I wasn’t going to post today – but I just have to show these photos. The late afternoon sun was shining through our stained glass window onto a vase of daffodils. Oh my gosh, the colors, the shadows . Yellow daffodils become orange! Just enjoy them. If you click on any of the photos, it makes them bigger.
I have a house for sale. Please come buy my house. It’s been on the market for three days and no one has bought it yet! I don’t know how long I can stand to keep this house so clean. This is what selling a house means:
You know which one is the hardest? The shoes! I try but at any time I may have five pairs of shoes scattered around the house. I seem to be incapable of putting shoes away. And I don’t do dishes after every meal. My dirty laundry just sits in the laundry basket so now I keep it covered with a little rug. And it doesn’t bug me that the newspapers stack up in front of the couch.
I drew the line at the cupboards. I did sort the linen closet, but I stopped there. The kitchen cupboard where the bowls and refrigerator containers are? I can clean it and the next day gremlins have wreaked havoc. It has nothing whatsoever to do with the fact that I throw refrigerator containers in the cupboard instead of placing them in neat stacks. The closet in the office? Where all my newly-organized photos are? Potential buyers are just going to have to use a little imagination to see how spacious it could be when organized. Same for the closet in my studio. And the coat closet. And the entire laundry room.
The garage is in a class of its own. Bad at any time, it’s now a total disaster because Mark is restoring his Model A. At least people looking in can see that there is a real project going on.
It’s not that I’m messy or disorganized. It’s just that I have no interest in doing these things. I’d rather write, or draw, or read, or ride my bike, or drink wine. Heck, I’d rather just sit and look out the window. And my housekeeper has missed two weeks because she got rear-ended and is in physical therapy.
I must admit, though, the floors are pretty darn clean. Cat hair in this house during shedding season? No way.
So although I am flapdoodled, frizzled and fragmented, I feel like I’m in stasis. Can’t start a painting or collage because the entire studio would be in disorder (I’m not a neat worker). Can’t start packing for the move because there is no where to put anything – our storage unit is full as is the garden shed. We just have to close on the house we bought so we can start packing and moving stuff over. Having a wedding shower Saturday so I have all the stuff for that sitting all over the laundry room.
So would someone please come buy my house so I can start living again? This is what it looks like.
This is the front. I had to take these pictures for the MLS. Did you know you can put your house on the multiple listing service even if you’re selling it yourself?
Notice how clean the stairs are. And the nice stained glass window by the front door.
Living room with fireplace and a cut-through to the family room. It’s a nice open floor plan.
Dining area leading to the patio and the kitchen. Aren’t the floors clean?
Family room. It is so uncluttered!
Library. Talk about status! Who wouldn’t like to say they have a library? Of course, it’s also the grandkid’s playroom since I appropriated their playroom for my studio.
For that matter, who wouldn’t like to say they have a studio? Especially one that looks like a kid’s playroom?
Wonderful concrete counter tops in the kitchen with a fabulous sink.
Great back patio where you can do lots of entertaining. Like the shower I’m giving on Saturday.
And of course, the view.
The MLS only allows ten photos so you have to take my word that there is an upstairs with three bedrooms, two baths, etc.
NOW – those of you who saw the post with photos of our new house must be saying this woman is insane, why does she want to move? But I promise that the new house will be fabulous as soon as we get our happy paint on the walls and cover up all the ridiculous olive drab that the whole thing is painted.
And you know what? Speaking of paint? I hope the couple who looked at this house today buys it and for one particular reason. She said the paint colors were happy! She got it! Our walls are orange and ochre and lime green and bright blue because those colors were all over Costa Rica and we were happy there. So we painted our house in happy colors. The woman who looked today is the first person EVER except for us that has called them happy colors out loud.
But if she doesn’t buy it – will someone please buy this house before it’s been on the market a week? So I can relax? So I can quit being flapdoodled, frizzled and fractured? So my days will be frabjous days? I want to wake up and say “O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!”
How many special moments do we get in a lifetime? I mean the truly magic moments that stop us in our tracks to marvel, that imbue a sense of awe that we remember forever after. On Friday the 13th, a year ago March, it seemed like a good idea to recall those moments if for no other reason than to remember.
Fort Bowie
Our daughter Jennifer and her husband Matt spent a summer in Tucson, Arizona back in 1993 while Matt interned with the Indian Health Service. We like to go wherever our kids are to see new places and be able to better share their experiences. So off my husband and I went to southeastern Arizona in late June. The heat was blistering, but where we were was so interesting that it didn’t matter, and anyway, Mark and I love the desert, which comes with heat, conveniently or not.
