Waiting for Watering

Day 3:

After getting all of my wood cut up into pieces and finally obtaining all the tools needed to put my garden bed together, of course the weather decided to step in and put a crimp in my plans by dumping several days of rain on us.

As I sat inside listening to the pitter pat of barely there rain, I reviewed the gardening books that I have and a few gardening websites. The main purpose of my garden bed was to grow tomatoes to can myself, since I am wary of tomatoes packaged with BPA in their linings. A quick review tells me that I will most certainly not be able to grow enough plants in a 4'X8' bed to keep us in tomatoes all year. And even if I could, I then shouldn't put tomatoes back in that bed for 3 more years (or crops, or something, I don't really get this whole rotation of the garden deal).

So after determining that I won't get enough tomatoes out of the bed, I decide that maybe I should dedicate more space to other stuff.....but what? And in what combinations? The more I read, the more confused and fuzzy I get.

Some books/websites recommend packing things in to get the maximum amount of stuff from your space. According to them, through staggering and interspersing you can plant things closer together than you could if you just had traditional rows of crops. Other books/websites recommend giving the plants lots of space. And then we get to the idea that some plants are great companion plants and are beneficial to each other, while some plants can cause the fruit of others to be less than desirable. Added to that, I have to take into account what I receive routinely from my CSA box weekly, and what my daughter will and will not eat and my head starts to hurt.

I finally arrive at a plan which includes a few tomatoes, peppers, herbs, eggplant and strawberry plants. I have a spot for spinach but I need to figure out if it will bolt on me our weather. I put the plan aside and just enjoy the rain for a bit.

A Stick in the Mud

Day 2:

On day two I take my pint size helper to the other home improvement store in town. (I am still a bit too irritated by my trip on Day 1 to return to the scene of the crime. Although, honestly, I am mostly irritated at myself for forgetting that their store layout stinks since this is not the first time that I have wandered back and forth a ton of times to collect what I need.) I consult the man in the orange vest about the appropriate tools to cut my 2"x8" and 4"x4" boards and post, and it turns out that I already have what I need (or my dad does) to get the job done.

I call my dad over with his Saws-all, park the munchkin in front of the TV and we get to work cutting up the wood on the driveway. When we are done, I have a bunch of wood that, while not perfectly sized, is close enough. We bid adieu to my father for the afternoon and I prepare to start assembling.

The first step is to pre-drill some holes for my bolts, so I get out my cordless drill and affix the proper size drill bit. But when I press the trigger, nothing happens. Shot. The battery must be dead, but that is ok because I have another that has been on the charger since the last time I used the drill. I swap out the batteries lickety split and....... nothing. Good thing I have another drill with a battery that is ALSO fully charged. Except, that does nothing either. Now I am perplexed. I have 2 drills and 3 batteries and something has gone very wrong here. Either both drills are dead, or all 3 batteries have given up the ghost. That just doesn't seem feasible, and it leaves me unable to identify what I need to replace.

I call my dad back and ask him to bring me his battery so that I can test my drill when he comes over for dinner. When he arrives, it turns out that his battery pack is not compatible with my drill, so I can't use it. Luckily he has brought his drill with him and agrees to lend me the set for this project.

At the end of the day, I still haven't assembled anything, but at least I feel like I finally have everything I need for the next day.

Digging In

For the last few years I have been steadily working on changing my black thumb into sometime more greenish. I have successfully grown tomatoes and strawberries in containers in my back yard for the last two summers, only killing the tomato plants well after they stopped fruiting. (The strawberry plants continue to live, even though they didn't produce much fruit last year.) So I decided that one of my projects for the blog should be gardening in a big way and I would go ahead and get a big raised bed built and started in the yard.

Day 1

Before I can build and plant the raised bed, I need to head to the local home improvement store. It is a non-preschool day for Agnes, but I think, surely this can be a trip that we could take together without too much fuss. Right?

We pull into the parking lot with Agnes loudly protesting from the back seat that she wants to go to the grocery store instead, since she is hungry. I finally convince her to pipe down and get on board with this trip and we can exit the car 5 minutes later. She is ecstatic to ride on the big lumber cart and defies injury switching from standing to sitting and moving between the 3 sections of the cart. I haven't the strength of will to fight that fight, and any injury sustained isn't likely to be critical, so I let it slide despite the glare of doom from another woman. I head for the lumber section.

