Life's a Stitch

A little over a year ago we were living in our house in the rain forest, dreaming of finding our forever home. We zoned in on White Rock, a seaside community, a place we thought we could never afford. I researched what it had to offer as a community and something caught my eye – a course in Chinese brush painting. 

In our second year of retirement, it's all come together. We sold our house in North Vancouver and were able to find one in our desired location, somewhat affordable as it was "structurally deficient," in need of significant work. We still hope that the major renovation will come in on budget. Originally planning to move to a condo, we hope to able to live without association fees and those dreaded special assessments plus have the benefit of a secondary walk out apartment on the ground level.

The vision was complete, when this weekend I took a two day course in Chinese brush painting, offered through the local art guild that I was able to join, despite spending significant time on the waiting list. The art of brush painting takes years to master. It is a method of conveying, through a series of exacting brush strokes, an image from your head to rice paper. There are no photo references or pre-drawings, you develop your subject from within.

Scary stuff, this brush painting. There is no going back, no correcting nor improving upon what you've put on the paper. You only get one chance. What you paint is an impression of the object and a reflection of yourself. In consideration of the philosophy, so different from western thinking, I suppose this is me as a bird:

The most important lesson: there's no such thing as perfect. I like my little imperfect little me-bird.

Times have changed in the 40+ (!) years since I finished my undergraduate degree. Googling crazy college stories you get a top ten list, a wide variety of tales from Tinder to other types of hook ups. We probably had our share of similar arrangements in my day, think the Summer of Love, but out of ten stories they would be minimal. 

My dorm stories would include opening a wine bottle with an umbrella, only to have the pointy end come out the bottom end, bottle in tact. Or the time (in NY) when after a night of partying (I'm not sure party was a verb in that era), when five of us crammed into an orange MG MGB GT and drove to Central Park, arriving at 5:00 a.m. to "borrow" a rowboat and row around the lake to watch the sunrise. Funny, my two years older cousin was involved in both those escapades.

In the latter years I remember a long night involving far more red wine than I would now choose to consume and a young woman claiming to have links to others' past lives. It was a warm starry night, sometime in the early pre dawn. She went one by one, telling us our past incarnations. The first one in the circle had been an Egyptian princess, the next a medieval noblewoman. She went round the circle and finally got to me, the last in the line of women with auspicious pasts.

You, she said. I held my breath in wonderment. What was my story going to be? You, she declared strongly, were a prairie pioneer woman. What? Amongst all these queens and duchesses, I crossed the prairies in a covered wagon, hauling wood and collecting kindling? No wonder that book about the Donner Party scared me to death. I must have heard of their fate and dreaded my own expedition on the Oregon Trail. 

Really, though, I have an appreciation for the prairies, with the exception of the absence  of large bodies of water. Remember, from past posts, I am quite happy 1500 miles out at sea, especially when the weather is good and seas are calm.

This past trip to Alberta included daily walks in a park in the high prairie, where the natural vegetation has been preserved, including a huge blue sky, waves of grasslands and shady stands of cottonwood and balsam poplar. The majestic Canadian Rockies in the background, you could almost imagine what it would have been like in years past. 

I wonder, when looking back, what crazy retirement stories will be like?

 

Taken out of context that could have dire implications. In child bearing years anyway. Or for certain situations such as a job interview. For me, it's sticking to a weekly blogging schedule. In retirement. Can you imagine I've given up my career and still lack time? I was warned by very wise people that this would happen. 

We are back "home" for a few weeks while moving yet again. Our building permits are imminent and the deconstruction crew is due to take over at the end of the month. There is hardly time to sit for more than a brief bit as we continue our part of the demolition. Our builder has humoured C in letting him try to fit the current kitchen cabinets into the downstairs suite.

We couldn't bring ourselves to let go of such beautiful maple cupboards, not to mention the blue oyster granite, which will fit downstairs with minimal cutting. If I were renting a walk out apartment in a house, I'd love to have a smaller version of that kitchen.

We had intended to hand over demolition to Habitat for Humanity's restore, but all they were interested in was the kitchen. They don't use salvaged items for their new builds, and are quite selective about what goes to their Re-Store. Instead we turned to the free section of Craig's List. Some of our interior doors are now being shipped to the Philippines where a local man is building a five room house for his sister, the rest went to a couple to repair their rental unit that was trashed by drug dealers. I believe that some of our bathroom fixtures are also being shipped to Asia.

