<p>Central Park, in the 80s by Madison, Bloomberg’s nabe, dog walker of course, very trendily dressed dog walker, it was all oh so chic and hip!!! You know the scene bears, tres chi chi, I would have thought it was Paris’s dog but then she favors chilhuahuas and there’s really not enough body there for a good cheetah pattern. Love the leopard shaped garter idea…</p>
<p>Bears, there is a book “Why Paint Cats” that was donated to the library that I work in. (It became a big hit!) I was astonished and thought at first that they were paintings of fantastically furred cats. Nope, someone actually painted a cat. The same authors came out with “Why Cats Paint” about a decade earlier so maybe it seemed logical to them to have the artist become the canvas. Or something like that. Maybe they got the idea from Demi Moore?</p>
<p>A 69 for me. Had my mother done the smart thing and thrown my father out, it would be a 77.</p>
<p>Note to those sending care packages: Include first aid supplies. D texted this am that she bought a callous remover, shaved too close and cut her foot. Said that was not a good time to find she was out of gauze and guaze tape. Said she remembered an old boy scout trick from a first aid handbook and used a sanitary napkin. I wonder how they explain that in the book!</p>
<p>Oh that just made me shiver!
It’s the chalk on the blackboard reaction.
The fix was quite imaginative and smart</p>
<p>The Boy Scout book could have a chapter on raiding your sister’s personal products and having a perfectly good reason for it when you get caught! </p>
<p>I also remember reading a book where a woman used sanitary napkins to improvise shoulder pads. Must have been the 80’s.</p>
<p>Some years ago at a place where I was working lunches would go missing. I accidentally discovered the “fix” when I bought a sandwich and an unopened box of tampons and mistakenly put both (in a brown paper bag) in the refrigerator. Someone opened the bag and had obviously hastily closed it again without taking my food. Led me to suspect that the perpetrator/thief was male, afterwards I just kept the tampon box in with my lunch and my food was always there waiting for me!</p>
<p>If it’s a female food thief, you could have a container of ladybugs or nightcrawlers in with your lunch. Relax, they’re hibernating in the cold! Seriously, where I work someone had nightcrawlers in the fridge for weeks. No one stole them.</p>
<p>I must say the nightcrawlers would have me going out to lunch.</p>
<p>We’ve had nightcrawlers in there along with crickets, but can’t remember what we would have fed those to - maybe the big fish. D is gone, so the frig is safe again.</p>
<p>Wait, wasn’t it you who had the drying deer carcus or some such thing in the backyard?
We are a funny group aren’t we, the whole dang lot of us!</p>
<p>Yep, that’s me. have just added dried up still intact fish to the “rotting box”, and had to move the deer head under there also, because it has not come apart from the rest of the body and the dogs were playing with it. Never a dull moment. Dead wild pig in the canal, and D wants me to bring that home - ain’t happening!</p>
<p>Are all art students natural hoarders? Always seeing the potential in any material? I made the mistake of reading off a few things on a local Freecycle site and D jumped on it. “A 30 pound block of alabaster? Get it!!!” Well, I got it and after thinking of what a nightmare it would end up being to D (one of those albatross things that you think are too good to get rid of but never actually do anything purposeful with), I came upon the solution of just putting in the garden. It’s now just a big, funny looking rock under the hydrangea. Hopefully she’ll be able to let it go one day if we sell the house. </p>
<p>It’s better than anything rotting although I have a big bag full of splintery wood studded with rusty nails in my shed that D used for some project. How long do these things last? She made something out of toffee and I was so happy - finally an art project with a shelf life!!! Not so fast, it’s wanted for a student work show next August! We have to keep the thing alive, not cracking, and not devoured by ants for several more months! It’s so big it’s inside a trash can, double bagged in plastic and taped securely shut. Will it keep out the ants? When it gets warmer I’ll have to move it in the house or it will melt.</p>
<p>So we don’t have anything rotten but piles of materials and old projects. Everyday as I drive into my garage the headlights hit the full size sculpture of strange monster on bicycle dressed in a rather nice designer red raincoat from the Goodwill store. do I put it in the garbage? There is the pretty lousy clay sculpture of his head from 11th grade next to the refrigerator downstairs…it is crumbling…what to do? I may try to sell the sculpture at the next garage sale…there are piles and piles of sketches and paintings…there is a large quantity of material used to make parachutes for science fair project, pipe cleaners, paints, plastic eyes, rubber stamps, many many crayons and markers, newsprint, etc…</p>
<p>It isn’t just art stuff from S…I am also guilty of hoardingstuff with the idea that it can be put to good use by the next kid but some of it is more likely to be used by grandkids in 20 years…like the home made electric generator made with plastic spoons, magnets and copper wire housed in a very cool lego castle that S put together last year in a desperate attempt to get physics extra credit to bring up C grade … I still have an old clay volcano originally from 4th grade that was used by both kids for multiple science projects…the 2nd grade frog outfit …and less noxious than a carcass but a little gross anyway, the reconstituted/reconstructed vole skeleton from an owl pellet…D was so proud she wanted it put in one of those fancy glass display cases but it is starting to crumble now. </p>
<p>I think animal carcasses definitely are the strangest things to h ave kept for art kids…but I know I have my share of weird stuff that I can’t seem to let go of… the perils of having a large attic storage space in suburbia</p>
