Category: State-of-Being

Test Painting

The minute I painted a 25% strength hi gloss acrylic glaze over these stilt dancers, to see what would happen, this became my test painting.

The glossiness of the glaze was cut right back I was glad to discover. The suggestion to glaze came from johnlovett.com …. I may have said before that I’m not keen on framing pictures behind glass.

I have a couple of paintings on the go where I’m scared to touch the good stuff with more water, and so destroy them. though they bothneed more work. What to do?

Got the test painting out. Touched up cartain areas with acrylic paints. Let them dry overnight. Did it work? Did the acrylics rub off? Yes for the first question. No for the second.

The dark red fronds were overpainted with acrylics. The deep gold ditto. The greenish base, also. And none of it, upon scratching, comes off.

So, I’m good to go with sealing my Geriatric Aviatrix, and touching up her scarf with acrylics, because touching her up with water color over gouache might be a disaster …

A ‘Blast from the Past’

Trying to get into an organized frame of mind … we’ve been warned there is to be a Fire Drill this morning, and also I should/must get my new mobile phone SIM installed that I have already done the online stuff for.

Now just waiting for the old SIM to stop working … no that’s not right … they’ll first send me a code that I’ll need to put in somewhere. Then wait for the phone to stop working and THEN change the physical SIM card. Something which I will need help with.

My weak old fingers can’t even get the case off the mobile, let alone negotiate the teeny tiny fork to open the little draw, to then insert the minuscule card! None of this stuff was invented with old people in mind. And times like these, I really do feel like the geriatric aviatrix (IE the geriatrix negotiating the virtual skies of the web) I sometimes write about.

I stopped thinking of myself as any kind of surfer about the time I did the research about surfing I needed to be able to write knowledgeably about the process in MONGREL. I knew just ordinary body surfing was simply giving myself to the power of the water to take me, straightened in a torpedo shape, with itself to the shore. Surfing using a board was a whole other process.

As a child in the 1950s I was pretty sure that one day I would be a pilot. I collected cigarette cards of planes, identified planes going over (not nearly as many as these days) and imagined being a pilot by extrapolating from my father’s actions at the wheel, driving his first car.

Which was a share car, by the way. The two families owning the car used to take turns going on camping holidays.

This example from http://www.simoncars.co.uk/coachwork/woody.html

As near as I can recollect, the sides of our woody were all wood panel, that there no windows in the sides of the back. And of course it was old and decrepit. Traveling in it, if I wasn’t staring out the front at the horizon, between my father driving and my mother in the passenger seat, I’d be car-sick, the smell of petrol pervasive. As it was originally a tradesman’s van, there were no seats in the back, and we kids had pillows and an old mattress to sit on. And I do seem to remember that my mother and father sat in old arm chairs.

What happened to the dream of becoming a pilot? A girl, in the 1950s? It was kindly explained to me that girls did not become pilots, but that I could become an air hostess instead. I grew and grew. By 1960, even that dream went by the way. There was a height restriction of 167 cm, 5′ 6″ for air hostesses in the days of low cabin-ceiling prop planes. I was too tall!

And that was only the first fly-away this morning.

Reading my emails and posts, I side-tracked into Susan Cornelis website again this morning, this time about her Norwegian memories. She quoted the Garrison Keillor sign-off from A Prairie Home Companion,

“I couldn’t help but remember Garrison Keillor’s sign off on Lake Wobegon “where all the women are strong, the men are good looking, and the children are above average”.”

That was so familiar, I can practically hear Keillor say it, a radio show I used to listen to way back when. I clicked away from what I meant to do and to the website, and it’s all still there.

Not that I’m listening to anything right now other than the sounds of people in the corridor. Next, the announcements and the siren … the cat shot under the couch … and it’s time to gooooo!!!

While down on the podium, and after signing my name off, a kind person with strong hands helped me by getting my phone case off.

Now. Off across to the shops where I’ll get the SIM changed.

‘Spatter and Spray’

… is a way of painting with watercolors, I’ve discovered. And I’m in the throes of experimenting using the technique.

First came across it on Susan Cornelis’s blog. https://susancornelis.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/googleeye.jpg

So I’ve fallen in love with granulating paints. My first effort was Miss Tabitha…

Ordered a couple more tubes of granulating paint and washed out a fine spray bottle originally used for a deodorant.

Second, this fish. I call it a bottom feeder, but may rename it … I’m having so much trouble getting this from my mobile … might have to do magic. Like, abracadabra … OK I’ve got it. Ended up saving it to the desktop … isn’t she beautiful? A spatter and spray painting barely touched up. Well, OK, I painted the scales. The rest is dabbed. Not yet sealed.

This is the top half of my third effort. I’ll tentatively call it The Aviatrix. The bottom half of this painting is still a problem. one thing is for sure, I’m learning a lot about gouache.

It’s hard to believe what you can get from spattering paint onto the paper then spraying it with water. But that’s only the first layer. You let it dry, then the next day, if the pattern you have doesn’t yet suggest anything to you, you do it again. Like I did with this one. The third day, this aviatrix lay there waiting for me. I painted some of the areas to increase that likeness and here she is.

The bottom half of her face needed work of a different sort. After my efforts first with gesso, then with gouache that’s still in the thought-pan, and another post.

As well as the spatter and spray technique, I’m experimenting with sealing my watercolor paintings with an acrylic varnish. I hate the look of paintings behind glass or the whole process of framing. Miss Tabitha has been varnished and the look is good.

And plus, I don’t have enough wall space to hang everything I paint. Nor will I foist amateurish experiments on my nearest and dearest. So, most must be stored. Varnishing them seems like a good option.

