EVER HAVE AN OFF-DAY?

[No, you're not imagining it--this post appeared in February of 2023. Well, here we are 6+ months later, and guess what? I'm going to have an Off Day! Planned down to the last minute. Meant to enhance my understanding and practice of making art. Really! So this week's reposting is my gift to you of ways to deal with "off days," which, as I'm sure you know, everybody has, at least once in a while.

Next week, September 7th, you can think of Thursday's Child frowning at her easel, paintbrush dripping the wrong color on the table/floor/shoes, and loving every minute of it! We'll meet up again on the 14th. Till then, try to avoid the "off days" if you can. And if you can't? Well, help somebody else through that off time. See you soon!]

 Off-color? Off-side? Off-balance? Off-center? Off the wall?

Yeah, one of "those" days.

I wish I had some tried-and-true, absolutely surefire, and you-won't-believe-it advice for how to handle the Off Days. They're what the songwriter meant when he penned, "Into each life some rain must fall." Boy, was he right.

Off-Days can occur any time. Maybe you've noticed, though--they seem to spring upon us at a time when we positively don't need/want/desire such a thing to happen. They seem to have a mind and a menace of their own.

Here's a little of my own experience:

• Off-days seemed drawn to the times I needed all my wits about me--for taking care of young children, going to college classes, teaching a room full of freshman students who, given their druthers, would've been swilling coffee in the Commons.
• I eventually outgrew that phase of my life (all phases eventually go away, I've found).
• Instead, I had a dog. Medium size, full of personality, IQ 'way up in the stratosphere (I swear she understood my brand of English). I loved that girl; she made my life more varied, more interesting. But as always happens, she aged, and in her later years returned to early puppy ways--mixed up days and nights, wanted to go out at one o'clock (AM), had no sense of seasons so the 1:00 AM voyage was pertinent any day/month/season of the year.
• Her confused nights meant I also had confused nights. Sleep came in bits and pieces. And if her nights happened one after another, my next-day experiences were of the Off variety. Also one after another.
• I wouldn't give up those years with Joy the Dog; I still miss her. But I'm realistic enough to know getting another dog is probably not going to work out. I still remember the Off-Days.

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You can make your own list of Off-Day triggers. COVID and its attendant uncertainties and effects is a common one for our global village. Inflation and resultant downsizing of businesses--or even annihilation of businesses--is also well-known.

Then there are your everyday concerns, or worries, or fears--you know what they are. Anything that steps into your life and knocks you even a little bit off-balance can end up with the following day(s) being Off.

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I said I don't have any answers (see paragraph 3 above). But I do have some thoughts. Maybe one of these will resonate with you:

• For folks who find prayer helpful, that's a time to trot out all your everyday "stuff" and give it to your Supreme Being for safekeeping when you go to bed. 
• If you have a favorite prayer or psalm, recite it when you go to bed. Changes your mind's landscape.
• Some folks might explore therapy with a professional therapist.
• Others might find a meaningful activity--music, art, physical exercise, crafts, working with charities, helping at a food bank--something attractive to them that will take them away from the other "stuff" that seems to bring only concern or worry. (It might also nudge the Off stuff into a lower place of importance. Been known to happen.)
• Some folks swear by yoga--meditation--tai chi--running--biking--and so on. Find your place in the physical world if that appeals to you.
• And if all else fails--Embrace the Beast. Meet your nemesis head-on--your worry, your concern, your fear. Embracing the problem isn't easy, I'll not kid you about that. But you can't live a life forever running away from the problem, or ignoring it, pretending it doesn't exist. 
• Well, I guess you actually can do those things. But the results aren't worth the life you'll be living.
• And, something to consider--it uses less energy to embrace than to fight. Hmm.
• Sorry I can't give you some great resources to read or podcasts to listen to, to convince you how to deal with your Off-Days. But you can probably find something to help. Google thinks it knows everything. But people also know a lot. Talk to folks. Yes, you'll be vulnerable, putting yourself out there on a shaky, shivery, limb. However, is that any worse than living with worry/concern/fear that makes your days--and nights--a misery?

