A little art from my friends

San Fran Margo, my good friend of many years, has become a great water-colorist. She recently sent this lovely card depicting a B&B Doug and I visit at Bethany Beach, Delaware.

PS: I swore in January 2017 that I wouldn't blog about that maniac in the WH. Believe me, it's hard! But every time I post without mentioning him I feel a little stronger.

Hi Kathy! I don't save the bee balm seeds but I'll start if you want them. Sorry about the deer and your purple hyacinth beans. They love mine too.

Sad Beautiful Tree.

My neighbor has trained a wisteria plant, or plants, to create this tree -- picture taken in May 2015.

Here's what it looks like today, April 22, 2016.

It's getting very late in the wisteria season...I've seen wisteria shrubs and overgrown vines in full bloom nearby. But this guy has only a few emerging leaves. My neighbor is worried. I'm worried too, mostly for her mental health. This lady is very attached to that tree and will mourn grievously if it dies. I suspect, but really don't know, that it might need a serious pruning, now rather than later. Any opinions?

A frost we had a few weeks ago got to it for sure, although there wasn't much visible spring growth at the time. But much of the emerging greenery got fried by that frost -- it just didn't seem like enough damage to make the entire tree stop producing leaves and blooms.

I know wisteria is a wildly invasive plant, scorned by true gardeners. But with care you can prevent it from spreading.  

Arthur and Anne. And Rebecca.

A good friend, and lapsed blogger at The Complaint Department, gave me this print in honor of my love of crows (and a convenient birthday). I loved it from the moment I saw it. It now hangs in my dining room so I can see it every time I eat at the dinner table. Which is most nights of the week. The artist is Colette Davis. Thanks again Anne!

I named the crow Arthur, and of course the lady is Anne. She asked if I thought the lady in the painting looks a little like my daughter. I think she does!

A Worthy project.

Every Wednesday I spend a few hours volunteering at my local library. This is my all-time favorite volunteer activity -- shelving books, recovering books, moving books. I even get to push one of those library carts around like a big shot.

Recently the head librarian asked me to take on a special project (!!). Mr. Worthy, a daily library patron I've never met, leaves little slips of paper with quotations he's found in books he's reading. The librarians, not knowing exactly what to do with all these slips of paper, have kept them in an envelope waiting for an idea to emerge. Now I have the slips of paper and I'm typing them up, cutting them into strips, and they'll be folded and placed in a basket so other patrons can pick one up as they leave the library. Sort of like fortune cookies without the cookie. 

When I'm working on this project, I always think of my good friend San Francisco Margo. She makes adorable book marks and sends me a supply every couple of years. She often uses old Christmas cards or other greeting cards to find a nice image. Then she laminates the pithy quotation on the back and viola! a sweet bookmark. They are well used in this house. 

Most of Mr. Worthy's quotations are sweet thoughts about how to love and live happily. This, however, is my favorite so far:

When you criticize someone you should walk a mile in their shoes. That way when you criticize them you are a mile away from them and  you have their shoes.

                                                                                                           Author Unknown

Lunch with my buds at the Silver Spring Diner.

We are five women who met at work in the early 90s at the National Institutes of Health. Three of us are now retired but we join up with the two still-working young ladies every month or so to have lunch, or breakfast, at the diner. Always a good time.

Happy Hallowmas.

[November 1st is All Saints' Day -- and is also known by some as Hallowmas, facts I spent most of my life not knowing.]

Today I went with a friend, formerly just another blogger (The Complaint Department) and now a very good in-person buddy, to the National Gallery of Art in DC. We thoroughly toured an Andrew Wyeth exhibit, and also saw a few other odds and ends. (And, truthfully, we had a long lunch in the Gallery restaurant and then a long visit at the gift store so it was a balance between art and consumption.)



Wind from the Sea, 1947.

We parked in front of the Capitol, which is undergoing repairs. [insert lame joke about Congress and repairs here]

 

The Rotunda in the National Gallery of Art.

 

Many people know of Wyeth's famous painting Christina's World. It's not my favorite Wyeth, not by a long shot, but maybe that's because it's almost become a joke painting -- so many take-offs and parodies over the years. The works we saw today contained no humans but many windows and curtains. All were stunning.