We took a camping trip in Cochise County – territory we could have covered in a day, but there was so much to see we took almost a week. We absorbed as much history as we could as we explored an area saturated with Indian lore. Geronimo, Cochise, and the history of the Apaches gave this little corner of Arizona a spiritual feel. We spent a couple of nights at Chiricahua National Monument, where we took a morning trip to Fort Bowie.
The trail to the fort was incredible – there were tracks from stage coaches
Foundations of the Butterfield Stage Stop from the 1860s
and wagon trains that told the story of fortitude, duress, and the quest for a new future;
Wagon from the 1860s on the trail to Ft. Bowie. This was the site of the Bascom Affair - a massacre.
Pony Express stops and a small cemetery that housed the remains of Geronimo’s young son spoke to the nature of one person’s quest creating another’s tragedy.
Geronimo's son Little Robe was shot in the forehead by soldiers at Ft. Bowie. They also killed Geronimo's wife.
Then there was the fort itself. Fort Bowie was a Civil War fort and there were remnants of many of the walls and buildings.
Sutler's quarters at Ft. Bowie, a Civil War fort
I imagined myself in the time period, felt the tension between soldiers and Indians, the sweat and discomfort of uniforms and closed, small quarters in the heat.
View of Ft. Bowie from the ridge trail
I picked up a nail and a piece of adobe and began the trek back on a high ridge so desolate, so alone, so quiet, that as I stood and surveyed the territory with a small breeze at my back, it was as if “the whole” blew through me. I felt connected to the earth and to history, to the spirits of the Apaches and the entirety of the world.
Words don’t convey the expansiveness of this feeling, this moment, as well as its intimacy. For just that brief instant and for the second time in my life, I felt that no questions needed answers, that soul was connected to soul. It was illuminating, it was magic, and then it was lost as we continued the trek to our car.
Trail leading up the ridge. On the back of the photo, I wrote "Indians walked here."
We almost lost ourselves on that trek as we had failed to bring enough water, not understanding how the 115-degree heat could suck all the moisture out of our bodies. We drank the water we brought, we poured it over our heads and down our shirts and barely made it to the car where we bowed to the vending machine gods. Yet that one transcendent moment lives within me still.
I have a new show opening tomorrow at the Empty Space Theater Gallery. Just a small show of 13 black and white photos. Most are 5×7, two are 8×10. Since this month’s theme on Creative Every Day is telling stories, what better way than to have each photo tell its own story? Each photo is for sale, by the way, and you can order unframed prints from me!
Girl Power
The story on this is funny. My friend Michael Purcell and I were going to Colorado to visit my daughter last year. We were just outside of Las Vegas and there was nothing there – but I needed to stop and get something out of the ice chest. I pulled off on a dirt road that perhaps said no trespassing (it was government property) and it was as desolate and barren a spot as the moon. Only hotter. Michael said, “This is the kind of place someone would come to dump their porn collection so no one would ever know.” Right. Except as I wandered off I found these video tapes just as you see them. Um, the one in front is called Girl Power. Some are Superstars of Lesbianism or something like that in multiple volumes. Not all the secrets the desert holds are natural ones.
Cacti Mundo
On our Mexican Riviera cruise last December, we took an excursion in Cabo San Lucas that stopped at Cacti Mundo. It was amazing! Especially if you like cacti. Patterns are so intriguing. I’ll bet we could make up a story about these little cacti – lined up like soldiers in perfect precision.
Popcorn
Yep, you can pop corn right off the cob. I think of this ear of corn as something like an egg sac, and all the little kernels are struggling to get away. Most made it, these couldn’t break free. Doomed to be mama’s kernels forever. Traded freedom for the security of mom.
Rain
Three photos from Martin Luther King Day this year. What wonderful clouds. Think of the stories they could tell, especially in relation to struggles for freedom. Is the sun about to break through, or are the raindrops trying to escape the confines of the nebulous clouds? Do they portend a gathering storm or are they empty threats? I love all the metaphors that images yield.
Maybe they mean nothing more than it’s going to be a rainy day. Which reminds me of one of my beloved childhood poems from Robert Louis Stevenson’s A Child’s Garden of Verses.
The rain is falling all around,
It falls on field and tree.
It rains on the umbrellas here
And on the ships at sea.
The Bath
Walking through the woods near our cabin I came upon this bathtub. Nothing relaxing in this tub but pine needles. I don’t know what story this tells other than someone didn’t want to move it either into a cabin or out to the dump. But I sure love the tub. And the photo is almost but not quite black and white. I left this in color as well as one red traffic signal in a cloud photo.
