Rolf came home with more berries than you can shake a stick at last night. 

He had picked Freyja up from daycare for me,  and they went berry picking and then to dinner at a favorite diner of ours. 
There were clamstrips and giant rootbeer floats and heaps of french fries.

I was sort of impressed.  In the 24 years we've been friends it has always been my job to navigate.  To set up the plan and find the spot.  I even order his food when we go out, so I was gobsmacked when he and Bootiful Princess rolled in at 9:00pm, having eaten.  He is an excellent babysitter, but almost always forgets to feed the children things other than massive quantities of fruit. 
Mark and I took the empty house as a sign to go grab dinner ourselves at Broder.  Mark said "I think I thought I liked this place better than I do."  but I still liked it a lot and ignored him.  We sat in the window and the service was outstanding and they have teeny, tiny ramekins of condiments, which I find utterly charming.  If you want to really win me over you will fill up a bunch of little dishes with add ons.  I like my sauces, pickles and side dishes a lot, thank you very much. 

My mother arrived in a Volvo station wagon last Saturday, with literally every inch of space, except the driver seat and a patch of passenger seat for the dog, packed all the way to the ceiling.  A moving van with 250 crates and furniture was to follow.

She made the trip in two days, instead of driving straight through.  She and the dog stayed at a dog friendly hotel somewhere in southern Oregon, and arrived in fairly good shape.

I had bad news; the painter was two days late on finishing the house, which meant the cleaners couldn't get in on time, which meant the movers would be moving stuff into a dirty house. 

It all turned out to be moot in the end, when  the movers showed up five days late.

The plan was for them to come to my place on Saturday and deliver a living-room suite, a bed, and a dining-room table, take my old sofa with them to my mother's new house, for her to use until she found the perfect sofa.  Instead they showed up days late, dumped things haphazardly in her new house and then dumped things at my place and left the sofa.

My mother was nervous, I was a wreck and her dog decided that she had to sleep with me every night.  I don't like dogs, I like poodles, so this was a big problem.  The dog also had a stair phobia, and my lawn is at the bottom of ten stairs.

I was at a breaking point, having gone through a major stressful work transition during this same week, as well as Mark's cancer follow up.  I was done, as they say, fortunately my brother came and moved the sofa, fixed the drier.  Did I mention we gave away our washer and drier, so we could take my mother's super fancy set, that was too large for her new place?  We did, except the new set was on the truck so we couldn't do laundry for ten days, which was a fairly big deal.  When the washer and drier finally did arrive, the cord was the wrong type for our outlet, which meant buying a new cord, and attaching it, which being not very handy people felt very overwhelming. So my brother fixed it all and told me not to freak out and even though there are still four chairs and two bar stools in my living room, that need to go to his house, I am trying to listen.

We watched the film "Rampart" with Woody Harrelson last night.  It was a well done movie, but I am not quite sure where it was going, or what the point was.  Woody plays the bad, corrupt cop, that has a good or well intentioned moral center, he just has anger management issues and a hard time following the rules.  He also has a very weird home life and what appears to be an eating disorder, but there was no real back story on that part, so it was hard to make sense of why those details were included. I suppose they were included to make the viewer think, yup, this dude is multi-dimensional and freaky.
I always enjoy a good corrupt cop movie, next to a mob movie, they rank high on my scale of goodness.  I suppose I like to think everyone is layers of dark and light, and complicated.

I haven't been reading much lately, for the first time in my life, really.  It feels weird, but nothing seems to interest me, and I don't know where my time has been dedicated, but it feels like I don't have any left over for reading.
I did manage to get through Joan Didion's book about her daughter, which felt so so to me.  I wanted more depth about her parenting, and less kvetching about getting old.  I suppose that is insensitive of me.

listeing to...

Stupid video, great song

Good housekeeping

The container garden is really starting to take off!  My friend Lily gave me that giant green pot  that I filled with pansies and herbs, she gave us the kitty face too!

Our first berry! Freyja found two more in our raised beds, this one is from a pot on the deck.

