Pressures Low and High
This week has been sort of low key. I've been having a few weeks of strange free floating anxiety. I know it's chemical. It's meaningless, but it just is what it is. I am wondering now if it's been triggered by my blood pressure medicine snafus. It's dropping my pressure levels too low so I'm sort of just napping off and on a lot of the week. I find when I'm rather frustrated, sad or angry it's my stupid body trying to get me to notice something. Talking to my neuro about this right now as every blood pressure med they try me on eventually drops it too low and I turn lethargic.
Monday we took our friend Dave to Liberia, just to take him to Price Smart, and show him all the places to pick up the best of everything. I bought all new towels for the house. It's been almost 4 years in our house and what we bought is showing some wear. It was a very fun day with Dave.
On the way home Dave showed us around where he lives at the Black Stallion subdivision out past Villareal. I've been curious about the place for ages, horseback riding, zip lines, rental houses.
Jim's in a lather this week over the testing and end of the English teaching contract he's involved with. He and the other teacher had to pick a student to win a scholarship to a slot at a U.S. university. Crunch time, so he went back and forth. While I'm writing this he's at his desk hard at work grading the essay portion of the tests they administered.
The car was in the shop for a day with muffler problems and getting the catalytic converter changed out.
I've been bent over the sewing machine finishing up covers for the chaise lounges by the pool and whipping up a few new curtains for the guesthouse.
On other fronts I've spent some time these last weeks working on 'pour' paintings, trying to determine the exact right viscosity of paint versus adding silicon and it's not going well at all. There have been very few artistic endeavors I've turned my hands to that I haven't quickly mastered the rudiments.
Stained glass? A few lessons and away I went.. only stopped because of my lung doctor insisting it was not a hobby for asthmatics, what with all the melting lead and lead fumes.
Painting with oils and acrylics? Check. Lessons, studied it some at university, painted piles of canvases and sold a few through the years. My painting has taken a nose dive since I now cannot tolerate the fumes of either without making the asthma crazy.
Candle making, soap making, clay sculptures, wall murals, quilting, sewing, crochet, weaving, making yarn out of weird things to craft with, macrame, embroidery, needlework galore, jewelry making, bead making, Check, all these and more.
There are now three that escape me. The first I ran into as a teen, watercolor. We did a watercolor unit in high school art class and I just sucked at it. Then, as now, I keep finding myself pulled back into using too intense of colors without using enough water. Using oil painting techniques of layering or pointillism. I remember my high school art teacher just sighing and telling me how horrid I was at it. I am marginally better now, but not by much!
I can crochet, upside down, backwards, swacked stoned stupid, any condition. But I cannot knit. It's not by lack of trying, lord knows I've taken lessons, but it just never works. I end up with some strange looking pulled tensions oddities, throwing down the needles to go right back to crochet. I think it's because I learned to crochet as a child, and just cannot make the adjustment to other things with yarns.
And now the third one is this pour painting, which is pouring these super thing concoctions of acrylic paints, silicons, water, perspiration, heat gun and blow dryer. The first one was dreadful! Except when I hit the painting with the heat gun I got all these lovely bubbling cells in the greenish star shaped edges. I'd mixed the paints far too thicklu, and ended up using the old palette knife to scrape out the center. Now I have the original green background peeking through the new bluish background with bubbling greenish jagged bits, some red squiggles that ran, a few I added. So I decided to redeem the entire mess by adding a sunflower in oils. It's hanging right now in my bedroom, very weird but I like it.
Pour painting since them haven't gone any better. I'm having to scrape off and start again. I don't think I'm going to be able to master it living here, where the supplies are difficult to get and expensive. I think I'm going to presage a return to oil painting, which I love, where you can do so many cool things, from paint in a traditional style, to use odd things as paint brushes even things like Saran wrap, or you can mix your paint with wax and sculpt right on the canvass. Sadly this old dog isn't learning new tricks.
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