Do Fences Make Good Neighbors?
This lovely little fence near Telluride, Colorado, could tell many stories. It reminds me of Robert Frost’s poem The Mending Wall.
Frost asks,
Before I built a wall I’d ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.
And his neighbor answers,
Good fences make good neighbors.
Like all of Frost’s poems, there are layers and layers of subtlety in this.
Man in Telluride
Telling stories with pictures almost makes me want to teach again. I’d love to know what kind of story my students would construct around this lone man in Telluride, Colorado.
The Hotel Padre
Bakersfield’s Padre Hotel already has plenty of its own stories. In fact, they are so colorful I don’t think you could make them up! You can read about them here.
The Stormy Day
You know, I’m not sure how good a photo this is, but I keep coming back to it. That in itself makes it good enough for me to put in the show. It’s been a bountiful rainy season in Bakersfield so far. We’ll probably exceed our annual average of 5+ inches. Yes, to us rain is exciting and we often wonder what that wet stuff is coming down from the sky. We could turn it into a Chicken Little story – the sky is leaking! The sky is leaking!
Quonset Hut
There seem to be a fair number of quonset huts scattered around Bakersfield. Guess they never wear out. The bounty of the rain left a puddle big enough to make this look like a cylindrical building. Cool, huh? Every picture tells a story.
Surrounded
I started with the drive through Las Vegas and I’ll end with it. Michael was driving and he speeded up (or maybe he slowed down) so I could get a picture of the back of this trailer. “We’re surrounded…that simplifies our problem.” Is it a line from a movie? I think this is one story I don’t want to know! A little scary.
So that’s the show. If you live in Bakersfield please drop by The Empty Space and take a look.
Creative Every Day has a theme for March: Stories. I’m going to tell some true stories I’ve been working on and I think it’ll motivate me to get going and do more. The first one:
Terror in the Classroom
The incident gave me the first jolt of pure terror in my classroom. I had a python – Jake the Snake. He’d been in the family for a long time, sometimes living with me and sometimes with my daughter. It boiled down to whoever was sick of buying mice every week and asked the other to take over for a while. It seemed like a great idea to have Jake in the classroom because I was going to be a really cool teacher and what could be cooler than snakes?
So in the corner of my busy classroom, and by that I mean a classroom not just with busy students but also with busy walls, sat Jake the Snake in his terrarium, waiting for his mouse. Every Monday I’d bring a live mouse and during silent reading time, the snake monitors would clean the terrarium, change the water, and send the mouse to his maker. Plus, a group of students could watch Jake catch and eat his prey.
It was imperative that the room be silent because otherwise Jake would be distracted and not eat. You can’t leave a mouse in a snake cage for long because as they become accustomed to each other, the snake fails to eat the mouse and sometimes the mouse will even gnaw on the snake. Really. And then Jake the Snake would become Jake the Snack – which was how some of my weaker spellers already described him.
The fateful Monday arrived.
“Adam, Alex, you’re the snake monitors this week. Time to get busy. And the blue group, it’s your turn to watch Jake eat. Come on up and remember to be perfectly still and silent.”
Alas, it wasn’t destined to be a silent Monday. Before I could act to quiet the kids, Jake acted. The mouse was in the jaws of death, the kids made too much noise and movement; Jake dropped his lunch into the water bowl, lunged after it, and voila! The mouse was again in the jaws of destruction. But, agitated by the commotion, Jake had him crosswise, not head first, and he couldn’t disengage his jaw to drop the mouse and start again.
Crimany, snakes I was ok with but mice gave me the creeps. Think. Alex and Adam were boys; they wouldn’t want to show fear or squeamishness, so they could handle this.
“Blue group, sit down. Boys, one of you is going to have to hold Jake and open his mouth while the other one removes the mouse.”
“Cool dude, that’s awesome.”
They both were excited. And Alex pried open Jake’s jaws while Adam removed the mouse, which then exploded. And there was blood. We – they – got it cleaned up, the day went on, I went home and started to worry.
Alex didn’t really have a family so no problem there, but Adam’s mom was involved. And she was big. Not fat, just really big and solid. Tall, imposing, scary. What if she got upset? What if she started worrying about salmonella? Isn’t that what you could get from handling reptiles? Why did I ever bring Jake to school? Maybe she was scared of snakes and would go to the principal about this irresponsible thing I’d done, exposing her son to illness and snakebite and mouse poisoning. Or talk to other parents who would talk to the principal because every Friday everyone in the room got to touch Jake when the snake monitor carried him around, and salmonella would reach epidemic proportions.
