Cleanliness is an infectious disease...

And it has infected my car!

I don't know if I should be proud or ashamed that my car, which has been in my possession for about 9 years now, got cleaned for the first time today. I don't mean just the removal of used kleenex or old parking stickers, spent coffee cups and google maps. I mean it got a vacuum and a windex.

In what was yet another one thing leads to another category — I mentioned yesterday that all kinds of things were staged by the door waiting to go to the Goodwill. Some of those were pretty large items, a chair, a suitcase, and they were really in the way. I went to load them in the car this afternoon, and figured, oh heck, I'm cleaning the house, I might as well clean the car.

When we bought the Carr, it came with 2 sets of floor mats (that's 8 of them). When I bought the Saturn 9 years ago, it did not come with mats, you had to buy them separately. I was outraged. So I figured, hey, the Subaru got totaled, it was about to get towed away, it wasn't going to need them mats anymore. So all this time, the Saturn had been using Subaru floor mats from 1980.

And now it has 2008 Subaru floor mats! It practically looks like a new car!

So yes, it's been days since I've done any work in the studio, but the house is looking preeetty good! Spent the afternoon and evening trying to make a screen from this old sari I have (I always knew I'd find a use for it!). Only problem is that it is stretched out of shape a bit and does not want to hang straight, but I think it will be fine for what it's for.

Cat Box Relocation Program has begun. The new box has a swing door, which is different from the current box, so we've just set it up with no litter in it, and have been trying to get the kitty to go in and out. Not sure about the psychology of playing with the box, she's probably thinking, "OMG, this is the best toy I've ever had, I'm never going to poop in it!"

More de-junk-ing

My frenzy of cleaning up the place has now infected the downstairs. It's starting to look a bit more roomy down here, what with all the things we haven't used (except to put other junk on) now staged by the front door, waiting for my 3 trip to the Goodwill in about 5 days. Even the Good Prince is becoming motivated to clean up His Corner (which is really more than a corner).

The kitty is a bit spooked by all this, especially since 'her room' is now devoid of all the boxes, bags of stuff, whatnots, that she's undoubtedly quite used to, and they probably provided excellent hiding places. Instead, the room looks so open and respectable. Two more things to shop for — shades for the window and some kind of a privacy screen for the entry. This room was originally NOT chosen as the guest bedroom because it does not offer much privacy. If the guest closes the door, then there's poor air circulation; if they don't close the door, well, there they are! So it will probably end up looking like a Japanese restaurant, with those fabric panels in the doorway.

Redecorating, did you say?

Having cleaned up the spare bedroom so that it's a usable guest bedroom, I'm now shopping for a new sofa bed. The one we have now is a traditional sofa bed, which is pretty uncomfortable and really isn't good for more than a day or two. So in between running some errands for Portland Open Studios, I stopped at the the futon place and checked out the options.

And of course, one thing always leads to another, and I started thinking about ripping up the carpet and putting in a wood floor, something we've talked about doing since day 1 (almost 17 years ago now). But sounds like my grand plans have been thwarted once again, this time due to the bad economy...

In yet another one thing leads to another category, I'll have to figure out how to deal with moving the kitty box. She's had her box in the spare room for 6 years now. But we can hardly make the guests sleep with the cat box now, can we?

Mit, 1st senior, day 3

Woohoo! K (the activities coordinator) at RSM has turned this ship around! It's clear that the residents trust her, and she's also good about using different words to try to direct them.

We met with my 1st senior again today. I had no expectations that anything was going to happen, and in fact, arrived under-prepared — I forgot to bring my recorder. But my senior seemed not as tired today as Monday, even though she just found out her son was moving away (not sure about that) and was in "a bad mood" (she said so herself, although not detectable by me).

Anyhow, since she expressed the feeling that I was pushing her into doing something she didn't want to do, I was determined to not be pushy today, and I was only going to bring up the subject once. If she said no, that would be it.

Well, I brought it up, and she said no. But K went on to ask about her favorite books, and although her reply was that all her books were favorites, she asked me to bring her her prayer book from the cabinet (now we were getting somewhere!) that was given to her when she was confirmed. There was a beautiful insert, with her name and names of the rabbis printed and signed.

But when I asked if we could make a print of it, she said she had plenty of prints already and didn't want/need any more. Immediately, K said, "oh, we're just going to make some copies of it."

Well, in that case, that was just fine!

It was obvious that she didn't want to do the actual gocco printing itself, so K and I went off and just did it. Returned the original and gave her 4 of the gocco prints. She seemed to like them and sounded happy that I would come back again next week.

Yippee! I was pretty happy after that. But of course, next week, she'd probably not like "copies" any better than "prints." See this entry for the disappointing visit last time. Today was just 100% better.

