Hang Ten

As most of you know, I have been working on remodelling the house on Nichol Avenue since January of this year. I wanted to give you a little update on my progress. I think I have repaired all the walls that need repairing. I did the interior encasement framing on about 14 windows and now I am in the taping and spackling phase. The pictures I've included here are of the living room. .. "before" and "currently". The walls in here were covered with spackle that was put on in what I call cake icing style and topped with gold glitter. Maybe it was quite beautiful when it was first created but over time, dust had settled on the different surfaces. It was quite a mess. I knocked off all the edges and washed down the walls to create a somewhat smooth surface. I then spackled over all the walls to make a smoother finish yet.

Last week I was standing on a ladder, 3 feet off the floor, reaching to the top of the 9 foot walls to smooth spackle on the walls and dipple it into the ceiling. I had some music playing. It was a cd that my friend - Julie - gave me years ago after she and Jack and Phil and I had gone to Chicago to see Circe de Soliel (sp?). It was Varekai(sp?). As I was reaching and spackling, I thought of those performers on the stage in one particular skit. There were about a dozen performers up on a moving contraption and as they were moving and spinning, many of them would flip around and land on this shed type structure. They got to moving so fast and furious that it looked like some kind of human molecular structure in action. The whole thing was so amazing that as I watched, I felt like I was holding my breath so as not to in any way throw off their balance and momentum. And I think everyone else in the audience felt the same way because when the performance ended, we all exhaled in relief and jubilation that no one had gotten themselves killed! It was thrilling.

I bring that memory up because as I was standing there on the third rung of the ladder, my feet clutching the step and my left hand holding the wall as I smeared the spackle, I started thinking about courage. Where do the people who do the toughest things get the courage? I don't know if you would have to have the greatest faith or have to abandon faith altogether to flip from a moving structure to land on the shoulders of someone standing on an 8 foot high structure 10 feet away. I felt a little better standing on that rickety, old ladder after that.

Speaking of courage, check this out....http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s0Pw7vKtqpo

Red Moon Rising

The moon rose red over the soybean field. It seemed to quiver in the blue of the night sky. I was sitting at my dining table witnessing this ancient happening. I grabbed my camera and went out by the mailbox to take a picture.... a red moon on the horizon. Later I went back to take a video of this scene as the clouds had started to do a peek a boo.
After downloading the videos to my computer, I thought that I might just delete the videos as it is hard to get a good movie of far away objects. Then I noticed the sounds in this video. And maybe I'm just weird but I love the sounds even if it is hard to make out the moon.



I was looking at the Prairie Home Companion website this week and came across a good piece of advice from Garrison Keillor. A young writer wrote in to him and asked "Do you have any advice for an aspiring young writer?"
Keillor wrote back ... " The first obligation of a young writer is to describe your parents, a major project. I also think you should start a novel right away. I put mine off for years, thinking I wasn't ready, but it's invaluable experience---- to set out to write a sustained work of prose fiction of a hundred-thousand words or so. The main character is you yourself, it's set in Bristol, and your parents are definitely in it. Your main character has to get in trouble and then get out. And maybe that's the problem here. You've been too good, too obliging, helpful, kind, considerate, thoughtful, generous, responsible, etc, etc. It's hard to be interesting writing about pure goodness. Find some vein of evil within yourself and work from that. You don't need to enact these things in real life, by the way. Unless, of course, you want to. The way to write a novel is to write a few hundred words a day, every day, no fail. So try it. Maybe it'll be a big failure, but big failures can build the foundation for great success."