I worked hard at calming myself down since other stupid things I’d done had turned out ok in the end. But the next morning right before class started, the office secretary called to say Adam’s mom had come to see me. My fate was sealed. My first year of teaching would come to an ignominious end.
Adam and his mom entered the room, I greeted them calmly, on the outside at least, and she asked me a question about his writing. So far, safe. I still had a job, but I was waiting for the bomb to drop. And it did, but it was a dud. As we were finishing, she said, “By the way, about the snake yesterday? That was a really cool thing. Adam told me all about it and how exciting it was. Thanks for giving him the experience.” As she exited, somehow, I remained standing.
NOTE: The art journal image is actually one of my former 5th-grade students holding Jake the Snake. Jake now resides with Josh, my daughter Karen’s former boyfriend. Karen and Josh had many reptiles when they lived together, and he was happy to give Jake a home until one of us might want him back.
TRIVIA: A note about the student, Cristina. I had pictures of all the presidents in the back of the room, and one day Cristina put up her hand. “Yes, Cristina?” “Why are the presidents all old white men?” I thought it was a brilliant observation and I keep meaning to stop in at Walmart, where Cristina works while going to college, and ask her if she remembers that remark. Because of course it is no longer true.
Part Two
I’ve just picked Nita up from the airport wearing those flashing antennae – and on the way I saw a rainbow which I immediately took for a good omen.
Nita saw the rainbow also – from the plane! We headed back to Fantasy Springs – no need to wait for luggage – after all, Nini would be leaving again at 4:30 the next morning! So she arrived with a little hot pink bag whereas I arrived with a huge suitcase containing my pillows and down comforter. Why not? I was driving, (although I do confess to taking my comforter to Europe more than once). Most importantly, in our bags were the outfits we were going to wear to the concert.
Dress-up
Part of the fun was getting ready for this extravaganza. What to wear? I settled on black leggings rouched at the bottom, a gold sequin top (would rather have had black, but the black didn’t come in big sizes), a black jacket thingy I’d got at Ross ages ago, black boots (with gratitude to zappos.com – if you don’t get shoes from zappos.com, you should), and of course Party City’s flashing antennae. And a purple and black feather boa. That thing dropped feathers! You could follow me like Hansel and Gretel.
I’m getting ahead of myself again. So back to the resort – we had barely walked into the hotel when we encountered a group of women, and Nita knew quite a few from Twitter. They were going to lunch at Elephant Bar – did we want to go? Of course we did. No experience would be missed. The word of the day was YES. So off we went – with hot pink bag still in hand.
Look at that pink ring Nita is sporting! A wonderful glambert whose name I don’t know was giving out huge rings, little tiaras, and an Adam Lambert Concert Survival Kit!
This was fun and gave me more stuff to wear to the concert – all the necklaces, the little tiara, etc. Whoever did this – thank you so much! It’s so appreciated and really added to the fun and made me feel a part of things. I am not an active Lambert twitterer nor fan club poster, so I don’t know all the names like Nita does. Just the four I mentioned yesterday.
We wandered around back at the hotel, looking at all the fountains and such. What a gorgeous day.
I loved the angle of this next photo – the way the blue streak looks like a reverse plume of smoke from a chimney.
All righty. Time to get dressed! Which we did and Nita looked splendid in a fantastic blue top – you’ll see a photo below. It was time for the Glamily Reunion. When Fantasy Springs scheduled this concert, I don’t know if they really understood how we would take them by storm. As it became more apparent, they planned this Glamily event so we could all mingle and enjoy each other and Adam’s music. They had a cardboard cutout we could use for photos. Close as I got to the real thing.
Doesn’t Nita look gorgeous? I gotta say, though, if you want real attention, wear flashing antennae. While I was taking this next photo with my cell phone…
A reporter, Rodrigo Pena of the Press Enterprise, was taking this photo…
which appeared in the newspaper the next day!
Ok, Glamily Reunion over, we were primed. And in the lobby, there was Adam’s drummer Longineu. What a sweetie.
We were ready to rock and roll. Here we are waiting for the concert to begin.
And oh my, what a concert it was.
I won’t try to write a review, but I will make some observations. It seemed like Adam was finally free of the Idol constraints, the constraints of prime time television, and he was able to be himself. He was indeed our alien from the Planet Fierce.