 

After I got home and did some googling on Wyeth I was reminded of Helga, a secret German model he had for many years who posed nude for him. He was married, she was married, and neither spouse knew of the painting sessions. I'll have to do some more reading to find out what else occurred, if anything, during those long hours of posing and painting. And there's my gossipy art lesson for the day. 

One article, full of common sense. I wish it would change my life.

Even my gardens are cluttered. But I think it's OK to clutter a garden.

The stuff clutters the mantels, crowds the table tops, overflows from shelves. It creates confusion, requires constant dusting, and makes no decorative contribution. Everyone ceases to see it. Usually 90 per cent of this clutter is too small to require a second thought. Having it on display is like wearing all the costume jewelry you own at one time. So unless you want to develop a serious case of bric-a-brac mind, the frivolous, petty, small junk must be cleared out.

From How to Keep House, 1948, Mary Davis Gillies.


Place firmly in your mind the protective mantra that if you haven’t felt affection for an object in six months, the unbearable pain you’re feeling at the thought of its demise is a kind of false consciousness. Also, beware of overindulgence in thriftiness, which is very often the first sign of hoarding. Indeed, when I roam my house with receptacles (for donation, recycling, and garbage), I call it my “anti-hoarding” prowl.

From this article on Slate.com.

I quilt. Occasionally.

 

My good friend Shannon and I have been making quilts together for, I don't remember how long. (We met in 1991 so sometime between then and 2003.) Here are the most recent paired quilts we made and swapped as Christmas presents to each other. As always, we started with the same fabrics, and the same basic pattern and idea, but then we did our own special design and surprised each other. (Top quilt made by me, now living with Shannon. Bottom quilt made my Shannon, now living with me.)

Downward facing kitty (Clarence) above. He LOVES this quilt.

 

 

They were great fun to make, and now she and I will start working on another quilting project. TBD.

"I tend to hold back my opinion on things that I know nothing of."

This remark came to me during a casual email exchange with someone about 40 years my junior but way, way wiser than I. It's a good principle to follow in life, even for someone of my advanced age. Never too late to learn.

[Photo: Father of the bride the evening before the wedding. Totally unrelated to the above quotation.]

A Colorado columbine successfully re-locates to Maryland.

Thanks to Kitt, who a couple of years ago sent me some seeds from her gorgeous patch of Columbines.  I planted the seeds a year ago but nothing happened. I saw this plant growing a few weeks ago and thought at first it was a weed. But my weed-loving instincts told me to let it be. I was rewarded! Only one plant came up (or survived me poking around in the ground nearby) but maybe I'll have more next year. Thanks again Kitt!

Well, maybe next time for Stephen. And thanks to the always funny SF Margo for the other photo.

Although I'm not a Catholic I spend time each week at the place below, the Franciscan Monastery of the Holy Land in America in Northeast DC. I'll be there tomorrow and expect to see lots of atta' boys among the brown-garbed brothers.

How great is this? SF Friend M. becomes a foster beekeeper.

It's a long story, which I'll report later. Margo lives in San Francisco in a really old house. Details to follow.

[note: I'm trying to type using only one space between sentences; mostly I'm forgetting, so I have to go back and delete one space -- very annoying]

A trip to the National Gallery of Art. 18th Century artist Itō Jakuchū. 30 scrolls in a collection called Colorful Realm of Living Beings.

My blogging buddy Anne got me out of Silver Spring and into DC to see this wonderful exhibit. Last picture shows wisteria growing along a wall on the mall entrance to the Gallery. And I managed to take one interior shot before a guard politely told me to cease and desist. A beautiful exhibit and a lovely lunch!

Speaking of plates...

For my birthday my friend Anne gave me this beautiful red platter and the delights it holds. The red plate is in honor of our many talks about food and dieting (and this interesting little factoid she recently came across). The chocolate is in honor of...well, does chocolate need a reason to exist? And the shells: Oh those shells! She lives above the Calvert Cliffs, in Calvert County MD. When she takes walks on the shoreline she finds these amazing shells, many of which have been buried in the cliffs for thousands of years. Like that large scallop shell. Also in the grouping are barnacles, a moon shell, and I can't remember the names of the others but maybe she'll chime in.

