BITS & PIECES

 Bits and pieces are what you get when you drop a cup on the tile floor--or when your soup in the microwave explodes--or when your moving vehicle meets an immovable/stationary object. Doesn't matter whether you're the crasher or the crashee--it's still bits and pieces.

To set your minds at rest, I've participated in none of the above crises. But my life is, in another way, just a series of this and that, random thoughts, whatchamacallits, minutae, and other little stuff--bits and pieces.

For instance--my calendar veers from "something every day" to "nothing this week." All efforts to regulate the filling in of calendar squares have come to naught--some days I have two things on a day, then later in the week I have one thing per day. The next week--what I'd looked forward to has been cancelled or rescheduled.

I used to have a regulation planner. Nowadays, to remedy this situation, I make a weekly calendar on an 8x11 spiral notebook--one week per page, cut into 8 equal parts--7 days plus a square to pen a few reminders for the coming week. Each day's "list" includes what kind of exercise I do that day--biking or yoga; what hobbies I need or want to pursue (sewing and painting feature often); phone calls I need to make; and sometimes a reminder that I'm going to clean the bathroom that day or do a load of laundry. As you might expect, I'm growing fairly desperate when I have to list nearly every single thing for the day. But since I'm pretty visual in my approach to life, it works to "see" what's happening.

That's the calendar thing. Low-cost, simple, and I can abandon it any time I like.

Reading--through the last of the winter months I binged on mystery series that I own--Harold Adams (writing about the 1930s); Agatha Christie (into Tommy & Tuppence right now); Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe novellas (which I've read dozens of times since I discovered them in the 1950s). When I ran out of mysteries, I switched to non-fiction: Benjamin Roth's diary of the Great Depression; books by various artists sharing their techniques for watercolor and drawing; Liz Flaherty's Window Over the Sink, a collection of her essays and columns about Life and People and Living (highly recommended!).

I also read magazines but not on a regular basis.

Sewing/Quilting--finally made it to the end of the sofa throw I'd been working on since sometime late in 2020--since it was for myself, I didn't have a deadline. Also didn't have a lot of luck with the simple quilting, so the half-finished throw was gotten out, looked at, and then put away again. But eventually I persevered and it is now something for me to sleep under--turned out larger than a sofa throw, more like a twin-size bed quilt. 

Another project I wanted to make--a scrappy throw in many shades of gray--got going. I'm currently at the point of stitching three large sections into one for the quilt top.

Knitting--happens mainly on Tuesdays when I meet with Emily for Knitting @ Noon. Small projects only--I don't have the stick-to-it-ive-ness to work for months on a bigger piece.

Reference Photo

Painting--YouTube has made it easy to access tutorials any time, any place. On days when I can't conjure up a landscape on my own, I browse the tutorials for ideas. Other days, I'm right there with my paper and paint to work out a study of something or other--trees, clouds; color mixing . . . . About once a month I paint with my friend Pat at her house (she has more room available for us to sit and paint and chat). And I like her little dog, Sheldon, a Shih Tzu.

I'm in my silver birch tree period, in case you're interested.

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That's about it for me--bits and pieces. 

We could add in shopping (I go about once a month) and dishes (I on KP twice a day, my daughter cooks) and laundry (twice a week to make smaller loads) and attending (so to speak) online worship services and filling bird feeders. It's still a little of this and a little of that.

Maybe that's the way of the world now that I'm in my 80s. I've read that the 80s are the new 60s, but I'm deeply grateful my new 60s aren't as traumatic health-wise as the ones I lived through 20 years ago.

Probably I can get into this bits and pieces thing. Just takes practice, right?