The one thing that's most difficult to sacrifice is the 3/4" oak hardwood after seeing what a good job our neighbour did refinishing his. In reconfiguring our house, flipping the main and the top floor, there'd be so much patching it would be far more expensive than replacing with engineered hardwood. Add in the fact that the house will be roofless for a period of time leaving the floor exposed to the elements. I don't want to be around when it goes. 

Also late, I realized that I forgot to post my final picture of St. John, New Brunswick done in coloured pencil on canvas. The last time you saw it in the tonal drawing underpainting phase. I called it Twelve Red Chimneys, sort of an I Spy painting, I imagine the grandkids trying to pick them out. 

Downtown St. John has done a good job of preserving their old buildings as opposed to the Vancouver area where thousands are demolished and rebuilt, and so many people are rushing around trying to arrange moves and demolitions and end up late posting to their blogs.

 

Having our life's belongings packed up and ready to go has allowed us lots of flexibility. The past two weeks were spent in Calgary, Alberta for a family Easter celebration. 

Who would have expected a white Easter? Certainly not me, the British Columbian weather wimp, but apparently there can be snow during any month in Alberta. There was no stopping grandson Rye from his search:

Uncle KC was tasked with picking up a pocket bib for Mr. Parker. The only one left was hot pink with a string of pearls closure:

The purple yams were a hit with the men in the family:

By afternoon, the snow was gone. Elina had arranged an elaborate Easter activity, after blowing out the contents of 60 eggs and filling them with colourful tempera paint, we had an egg toss onto canvas. We each went home with a work of Easter art:

A colourful time was had by all. 

My eldest daughter's and my names are blends combining the first and middle names of a number of family members. Elina's has part of mine, my mother's, my MIL's, our sisters, my cousin… Throw in her middle name, Marie, and at least four more are covered. 

Mine is a combination of my mother's and grandmother's, with a slight spelling change of an "s" to a "c:" Lilice. If it had remained an "s" it might have avoided the mispronunciation that rhymes it with Alice, rather than Denise, and there would be no way my boating license would have been issued to "Lice."

Around the time wheaten Scottie dog, Gracee, joined our family, we had dinner at a local marina. Docked in front of our patio table was an old motor boat called, you guessed it, Gracee. A couple of the kids disagreed with the spelling choice, so we agreed to disagree, and for a time we each spelled it In our own way. It doesn't matter to a dog, does it? They eventually gave in.

A recent Saturday watercolour subject were the hulls of  old rusty fishing boats, one name meaningless to our family, so I changed it:

Oh that feeling of completion. From finishing a years-in-progress knitting project to finalizing the tax returns to small endings like using up the last of the blue cheese dressing and tossing the jar into glass recycling. More space in the fridge and one less thing to think about moving, storing or giving away.

I'll be glad to get to the end of my current read, the Indifferent Stars Above, by Daniel James Brown, the author of the Boys in the Boat. What possessed me to read an account of the Donner Party's ill-fated journey? It might require critical incident stress debriefing afterwards, similar to when I recently read the Holocaust parts of James Michener's Poland. I'm taking recommendations for a happy book.

This finished painting marks the end of winter weather. I think we're there – the cherry blossoms are finally blooming, three weeks late. Last year they were three weeks early!

What could that title possibly mean? There's a simple explanation:

On the set of the Christmas movie, in which C and I were acting as artists at a craft fair, C had an extensive conversation with the movie's Santa. C proudly showed him the picture of his post Camino beard.

With a beard like that, Santa encouraged him to develop his acting career. The possibilities include not only Santa, but roles as Vikings, bikers and the homeless. He also encouraged C to buy his own Santa suit and tuxedo (not sure for which part – imagining a biker dude en tux). When you can furnish a specialized costume, the movie actually rents the clothes you are wearing. A tux nets you an extra $35. It brought back memories of a movie of B's younger acting career where they rented a couple of my scarves for the production at $15 a piece.

Santa concluded his advice to C to pursue his  part time retirement career with the fact that plenty of Santas have died this year leaving room for more. That's reassuring.

