Bumper Sticker Sighting

This is for Linda at Vulture Peak Muse, with love and affection...

and because she is thinking about dragons.

Happy Hour Friday

Time to begin making dessert - peach crumble with this year's first local peaches.  Have a great weekend. :-)

Love and all Groovy Stuff,
Gina

Honest Scrap Award

You know I've made a blogging comeback when the first real, substantive post I put up is based on a blog award. A tad pathetic perhaps, but it does the trick for entertaining me at the moment. Besides, I like it that the famous Utah Savage (the esteemed blogger) whom I most admire, thought of me when doling off her honest scrap. :-) I mean, the woman inspires great painters! Enough said.

Thank you, Peggy and may you spread these little trinkets my way any time. Anything that gets me back to your blog. With the added bonus of making me feel less like a failure in life. ;-) I'm a bit droll these days. My apologies.

I've yet to get the rules of this award straight. I think you're supposed to invent seven honest things about yourself and then pass the award on to seven other bloggers. I think that's where the honest factor comes in. Sort of. I also noticed something about poetry and I perked up! Poetry? Why, of course. Poet? Of course not! :-)

In any event, it's all fun and good, isn't it? If I've failed to follow the rules, I may either have flopped the award meme or created my own! Who knows, right?

The Seven Honest Things (is this sort of like The Seven Deadly Sins? That was a brilliant one from Kay, wasn't it?

1) I love to eat raw fish and seaweed. Sometimes I scare myself trying to figure out what creature(s) I would have been in other lives.

2) I am fiercely protective of those I love.

3) I am very practical and I have common sense; usually. Especially in terms of every-day life matters, raising a family, work, etc. I often butt heads with people who are neither smart, creative nor flexible and who are incapable of articulating their ideas or don't want to. I know. It sounds arrogant. It is, probably. But I'm being honest, knowing I am neither an angel nor a demon. My name is Gina. :-) I'm okay. Ha! That feels good to say!

4) I am sensitive. My emotional side is always at odds with my rational side. I believe that I am almost equally in charge of all the sides of my brain. I am bad with numbers but functional with geometry and patterns. I had a very early and precocious predisposition to literature, poetry, art, nature and equally so a keen sense of people; (unfortunately mostly mixed) by a pretty young age. I loved my parents and they loved me and come to think of it, that's all that really matters. :-)

5) It takes a long time to really get to know me and thus really love me. ;-) But I think it's worth it! :D

6) One of my favorite quotes: "Love all, trust a few, do harm to none."
~Willy the Shake

If I were to reinvent that quote to suit me personally, I would change it to

"Be civil to all, trust and love a few, do harm to none or nothing." ~ Pagan Sphinx

Okay. So I'm not Shakespeare. But you get my drift. I hope.

7) I'm currently in love with a family friend's dog; a bulldog named Omar. Just look at that face! I don't so much know if it's the breed or this particular dog. All I know is that if Omar ever needed a home, I would take him in in a heartbeat! What a sweetie!

Isn't he cute?

Honestly, while I personally enjoy these awards, I'm at a point where I don't know who to give them to because it's hard to keep track of who likes them and who doesn't and, even, who has already received it a hundred times. Instead of giving the award, I'll link you to seven great blogs and if their respective blogger wish to pick up the award and display it, by all means. As always, no obligations! We all have enough of those in our day to day, non-blogging lives, right? I just hope you pay a visit to these lovely people, if you haven't already.

Little Bang Theory - Cunning Runt
The Five of Us - Catherine
Phantsy That - Susan
Color Sweet Tooth - Steve
After the Bridge - Sherry
Betmo's Corner - Betmo
Imac's Photos from the Mind's Eye - Imac
Why, What Have You Heard? - Mojo (plus a huge thanks for helping with my photo sizing)
Forks Off The Moment & Do You See What I See? Dianne

I think that's more than seven but I've never good at counting...

Alive From New York

But just barely.

It's not like me to whine and complain; at least not on the blog. But damn it, it's not been the best trip I've ever taken. I started out with an industrial strength headache just before we left, followed by....ta da...a UTI. And if you read this post from a few weeks back, you'll know that I struggle with these; have since I was nineteen and they aren't going away.

So here I am in New York and I need to put in a call to my doctor (whom I've not yet replaced), whose office never called me back. I called twice, in fact, and was told that The Doctor was busy with patients and had not yet found time to "review" my situation.

I then call the answering service and leave a message for the on-call doctor who promptly got back to me and was very helpful; calling in the prescription immediately to the Rite Aid around the corner on West 50th Street. Problem solved. Well, sort of. The headache came back and I'm now taking a load of Exedrin so we can take the subway to Brooklyn for my first visit to The Brooklyn Art Museum. I'd be more excited about that but every time I express enthusiasm, my head pounds ferociously. Ugh.

To top it all off, WP isn't in the best of moods either. He's perhaps fed up with my complaining which I do profusely under these circumstances. I mean, every chance I get, I'm mumbling under my breath "my freakin' head hurts". It's really selfish of me and not fair because he's done all he can to help me with this; including running to the pharmacy to get my pills.

We went to MoMA yesterday; mostly for WP's benefit, since I was there last summer but that was a business trip for him so he missed out on it. He loved it, so that was a bright spot. I also saw and photographed some things I'd either missed last time or they weren't there last time.

Being very emotional this time of the month, I cried when I looked at the two Frida Khalo paintings the MoMA has. The look of pain on her face was just too much for me to bear. One of those paintings was featured in the movie Frida with the stunning Selma Hayek as Frida. It's the self-portrait where Frida is sitting in a chair, wearing a man's suit, with her hair all chopped off. Cutting my hair very short has long been something that I've wanted to do. By short I mean...shaved...like a monk; like Sinead O'Connor; like Grace Jones. I don't want to scare The Adorables (my students) so I think I'll have to wait until I retire. But it's in my future.

Now that I've ranted on about illnesses and shaving my head...I'll leave you scratching yours. I'm revealing random things about myself that perhaps don't make much sense unless you are inside my head. But in some ways, you are. Because honestly, I tell you all more than I tell anyone except perhaps my daughters, who know me better than anyone. I'd be lost without them and it's becoming clear, lost without you, too.

Time to go. I'm looking forward to feeling better tonight for Indian food. Wish I hadn't forgotten the cord that connects the camera to the computer so that I could show you pictures. That will have to wait until I retern home on Saturday.

Stay strong and alert and safe and good. And because I feel naked unless I post a picture. Here is the one that made me cry. From 1940.

Love,

Pagan Sphinx