Category: a day in this life

Opinionated

May 29, 2019

a day in this life

Here are some of my opinions.

If it is a right, you shouldn’t need a law to get to have it. Therefore, everyone should be able to vote and be married or any other thing they want as long as it doesn’t infringe on the personal space of anyone else. The fact that laws are needed for the rights of some to be honored pisses me off.

I want everyone to have the same privileges I do, because I don’t WANT to get something because I’m white. I want it because I earned it. And I don’t want to NOT get it because I’m female. Or have blue eyes or grey hair or for any other accident of birth. And I don’t want your accidents of birth to give you, or keep you from, anything.

I am a believer in a meritocracy. I believe in everyone having the right to Life, Liberty and the PURSUIT of happiness. I don’t believe that you should be allowed to keep other people from those things.

Also, I believe in paying taxes. I want services and I’m willing to pay for them. I want smooth roads, good schools, speedy firemen and EMTs. I would like for everyone to have Medicaire instead of health insurance. I am willing to give up more paycheck in order to have more services available to those that need them. I don’t believe in tax loopholes. Fucking pay your part. You live in the land of the free, help tote the load.

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Home update

May 14, 2019

a day in this life, home

I have always hated the brick-look vinyl floor in the kitchen. And the carpet in the living room had been abused by shoes and pets tracking clay in for over a decade. AND my child had done some damage to the kitchen vinyl when they were in high school. The damage was small and only noticeable if you looked in the right spot. But, I knew that it was going to be an excuse to redo the floors sometime.

That time came last spring. I looked down and a small piece of the vinyl had come up. It terrified me. I was afraid that, if I left it for any length of time, there would be damage to the sub-flooring that would be ridiculously expensive.

Chuck and I had been talking about replacing the floors with laminate and had looked at options. Even getting chips from Lowe’s to bring home and think about. Of course I couldn’t find the one we liked best when it came time to actually do it.

I went to Lowe’s, looked at choices again, picked out 3 I liked (again), talked to the guy, got a rough estimate and found i could pay for it without taking out a second mortgage and came home to talk to Chuck. We picked a floor and I signed a contract.

AND we decided that since the paint was ancient and in need of refreshing, we should do that before the floor was laid. When we moved the furniture in anticipation, we found the floor chips we had gotten 2 years earlier and the one we picked out was one of the trio. CLEARLY this was our favorite.

We ended up with both rooms the same color and with the same floor. I even found switch plates and outlet covers that matched the paint.

We gave the old carpet to my friend, Carolyn, who had admired it for years, and got a new one to go with the new look.

When my mother came to visit, she and I stopped at the ReStore in Durham to drop off a lampshade I had changed and found a sofa that was the shopping coup of my life. They took the old sofa that had been badly reupholstered and sold me that one for $13. It had been marked down from $75 in October to $20 and was 40% off the day I went in.

It almost feels like a new house.

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RiverRun 2019

April 10, 2019

a day in this life, art, film, RiverRun International Film Festival

This weekend, I took time from work and went to the RiverRun Film Festival in Winston-Salem.

We were given free tickets to the Gala a couple of year ago and had a big time. We bought tickets this year and decided it’s more fun for less money. The same band played less dance-able songs and small cocktails are more acceptable when you get a drink ticket included with the price of admission. It was a lot of fun watching all the ways people dressed up for it. And we did dance. But, Prince and Charlie Daniels didn’t inspire us to stay as long this time.

So far, we’ve seen 4 documentaries and 2 feature films. We have one more documentary tonight in Greensboro. It’s part of the festival? But not close and tickets are sold separately.

Friday evening, we saw Care to Laugh. It’s about a comedian living with his aging parents in Los Angeles, trying to work and tend to them at the same time. Making a living at stand up takes a lot of hustle and he doesn’t have any siblings to help look after the old people. He got a significant break while they were filming and he’s able to afford some help taking care of them in the after math. If you get a chance to see see Jesus Trejo perform, go for it. He’s funny and he’s a nice guy.

Saturday, we saw The Raft, which is a retrospective talking to the 6 people still alive who had an adventure in 1973. (Nobody died on the ocean crossing. They’re just old, now.) Neither of us remember much about the original event. I think I remember knowing that it happened. But, I was 13 and it wasn’t the most important topic to me at that time. Chuck doesn’t remember it at all. Their conversations about the expectations of the trip by the man who created the original experiment was fascinating.

After that, was One Last Deal. It’s a Finnish “redemption movie” about an art dealer who thinks he’s spotted an important painting at an auction. It was very sweet with no real surprises. It did make me desperately want a coffee and a pastry afterward.

Before bed, we saw While I Breathe, I Hope. I don’t know if you were aware of Bakari Sellers’ election to the SC House of Representatives in 2006 when he was 22 years old. He served while he was going to law school full time. This film follows him in his run for Lt. Governor (he didn’t win) and his activism in getting the Confederate flag removed from the state house grounds. If he ever runs for the Presidency, I’m voting for him.

