-words. One merely needs to look up what follows un and know that it's not that… Bam! Words that start with water fill more than two pages. Whoa. It's too bad the earth is running out of water when there are so many words associated with it. Will they be extinct?

I remember hearing on NPR that the word take has more meanings than any other. Unless I look at every page in Webster’s, I can’t say whether the comparison is true, so, I looked it up…online. Take indeed tops the list followed by break, turn and set. For take, the first entry in the ’68 dictionary is a verb that includes 55 meanings plus another column of terms used, such as, to take care or to take it lying down.  There’s a second take-verb relating to getting possession with 12 meanings, followed by a noun with six, relating to the process of taking. The 2015 online list indicates 127 meanings suggesting that in the ensuing years creativity in word making is down. By the way, only the game of Bridge used the term "take out" in '68. No chicken nor synonyms for murder, I guess. 

What a turn in vision Noah Webster took when he set the foundation for this book. It includes 157 pages of supplements including practical business mathematics and terms, air distances between cities, the history of the English language, forms of address, abbreviations, pages of signs and symbols and the history of Canada. It even spells out the Constitution of the United States and the Declaration of Independence.
In an attempt to speed the user's interface, (1968 interface, n, a surface that lies between two parts of matter or space and forms their common boundary); the book is constructed with black wells with letters along the edges. I learned from a brochure I found tucked between pages that these features are “stamped in gold” and called “thumb indexed.” They claim and I don’t disagree, that the book is “richly appointed throughout.” The paper is fine, thin and yellowed... both on purpose and now with its 47 years of age. The book is heavy with so many pages and so much information to offer. The description on the insert says its “Monumental- 2.304 pages”, and “Massive- weighs 11 pounds, 4 ounces, 11 inches high x 8 ½ inches wide”. It includes “400,000 word definitions, 2,132 illustrations, many in full color bound in handsome sturdy, buckram”. (I had to look it up. A coarse cotton, hemp, or linen cloth, stiffened with glue or a gluelike substance.)  

The insert includes, in the purchasers hand writing, a curly fine style that reminds me of my grandmother’s, that says, “ordered, 10/28/68 4.65/mo. 13.95 Total.  Seems a bargain now for this massive, monumental resource. That was fall of our senior year.  I remember chipping in coins from fifty or seventy-five cent an hour babysitting jobs to fill up our dad's cars to go to football games, Blazo’s or Big Boy. The gas at the Sunoco station cost around twenty-nine cents per gallon. I never would have purchased something so extravagant. It would take 28 hours of babysitting for me, and I had more critical purchases like 45s, Villager outfits, Sebago Mocs, Bonnie Bell and Monet earrings.

Watching TV one night, I sat Webster’s on my lap, leafed through and noticed an illustration of a zorapteran. Bored, I pulled out markers and colored it, then found other bugs in nearly every letter of the alphabet. I colored from back to front until an acarida. Since '68, publishers replaced engravings, the little pictures with photographic processes, (I learned from Wikipedia), but, it made me wonder how editors determined which words to represent. Pictures aid in understanding a concept. I could never conjure a halberd without the drawing. The little engravings aren't on every page making the information dense... intimidating… so much to know. The illustrations are a relief, a resting place for the eyes and the brain. I wonder whether the priority came from a layout decision or the information? By the way, the first illustration in the book is of an aardvark, already a cool word with its double-a beginning, the last a zoospore balancing out coolness with its double-o middle.

Though I access Thesaurus.com much more than the dictionary, I don’t learn nearly as much using it. I find my word, you know… the one… right… on the tip… of my tongue. I copy the word, X the webpage and edit my Word doc. Done. Each time, I am reminded that at this point in my life, words are precious. They don’t reliably show up for me. Use of Thesaurus.com is increasing. I get as frustrated with myself as I did with my mom when words don’t emerge when I need them. Word finding. It’s part of aging, I’m told. It must be a modern term, because it’s not in the ’68. It, however, doesn’t make me feel modern.

I so love this dictionary for helping me mind my Ps and Qs. 

Word. (as in, to flatter in 1968.)