Yum

Most of the time I am what you could call a good plain cook.  Years of facing random ingredients sometimes in quantity has honed some of my skills.  Among other things I fry a mean hamburger, and I can make a pie crust that would make your heart melt.
Summer is good eating time and I try to eat in season until I am sick of it.  The Footless Man confounds me  a lot by bringing home quantities of something that I wouldn't want even a little of ( chard comes to mind) wherein I feed my compost pile.
The Footless Man came up with a case of peaches and three dozen eggs as his latest addition to our diet  After studying the possibilities for this I ended up enlisting the Swordsman to pit and chunk  them for a crisp.  It turns out that they were the  flat white peaches that taste like a peach flavored cotton ball and don't want to let go of the pit.  A case of not very good peaches is a lot to work with.
The footless man  suggested that maybe I could combine them with the eggs somehow.  OkieDokie.
Peach custard pie.  Doesn't  it sound good?  Peaches, milk, eggs, a touch of sugar, blended up and poured over sliced peaches in a crust. baked for forty minutes.
We let it set overnight.
We tasted.  After a reflective silence we renamed the pie.
Peach Poo pie.
It tastes as good as its name.

what does Love look like

The Footless Man generally looks on my creative side with something between awe and tolerance. He doesn't understand what drives me but he likes what I do, mostly.  He can appreciate the skill and persistence that it takes to produce a finished piece of work, be it a sock, a meal, a garment or one of my tiny canvas cards.

I have been working diligently to re image my deck of healing stories.  When I first drew them, my skills were limited so the pictures were rough.  They lacked depth, color and detail. ( Even so they could pack quite the emotional wallop.) Over the years I have improved my drawing ability.  I learned to work with color and paint.  As my technical abilities improved so did the depth and texture of the pictures

Here is the original.

Here is the repaint.  It has the same humor, but the style is much more fluid and it has a lot of texture and shading.
Most of the time the footless man looks at the paintings and say's politely, "that's nice." I don't think his eyes can take in some of the detail.
Then last Tuesday I repainted one that I guess that I didn't scan (it is called The Sage)
I re imaged it as The wounded Healer

I felt very good about the details, and the accuracy of the prosthesis.  I was pretty surprised that Footless Man didn't like having the painting in the deck.  It hit him somewhere that he still hurts.  So I had a problem.  The image is good, he feels exposed.
So what should I do?  I could ignore him and take his protest as a compliment, I could hear him out and do as he asked, and neither one felt right.
I repainted the card.

Same Idea, just a slight variation.
Maybe even more clear.
The purl side of knitting makes a grand texture that looks like bark when you dip it in paint and smoosh it on the paper.  You can see it on the tree.
I gave the original card to The Footless Man after I scanned it in.  It won't be appearing in my deck.
He would have been hurt too much if I ignored him.
Love.

getting unstuck

John Bunyan called it the slough of despond, and you got pulled from it by an angel.  I feel like I have been ass deep in alligators, knee deep in mud all summer.  Somehow making any movement at all that would get me going hasn't been easy or even possible. 
   So what do you do when you can't move because you don't have a way to move yet?

apparently you get stung by a yellow jacket and spend your down time painting

And it's not all that much fun.

It's hard to see, and harder to put down

It's nasty here in the muck

 

 

 

I must say, My skills as a painter on a tiny canvas have gotten a lot better however, my formatting skills at present simply suck

hatred, loathing and despising

I hate yellow jackets.  I loath yellow jacket stings.  I especially despise the celulitis that always is the result.  I hate the swelling, the itching, the pain and the fact that I Have to take medical steps to deal with it.
I hate dealing with the attitude that goes:" OK so you are sick and you can't stand up for more than five minutes without severe pain, could you help me pick up apple falls/cook dinner/shop for food/ dumpster dive bunk wrappers at the lumber yard? no? why? I need your help!"
Now tomorrow I must be up to deal with work because no work means no money which means no paying bills.
I will then deal with: "well if you can go to work why can't you do what I need you to as well?"
I am not going to even try to answer that one because my voice level would reach a decibel level and tone that while it wont break glass, might blow the hair off the offending person's head.
I have commented to people that having a voice means that you can be soft spoken because loud spoken is also an option.  I just don't use it unless I am pushed past the line of my patience.
Right now my patience is thin.  Very very thin.

Progress, not perfection

I am putting this up between a client this morning and one on my late schedule this afternoon.
The Footless Man is not having a nice week.  Yesterday he was cleaning up branches on the side of the house, and fell a foul of a nest of yellow jackets who had taken up residence in the trash can.  Four stings and his fastest gallop into the house later he was heavily coated with baking soda paste.  Baking soda water paste neutralizes the venom in the sting, they were minor bumps about an hour later.
He is still struggling with having the hoard disturbed and the intense anxiety that provides, so he had another trip into emergency room land.  I do my best not to get upset and angry, he isn't doing this to upset me.  All the same it can't help but be stressful.
I have been trying to offset some of the stress with exercise, (Commuting by bike) and had a reward on my way home this afternoon.
I spotted a crane on the bank of the Poudre River standing still as a sculpture.  I stopped to watch, and saw him wade out, dive and come up with a six inch trout.  He took it onto the bank, inspected it and moved around to the tail. Then in three sinuous gulps he slid the whole thing down his throat and into his gullet.  I could see the fish shape slide through the feathery tube and into his belly.
With the show over I went on.  You can bet that I am going to be checking that bank to see if he is there this afternoon.  Maybe I can get a photo.

whine

It's hot.  Every damn day right now.  My arthritis that is worse in the heat has kicked in and my hands and fingers are inflamed and painful.  I am drinking a half gallon of cold tea all by myself every day and it most likely isn't enough.
It is too hot to ride a bike after ten in the morning. 
I am stressed out because The Swordsman is temporarily moving back home (Over all a good idea, but stressful none the less) to re think how he goes about his life's purpose and get some counseling.
This has meant that some needed cleanup, furniture moving and stuff removal is happening.
But that means that The Footless man is having his hoard disturbed and he is therefore an anxious mess.  When He is an anxious mess, his blood sugars become even more unstable.  (On top of that he is angry and defensive about being anxious and having unstable blood sugars).  so I have a beloved husband who is temporarily cranky, and can sail into loopy and uncooperative at a moment's notice.
The cleanup has brought out just how much Michael the elderly cat has been doing cat graffiti in three of the four bedrooms, which will involve a rug doctor and a lot of work to get them livable, which needs to be done  NOW.
The Swordsman is upset at needing to move back, it didn't figure in to his plans to have to come back home to regroup.
He is defensive and touchy as well.
I am so tempted to move to a studio apartment with a pot for ramen, and all my sock yarn plus a bathroom to myself and let the Footless Man and the Swordsman sort it out between themselves.
At present I am going out to dump some garbage, by myself.
Alone.
 

Fashoom

About two weeks ago I was sitting with a friend who is waiting for the next step in her healers progress, and we visited the concept of fashoom.
Fashoom is the experience of moving through a healing process at lightning speed leaving you breathless, wild eyed and light years along in your growth and maturity process.
I have been sitting and waiting for the wave to hit and not knowing what I am waiting for. Just that it will be sudden, and that keeping my balance might be difficult.
From where I sit I can see the wave starting to crest off in the distance, and I can see that a good part of the progress isn't even my wave.  I am off balance, unready, and I can't say that I am even slightly willing.  It doesn't matter.  Here it comes.
F-A-S-S-H-O-O-O-O-O-M!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!