On the morning of my rain-chequed birthday, C headed up to the local hospital thrift store to pick up a $30 tux he had seen. Thrift stores are a staple in the movie industry. He found the jacket, but the pants were missing. A hanger-by-hanger search revealed the missing trousers in the women's section. At the cash registered he discovered that all winter stock was marked down 50%. A short while later he appeared in his $15 costume (sans bow tie and appropriate footwear), to hand deliver my birthday gifts.

On the topic of Christmas, all the rain we experieced in the Coachella Valley over the holiday season meant lots of snow in the mountains. On our way home from the annual art show, I stopped to take a photo of the the snowy mountains with palm trees in the foreground, thinking that it would make an interesting painting. This is the finished watercolour:  

 

 

Some of you will remember that satirical David Frost news show, circa 1964, one of my dad's favourites. This will be one of those minutiae of life posts, a genre I generally don't appreciate, so popular on social media sites such as Facebook. But it was an interesting week, to me at least. 

Monday: after a fun weekend with Blogless Marsha and D, I  was anxious, as in nervous, to attend my first meeting of the local art society, having been admitted while we were away last fall. There was a painting challenge with food being the subject. There were maybe 75 people present and about 25 entries. Long story short (all the better when having to endure another's minutiae) I won second prize for my olive painting. The cash prize will go toward a fancy brush. 

Tuesday we worked a 14 hour day on set of another greeting card company's Christmas movie. I think I read that they produce 17 new Christmas movies per year. Once again C and I were hired as artists to display our wares in a craft fair scene. There were plenty of soap suds snow squalls and truckloads of real snow shovelled about. I felt bad for those production assistants, whose job it was to shovel snow all day. They worked us hard, too, 12 hours on our feet. It was fun, though, reuniting with seven of the eight artists from last year's film shoot.

Wednesday was my birthday, a write off. We retired folk were wiped out after a 14 hour work day. I took a rain check until Thursday.

Thursday: C, the reluctant geocacher, accompanied me to a nearby park in our new neighbourhood for the obligatory birthday geocaching expedition.

Dinner was crab night at the local pub, with C, B, and Footloose (our boarder from our last house), a bargain at $12.99 each. 

Friday morning was my biennial mammogram. New to this health region, it was my first experience at this particular clinic. At the point when they asked me to grab the handle and turn my head to the right, I noticed the quilt on the wall, the perfect distraction:

Saturday started with a dental appointment at 7:30 a.m. followed by breakfast at a friend's new condo. Then it was a painting day with my instructor back in North Vancouver followed by a delicious birthday dinner at my friend Lynn's, complete with my favourite Boston Cream Pie.

That was the week that was.  

 

 

Remember old cartoons that depicted First Nations settlements with a circle of tipis and a totem pole in the middle? A cultural anachronism for sure, as those two items belonged to Native American groups located in completely different regions of North America. I live in the region known for its totems, constructed by Northwest Coastal Aboriginal people. Totems are intended to document important events or family stories and are treated with great respect. If one starts to lean they can be braced, but when it falls to the ground it is left to be consumed by the earth. 

In last week's painting class the subject was a portion of a totem I've walked by, in one of our three trips to Juneau, Alaska, called Harnessing of the Atom by Amos Wallace. We painted the man (in the middle) who was holding the sun, but the depiction of the Russian Priest, under the eagle, kind of reminds me of C. Here's the story:

 Here's my painting:

 

Driving from the Coachella Valley to Phoenix, we stopped for gas. I asked permission to take a picture of the sign at the cash register:

The clerk said boob money is a major issue. Who knew?

Then we saw a massive building complex way off in the distance in the middle of nowhere. Next came the sign that explained it all: 

I wondered how often that sign has done its job of deterring prisoner pick up.

 Not a sign sign as in something meant to provide information, but a sign of the times. Walking in our California neighbourhood, amongst the post-Christmas trash, there were boxes for Hatchimals, Superstar Buddies and a Quick Access Biometric Pistol Safe.

I guess I should feel safe?

Another commentary on today's lifestyle reminded me of this scene from the Robin Williams "Moscow on the Hudson." It's an entire grocery store aisle of cookies and chips. 

Back home, B and I went for a walk along the main street of our new town. A charity thrift store displayed this one:

Looks like you'll have to wait until those children turn three before you can donate them.