Herself: Walked over an hour, sometimes two, on each of the last three days. Had fun following him around yesterday, but everything took so long we never got to Amvet’s Thrift Store. Yes, they hang clothes by color. I love their stores. Got grocery shopping done at Costco, Target, and local Stumps and half an hour at home before dinner at M’s. Charming home but very moldy. Going to class today by myself….friend decided not to go. Put a slight pall on things. Answers: Swap meets work when someone leases a very large parking lot such as the Rose Bowl lot, and sellers rent parking spaces from the leasee. About half the sellers sell new goods, and the other half have either collectible things or garage sale stuff. Prices are not firm. You can bargain all you want. Cash is usually the main medium of exchange tho you can work trades or swaps. Sellers are closely regulated for stolen goods or illegal goods. They are flat out fun to go to. Reading: Dresden 6. Balance: Having three days with G. |
I chose to sacrifice a black sweatshirt, a pair of newer fat-lady denims, and a twenty year old faded green, but loved, T-shirt. Comfort and age. You see, many years ago when I stopped painting those giant color things I produced, I gave my paints away. I threw away my painting clothes too.
My favorite old painting sweats had reached the stage of donation to the trash can with their holiness. Not only had they helped me work my way through art school, they had covered me while I painted the Plunge in bright Thalo Blue and bright Cadmium Yellow year after year. In some places there seemed to be more holes than fabric. I mourned their loss. Now I get to start over.
Starting over was not only with clothes but with painting boxes too. The acrylic paints went to my youngest daughter…in their tool box…those many years ago. The watercolors stayed here but their box biodegraded. When I pulled it off the shelf, the leather handle had crumbled, the key to the lock had vanished when its tether broke, and the many years of dust and dirt had sunk permanently into the wood.
The contents looked pretty good tho. The prices on the tubes of paint looked high to me…but that didn’t take into account how many years ago I bought them. If a tube was ten then, I didn’t even consider what it might be today. There were duplicates too. I could put off considering price increases for a few more years, a thought that made me feel half human.
The new tool box is from Home Depot with its permanent partitions partially removed when G ingeniously sawed them out. I filled the little drawers and spaces happily forgetting of course to mark what color went in what drawer. My favorite old rags were washed and put in their sections. A good sponge here, another rag there. I waited to put the brushes away until I saw what sort of brush containers the Art Store offered.
After this errand and that errand and more of this errand, we visited the nearest art store, Blick’s.
“Blick’s are buying up all the art stores,” Bee told me.
Art Safeway I thought. We found art Nordies prices. Big paper has gone from fifty a roll to a hundred. No good brush containers….not one that would fit in my new box. No nice little, ingenious pencil boxes either. I found good artists tape, not the blue painters tape I tried out on the Red Quilt, but the stuff I knew would stick and seal then pull off and not leave residue. Imagine, a new pink eraser. Twenty five sheets of student paper. Not a bad price. Arches student paper was five bucks a sheet, I didn’t tell G that. G found a funny little art toy…but in a nice little metal box. Only six dollars instead of sixteen.
I’m complete. The jumpstart to my painting cost as much as a week of groceries. Now if my misbegotten years of playing solitaire on my computer jumpstarted my missing hand eye coordination, I am back in business.
Wow! Arches 5 bucks a sheet. It's a long time since I bought any. This spring in Alaska I painted little tiny things to give away. That is economical, and it solves the problem of what to do with the kind of enormous paintings we all did in art school. If only we lived in museums we would have a place to hang them.
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