Winging It

saturday

The more research I do, the more choices I have when it comes to a personal alarm. As I write this, I’m disinclined to get an alarm. Instead, I’m more inclined to get an iPhone and just use it to call for help when I need it. Koodoo provides cell service for the phone for less per month than my personal alarm.

Dave is a truly lovely man. I’m so glad that I called him. He fixed my computer and showed me how to fix it myself should I lose the sounds that signal an incoming email or an incoming Facetime call. I feel a lot safer and better connected to the world with the sounds working.

In the morning, we walked, and I watered the beds in the backyard. I felt no need to water the edible garden or the front yard trees and bed until today. In the afternoon, I harvested blueberries for over an hour, and then I took Sheba to Elder Cedar to walk but she was not having it. She did not want to walk, and that was fine with me and my sore heel.

Besides getting my computer back to functioning, I was very happy to discover that I can add photos to my blog posts by using Chrome as my search engine. I like looking for the images and I really like posting them with my little bits of personal text. 

sunday

But I didn’t post yesterday because it was My Day, a day for self-indulgence, but that failed to materialize. Instead, chores were demanded of me. Before our morning walk, I got started on watering the trees. It was a very hot day (34° at 15:30 on my thermometer), so thorough watering was the order of the day. Even in the morning it was warm. It was 22° when we went for our walk at 8:00.

Except for the time I took to nap in the shade mid-afternoon, I watered much of the day and did some minor yard work. I also had time to make a quick trip into the village. Due to those pauses, I didn’t finish watering everything until 16:00, and that’s when might have gone for a short walk because it was so hot and because my fucking foot is a source of constant irritation. But we didn’t go, Sheba showed no interest in walking. She did not want to leave the house, probably because it was a wonderfully cool 17°—almost half the outdoor temperature!

Two shocking events were drawn to my attention yesterday. One was news from the American Stuttering Association. It was terribly sad reading. You may have heard that an American soldier went postal at Fort Stewart opened fire on his fellow soldiers. It was all over the news, but precious few news outlets dealt with what triggered Seargent Quornelius Radford. Seargent Radford has a bad stutter. From NBC news:

The soldier accused of opening fire Wednesday at his Army base in Georgia, wounding five people, had endured relentless bullying over his stutter almost as soon as he joined the military, former co-workers said.

Sgt. Quornelius Radford, 28, was picked on during the roughly two months in 2018 he spent at the Army’s Advanced Individual Training (AIT) school at Fort Lee in Virginia, according to two people who served with him there.

“He got bullied a lot,” said Sgt. Cameron Barrett, 28, who became friends with Radford during that time. “It was very bad to the point where he could barely talk.”

Barrett said people would mock Radford by also pretending to have a stutter. He said the apparent speech impediment was a “trigger” for Radford, who endured the mocking by being silent.

Still, Radford showed no signs of anger, resentment or deeper issues, Barrett and other fellow soldiers said. And to those who got to know him, the reserved Radford shared a goofier and playful side, they said.

So, they said, the Wednesday morning shooting at Fort Stewart came as a complete shock.

The other shocking event of the day was hearing from Steve that our friend, Tom Bell, died of a heart attack on Saturday. Steve had enjoyed a dinner with him when he left here to go to Vancouver. It was dreadful news. I’ll never get used to death. It’s always such a shock. Steve sent me photos of he and Tom at their dinner just days ago. 

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I wonder where I’d be now, what I would be doing, and what I would have done in the past almost nine years if I had not been hit with my psychiatric diagnosis. Travel? Still in Vancouver? But I did get that diagnosis, in fact I got two, and one day I saw this house for sale, and even though I had no plans to move at the time, I moved into this house one month and three days later. I sold my Vancouver condo two weeks after I saw the ad for this house.

I had never considered rural life before, either. I had no idea what I was in for. The first few months were a steep learning curve for me, learning all about my water system, how to buy wood, use Facebook and how to use a generator. I had to learn how to use a lot of tools. It has been quite an experience being here.

