Getting Settled

We managed to get out of Berkeley by 11:15 today, a near-miracle.  We took everything but the kitchen sink:

Jerry's car, of course

A welcoming plant at the door

Inviting sun and chaises in the courtyard

Flowers left by our hostess

View from the desk where I'm working, Tomales Bay in the distance

A walk on the Estero Trail in the National Seashore

Colors of grasses and plants--no shadows but gray foliage

The trail to the Estero

The Estero at the lowest tide we've ever seen--all is mud

A favorite bench we pass and never sit on

Packing: The Final Stages

We're leaving tomorrow for a short vacation in West Marin.  It's been frenzied around here getting ready to go, even though we've been vacationing in Inverness for 20 years, and we've stayed in more than a dozen rental houses.  I know the drill, but I get frenzied, anyway.

Our landlady, our friend Elisabeth, is going to England,  so we get to stay in her beautiful, well-organized, and fully equipped house with a view of Tomales Bay:

I can tell you that working for the Department of Pre-Travel Overkill has been exhausting. Here's what I've done:

1. Finished the design of a quilt that's been stuck in a drawer for three years, constructed numerous squares, labeled them, stacked them, and packed them so I can construct a quilt top while we're there, possibly to auction off to benefit the Berkeley Food Pantry.

I also packed a rotary cutter, sewing machine, rulers, cutting mat, thread, seam ripper, and all the other quilting paraphernalia I might conceivably need (no fabric store there).

2.  Planned two weeks of dinner menus, made a list of all the ingredients, bought them, and loaded them into plastic bins.

Staging area.  Jerry packs.  Note several pages of typed list.

My packing consists of parking things in boxes

Don't ask me why, but we never eat out there, unless it's at somebody's house. Yes, there are grocery stores there, but we hate shopping.

3.  Bought reading material:  four novels and then I managed to track down  a copy of Roz Chast's latest, "Can't We Talk About Something More Pleasant?" as a treat to read while I'm away.  I couldn't help myself and read it last night (Excellent!  Funny! Sad!  Depressing!)  Will take it anyway.

 4.  Washed numerous pairs of jeans, plus t-shirts, and debated what to take.  Bright colors are not worn in West Marin unless you're a tourist, in my experience, and I feel uncomfortable wearing them there. (Once I wore a bright orange fleece jacket and was asked if I worked for Caltrans). Of course, I am a tourist, but that's beside the point.

5.   Chose a jigsaw puzzle from a stack in the basement.  I hate jigsaw puzzles, but Jerry and my sister like them and swear at me for bringing them on trips because it "wastes so much time."

Bought it at a garage sale.  Are all the pieces here?

5.  Drove over to Inverness last weekend with two bicycles and stored them at Elisabeth's.  We're actually taking two cars on our trip, but bikes would take up the back of one car, and the other car couldn't contain all our stuff.  For two weeks.

Jerry, who once drove home from Inverness the day we arrived to retrieve his briefcase, has only two categories of packing:

1. Bug-collecting equipment
2. A small, random collection of clothes "because there's a washing machine there."

An hour ago, I talked to Elisabeth, who faced the challenge of leaving her house ready for renters (us) AND packing for three weeks in England.  She was at San Francisco Airport buying a book to read on the flight.  She actually apologized for leaving dishes in the drainer and laundry in the dryer.  She is another member of the Department of Pre-Travel Overkill.

Now I'm going to fall asleep at the keyboard because I managed to wedge in a trip to the allergist for a shot.  Benadryl is very relaxing.

A Tale of Two House Dresses

Vintage version

 A house dress is a foreign concept now--what the hell WERE they?--but when I was a kid in the '50's and '60's my mother wore one every day.  

2014 version

A house dress was a washable, cotton number that mothers could run up on their Singers from a Simplicity pattern.  My mother wore hers when she did housework and went to the supermarket. They were sort of shifts (remember shifts?) with a belt.