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We're not talking health issues here--if you have physical balance problems, that's a different kettle of fish, not to mention a horse of a different color. You know what to do about that kind of balance issue. For the emotional and mental off-ness, yes, take it seriously. In the meantime, we wish you fewer Off-Days, more joy in living, and a life of fulfillment.

Blessings,

Thursday's Child

STILL AUGUST . . .

One year ago I wrote a blog post called "Say Something Nice About August" and I actually came up with some nice things that occur in August--birthdays, local events, summertime doings.

This year--I'm having a hard time thinking of new things to say about August that suggest it's still a good month. But I'll give it a go. Ready?

#1 - It's hot. Danged hot. I can't make a blessing out of that no matter which way I turn it, twist it, torture it, or just plain ignore it. This year August in my neck of the woods--and in LOTS of other places, I've read in the news--is hot as my grandma's griddle. I guess the "good" thing is--it isn't hotter!

#2 - Air conditioner is still doing its cooling thing. Couple of months ago I had to have the unit serviced because it had a bad habit of hesitating before it got going. The service man replaced an essential part, and it finally quit clearing its throat. Now it's doing that again. So tomorrow, when you're reading this with your morning juice and toast (or espresso and bagel), I'll be on the blower to the A/C folks. And if they can't get here quickly, you'll hear a lot of prayers going up.

#3 - Had a dental cleaning appointment. No new problems, just an old one that I trust will solve itself one of these days. Noticed costs of the various services had gone up--definitely not a good thing--but I'm trying to focus on the lack of follow-up appointments to fix something.

#4 - Got some new books . . . ordered them from my favorite online used book store, and these were brand-spanking-new. One is a book on the craft of writing, by Ursula K. LeGuin, called Steering the Craft; the other is Finding the Mother Tree, by Suzanne Simard, a scientist who studies trees. Two other books are on order, soon to arrive: The Cave Painters and Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank's diary). Four new-to-me books are a really good thing to say about August.

#5 - In a little over a week I'll start an art workshop--one week long, free, and offered online; some parts are streamed live, and others are videos sent via email. It's been a long time since I took a class in anything; looking forward to this one a lot.

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I suppose I should also mention that the lawn isn't growing as much, given the extra heat and lack of rain. But we mow the grass a little higher than other folks, so it stays pretty green in August. (I say "we" but you know I don't mow--I just paid for the mower and enjoy the view. My daughter does the actual work.)

Also, flowers and our garden plants are thriving. We now have a few ripe roma tomatoes and a bumper crop of nice basil. And the resurrection lilies that I was concerned about recently have finally managed to show three tall stems with lovely pink blooms on top. 

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I hope you found something nice to say about August. If you're still scratching your head trying to think of something, just remember--next week is the very end of August, and you'll be into September before you know it. 

Til next time, blessings from

Thursday's Child

 HOT AUGUST NIGHTS...

[Revisiting a post from a few years ago . . . August days and nights tend to sap my brain power; and I don't have a battery back-up for my brain. So we can look forward to a brand-new, never-before-read blog post next time. Promise!]

Neil Diamond wrote a rousing song, about hot August nights, called "Brother Love's Travellin' Salvation Show."

In my experience--or rather, memory over the last 60 years when I actually thought about weather--August nights in the Midwest were usually much cooler than July nights. In fact, it was delicious to sleep on August nights with a light blanket wrapped around my shoulders. Daytime could be hell-hot, but nighttime--um, lovely.

What has that to do with today's post? Well, not much, really. But August seems to have been one of the more history-crammed months--or maybe it just seems so to me. Here's a sampling:

August 4th, 1944 - Anne Frank captured, after her family and several others were hidden in an Amsterdam warehouse for 25 months; she and her sister, Margot, were eventually sent to Bergen-Belsen and died of typhus. The famous diary has been published in more than 70 countries; a revision in 1990 contains material omitted in earlier editions.

August 5th, 1962 - Marilyn Monroe, about 36 years of age, found dead in her Los Angeles apartment; official cause of death was suicide from an overdose of prescription meds she took for depression.

August 6th, 1945 - Hiroshima bombed by U.S. using atomic bomb

August 7th, 1782 - George Washing creates the Badge of Military Merit, forerunner of today's Purple Heart citation

August 8th, 1974 - President Richard Nixon resigns.