Ever since we moved in we have had a really ugly utility shelf unit in the mudroom, with dog-food, art supplies, and over-sized groceries.

It wasn't the worst thing ever, but it didn't please me very much. We used to use this piece as our "mail table", with my over-sized serving pieces stored below, it was in our dining room and I wasn't ever very happy with it either.  I had to move a number of things around & re-purpose some furniture to make Freyja's room more organized, so we wound up moving a shelf that is better for the mail, into the dining room, and this thing was a leftover.   So I decided to put it in the mudroom, and get rid of the utility shelf once and for all.  It's a little weird to have dog-food AND art supplies together, but who cares, right?  Freyja's room looks great, the art supplies are handled and the dog has a lot of food.

Aparently I need a lot of colored pencils & scissors.  The acorn canister is full of markers.                                           I also need to own a lot of markers and a giant bowl of modeling clay is also essential. The scissors and paint brushes are being stored in test tube holders the university where Rolf works were throwing out.  They were brand new, unused.

GLUE! I need to have ten varieties of GLUE! A basket FULL of glue makes me very happy indeed.

Support recommended, not required

 

I have this cool new AP for my IPhone, to turn everything into an illustration.  

I'm sure I will drive everyone crazy with it long before I get tired of it myself. 

It has been in intensely emotionally draining week.  

The kind of week when I feel like I can't bear to hear one more person's complaints or needs, yet I don't really have a choice. 

Listening seems to be both my work and my job.

Someone told me "I feel SO UNSUPPORTED", which was possibly the most hurtful thing anyone could have said to me, as I feel like my life has been almost completely devoted to supporting people, in that corny new agey sort of way, that requires so much emotional energy. 

There is no measure for support though, so I can't really prove that I was trying hard.  

I can't stand up next to my supportometer and say "see, I am clearly a level 10, two steps above what is required of me."

I came home and cried, and cuddled the new dog, and ate some melted cheese with spoon.  I didn't defend my support effort very vigorously. 

I read a little kerfuffle about a artistic credit dispute, that a friend found herself in.  

One of those byproducts of having something really great happen to you.  

It reminded me of the time either 1983 or maybe 1984 that an artist approached me in a cafe and asked if he could paint my portrait.  

I was used to that sort of line, but it turned out that this was a real painter that specialized in those really cheesy paintings of women's faces that were so popular in the 80's and so I said "sure" and posed for photos, from which he would make this series of portraits.    

There was nothing risque or off color about it at all.  

He painted several large pieces, two really lovely paintings of my face stand out in my memory.  

One hung above the piano at the Metro on Broadway cafe.  I was terribly pleased about the paintings, but I was unpaid.  

When my mother and my then stepfather found out they were furious that I had not been paid.  

I could not have cared less. 

I remember Jack saying "don't you want money? Don't you want a fur coat?"

I did not want a fur coat. What a stupid and foolish question.

I wanted my picture to hang in that cafe.

They made an enormous fuss and the painting came down, from the gallery and from the cafe, and the artist was livid with me. 

He was an asshole of course, and should not have been dealing with a young teenageer with out parental consent.  

He should not have been angry at me.  

It was not my fault. 

It all passed and my life went right back to being as uneventful as always, until 1987 when I went to some sort of event with my mother and it turned out that the niece of one of my mother's friends was dating the painter, all sorts of awkwardness ensued and I felt terrible.

In retrospect I wonder why I felt terrible.  I was a kid.  I was not the one that got angry, or asked for money.  I was not the adult painter that painted a portrait of a child without permission of her parents, but I was the one that left the event early feeling bad. 

So I suppose I said all of that to say this.  I feel compassion when other people are dumped on because something they did or said or wrote, unintentionally impacts other people, and I feel really hurt when other people don't value my efforts to do the right thing.  Sometimes these things are related, and sometimes they just pop up in my life like random memories, or sudden outburst by people that think they can just dump their emotional baggage and leave.  

I suppose I am using this as a forum for doing my own dumping.  That may be why I created this space, or it may be a coincidence.