My Aunt Kit, who lived in England, wore house dresses, and when she died about 20 years ago, my cousin Sue rescued a couple and stuffed them in a drawer.

When we were in England in 2011, Sue mentioned that I might want the house dresses to cut up and use in a quilt.  Sure, I thought. Why not?  Sentimentality and all that.   She said she'd dig them out and give them to me on our next visit.

But last year when we were in England, Sue forgot to give them to me.  No problem, because my friend and neighbor Leah was going to be in London in the summer, and she could collect them.

I sent a photo of Leah to Sue, so she'd recognize her when they met.  They connected at Victoria Station and spent an hour chatting in a cafe.  Then Leah flew to New York with the two house dresses.

I was in New York about a month later, and I retrieved the dresses from Leah.  (These are well-traveled house dresses).  Here we are during the hand-off at her apartment:

Greenwich Village, September 2013.  

Note the two dresses slung over my arm. 

I brought them back to Berkeley and examined them:  two nondescript dresses, a pocket here and there, no piping.  I cut them up and put them in this bin in my studio closet:

A few weeks ago, I was writing an e-mail to Sue and I thought, really, I need to do something with those fabrics.  And a bunch of other DFP's:

An aerial view of the DFP box

I cut the dress fabrics into strips and played around.  I tried this and that.  I found myself adding more interesting fabrics.  My friend Claudia A. sent a possible pattern that reduced the DFPs to very narrow strips embedded in larger-patterned prints.

Stacked Strip pattern that  just about hides the DFPs

But I'd  already cut most of the fabric into wider strips, and I was determined to work with them.

I tried and tried, and then I discovered I can deal with DFPs only if they're reversed:

Right side

Wrong side

Here's a draft (ignore patches of white design wall):

Draft, with the house dress fabrics just about lost in it

So my plan is to use the dress fabrics right-side-up only on the back of the quilt.  It's the best I can do.  And when the quilt's done, I'm going to give it to my cousin Sue and not tell her which side is the front.

My cousin Sue in 2011, the year she told me about the fabric.

Art Trek: Potrero Hill, San Francisco

Last weekend, my friend Rebecca and I trekked over to SF to check out a few galleries that have moved from downtown San Francisco, where rents have sky-rocketed, to Potrero Hill.

When I go to San Francisco these days, all I can think is "money."  The house prices and rents are insanely high, and the competition to buy a house or rent an apartment is daunting. 

Potrero Hill, which I remember from the 70's and '80's as rundown and industrial, with the residential blocks in the initial stages of gentrification, is now, of course, hip and expensive, with trendy restaurants and boutiques.

A florist on 18th Street

One of the many Potrero restaurants with outdoor seating...

...this one with its own bike rack

Maman's

We had lunch at Maman's  (1485 18th St.): crepes with smoked salmon and spinach, seasoned with lemon and who knows what else.  It's a narrow restaurant with few tables.  We sat at the counter  facing two big round griddles for crepe-making, so it was warm, but interesting to watch.

Cook at work making crepes

After lunch, we went to the Catherine Clark Gallery  (248 Utah) to see the new Deborah Oropallo show. I've followed her work for years, and I like to see whatever she's up to.

The current show, "Milk Made," draws on her experiences on her farm in northern California, and it's cows in a whole new way, plus chickens, pigs, eggs, and lemons.  Layered, unromantic but also fantastic and evocative, these pieces are wonderful, I thought.   Here's a sampling:

Gravid, acrylic on canvas, 2013

 

 

 

 

 

 

Cattle Class, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Tit Tat pigment print, collage on paper, 2014

Milk Men, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Milk Model, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Swine, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Trigger, pigment print, collage on paper

Barred Rock, wall installation, pigment prints, collage on paper, 2014

Detail of Barred Rock

We spent a certain amount of time trying to figure out what was painted, what was photo-transferred and printed, and how Oropallo accomplished the look of collage in a painting. I'm still puzzled, but who cares?