It doesn't take me long to add six 8 foot boards and an 8 foot post to my cart, but it does make it pretty difficult to maneuver. Now, off to get bolts to put these babies together. Of course the home improvement store doesn't store them anywhere nearby, they are on the opposite side of the store near gardening. I push the now heavy cart across the store while admonishing Agnes to be careful and not put her feet down on the ground, lest I run them over to no avail. Once we get to the right section, I find the bolts easily. Which is a good thing because the kiddo is losing patience and has started shifting the loose inventory around.

Next up is the gardening section, where Agnes begs me to buy her a red shovel and I relent. I get myself and Agnes shovels, a ground breaker for myself, and start looking for landscaping flags to mark my sprinkler heads so they don't get torn up. I start to realize that I should have put the lumber in the cart last, it is so hard to maneuver in the gardening section of the store that I become more and more frustrated I can't find what I am looking for. I finally track down an employee who tells me that the flags I am looking for are with PVC piping, not in gardening. Of course, that is on the other side of the store, next to lumber.

Back through the store I push the heavy cart and the squirmy child. I grab the flags and head to the check out only to find myself positioned in the only open check out behind a guy filling out a credit application. Agnes is begging for candy, and I feel like I have entered some circle of hell. Another clerk comes by and tells me to go to the next lane, since she is opening. But by the time I maneuver the cart over there, I am third in line.

I finally get out of the store with both Agnes and I irritated and unhappy only to find that the only way the wood fits in the car is if I roll down a window and have the wood stick out a bit, so we can't go to the grocery store as planned. When I finally get home, I am relieved......until I realize that I didn't buy any clamps to hold the wood to my work table while cutting it, and my saw is not large enough to cut through the 4"x4" post. I toss the wood in the garage, close the door and wonder if this project is going to be more of a pain than it will be worth.

Draw to a Close

I ended up skipping day 4 of drawing because I just wasn't feeling that into it and Agnes was home. On day 5 I felt a little bit inspired to try to get back on the horse, even if the misfit munchkin was still in the residence.

Drawing with a small child around is MUCH different than attempting to hone my drawings by myself. I am assaulted with a barrage a of questions about what I am doing and why I am doing it. Then Agnes takes it upon herself to, "Improve" my drawings. She tells me I am not drawing my lines dark enough, so she proceeds to wrestle the pencil away from me and trace everything I have drawn in a a heavy charcoal outline. I conclude that this is not going to work out for me and let her go to town, preserving a few of my better drawings, but letting her "color" the bird and the doodles I have made today.

At the end of 5 days drawing I am MUCH farther as an artist in this medium than I was when I started. More than the progress I have made in actual technique, I have a completely different view of the exercise than I did going into this week. I don't know what drawing will become my new favored hobby, but I can say that I will work on completing the exercises in the book. It may take me a while, but I am going to give it a shot.

PUBLISH POST

Drawing a Blank

Day 3

I start the day feeling a little antsy. I don’t really feel like drawing, and a review of the day’s planned exercise does not help with the feeling. For the next exercise I am supposed to craft a view finder out of plastic and card stock, balance it on one of my hands and draw that hand based on the resulting view. Frankly, it just sounds like work and I don’t really want to do it. So I spend some time farting around on the internet instead.

After an hour of monkey clicking around the internet, I finally get around to making a viewfinder…..sort of. I find the clear plastic clipboard I have intended to use as a viewfinder and draw a crosshatch on it. I start to get out the cardstock and decide that it really isn’t necessary. So I sit down to drawn my own hand.

Ten minutes later, I am still irritable and antsy. I stand up and sit down at least a dozen times talking myself into and out of the exercise. Why is this causing me so much ANGST? It is just a stupid drawing exercise, not even assigned by a teacher or a boss. Drawing is not the boss of me and I don’t have to do it. So there! I leave the viewfinder and go get some fresh air.

With about an hour to go until I have to leave to pick up my daughter, I return to my sketchpad. I feel like I committed to try things for 5 days and I really shouldn’t give up. So I decide to do the Day 2 exercise again, because it was pretty peaceful and Zen. I start on the Day 2 exercise and the first 30 minutes are just as they were the day before, but then I start to worry about the time. Determining the passage of time while I am drawing is pretty hard, so I start to worry that I am losing track of time and I won’t leave in time to pick up my daughter. So I start checking the clock every 5 minutes. This lack of focus is making the drawing harder and I am back to not feeling it, so I decide to pack it in for the day.

I don’t know what this means for tomorrow. Maybe this will be one of the hobbies I don’t make it through, or maybe I have been spending too much time with a child who has the attention span of a gnat and it has worn off on me. Whatever the case may be, I put it aside for the rest of the day.