I wish I could take credit for this photo, but it is Rodrigo Pena from the Press Enterprise. There are links all over the web where you can feast your eyes on this man, who by all appearances was happy. You can get a run down of the concert along with video at MJs Big Blog. Or just search the internet and you tube – some audio is better than others, as well as video.
Adam glittered, he vamped, he strutted, and oh did he sing. Anyone who hasn’t yet should download For Your Entertainment from iTunes and listen – especially to “Soaked,” “Broken Open,” and “Fever.”
Oh my God – Fever! The man became Laddie Gaga and was something indescribable – as he was in “Down the Rabbit Hole.” What I liked best was the acoustic set where his voice defied description – “Broken Open” and “Soaked” were worth the price of admission.
What brought the crowd to new heights of amazement was “Whole Lotta Love” which he sang in a slowed-down, bluesy acoustic version. The band hadn’t rehearsed it because Adam was spontaneous (he admitted to rehearsing in his car), but it was a virtuoso performance on all accounts. Do listen to this. For seven minutes, we were in a trance.
I can hardly process this experience still. To think that Adam Lambert may have never come to public attention without American Idol.
We were pretty zonked at this time and went up to the twelfth floor lounge for a tiny bit, then headed for bed. I took one and one-quarter sleeping pills and put in my earplugs, but Nini had to get up at 4:00 in the morning to take a taxi to the airport! She said afterwards that she thought about waking me to say goodbye – good thing she didn’t. She doesn’t know my total lack of functionality in the morning, and that barely qualified as morning. Pseudo-morning.
So after I got up at the more civilized hour of nine, I checked out and went back in to the Starbucks to try to establish some degree of coherence before heading home in the automobile. And after I chatted a minute with the guy behind me in line, my sleepy brain registered that it was Monte Pittman, Adam’s guitarist! He is also Madonna’s guitarist.
So this was cool. Oh – I should mention nail polish. See Monte’s black polish? We ALL had black polish, or dark blue, some with glitter. It was de rigueur.
Headed out with Adam on CD, loved the blue sky…
and the mountains and the wind farms…
(I wandered through the wind farms and that’ll be another post)…finally heading up over the Tejon Pass
(gotta stop taking photos while driving)…and exited the freeway at Olive Drive in Bakesfield…
which is the city I call home.
My fangirl experience had come to a close. Gosh I’m glad I did it. I was in a regular flapdoodle. I’m not sure what that means, but I read that word in the barefoot heart yesterday, in the “rightful sound” post by whollyjeanne, and I love it. I want to be in a flapdoodle so I’m using the word. I think it fits.
And let me just finish by saying this: my immediate fangirl experience may be over, but I am going to any Adam Lambert concert within a 300-mile radius. If I had the money and the time, I’d be a real groupie and go all over the world, but I’ll just have to live vicariously for now. Sigh.
The glittery alien from the Planet Fierce
Maybe I could just write the name Adam Lambert Adam Lambert Adam Lambert over and over. Would that explain it all? How does one begin talking about Adam Lambert? I’m going to try, so stick with me. Because this story is about more than one man, one glittery alien from Planet Fierce. It’s about bringing people together and making us play dress-up and go places we wouldn’t ordinarily go – not in our demographic. Adam’s main demographic, or fan base, as of now at least, is women over 40.
Creative Every Day’s theme for March is telling stories – and this is a multi-faceted story. Besides Adam Lambert, it’s a story about Twitter and making friends from cyberspace to real life. I went to Fantasy Springs with Nita Lambert, daxtonsnini on Twitter. I drove from Bakersfield; she flew from Oklahoma. We became best friends in 14 hours. But let’s unravel this story from the beginning, which of course is American Idol.
Why Adam?
Adam captured us with his voice. And his looks. Which did we notice first? Who could say? He’s the total entertainment package. But that voice, which spans octaves, bass to tenor! And that face and that body and the chameleon ability to morph into any decade, era or style! I talked about this with dozens of women at Fantasy Springs – what is it that binds us to this 28-year-old gay man? I think when we first saw him, it was nice to realize someone could still excite us. Next, our jaws dropped – someone like Adam couldn’t really be possible, could he? Then it was just fun. But we saw something else. As a 28-year-old gay man, Adam was comfortable in his skin. He had nothing to prove; he wasn’t making excuses because there was nothing to make excuses for. And he was nice – just a polite, nice Jewish boy. So we did what Jewish mothers do best – we got protective. Adam has thousands of mothers out here who will protect him like only a mother can. That’s our demographic. Don’t mess with our kid. Understand?