The varnish I’m using is water-based so easy to cut. A mixture of 25% acrylic varnish in 75% water seems to be working pretty well. Ideally this should be sprayed on but since I’m still only experimenting, I’m laying the varnish on the painting with a watercolor mop brush. A time-consuming procedure but the only one I can afford at the moment.

Browser Shenanigans …

My online world broke this morning, like this tile broke … and was rethought in the way that I’m having to rethink my desktop …

I was glad to hit on a familiar page at last with this one … my WordPress dashboard. Thankfully, it was the same as it’s always been. I heaved a sigh of relief when I arrived.

It was then 2.30 PM and I’d struggled since I sat down after breakfast and chores to get back to my familiar scenario. My troubles began when suddenly my online bank was unavailable and the helpline operator and I thought at first that I’d been hacked.

But no, my then-browser updated overnight and apparently threw up a firewall that kept me out of my bank as well as several other places. Well I thought, away with that browser. I de-defaulted it and all my problems began.

Who knew there’d be 500+/- settings, and that there’d be a whole different architecture to accustom myself to, and that there’d be a bunch of new rules? One good thing about the new old browser is that everything is easy to find. I learned more about browsers in a couple of hours than I’d learned the whole year with the de-defaulted one.

I hope all the new stuff sticks in my head, as do I hope that all the stuff I have open on the desktop stays on there when I close the laptop. That I don’t have to find it all from scratch again next time I open the lid.

And although I enthusiastically welcome the password app, I also wrote down a bunch of them. You never know when you might be shut out, and at what level.

I managed to retrieve the situation without the help of an AI assistants, I’m glad to say. What FB AI assistants are doing beggars belief.

Food: GF Bread

‘Falling off the Wagon’, is a phrase that originated in the Temperance Movement, according to Wikipedia.

Meaning falling of the water wagon back into alcoholism. Getting back onto the wagon means getting sober again. I’m sure I’m not telling you anything new.

Every so often I fall off my gluten free, dairy free, lowFODMAP and sugar free penny-farthing-bicycle and then I am in pain and discomfort.

Getting back onto my penny-farthing bicycle is a matter of figuring out where the bad stuff has crept in. While one teaspoon of gluten-containing flour in a loaf of bread is not going to cause any problems, a cup of 100% wheat flour will. And I’ve been mixing spelt flour in my baked goods to encourage yeast action.

And having that bread daily. Having anything you’re sensitive to daily, is another no-no for people with a lot of allergies, intolerances and sensitivities.

Having a particular food once every three days usually prevents a build up of the bad chemicals in the body. But sometimes all I want is to be able to eat something without worrying what it will do to my chemistry.

That’s when my penny-farthing slams to the ground and I fall by the wayside.

Which is why I’ve started experimenting with baking my own bread. Commercial gluten free breads tend to have a ‘stampede of ingredients’, and the breads that are any good aren’t always available. The phrase ‘stampede of ingredients’ … so appropriate to food intolrances … comes from the MooGoo people, who make natural skin care products.

Cutting gluten-containing flour from my diet only half-fixed my problem. I came to the conclusion yesterday it has to be a capsule filler causing me grief. I’m now taking 0.9 mg LDN daily, either a (3 x 0.2 + 3 x 0.1) dose equaling 6 capsules, or (4 x 0.2 + 1 x 0.1) equaling 5 capsules.

Meaning, I’m taking a lot of Avicel cellulose filler. And I’ve been reading in a pertinent group that this stuff gives a lot of people grief. They either have their capsules compounded with a different filler and that’s a minefield I don’t want to go into right now, or they throw the contents of their capsules in water. The LDN dissolves and the Avicel is the residue at the bottom of the glass, and then drinking the water.

That’s what I’ll be doing. I still have about one hundred and fifty capsules to work through before I can ask for a different filler. It’s a real “Good Grief, Charley Brown!” situation.

Lunch … couldn’t wait any longer. Wilted greens, avocado, a few olives and the equivalent of approx 2 slices of newly-baked bread. A third of an apple. A jug of hot salted water.

After stopping the bread machine for a minute, I hauled out the bucket and scooped out the equivalent of two slices of bread. Bucket back in to finish the cycle, 28 minutes to go. Going on the texture of the bread, it looks like it will be my most successful loaf yet.

In Hospital

Anthony Roberts from Tony’s Bologna reminds me to talk about something I’m emotionaly responding to … not sure of the grammar there.

I’m not in the mood for grammar. I’m cold, hospital aircon is like the Antarctic. I’m standing swaying, with a blanket over my shoulders in my ED hutch (roomlet in the energency department) at the Mater (Hospital) in South Brisbane.

Been here for four and a half hours, had a canula put in that’ll give me the pip for weeks the bruise surrounding it is momentous.

Waiting for the results of the CT scan I had half an hour a go figuring if there’s a good/bad reason for the blockage in my gut. Waiting for the pain to be flushed out.

ED beds are the pits, as I’m sure everybody who has ever languished in ED knows. I’m too tall, my feet always flush against the footboard. How do really tall people manage?

Does it sound like I’m moaning? Does to me. Emotions are totally tied into physical sensations, you know? There is no brain body separation.

The time is 13.13 … one of those synergies I have with time. When I check the time, ther’s more often than not a little pattern to enjoy. Synergies might be the wrong word. I’m frazzled, frustrated and freaking!

OK, I can still do alliteration. Can still think. Discomfort is in overdrive. Now to find a pic that describes how I’m feeling …