(Fun Factoid of the day: turns out, K, I, and my 1st senior are all Rats! K is half my age and my first senior is twice my age. Pretty cool, huh? Which reminds me, this being Chinese New Year (Happy New Year of the Rat), it was a pretty auspicious beginning!)

Since I was printing in their arts and crafts room, I attracted the attention of someone who came in to ask about some other project, and now she wants to be next to participate. Double Yippee!

On other fronts, made good progress cleaning up the spare bedroom. Found a recycler very close to us and the broken TV (broken for 15 years, I'm just now dealing with it) is loaded in the car, ready to go. That alone, cleared up a lot of space.

Haven't made any more progress on the LO Chronicles piece, but found out we actually have until April 15 to submit the image, so I want to let it sit for a bit before I continue.

(I just ran the spellchecker, and it wants to change 'woohoo' to 'boohoo'!)

MiT, 2nd senior, day 1

I met my 2nd senior today. Similar situation as the 1st senior — moved up here in the last 8 months or so from sunny Southwest; didn't want to move but children moved her up anyhow. However, it's clear that she has a very different personality. 2nd senior says that was her life before, and now she has a new life; she's taking art classes (and seems very enthusiastic about it); she's thinking about playing the violin again. So I hope these are good signs! I was pretty wired up even though I hardly slept last night and didn't have any coffee, just from being nervous I think.

Started to take over some of the Portland Open Studios web site updates. Not sure that I want to make really big changes to the web site, it will take so much time. On the other hand, I think the look & feel needs updating.

Spent the rest of the day de-cluttering. I want to get the upstairs spare bedroom cleaned up so it can be a real guest bedroom, leaving the downstairs bedroom for gocco projects.

I'm done with scary movies

Random Movie of the week — I Am Legend. And like I said, I'm done with scary movies. Can't take them like I used to, not that I ever could very well. But now I've finally wised up and see that I shouldn't spend money on it. Besides...[ SPOILER ALERT............the dog died...you'd think that he could've strapped the dog down until he found a cure, like he did with the infected human............END SPOILER ALERT]...which always makes me sad.

Other than that, spent the afternoon at the library and the morning at the dentist. I'm getting anxious about my meeting with my 2nd senior tomorrow. Hope it will go well. Of course, now I'm a nervous wreck about it, it will probably go terribly.

Moment in Time, day 2, and Lake Oswego Chronicles piece, day 5

My meeting with my first senior at RSM today was a bust. She continues to go back and forth between "I'm not interested in this project" to "I'd like to help you with this project." At one point, she said she wasn't interested in "buying what I was selling." Not sure where that came from. Anyhow, so no prints were made today, but we made another appt for Thursday. After that, I was most definitely ready for a Really Long Nap.

The activities coordinator thought we should move on and set me up with another resident, so I'll meet her on Wed. I'm not ready to hit the panic button yet, and hopefully things will go better with my 2nd senior. Or I will hit the panic button. (This is what the project is about.)

Here's today's progress on the LO chronicles piece. I'm really just not sure what I think of this yet.



Here's where it was last.

Me and my fainting couch

I hope I'm not having a relapse of my cold, or whatever it was I had. When I got home from the weight room, I was so exhausted that I went straight from the front door to the sofa and slept, instantly and very soundly, until dinner time. And I'm still feeling pretty tired. Needless to say, I slept away what might've been my studio time today. Tomorrow, I meet with my RSM senior for our 2nd printing session...news at 11 tomorrow night.

Lake Oswego Chronicles piece, day 4

Contrary to what I said I'd do the last time I worked on this, this piece is becoming more and more garish, and not less. But I'll fix that later.



Although it doesn't look like a big change, it took 5 hours to add the little segmented stripes behind the flowers & moths today. But I think I'm in good shape to finish in time (Feb 15 image due). And I'm thinking of having Aaron photograph it, rather than trying to do it myself, which is really such a pain.

Moment in Time, Day 1

So this was my first 'print' day with my first partner at RSM for this project that I got the grant for, named Moment In Time for now. And already, on Feb 1, I'm worried about completing the project in time (shows go up Nov/Dec this year).

I should've anticipated some of the issues that I'm running into, since my American mom is the same way — although 'my senior' says she's interested in participating and making prints, when it comes right down to it, she doesn't really want to work on the project, but she likes to have visitors. We ended up talking a lot; we went through her photo albums, and I'm getting lots of ideas for what 'her book' will look like. And it may turn out that 'her book' won't have very many prints made by her.

But this was clearly not a good day for her today, so maybe our next meeting will be a little smoother sailing. Also, I asked Katie to set me up with my 2nd senior next week, and maybe they can see what each other is doing and be inspired; or as the Good Prince says, a little 'peer pressure.'

Random Movie tonight: Persepolis! I've been waiting anxiously for it, and it does not disappoint.