I become a fangirl and find daxtonsnini
We were captured and captivated and we began reading whatever we could find about Adam. This newly-minted fangirl, who had previously only followed Don Drysdale (a Dodger pitching great of the 50s and 60s) with any passion, found herself joining fan communities. And one day I must have done an Adam Lambert search on Twitter because I found someone named daxtonsnini. I’ve written about Nini previously. But her name attracted my attention – because who would be called Daxton except my 13-year-old granddaughter Daxton? Who surely was unique in the namebooks. So I tweeted daxtonsnini, asking her, “What’s up with your name?”
She has a three-year-old grandson named Daxton – that’s what’s up. And her name is Nita but he can’t say that so he calls her Nini. Daxtonsnini. We had Adam and Daxton in common. And we were both equally star struck. We had stars in our eyes. We were starry-eyed. The stars had come out for us. I’m glad we have camera-phones, however poor, to capture stars. This is Nita and me.
Let’s jump ahead (which I just did in the previous photo). Adam was giving his first solo concert at Fantasy Springs Casino and Resort in Indio, near Palm Springs. I wanted to go. I wasn’t going to go. I had to go. I couldn’t afford to go. But how could I miss it!?! I would miss it. I was at the cabin on the day tickets went on sale, and at 10:00 A.M. I was online buying two tickets. I tweeted Nita. I had two tickets and a reservation at the hotel. She had to come. No, she said, she couldn’t come. Daxton had been ill, had surgery, and she’d taken too many days off work to care for him.
Did I mention she is a teacher, like me? And a reading curriculum specialist, like my daughter Jennifer? And that she’s been married 40 years? And I’ve been married 41 years?
Blackmail – almost
I shamed her into it. If I could go to Switzerland for four days, which I once did to visit someone, surely she could fly to Palm Springs from Oklahoma on a Saturday and return on Sunday? Indeed she could. I told her that she’d know me at the airport because I’d be the one wearing blinking antennas. If she didn’t believe me, she didn’t know me. (I have a friend, Tammie Stevens, who made a shirt for me once that said “Dignity is not in my future!”) So here we are in the airport and I have my blinking antennae on.
Synchronicity
I’m jumping ahead again – Nita didn’t arrive until Saturday morning, and I arrived Friday. I checked into the room and went to the box office to collect the tickets. And I ran into lots of people doing the very same thing. A few of us went into the Special Events Center where the concert would be held to check out the stage. And play on the stage as it turned out, and stand in the very same place Adam would be standing.
People came from all over the United States – the world even! Canada, Thailand, Australia – and Bakersfield, CA. I went into the casino with these ladies, who were from New York, Canada, and I forget where else, to have a drink in the steakhouse, suppressing my normal behavior which would have been to go to my room, relax, read, write, etc. I was going to wring every once of experience out of this fangirl adventure. And in the steakhouse we met Isabelle. She is an 89-year-old woman from Wisconsin who is a huge Adam fan! She recorded a happy birthday message to him on you tube, it came to the attention of fan groups who found out she couldn’t afford to go to the concert, so the fan groups started fundraising and bought plane tickets for Isabelle and her daughter; Fantasy Springs kicked in the hotel rooms, and Isabelle was even able to meet Adam.
That’s Isabelle in the middle. What a sweet lady and what a wonderful story!
Now this starts to get bizarre – creepy – strangely wonderful – and the synchronicity kicks in. I am in some fan groups but I can’t remember which ones exactly and my user names are all bollixed up, and Nita was my only Adam-related Twitter contact. As the concert approached, she suggested I follow GlamUlli, LambertFan8, and Binahlinda. So I did. Right after we posed for this photo with Isabelle, another large group came in for dinner. I recognized a photo from Twitter – it was GlamUlli – from North Carolina! Out of the 3,500 people attending this concert, GlamUlli walked into the restaurant!
Pretty dang amazing. Then a smaller group walked in and I sort of joined them at their table for dinner even though the waitress said there wasn’t enough room. And of those four people I joined, two of them were LambertFan8 from Fairfield in Northern California and Binahlinda from Texas. How amazing is that? I had just met three of my four twitter contacts and would be picking the fourth up at the airport the next morning.
That’s LambertFan8 on the left and Binahlinda on the right. So far, we all seem like pretty normal people.
Crisis
We had a great dinner – excellent food – and finally I headed to my room. I got undressed and started setting out my clothes for the next day – I knew I had to pick up Nita at 9:58 so I had to be prepared – I am not a morning person as regular readers know by now. I started organizing. Where were the tickets for the concert and the Glamily Reunion? They were not in my purse. But I put them in my purse – carefully! Stay calm, I told myself. Check jeans pockets, remove everything from purse, check wastebasket. They just weren’t there. Call restaurant.