<p>Lets see… there’s DH’s ‘Spawn until you die’ T shirt with entire salmon skeletons sewn to it… an old paper mache Bastet by D1 – I finally made her get rid of the scale model of the Acropolis, it took way too much room. Aspie girl has a puppet of Dick King that she made along with an enormous collection of horse jumps and corral fencing for the huge collection of Breyer horse models. Manga girl isn’t too guilty of keeping old projects… I’m hard pressed to think of what she’s scavenged… she did insist on two Japanese style tile paintings of flowers from my mother that are on the wall in her room now. Aspie girl is by far the worst of the lot. She won’t get rid of anything. She, in all seriousness, once showed me the stick from a lollipop and asked me what she should do with it. “It’ trash, put it in the trash can” I tell her. “But…” she says; “it came in my easter basket…” “Yes” I reply, and “you ate the candy part and the stick is left and it goes in the trash can”. She remains dubious. I really worry about her living on her own. I sometimes don’t see how she could do it by herself. Poor thing. DH holds on to things way past their useful life… I’m never sure why. Except that maybe it’s a family trait because his dad will send random things in the mail… used t-shirts… an engraved silver platter he got as an award from IBM(why would we want such a thing?) all sorts of odds and ends. When we go visit he’ll give DH a tube of glue or other random things… Once he showed up at my door and pushed a loaf of bread into my hands (just toast up some of this for me in the morning, I’m here to paint the inside of your garage door – that didn’t go too well because I gave him back his bread and pointed out that I didn’t have a toaster that I could put regular bread in and I wasn’t going to contaminate our toaster with gluten… and gee, we didn’t want/need the inside of our garage door painted??) He’s a strange one all right.</p>
<p>DH was dragging his feet about taking down the old car port. He was worried that when we were going to take it down it would “damage the asphalt” so he wanted to tear down the shed and put the wood under the carport to cushion the ‘fall’. sigh. I have been trying and trying to get him to rent one of those big dumpsters so we could take down the shed and carport… but DH drags his feet. Oh well, the last snow storm knocked the carport down onto the precious asphalt. So now we need to get the dumpster anyway. Won’t happen til I get back from my travels. Maybe Bastet can find a new home…</p>
<p>Any quirks my kids have they come by honestly. No rotting flesh in the yard, but every ribbon and button that ever passed through the house is kept - this includes the strings you cut off strapless dresses that hold it on the hanger. Old socks can be used to make mini stuffed animals, old pillows are their stuffing. The end of a piece of wood that Lowe’s was going to throw away after custom cutting for us…The bleached skull of an opossum D’s dad trapped in a have a heart cage before we went on a 2 week vacation…The list goes on…</p>
<p>But last year I spent weeks in a concentrated effort to purge but only of I could get everything to its highest and best repurposing: Unwanted clothes, shoes, suitcases to the Women’s shelter, old dog bowls and clorox to the animal shelter, books to the friends of the public library and several women’s groups, styrofoam to a styrofoam manufacturer and the list went on and on. In the end I got rid of many car loads of things (yes, i had been hoarding them - “in case”) and felt great about the new life I hoped they would have. But I guess there is a difference between saving for in-case and saving for art’s sake.</p>
<p>OK typical story of launchee’s less than successful attempt at “intelligent” independence…he has the independence part down but the intelligent is not so good…he is going to spend the first part of spring break at McGill in Quebec visiting best friend…I pointed out several not bad itineraries but left the final purchase of train/bus tickets to him…I bust into his email today to check on CMU late fees/tuition issues and lo and behold ther eis a greyhound itinerary there…it is the following.</p>
<p>Pitt-Cleveland (11pm - arrive 2am)
Cleveland-Buffalo (5am-9am)
Buffalo-Ottowa? or some other god forsaken part of canada and thenarrives sometime mid day with 1/2 hour to change to
Ottowa-Quebec…arrives at 5pm…
…bus tour of the great lakes apparently.</p>
<p>I call him and say did he realize that he has to change buses 4 times and has no more than 4 hours to sleep uninterrupted and no time to buy food.</p>
<p>“Oh”…he says…“when I saw the ticket it just said “interrupted” so I thought it just meant it stopped for more passengers”…I say to him that the cleveland bus station is probably not a great place to be for 4 hours…certainly no food and probably in such a horrible area that he will be stupid to walk to some all night food place…in fact it is probably the sort of place young skinny guys get raped in the bathroom so perhaps he could just pee on the bus. He was laughing and says he will see if he can find a bus to NYC because then there is the train to Quebec …my southern soul is tortured by the idea of my little boy in cleveland and buffalo…how terrible is it that he doesn’t speak French…he says he can speak spanish with a french accent and he did just fine in Paris everyone seemed to understand him.</p>
<p>Be careful! My sister and I still get together and complain about some of the things our mother got rid of. Our grandmother’s silk wedding dress from the 1920’s? So small it would never fit anyone and it was sitting around forever, said our Mom. The old black telephone and manual coffee grinder? Sold at a yard sale along with the beautiful metal double decker bus and dolls our Dad had brought back from London. </p>
<p>Worst of all, was the loss of a bridesmaid dress my mother had from the 1950’s It was midnight blue velvet, strapless, and had a huge skirt. We would put it on, hold it to our torsos (it was too big for a child, of course) and spin furiously around. The skirt was so huge it would sail straight out, and then start forming waves as you spun. It even sounded amazing. Gone at some yard sale while I was at college!</p>
<p>Another loss was a plate in the shape of celery that we only took out at Thanksgiving. A silly little thing but I wish it were still around. These aren’t the same as moldering old art projects, but I know I will be careful and ask around before I clean out anything that might have some strange sentimental value attached to it. I guess I’ll need a bigger basement!</p>
<p>McGill is in Montreal. There are plenty of English speakers around and he will be fine. </p>
<p>Change that bus ticket though, what a nightmare!</p>
<p>oops that implies that he needs french in buffalo and cleveland…I meant quebec obviously but what life skills do you need to survive in cleveland?</p>