Kenneth Baker wrote last week that "Oropallo's images suggest...preoccupation with the life of the farm and with artworks as survivors and precursors in cycles of creative cultivation far less obvious than in farming to those not engaged in them."   Let's say, they made me think about what I eat and how it gets to my plate.

Oropallo's husband, Michael Goldin, shares the galler in this show.   He makes stools with cowhide seats, and tables, and other implements:

 

One of my favorites,  a candelabra made from a milking machine:

Milk claws,  Michael Goldin

 The show is up through May 31.

 

After that, walked over to the Jack Fischer Gallery (311 Potrero) to see "Among the Missing," showing works by Josh Hagler and Maja Ruznic.

A watercolor by Maja Ruznic

An oil painting by Josh  Hagler

 

Other galleries in the Potrero include: Southern Exposure, Steven Wolf Fine Arts, Horsfelt, and the Wattis Institute Gallery at the California College of Fine Arts San Francisco campus.  My only complaint is that you have to drive to get to Potrero Hill from the East Bay, unless you want to deal with Muni connecting with BART (which I don't). 

A good day!  If I had $28,000 to spare, I would have jumped to buy one of the Oropallo paintings, but my walls are full and my art budget is zero at the moment.  But fun to look.

Bitch-Slapping Yourself: The Ultimate Mean Girl

But what is worse is that I have spent the previous three hours lying in bed bitch-slapping myself because I'd failed to make apple aspic.  "The Julie/Julia Project," Julie Powell, 2005

I loved that book when I first read it, so fresh.  "Bitch-slap" was all new to me, and "bitch-slapping myself for failing," was somehow so much more descriptive than the tired old "beating myself up."

The Online Slang Dictionary defines a bitch-slap as "hitting someone's face (usually the cheek) with the back of one's hand,"  but Julie and I mean it as judging yourself harshly, privately, and sometimes unrelentingly.  I'm finding it a very useful term.

Last week I had two days of pretty much unrelenting bitch-slapping because I was tired, and all I felt like doing was lolling in my Stressless recliner clicking between "The One Percent" and the Duggars.

There were a million things I should have been doing, my bitch-slapper lectured me.  Clean up your studio! Drag out the novel you finished in 2005 and do something with it! Order pants from LL Bean for Jerry so he doesn't look like a homeless man!  And by the way, why, at 64,  haven't you done more with your life?  Look at Ruth Bader Ginsburg.

I felt completely demoralized.

Then I remembered Julie Powell bitch-slapping herself.  What a dumb thing to do, pointless, even as you recognize you're doing it.

Since then, I've come up with a four-point strategy for disarming my inner bitch-slapper.  I'm trying to keep in mind that:

1.  She (or he) is wrong, as in "inaccurate."  Sneaky-wrong, like Fox News. Not to be trusted at all. 
2.  She is mean.  Really unkind.  She doesn't know the meaning of the word "empathy,"  and she doesn't believe in extenuating circumstances or gray areas.  It's black-and-white, mostly black.
3.  She is not going to listen to reason, ever.  Don't even try.  The most nimble defense lawyer couldn't shut her up.
4.  The only thing to do is to shut her down completely. Flip the switch.  Banish every syllable.

What's been working for me is to imagine taking my bitch-slapping inner voice, sticking duct tape over her mouth, and depositing her in a cell, like she's a sociopath in "Orange is the New Black."  And she's in a cell no one ever checks. God knows what will happen to her. Silenced.

So far so good, although as I write this, I can feel her clawing at the duct tape ("Who cares what you think?  This is woo-woo!")

Onward.

 

House Angst and Other Ruts

Jerry's fave

I've been feeling in a rut--tired of  how my house looks (let's say overfamiliar) and bored with the routines around here.

