Clara and Mr. Tiffany

What a great book Susan Vreeland wrote about the under appreciated Clara Driscoll.  I loved every stinking sentence of Clara and Mr. Tiffany.  This is historical fiction about the life of a woman living in New York City at the turn of the century.  She works for Louis Comfort Tiffany cutting glass and designing stained glass windows, mosaics and lamps.  The lamps were her idea although Tiffany took all the credit for the idea and the designs. She designed lamps to look like daffodils, wisteria, dragonflies and peonies.  Since I dig glass and mosaics I really appreciated the details about choosing pieces of glass and incorporating nature into her designs.  Tiffany would not allow married women to work in his glass. He only wanted to take advantage of unmarried women.  Clara was an artist and she submitted to his unfair treatment because he gave her the opportunity to practice her art. She lived in a boarding house with other artists and had many friends.  I enjoyed reading about the first subway in New York City and Clara's first ride on a bicycle.  Clara's involvement in the design of the Tiffany lamps has only recently come to light because the New York Historical Society found two boxes of Clara's letters.  This story outlines the plight of women in general and female artists in particular.   

What A Show!

A bonus of having the last four days off work and spending more time at home is the show put on by my local wildlife.  The birds put on a show for Thanksgiving. I had a flock of crab apple eating robins, downy woodpeckers, hairy woodpeckers, red bellied woodpeckers, pileated woodpeckers, and Northern flickers.  This is the first year I have seen Northern flickers eating suet but they have been back every day.  I had chickadees and goldfinches and white breasted nuthatches and cedar waxwings and juncos and blue jays and cardinals.  A flock of turkeys strolled through the yard on Thanksgiving putting on quite a holiday show.  Male and female white tailed deer visited along with my resident chipmunk and a bunch of grey squirrels.  Flocks of Canadian geese can be seen more clearly now that the leaves are off of the trees.  What a show!  I sure enjoyed being home during daylight hours for a change.

Moving Robin Crusoe to Her Winter HQ

 Today was the day to move my remaining chicken to her winter headquarters.  She moved off the prairie and closer to the house where she will be warm and snug all winter.  Today was her first day out of the chicken run since July.  She enjoyed being out.

She was scratching on the ground and pecking and eating seeds and walking around.

You can see she has been molting.  She doesn't look so good.  She reminds me of someone undergoing chemotherapy.

After hauling her house and her run across the yard I put fresh wood chips in the house for her with a full container of food and a heat lamp.  I wanted her to go back into her house.  She didn't want to go back in yet.  I chased her. It was ridiculous.  She hid under the deck which is smart because I can't move very fast while ducking my head under there.  Then she hid under the black spruce tree.  That was a very good hiding place. I gave up on chasing.  I tried to lure her with black sunflower seeds.  See the pile there on the air conditioner?  She's looking at the seeds but not falling for my master plan.  I ended up chasing her in the direction of the winter headquarters and she went in willingly.  This took a long time though.

Here she is checking out her new abode and thinking about curtains.

Turkey Art Contest

I was really impressed with the hard work my guests put into the art contest this year.  Some entries reflected current events.

Others reflected events in their lives such as school

or retirement.

Get it?  Re tire?

Some entries included movie stars.

Or personal practices

and eating habits.

Some were political.

Others were scientific. (Don't eat me. I'm endangered).

This one is a Vladimir Putin turkey standing on the planet earth with the Turkish flag in the background.

This one was a tad violent.

Another Trump turkey.  (Chickens Go Home!)

Another movie reference.

And a Frozen turkey (Let me Go!  Let me Go)!  Everybody should get an award this year.  The actual winner was a non-traditional sculptural rendition of a turkey that involved an entire pineapple, a pear, grapes, and strawberries.  I forgot to get a picture of it before we ate it.  Every year we seem to have a big discussion about what is allowed and what should be allowed.  Strong opinions are voiced and flung recklessly around the room.  And that is how I know we have created real art because only real art invokes such passion.

Happy Thanksgiving! What Are We Grateful For in 2015?

I had to capture this photo of the moment of taking the turkey out of the pan.  Somehow the white meat and the dark meat separated easily.  Sometimes in life moments happen and I just have to enjoy them.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In alphabetical order we are grateful for "A" names, beds, blankets, cheese, cats, doctors, exercise, electronics, food, furnace, giraffes, home cooked meals, intelligence, just kidding, kayaks, kazoo, long underwear, lakes, monkeys with cymbals, nature, no school, onomotopeoia, peace, paychecks, rocking around the Christmas tree, Sue science, school, telephone, Unicorns!, vacation, wool socks, xerox machine, yougurt and zippers.  No offense to you questioners out there but when I made the alphabetical list for people to fill in, I forgot the letter Q.  I can not explain why.

Is It Just Me?

Is it just me or would you hesitate if you were introduced to a new doctor and he said his name was Faust?  Is it any different than meeting a dentist who said, "I'm Dr. Payne?"  How about meeting a lawyer with the last name of Cheatem?  How about a banker named Fraud?  Maybe a butcher named Esther Coli?  I shouldn't make fun of people's names. A person is given a name and sometimes, as in my case, things develop that make their name funny. 

Can't Not Hear Them

At the gym the other day I headed over to the exercise bicycles.  I prefer the old fashioned style over the recumbent bikes because I work harder on those.  My gym has 4 of those style.  Two guys were using two of them already and they looked like they were talking to each other so I didn't want to get between them.  I chose the last one outside of the two talking guys.  I got on and started pedaling figuring I'd do this about 10 minutes before going to use the weight machines.  I had just come off of the stair master so my heart rate was up there already at about 120.  I like to stay between 120 and 140 during the cardio section of my workout. I started pedaling and regretted not having a book to read this time to help pass the time.  The guys were talking loudly and laughing.  We're in front of a long bank of television sets and the guys were talking about football.  I tuned them out pretty well.  When the newscaster got back to local news these two guys were commenting on that as well.  I'm booking along happily on my bike until the news station showed film of Highway 94 being blocked by the black lives matter protest.  I know that I live in a conservative part of town; the part of town that repeatedly elected Michelle Bachman.  I accept my lonely life as a liberal feminist in Anoka County. I live in the part of town where people are fearful and uses fear mongering for political gain.  They talk about political correctness as if it were a bad thing.  So when these two bloviating cyclists started talking about black lives matter, I started biking faster.  They throw out a couple racist comments.  I can't not hear them because they're yelling over 5 empty bikes. I bike faster.  By the time one of them says, "They should take a fire hose on those protesters and wash them down the drain," my Exercycle tells me that my heart rate is at 146.  I get off my bike even though I have four minutes left.  I wash down the handles of the Exercycle and walk away.  I can't not hear them.  I don't know the whole story.  I wasn't there and I don't listen to the television media's sensationalist renditions.  I don't care who they are or what they did, no one deserves to be washed down a drain.  A better person might have used this opportunity for education.  I just walked away and used the anger they incited to me to lift heavier weights with more energy than usual.