Thanks again Anne!

A trip to Old Town Alexandria, VA.

Anne of The Complaint Department and I went to Old Town yesterday. She wanted to buy some lamp shades and I went along for the ride. We had lunch at a Lebanese restaurant called Layla's (do the Lebanese worship Eric Clapton??) -- this was the sampler appetizer we shared.** And she wowed me by buying, seemingly impulsively, an enormous chest of drawers ... as a gift for her husband. It wasn't totally an impulse purchase. She had seen it just after Christmas and remembered it. I was just very impressed with the efficient, decisive, well-thought-out way she made the purchase. And then a gathering of store employees and free-lance workers-on-the-street helped load it into her car and off we went, back over the Woodrow Wilson Bridge into Maryland.

Old Town is a lovely place to visit and we're going back when the weather is better. I want to visit the Masonic Temple, which you can see way in the background on the left in the third picture from the top. I don't know why exactly, except that I'm always curious about these semi-secret societies.

**1/21/12 update: the restaurant was actually The Pita House not Layla's. Two Lebanese restaurants within a block or two of each other!

Tweet.

An alert and faithful reader reports that the writer Susan Orlean tweeted today that she was up:
“to all hours last night trying to sort out the plot of Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Failed.”
My alert reader alerted me to this tweet because she knew it would make me feel absolutely OK with abandoning Salman Rushdie and his beautiful but way too complicated for me book Midnight's Children. Thank you alert reader.

And now I've seen one example of why Twitter is worth the effort. I have an account but I never check it and lord knows I've never tweeted.

Picture of sweet daughter and sweet future son-in-law at the pond next to our house the day after Thanksgiving. Don't they look like they're lost and a little uneasy? They're used to the streets of Brooklyn.

You meet the nicest people on blogs. I admired Kitt's columbine and she sent me some seeds. And what a beautiful card. Thanks Kitt!

Here are Kitt's columbine seeds, some of which traveled from Denver to DC and I hope will be blooming in my garden next summer.

I'm making a tee shirt quilt for Stargazer, who lives way, way on the other side of the US.

After reading her post about, among other things, an outworn tee shirt, I offered impulsively to turn the shirt (along with some others of hers) into a quilt. I'm so glad I did. This will be a test to see how long it takes me. I'm guessing 6 weeks. It will be a tied quilt, not a quilted quilt. Quilted quilts take me years to finish. But a tied quilt that involves only minimal piecing shouldn't take long at all. One rule: I never sew until after 8 or 9 at night, often later. Something about not being able to sew during day-light hours .... If I was willing (able?) to sew during the day I bet I could finish it in a couple of weeks. We'll never know.

And after I finish her quilt, maybe I'll finally finish my own tee shirt quilt that I started years ago and just found. (I've GOT to clean out my quilting closet.)

Love the tee shirt from Minnesota (bad picture at top).

An ikebana workshop and a meet-up with a friend.

On Sunday I met my blogging buddy Anne at the Smithsonian's Sackler Gallery on the Mall for a workshop on ikebana, Japanese flower arranging. We also had a short tour of some Japanese screens and pottery, which was very interesting. Anne did a great job of summing up our very fun day so go there for more details.

I learned something interesting about Anne just at the very end of the workshop. We were each given a handy little box to carry home our two floral arrangements. Anne decided that lugging the box to her car and driving home with it wasn't for her. Too much hassle. She didn't need the recycled wine bottle that held one arrangement nor did she need the little glass bowl holding the second arrangement. Me? Even though I was going home on the Metro and had to change subway lines at the extremely busy Metro Center (DC is still in high tourist season AND the very popular Folklife Festival was being held on the Mall), I was determined to bring home my "loot" -- aforementioned recycled wine bottle and cheap glass bowl. Don't ever believe her if she says she hoards things. A true hoarder would have done what I did.

Isn't Anne adorable? Soon there will be another Anne-Pam adventure to report on! To be continued...

I keep joining and quitting Facebook b/c I've got a really bad attitude about it. But sometimes it's worth having.

Posted by Annie P. on June 6:
actual sign seen in my apartment building: "free books-- please take. don't need them. wife knows everything."