Michelle’s Art Blog

Well, my postcards are starting to work. I was contacted recently by a wonderful woman from Tilbury who had seen my postcards and wanted to personally invite me to participate in an expo to help Powered By Girl in the launching of a new book called One Of Us. I drew a memory from my child’s life for the expo, to be sold for $25.00. The sales will benefit Powered by Girl. I was thrilled to be asked to participate, and sent her the postcard yesterday. (She should have received it this morning.)

Here is the illustration I sent her.

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I did not tell my children it was April Fool’s Day because I didn’t want to be bothered with joke after prank after joke after prank. That’s exactly how it would be as they are both notorious little pranksters. The oldest two that is. It was a bad enough day anyway without all the jokes.

When it rains at our house, it literally pours. Not the wet, watery downpour from the heavens, but the bad luck. I swear. We have moments in our lives where it seems that nothing at all can go wrong, we are blessed beyond measure, and then everything will hit us at once. Take April 1st for instance. My son had broken the window the day before so I was after a window to replace it. After driving around all day, we finally found one. Now in order to put the new one in, I have to take the old one out. Would be great if I had one of those guns like on Star Trek that would just disintegrate whatever you aimed it at. But since technology hasn’t progressed toward things of that nature yet, I had to do it the old fashioned way, with a pry bar and a hammer. It’s an aluminum window, I figure it should only take me an hour tops to get the old window out and the new one in. Well, four hours, a bruised cheekbone, sprained wrist and a couple dozen cuts and scratches in my hands from broken glass, later, I still don’t have it out. Now, my son is hacking and coughing from what I can only assume is the dust I am stirring up while trying to remove the window. So, off to the ER we go to take care of his asthma attack. At least by then, my husband had returned from his Seattle business trip. Let him worry about the window.

The next morning, Good Friday, I’m washing dishes while my son takes a shower. I wander into my bedroom to check my email and start squishing in wet stuff through the floorboards. Peeking through the bathroom door, I find at least 3 inches of water all over the floor. Seems the front bathroom has clogged pipes and now they are backing up into my bathroom…closet…bedroom. My asthmatic son runs to find every towel we have dirty or clean, while the other empties the vacuum I had tripped over earlier while trying to fix the window. It happens to be a large wet/dry vac, but needs to be empty to work as a wet vac. Perfect for situations like this…or so I think.

I am feverishly trying to suck up the water with this vacuum on one end while the vacuum is feverishly spitting out the water on the other end all over the floor. After the vacuum is full, I stand up only to realize the two puddles I’ve created are now meeting in the middle. And me with no more towels. I’ve never wanted to bulldoze a house more in my life. After paying the plumbers a good chunck of my paycheck, I’m still thinking about it.

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Don’t ya just love yard work? I do when it’s finished, although I can’t stand doing it myself. But since my husband managed to leave it to me again this year, I had to grit my teeth and just do it. The front yard grass isn’t growing. No problem there, don’t have to mow it yet. Backyard looks like a beautiful field of knee high grass blowing in the breeze. And me without a lawn mower. (Both our mowers broke last season.) So, I dig out the old standby, my electric weed wacker with 2 billion foot long extension cord that always manages to somehow tangle around every tree and rock in my yard.

Now before I explain further, I’d like to tell you about our dogs. We seem to be stray central. We have six dogs, five of which we didn’t want but can’t get rid of. They like to eat…and dig…and bark all hours of the night and day…and especially poo. Yes, I said it. Big mounds from our big dogs, little tiny mounds from our little dogs. Too bad they can’t be taught to use a litterbox like our cat. That’d make life so much easier.

Back to yard work, the grass is about knee high in places, making it very difficult to see all the little surprises the dogs have left for me. So I jump right on in and find out that the grass is pretty wet nearer to the ground.  So as I am gently swinging the machine from side to side in a rhythm I can only hear in my head (mostly because the decibels of the wacker keep me from hearing anything else) I hit one of those lovely little surprises. Wet grass, wet poo, wacking machine with an RPM of about a thousand, you can start to see what I am getting at. As the poo comes in contact with the blades, they travel not out like I would have hoped, but straight up. Blah….I turn the machine off and wipe my face looking in disgust at the rest of the yard I need to get to. Can’t stop now.

My weed wacker buzzes on, I am still eager to get the grass hacked to pieces, only now, I make sure my mouth stays closed.

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My two oldest had birthdays at the beginning of the year, but because of issues, we had to postpone until March. Well, I thought we would have fun if we had an outdoor carnival type birthday party with carnival type games. Pop the balloon with the dart. Knock over the milk bottles. I even had a cotton candy, popcorn, snowcone, and hotdog machine all ready and waiting. The day was set for the first day of spring. It had been absolutely beautiful the weeks leading up to that day. Then what do ya know… it snowed. It was cold. It was windy. It felt like 20 degrees outside. Darn you Canadian cold front! We had to have our wonderful outdoor spring festival birthday party… indoors. Marshmallow shooters. Don’t ever buy them. Unless you want to spend a few hours after the party ends on your hands and knees scrubbing the squished marshmallows off the hardwood floors. Thank goodness we don’t have carpet. All in all, we had a pretty good time, now if we could just get my husband’s blood sugar below 500, we’d be groovy.

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My grandpa passed away today. He was 90 years old, but even then it was a bit sudden for everyone. He had gone to the hospital last week because of some issues involving his medicine, came back weak, but in good spirits. Then this morning, he started coughing and then collapsed. He died less then twelve hours later.

I was glad I could be there for him when he died, even though he didn’t know I was there. I squeezed his hand and kissed his forehead like I had my mom when she died of breast cancer six years ago. And like I had my dad after he died of a motor cycle accident a few years ago.  I am tired of death. Tired of funerals. Tired of crying for the people in my life who have to leave.

My son put a smooth wooden cross in his hand from the gift shop. I thought it was touching, even though we aren’t religious. He knew grandpa was.

Poor grandma. We all figured that she would die before grandpa because he was so much stronger. Healthy as a horse. He was supposed to be the one who could take care of grandma as her mind failed her, and he was doing a good job of it. We don’t know what might have happened unless he threw a clot. His heart was still strong though, even if the rest of him wasn’t.

We miss you already grampa.

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I actually think I might be getting tired of it. This is the third snowfall for the winter. Unheard of in Texas where the normal is maybe a nice freeze once in late January. It’s beautiful when it falls but it always leaves a big slushy mess. We didn’t get as much snow as a few weeks ago, but here’s a few snapshots of what we got last time. This was my backyard. Unfortunately it only lasted about two days looking this nice. Now it’s back to mud.

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