Sunday, we saw The River and the Wall. It’s excellent. Five people pedaled, rode horses and paddled from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico following the path the infamous Wall is meant to take. I wish it would run on every network in the country to be sure everyone sees it to understand exactly what that wall would and would not accomplish.

Our last movie, before coming home, was Datsche. It was a mess. The writer/producer/director was writing it as she went and it shows. The script seriously needed editing before it went into production and that just didn’t happen. The characters could have been interesting if the story had been tight. It wasn’t.

We had leftovers from our dinners twice and ate them for the 3rd supper, with a glass of wine outside a coffee shop on Sunday. We felt very efficient with not wasting food or having to bring a whole bunch back with us. 😂 We were at Camino Bakery (the coffee shop) daily. They’re right downtown across the street from one of the theaters.

Tonight, we’re going to see a Miles Davis biography. Chuck has (finally) become a fan of jazz and we have been indulging. And tomorrow will be dinner-and-a-movie again. I learned about a seafood restaurant in Greensboro when I was doing a Portuguese wine tasting a couple of weeks ago. I hope it lives up to the promises of the wine distributor who pointed me to it.

In addition to movies, we saw art at the South Eastern Center for Contemporary Art. SECCA is one of the venues for the film festival and we noticed that there was a new exhibition up when we were there for our movie Friday evening. So, we went back in the morning. There were some interesting pieces by UNC School of Art students and a small print and watercolor exhibition by local artist, Emily Clare, in the house.

The part that we had gotten a glimpse of was in the main exhibition area and it is fantastic. There are 2 mixed media exhibitions going on at the same time.

One is called Archives Aflame. It’s a collaboration between a Japanese artist whose father was at Hiroshima and an American artist whose father worked on the Manhattan project. It was devastating.

The other is Somewhere in a Dream I Got Lost. It is a powerful look at racism. Lonnie Holley uses everything in his art. Paint, sculpture, music, video. Found and created.

We try to get to SECCA a couple of times a year and sometimes, our timing is bad and we miss a change. We were really glad we didn’t miss this. It would have been worth the trip by itself, even if we hadn’t had other things to do while we were there.

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So far, so good

April 8, 2019

a day in this life, bonsai

I have been worried about the cedar. The aluminum wire from Michael’s that I used to wire it into the post wasn’t sturdy enough to hold it in firmly when there was a severe windstorm last Fall. But, I was afraid to mess with it much because the roots had already been cut and replanted twice. I was concerned that the roots were too traumatized to tolerate me fiddling with them, then.

It hasn’t looked particularly healthy this winter. I just kept hoping it wasn’t dead and losing its green very slowly. And trying to remember what it looked like in previous winters.

After the workshop in February and some continuous warm days, I decided to get in there and see what was going on. There were healthy roots. (Yay!)

So, I hacked them. I trimmed them up. I worked on the taproot with my new knob cutter so I could seat it better. And I wired it in with copper wire I had picked up from Lowe’s. It was the smallest gauge they had at 10mm, iirc, and still a little bigger than I would have liked. It was hard to bend it. But, that tree isn’t going anywhere unless the whole pot does.

It does have a little bit of a lean. I expect I’ll address that with wire, later.

I noticed that it has developed cedar rust, too. Fortunately, Chuck already has some organic fungicide and I’m going to get it tended to tomorrow.

The Japanese maples are leafing out nicely.

And the juniper is doing beautifully. I’ll give it another month before I look at it for shaping.

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Making a forest

February 25, 2019

a day in this life, bonsai

Saturday, I took a day off from work to go the the Bonsai Learning Center in Mooresville, NC to do a workshop that would help me create a Sharp’s Japanese Maple Forest. (The guys doing the workshop prefer the word “forest” to “grove.” I think that when it’s only 3 trees, “grove” is more accurate.

As you do, we denuded the roots and cut them back, using the nob cutter to keep the large outer roots as intact as possible while flattening the bottom. I feels really scary to cut out that much of the big roots. But, they all have good secondary roots and good feeder roots.

I used a plastic pot so we were able to simply drill the necessary holes for my tie downs. A couple of my classmates wanted to start with nicer pots so theirs needed extra work. Brad and Brian used different stuff but, ultimately, had the same idea.

They recommend aluminum wiring for the branches and say to make sure to rewrap gently as they start growing. If the bark grows into the wire, it will cause scars that will never grow over. So, rewiring may need to be done 2 or 3 times in a growing season. I can use copper wire to anchor them without any problem.

There is a layer of grated sphagnum moss on top of the bonsai medium to help keep everything moist.

Pinching back the branches will help keep them from getting too long and leggy. I just need to keep an eye on them to remove the growth tips when they start to leaf out.

They need to be maintained for a couple of years as they grow a nice root mat with the roots of all 3 trees intertwined. Then, I can lift them all up in a piece for maintenance. And to move them into a more attractive pot.

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