August 9th, 1945 - U.S. bombs Nagasaki

August 12th, 1990 - Nearly complete skeleton of a Tyrannosaurus Rex discovered in South Dakota; nicknamed Sue (for its discoverer, Susan Hendrickson). Sue resides in Chicago's Field Museum.

August 15th, 1969 - Woodstock Festival; Bob Dylan, Jefferson Airplane, The Who, The Grateful Dead, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Creedence Clearwater, et al.

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And that's only about half of the month. As might be expected, what makes history is often the most notorious or the most spectacular. I was pleased to find some "good stuff," or at least, "not-so-bad stuff"; and even the sadness of the end of Anne Frank's life is mitigated, for me, at least, by the survival of her diary; that one little book has been a blessing to many thousands, probably millions, of people to this day.

I can't find a not-bad place for the bombings; at this time in my life, they are just history to me. To many others, especially to the Japanese, they are atrocities. I have to accept them and move on . . . not condoning, just allowing them their place in history and how it has unfolded since World War II.

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My source was a website called Today in History. Worth a look.

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Until next time, blessings from

Thursday's Child

 AUGUST . . .

If you're reading this on the day it's published, you know we're one-third of the way through the month of August.

In my small city, yellow school buses began their tours yesterday, Wednesday, when local public schools opened their doors.

School parking lots were full--high school students' trucks and cars, teachers'  and aides' vehicles, administrators and office staff wheels.

Looks like we're back in business around here.

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August was never school time for me. Some of you will remember this--we started school in September, the first, or perhaps second, day after Labor Day. The first break in the semester came in late October for us: a two-day no-school period. Later it was called in-service days for teachers. And nowadays, the period extends for a full week--or in some school districts two full weeks--and they call it "fall break."

But whatever it was, or is, the beginning of school was always, for me, a joyous time. So much sensory detail! New pencils! New crayons! New tablet! New 3-ring binder! I was in love with all the minutae of going to school.

• Nowadays it's back packs, laptops or iPads, and calculators.

Even better, though, was the whole new year's worth of things to learn. Besides the reading, writing, and math that were the foundations of every grade, there could be science or social studies or history. Always a little bit of art. Sometimes music (especially in the lower grades).

Heaven to this little girl.

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It's hardly surprising, then, that I nearly became a perpetual student. I did make it last as long as possible, even with a break to get married and have children. The wonder is that I didn't become a teacher so i could go to school for years and years!

Instead, I kept on exploring and experimenting and learning new things on my own, or in short-term courses. In that way, I became one of the grand army of Lifelong Learners. With extension homemakers groups, I learned about decorating, cooking (more exotic things than my usual fare for the family), and sewing--all topics focused on the home.

Adult education classes also helped--it was during one of those that I began my journey into art, learning to sketch and draw. Later on, I found workshops about painting. 

And without any warning, I was asked to play first the piano and later the organ at my church. Piano I was comfortable with. Organ? Unh-unh. Even after a few lessons I realized the organ was probably too much for me. But despite my misgivings (and awareness of lack of skill), I was drafted into playing the organ--there was nobody else to do it! How's that for a reason? 

Funny thing, though--I never knew what was happening. I thought, when I heard "Lifelong Learner," that everybody was one. And when you think about it, that's really what we are, isn't it? You get a new cell phone--not like the old one, so you have to learn how to use it. Your car gives up the ghost--even if you get a used one, it's probably different from the one you had. More to learn. And that's just a couple of examples. 

Consider changes in laws--changes in your community (former 2-way streets are now one way)--changes in the grocery store (this one drives my daughter and me up the wall; from one month to the next, the things we buy regularly shift from front to back or side to side or from one end to the other end of the store). With scarcely any input from ourselves, we become Lifelong Learners.

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Now that school's in session in some communities, we'll see students lined up for the school bus to transport them to their places of learning. They're today's Lifelong Learners.

And while you're remembering, go back to your school days. You can either celebrate that time, or you can give thanks that you're past that. In the meantime, say a little prayer for today's teachers and students. 

But do remember this--you'll always be learning something new. And that's a good thing!