I got the security desk in the casino. I explained my predicament. They said the restaurant was closed. I said, please go see if Dominic is there (the manager) and he’ll remember me. Please look for my tickets. They did, they called back, and said no tickets had been found. I was approaching full-panic mode but I was stark naked. I called the front desk. All I could do was wait for the box office to open at 10 in the morning. But Binahlinda might still be in the casino! I called her cell number. It was not her cell. It was her home number. Her husband answered and I explained and asked for her cell and he told me to hold on while he found it. He must have had to go a very long way to find it but finally, I had it.
I texted Linda. Are you still in casino? No, she wasn’t. She had returned to the Holiday Inn.
Saved
I got dressed. I went to the restaurant. The door was open – I told the bartender what had happened (she remembered me also as we’d had quite a chat about Cochise County, Arizona, where she’s from), she told me to go in the restaurant and look, and someone appeared to say they had found tickets. I was saved. Can you even imagine having to pick up this wonderful woman Nita whom I had almost browbeaten into coming with the news that the tickets were lost?
Tomorrow I’ll finish with Part Two, unless it drags on, in which case I’ll turn it into a three-parter.
Stay tuned….as I proceed to dress completely inappropriately for my age and body type.
That would be Glambert day. Two days to go until the big Palm Springs adventure. (the Adam Lambert concert that I’m going to with my twitter friend from Oklahoma) Didn’t realize quite how long the drive was – four plus hours. I’ll be fine if I sleep. Last couple of nights I’ve been getting up at midnight or 1:00 am and going down to the studio to do a couple of journal pages. Been too long since I’ve been in the studio and it’s bottling up. Too much happening too, what with our unexpected purchase of a house.
Who watched Idol Tues. and Wed? I had a feeling that the season would be flat without Adam. He was so exciting that we can’t expect anyone else like that to show up. But really – the song choices were so drippy and boring. Out of the thousands of choices available, this is the best they could do? Casey is the boy standout, and not just because he’s so darn cute. He puts his soul in his work and his image fits his song choice. Other than him, where’s the stage presence?
Girls – Crystal and Lilly were the only stand-outs as far as I’m concerned.
And yes, I miss Paula; and no, I can’t get used to Kara. I keep trying but just can’t warm up to her.
So here are the journal pages I did the last two nights. They don’t mean anything in particular: my constraint for journaling still is watercolor background and collage material from a few National Geographics I have laying around.
This is The Blues. The next one is Electro Pop.
Full report with photos coming after Palm Springs. However – the Casino says we cannot take cameras into the concert. And how is this stopped, what with cell phones and all? We’ll see.
Today’s post is pretty darn close to the Creative Every Day theme of Home. Coming at the end of February, this is the kicker.
We made an impulse purchase yesterday – we opened escrow on a house! We seem to buy our houses with less than thought we give to spending $9.99 on a new can opener. It’s not quite as alarming as it sounds, actually. For anyone who’s been following my blog, you know that I’ve been dealing with aging parents. Mom is 86 with Alzheimers and is starting to forget who people are; Dad is 91 and is just now repeating himself, forgetting things, sleeping most of the day, and Sunday told me he thinks his mind is declining.
That’s all pretty normal. The problem is created by Mom and Dad giving no thought to their declining years other than a refusal to leave their home or let anyone in their home to assist. Which puts the burden on us kids. And “us kids” – well, we may be in our 50s and 60s, but we are still helping out our own kids with grandchildren. The world is getting smaller and we are gravitating back to the days when extended families lived together or in a compound and assisted each other. Only problem is, we don’t live near each other and we’re getting squeezed. Even living in the same city is not near enough. I wrote an essay about that, Stuck in the Middle, mainly to get my thoughts square I guess.
So my husband and I concluded that we need to take whatever steps we can to ease the burden on our children NOW, when we are 63 and healthy and vital. Because if we wait until we need to take steps, we won’t be able to. We decided to sell our house – our beautiful house on the lake. That was not an easy decision. We love this house, we’ve put so much into it, and it’s been perfect for the grandkids and for entertaining. But we thought we should have a one-story house with less maintenance, less yard, but most importantly, with a room and bath separate from the main house so that when we get like my parents are, someone can be hired to live in with us and take the burden off the kids. And moving, while daunting and scary, can only get harder as the years pass.