Drawing on Brain Power

Day 2:

I decide to give up on reading, “Drawing with Children.” Much of the information is similar, but is less interesting and the example drawings are much simpler and kind of boring. And less boring is good. I already spend a good portion of my day playing with a 4 year old which is great fun if you are 4, but less than mentally stimulating for the over 30 crowd.

Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain launches into a discussion about the fact that most people don’t learn to draw past 9-10 because they never learn to access the spatial relationship functions of the right side of the brain while turning off the dominant language and reasoning centers in their left. I start with a couple of exercises designed to show me how hard it is to draw when you are focused on naming things. And it is hard, very hard. I am instantly transported back to middle school and the suckitude that was art class. My brain rebels and starts hurling really mature thoughts like, “I am not going to do this and you can’t make me so Nah nah na nah NAH.”

When I am done struggling through those exercises, I move on to the exercises designed to HELP me access the right brain functions. I copy a copy of drawings out of the book, but I do it upside down. It is actually kind of hard to determine exactly what I am drawing, but when I turn them right side up they are pretty good. Not picture perfect, but not lamentable either. I also notice that I am no longer getting halfway through the picture and feeling like I have wasted too much time on it. I take as much time as it takes to complete the picture and don’t worry about the time. It’s actually kind of Zen.

Drawing the Starting Line

When I was little I never could figure out how to draw anything more than stick figures or box houses. My brothers both seemed to draw well, and I didn’t, so I figured that it wasn’t for me. My belief in my inability to draw was confirmed when I took art in 6^th grade and Mr. Dyer (or maybe Mr. Dyer was my math teacher? I can’t remember so we will call the art teacher MR. D symbolically.) solemnly let me know that my drawings lacked perspective and merited a D. I spent 6 months in that class drawing the same damn barn over and over again, never getting any better and never figuring out why art was the only class that I couldn’t “get”. Until I said “Suck it, Mr. D” and moved on to rock out science and math classes. (Yep, I am the kid who took extra science classes as her elective because of my ineptitude at creative arts.)

Day 1:

I start by perusing the selection of books on how to draw on Amazon and cross-referencing what is available in my local library. (Because what does a nerd do when confronted with a need to learn something new? Research!) Two of the books, “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” and “Drawing with Children,” come pretty highly recommended and are available for check out. Off I go to the library.

When I get home I start to read the introductory portion of the books and put together a list of supplies. The list looks surprisingly like a list for a kid’s birthday party. It includes pencils, paper, markers, and whatnot. The books differ greatly in their recommendations of what to purchase. “Drawing with Children” recommends that the prospective artist start with colored markers to prevent erasing, while “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” starts with a more traditional charcoal pencil and eraser nearby. In fact, the only thing that is echoed in both books is the belief that anyone can draw if they practice seeing things properly. I put together a list of supplies and head off to the art store.

When I get home I conquer the introductory exercises. In short time I draw a house with a tree, shrubs and person for “Drawing with Children” (which I have included a picture of for your entertainment) and a self portrait, person from memory and my hand for “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain.” I am instructed to look at them closely, and I am surprised that I am actually not too unhappy with my work. I already seem to be drawing better, just by checking out the books. Which is to say I am drawing like a regular 11 year old, instead of one that is eligible for special ed. Amazing!

Kicking this Habit to the Curb, for now

Day 5

It is the day for me to try out a regular martial arts studio.

Agnes is having herself a grump and disciplining makes me run late. I arrive at the studio just as the previous class is bowing to their teacher. A quick review of the people waiting to take the mat reveals that the class I had agreed to join is made up of three barely pubescent teens. When I speak to the teen working the desk, it turns out the main instructor is out sick. Unfortunately this is the person with whom I spoke about visiting and no one quite knows what to do.

I am feeling less and less at ease with this situation. I don’t really want to be the only person not dressed in a gi, the only adult, and have to explain multiple times that I am there to try out a class. I opt to flee instead. I head to the library to drift among the books. (Because who goes home early when you have a babysitter? Especially when your child was being a pill when you left.)

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The final word on Martial Arts is that it is a big question mark. I actually enjoyed the class at the MMA gym, but I feel ill prepared at the moment to keep it up. I will probably continue going to the gym near the preschool Agnes goes to until I pull her in preparation for her attending school closer to home. At that point, maybe I will feel like I have made enough movement in the fitness arena to stop feeling like I am too out of shape for their conditioning classes. We will see.