Blessings,

Thursday's Child

MR FIX-IT

When I was growing up, there was always somebody to fix things. You know, make them work again--can openers, rusty saws, broken zippers, missing buttons. You name it, somebody could make it like new--or else, good enough to last a little longer.

That's what life was all about when I was growing up in the '40s. Money was tight. New stuff wasn't always available, even if we had the cash. Our country was recovering from The Great Depression, as well as finishing up World War II and then recovering from that.

So I think it's safe to say, we were a fix-it generation. Probably had been for a long time.

That's the up-side: fixing stuff so we could go on using it, not having to put out hard-earned cash for a replacement (always supposing a replacement was available), and having the satisfaction of doing it ourselves, or having it done by a family member or friend for a little bit of that hard-earned cash.

[As an aside--looking up "fix-it shop" on the Internet was a bust; there's a fairly recent (2017 publication) book based on a true story, and it's called The Fix-It Shop. Not what I wanted to know. Even Wikipedia let me down. Now that's bad.]

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So far, we're talking about fixing "things" that might have a little life left in them.

Let's move on--what about other "things" that can't be fixed? We're not talking about bicycles and cars and coffee pots. We're talking about situations--life stuff that happens--relationships that fail--you get the idea.

Here's an example:

Recently, we've noticed more trees are being cut down by the City. {My City is about 12K populationn.) Not an ideal situation, but sometimes, it's necessary: trees are diseased or dying, trees are rotting and are dangerous to people and buildings below, trees are in the way of overhead lines for utilities.

Okay. I'll agree that those are valid reasons for removing trees.

I do know that the City has often trimmed a tree to allow the overhead lines room, without removing the whole tree. The result may not be pretty, but the basic tree is still standing and the shade it provides may be less, but it's certainly there.

In the past two weeks, two trees on my block (a short block, quite a few trees for shade) were cut down completely. The trees were not diseased, dying, rotting, or dangerous. They were simply "in the way."

This was a tree two days ago

[As another aside: Do you know how long it takes a tree to grow to maturity so it provides shade? Obviously that depends on the type of tree, but a good estimate is ten-plus years. Many American tree species grow 1-2 feet per year.]

A few years ago, the City came to trim trees along the alley behind my house (lots of utility lines out there). They offered to take down one of my trees and "replace it with a new tree." Only ten feet away is a fully mature maple, twin to the "offensive" one, and I just looked at the man and said, why would I want a new tree? It would be small. I was almost speechless. Couldn't he see that a "new" tree would look idiotic beside a fully mature one?

They trimmed away a lot of my tree, but it's still standing and still provides shade over the back half of my house.

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Here's where we come to the fix-it part. How do you fix something you can't fix? You know what I mean, it's out of your control. You have no say in how the process works. There's no review board or appeal body to hear the complaint.

So I've come up with my own way of dealing with something I can't fix, or control, or even have a say in the process. And I assure you, it's legal.

I've decided to paint trees. Not the ones growing in the ground--just pictures of trees I see and like or admire or want to preserve in memory. I could take photos--in fact, I have quite a lot of tree photos in my phone--but I want/need to have a hands-on activity to preserve trees.

Will somebody come along and cut down the trees after I've painted them? Could be. Probably will. 

Does it matter? Certainly! I don't want those trees removed. But if I have no clout to have them preserved, then I can "save" them on watercolor paper.

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A year or so ago I decided to support Arbor Day Foundation. That charity helps replant areas that have been destroyed by wildfires and other disasters. 

Recent news stories about wildfires, especially in Canada and the western states in the U.S., have encouraged me to tell others about what we can do.

If you keep up with regular news, you'll know that climate change is impacted by changes in the natural habitat. Trees are a part of that habitat. My small contribution to replant trees won't make a huge difference. But that's not the point--it may not be huge, but it's something I can do. 

If I can't stop the City cutting down trees in my neighborhood, I can at least plant new trees somewhere in the world. 

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Today's post won't end with a positive spin--not much way I can make something good out of trees cut down to the ground. But I can quit taking for granted the world I live in. It may not last forever, but I want to enjoy it while it's here.

Blessings,

Thursday's Child

It wasn't a small tree, was it?