We were going to wait a year and then start looking. Just the other day I asked Mark if he’d given any thought to neighborhoods and suggested that we might want to think about areas we’d like. Of course, it would be within a small radius of where we are now since two daughters live close by. I said I’d always been curious about the San Trope development.
Which brings me to last Saturday. I went out to take photos of orchards in bloom, took my usual route home which passed San Trope, saw an open house sign and on the spur of the moment turned in. The street was Via Lugano. Not only was Italy our favorite country, I visited William, a former student, three years running while he was in boarding school in Lugano, Switzerland. It must be an omen.
I got to the house.
See the brown door? That’s the front door. This is the door to the left of the brown door:
It leads into a room and bathroom separate from the house! I couldn’t believe it. Some good karma was going on here.
Walking in the front door, there was a large area for a living room.
And a dining area with a built-in breakfront. But take a look at that door you can barely see on the right. It leads into a room with fantastic north light. Studio, anyone? I was getting goosebumps.
Nice big open kitchen with a giant island – something I’ve always wanted. And the drawers have pull-outs so you don’t have to squat and search through the shelves for a bowl. Knees work a little less well each year, so this is a wonderful feature.
A nice family room with fireplace (because we really need that in Bakersfield) and built-in entertainment center, which we’ll probably use to display sculpture.
Fantastic master bath – look at that tub! Bathtubs are very important to me, and we can put in bars and a little staircase when I need it. Like small dogs have to climb up on beds.
Now I was really flipping. This closet is as big as a room, and the house is 2,800 square feet.
Next is the best part. I was afraid we’d have to move into a smaller house in a crowded area. But this house is on a golf course.
We may get hit by an errant golf ball, but we’ll never feel hemmed in.
The yard isn’t too bad. Not much maintenance, and we’ll gradually replace the shrubs with cacti. And we’ll plant a row of queen palms in front of the fence – it might block a golf ball here and there.
The front has a nice parking area, and when the trees have leaves it’ll be like a park. And our end of the street ends with a canal, so no development there.
I drove home and said, “Mark, I’ve found our house.” He came back with me, we went back on Sunday and made an offer, and by the close of Monday we were in escrow. It’s a short sale but everything has been approved. It all just seemed like fate.
Operation Old Age has begun. Packing and moving will probably hasten the old age – Mark can hardly face it, but it would only have gotten worse. And of course there is the matter of selling our current house. Naturally, the next couple of months are the busiest of the year for me without selling, packing and moving. We truly can’t afford to own three houses! (The cabin in Alta Sierra is house-size.)
It makes us sound rich, which we are not. In fact, I hope we have enough to get us through old age. But compared to most of the world, we are wealthy. We’re aware of that and quite grateful. We’re wealthy in family, in possessions and health, in love and friendship, in self-fulfillment. And we have the self-awareness to begin planning for the future as much as possible. Operation Plan Ahead, or Operation Old Age, is underway.
Creative Every Day’s theme for February is Home. Today I took a few minutes to look over one of my homes. We all have so many: the walls that surround and contain our house is what we most often view as home. Yet our homes go deeper as well as wider. We can be at home in our bodies, spiritually home in our souls, comfortable in our own skin – but we can also be at home in our neighborhood, our city, our state, and so on up the continuum. Today I took a little tour around the neighborhood I call home, and it was indeed a beautiful day in the neighborhood.
We have rural areas about a mile from our house. The almond trees are in full bloom – so beautiful! Obviously, Saturday morning traffic was light.
The blossoms are so delicate and lovely, and the fallen petals look like snow. If you check out this link, you can see last year’s orchards, which I used in a collage, Burro Love. You’ll have to forward through to picture 32. And if you stop at picture 24, Grounded, you’ll see the background is just almond petals. I used that as the background for the lotus flowers and the Buddha, photos I took in China. The background is enigmatic: no one was able to recognize just what it is – almond petals.
The almond trees whisper to us that Spring will once again visit this corner of the earth. It won’t be here long – in Bakersfield Spring quickly turns to Summer – temperatures in the hundreds, dirty air – but for now, Spring is so hopeful that it doesn’t seem to matter.
The grapevines, however, remind us that we do have a ways to go yet.
We have this to look forward to – leaves of the newest green, deepening as the grapes grow, and finally ending with blazing fall colors, only to go dormant again.
So it was a beautiful day in my neighborhood, a place I call home.
New find for the studio
I became aware of these dish drying mats at Bed, Bath, and Beyond. I’ve been using them in the studio to wipe paint brushes on, etc. and I just pop them in the washer from time to time.
They’re about $10 each – but they sure save on paper towels. I use them for the dishes, too.