I’ve never had so much land before. I’ve never landscaped before, but since childhood, I’ve always loved plants. I made bouquets for everyone with things I picked in the wooded lot near my home, and things growing near backyard fences, or on boulevards. To have this place as a blank canvas was a fitting reward for a retired worker bee. 

I would not have come here, were it not for my diagnoses. The irony is, I created a physical paradise for myself. Steve and our friends who come to the annual dinner are the only people who see it. Pete and Ali are my gardens’ biggest fans.  What’s very nice for me, is that most people who come here to get things that I’m giving away, or delivery people, or consultants who visit, like David on Saturday, they all compliment my garden.

I’ve written here often that I did not have a plan. I just started making gardens here and there and then getting plants that were shade tolerant. And it turned out okay. I will be tweaking it I leave here. 

When Steve and I were together, I felt invisible. It was always his way. One day, it came time for me to ask that a vacation be done my way. He planned everything, every day, every meal, and it was nearly always a gay place. He happily agreed to it.

What I wanted to do was choose a day of departure, and a day to return. And that was it. Well, there was a bit more. I wanted to follow the ‘thermal’ path. I knew he would go for it because it involved visiting several hot springs. I wanted to follow a path chosen for geographic sites: petrified trees, cinder cones, craters, acres of volcanic glass, Mt. Saint Helen’s, all in our van with Bela, our dog.

The pint is, I wanted to ‘wing it.’ What we’d do, we’d do. We’d do all of the plan or some of it, and he enthusiastically was in. 

The theatre I built and ran when I was in my twenties, and the art gallery I started right after the theatre got going on its own, I was winging it the entire time. I had no training to run a gallery, or to design a theatre.

My friend who had a framing store, decided to add art supplies to his business. I started doing graphics for him, and that lead to me writing copy for the graphics, and then for a newsletter and that gave me a new short-term career. But it ended with a bang, a book that earned me a lot of money.

My whole life I’ve been whinging it.

For my whole life I took the easy way. The fun way. But good came of it. 

Somehow, I took on Artropolis. It was going to fail. (It was an enormous art show every three years in Vancouver.) There was no budget. I got ZERO pay. My home became the office (the main floor, I lived upstairs). I believe I raised about three hundred grand in cash, supplies and advertising, and the best part of all was finding a FREE location: the empty studios of CBC television. Rough guess: About 300 artists were seen by 60,000 people over two weeks.

Winged it. Success.

PS: Success has always meant, for me: better than good enough. I kept my goals modest to lessen the potential for disappointment.

It’s the first time I’ve truly realized what I’ve been doing all my life.

Thank God, I’ve been lucky. More truthfully, born with a mind that loves problem solving, and is creatively—particularly visually—oriented. And because my first project, the theatre—also created with no budget from the organization that would inherit it—worked. It worked well, and that encouraged me. 

So did starting the photography gallery. That was as much fun as building the theatre. The gallery was already built and the woman running it was bankrupting the entire arts centre, including the money the theatre was earning. So, I stopped depositing money, she got fired, and I got the gallery.

There were many personal reasons that had me choose to establish the photographic medium as the mandate of the gallery. I loved programming big name artists and charging money to put in the bank. Every time I booked a major show, I also booked in the other gallery, the local photographic artist I thought most deserving of exhibition.

As I said, personal decisions. Winging it.

It was endlessly rewarding.

monday

Today has dawned two degrees cooler than yesterday morning, but it is far less humid, so it feels a lot more comfortable. I don’t know, maybe I’ll do something different today like watering in reverse order. We’ll walk with our friends this morning, and then I’ll spend time with the hose. 

Bruce is coming to stay for the weekend. He’s arriving late on Friday and leaving Monday. The weather might be iffy for par of his visit, but we’ll find things to do.