Changing things in the house makes me tired just thinking about it, so yesterday morning I got the idea of doing six things this weekend that we've never done before.  Here they are:

1. We went to see my elderly friend Marian, who's still struggling with lung problems.  She's now in a rehab hospital in a very posh area of Marin County, near Ross.  After we chatted with her (and she was thrilled to see one of "The Men," as she called the professors she worked for in Entomology in the 1970's, just before women joined up), Jerry and I took a short walk to downtown Ross:

 An idyllic small town available to the lucky few who can afford it

A mere $7.6 million (and I'll bet they still have spells of house angst)

 The houses in Ross cost zillions, and I noticed two predictable characteristics of a wealthy community:  no neon signs on business and lots of window boxes, definitely The Carmel Syndrome.

By the way, the cost of Marian's care in the facility, one of only two in the Bay Area that would accept her from the acute care hospital she was incarcerated in for 57 days, is $10,000 a day.  Not a typo: $10,000 a day.

2.  I bought French tulips for Marian, a first.  They have longer stems and petals than regular tulips. That's the only difference I could see.   I meant to take a picture of them, but I was too busy making sure the vase didn't tip over in the car.

3. Jerry and I took a walk on the  Lobos Creek Valley Trail in the  Presidio in San Francisco.  It's taken 20 years, but dedicated volunteers and the National Park Service have reclaimed the land and restored the dune habitat.

The Lobos Creek Valley Trail, San Francisco.  Lots of native plants.

4.  We moved our dining table in to a sort of nook off the dining room so we could switch out rugs.  Then we left the dining table in the nook long enough to eat dinner at/on it.  Another first.  Liked it.  May empty the dining room of the dining table.  Then what?

In the meantime, I'm working on moving art around and moving some of the furniture out.  This is the before picture:

I'm even tired of the red paint (less bright and less orange than this),  a 50th-birthday gift to myself

Stay tuned for the After.

5.    We bought an edge-er contraption at the hardware store, a scary non-electric mechanical thing that takes a fair amount of strength of use.

Sculptural but scary

  I pushed for electric and lost.  Our parking strip now looks more or less trimmed:.

6.   For two weeks, I've been pricing airline tickets to Costa Rica for next March.  Yesterday, United and American came within $64 of each other.  American was cheaper, so that's what I'm going with; also, from past experience, I like their colors better.  Definitely the first time I've bought a ticket based partly on interior decor of a plane.

On second thought--this is better?

Does that count as six?  There's a fine line between comforting routine and a rut.  Last night, we re-embraced the rut and settled in to watch "Foyle's War."

The Problem with Lurking

I read a fair number of blogs, because I'm a snoop. 

I'm especially drawn to blogs written by women who have lives completely different from mine:  very religious, homeschooling mothers who are Republicans.  Call it ghoulish fascination.

I rarely leave a comment.  (No, I don't think homeschooling is the bee's knees!  No, I don't think relying on the rhythm method at age 45 is a good idea!  Etc.)  I silently absorb and marvel, even when what these women write strikes me as sheer, uninformed lunacy.  I'm what's known as a "lurker."

But then, every once in awhile, I lose it, often over something relatively minor.  I told a Mormon mom in her comments box that her obsession with choosing a hood for her kitchen displayed  misguided priorities, but I'd bitten my tongue when she went on about being pro-Proposition 8.  Does this make sense?

No.  It's like a bad marriage.  I get pent-up, and then I let them have it.

As of this morning, I've decided I'm done.  No more lurking.  I can't tolerate these viewpoints at complete odds to my own for the sake of satisfying my curiosity.  Exploding occasionally in the comments box ("Combox" for those in the know) about something trivial is pointless and not really fair.

These people are going to go one with their lives and their (misguided?) values, and I'm going to go on with mine, and I'm sorry to say, never the twain shall meet.   If I were honest, I would have read one of their blogs and said, "For God's sake!" and never returned. 

 It's going to save me a lot of time.