Another gem from the daily calendar:

Georgia O’Keeffe had resolved to become an artist, and a famous and successful one at that.  She knew the road ahead would be hard, given the 1910 general opinion of women artists.  Undeterred, O’Keeffe enrolled at the Art Institute of Chicago (where she ran in embarrassment from her first class with a nude male model) and then the Arts Students League in New York City.  Despite winning prizes and scholarships, she endured the contempt of her male colleagues, one of whom said to her, “It doesn’t matter what you do [in art school].  I’m going to become a great painter and you’re just going to end up teaching art in some girl’s school.”  That student was Eugene Speicher.  Ever heard of him?  Didn’t think so.

So of course, I had to do a little research. 

This is Eugene Speicher.  Apparently Wikipedia has heard of him.

 He looks like an arrogant ass, doesn’t he?  I don’t know why I feel the need to champion Ms. O’Keeffe, unless it’s my modern woman’s sense of outrage at his derisively misogynistic statement. 

I’ve always liked O’Keeffe’s work – even the blush inducingly salacious ones such as this example.

O'Keeffe - Red Canna

Speicher’s work is VASTLY different from O’Keeffe but I tried to find some flowers that we could compare.  Click on the pictures to enlarge them.

 Speicher’s is lovely, but certainly less legend-in-the-making worthy.

My Honey has been helping Sassy with her science project for school.  She’s making an Automatic Dog Petter.  It’s really cute.  There is an axle with a crank that spins a giant wheel that has 4 padded gloves.  Ideally the gloves will pet a dog that is calmly sitting there waiting to be petted.  We don’t know if it will work.  Our dog is completely uncooperative.

The Bandit has been assisting by hammering random items, spilling the glue and putting double stick tape on the dog. 

Serves the dog right if you ask me.

From the daily calendar:

A flop as a lawyer, Franz Kafka tried his hand at insurance.  He took a job as claims manager at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute of Bohemia, but the hours were brutal and the conditions stultifying.  He spent most of his time drawing severed, mangled, and truncated fingers to document defective apparatus and malfunctioning machines.  As he wrote to his friend and fellow writer Max Brod: You have no idea how busy I am.  People tumble off scaffolds and into machines as if they all were drunk, all planks tip over, all embankments collapse, all ladders slip, whatever gets put up comes down, whatever gets put down trips somebody up.  And all the young girls in china factories who constantly hurl themselves down whole flights of stairs with mountains of crockery give me a headache.”

Kafka’s work has been very influential in modern literature.  You remember reading some of his more famous short stories in high school – specifically The Metamorphosis.  Apparently, he also had a witty sense of humor.

I have always found Eastern Philosophy to be brilliant.  Would you like proof?

This was in my fortune cookie last evening: You deserve special treatment this month.  Enjoy dessert.

Pretty damn insightful if you ask me.

Also, you know how you always think of the perfect thing to say after it’s too late.  I hate that.  I am extraordinarily witty 10 minutes later.  This morning the universe threw me a bone and let me have one.

When I take Sassy to school we always sneak in the back way because the front parking lot is a complete zoo.  There are a few other wise parents that park back there, too.  We have to drive through a residential neighborhood and park at the city park the school leases as the school yard.  I am always careful to go the speed limit through the housing development because there are always lots of joggers and dog walkers out in the mornings.

This morning, Sassy and I were jumping out of the truck in a hurry because we were running late of course.  An older gentleman passed us and said, “The speed limit is 25 through here.”

“I believe I was going 25,” I replied as I yanked Sassy’s door open.

He snorted in response but didn’t say anything.

“Perhaps it’s time to get yourself re-calibrated,” I told him as we dashed off.

I’ve repeated that little spark of timely brilliance all day.

I was looking at My Honey today.  He looked weird.  Like he was off kilter or askew in some way.  I didn’t say anything to him.  I didn’t want to freak him out.  Besides, I figured it out on the way home from dinner.

We had gone to buy Valentines for the kids to give their classmates and, when we were finished, it just seemed easier to go get dinner. 

I’ve decided there needs to be another section in the restaurant.  Do you remember in the old days the hostess would ask you, “Smoking or Non-smoking?”  Now I respectfully request the “No Children” section.  Specifically, I’m referring to my children: the one who hollers at us and refuses to eat his dinner and drops 75 pieces of silverware on the floor over the course of one meal, and the one that won’t stop singing Miss Mary Mack incessantly.

In the car on the way home, I decided I wanted to get a trailer to hitch to the back of my Durango.  Like a little U-Haul trailer.  I’ll heat it in the winter and air condition it in the summer.  I’ll put some of that squishy foam all around the floor and the sides and fill it full of toys and those damn kids can ride back there and fight and spill food and yell all they want and I won’t have to referee it.

And that’s when I figured out what was wrong with My Honey.  One arm has grown another couple of inches so he can reach behind his seat to smack the kids while he’s driving. 

He’s my hero.

I finished the pirate story.  That’s six out of eleven books down and 1,818 pages. 

This book was fine.  That’s the most enthusiastic review I can give you.  It didn’t wow me, but I don’t have anything negative to say about it.

I’ve reviewed the math.  I wanted to see what my book/day count was since I slowed down there a bit.  Now I have to read a book  every 9.2 days.  That is totally doable.

Next up, another offering by the author I enjoyed so much from the previous category.  I hope this one is as good.

If you’re thinking about coming over to my house, I’d skip it if I were you.  Not only is the place its usual mess, but you’re likely as not to be asphyxiated.

Intrigued? 

I came home from work today, walked through the front door and immediately gasped for breath.

It seems The Bandit absconded with Sassy’s fingernail polish remover solution and spilled 90% of it on the carpet in his room.  Of course, he didn’t tell anyone for fear that he’d get in trouble. 

We had to rush right back out of the house to a dinner engagement so there was no opportunity to air out the house.  When we returned tonight, my eyes watered when I opened the door.  We’ve turned all the fans on and opened a few windows. What we really need is to turn on the cooler, but it’s much too cold for that.

If you don’t hear from me soon by way of a blog post assuring you that we’ve all lived through this, I bequeath my unpublished manuscripts to the Sisters.  Ava will assume that this is a whole ploy to get someone else to work on my revision.

The fumes are making me hallucinate.  A while ago, I thought the Care Bears were here.  I can’t feel my feet.  Hey, did you hear that? Sounds like buzzz……….ack……wheeze………..

I hit a little bump in the road.  Or to use the metaphor I attributed to my early reading success, my freight train ran off the tracks.  The last book in the first catagory I was reading was just not my thing.  It is a “continuation” of a very famous story written several hundred years ago.  I am not a fan of a new author continuing a much loved book long after the original author is dead.  I didn’t enjoy either of the continuations of Gone With The Wind for the very same reason.  I say quit messing with perfection.  Along that vein, it should also be illegal for anyone to remake Hitchcock movies.  And they sure as hell shouldn’t be allowed to colorize black and white films.  Who are “they” anyway?  Horrible people, I say.  Self serving #*%^&#!……..

Wow, I just ranted away on one heck of a tangent there.  Sorry.  Thanks for hanging in there with me.

SO, because that book is quite long at 500+ pages (or rather much longer than any of the other entries), I set it aside so I could blow through the other books and then plow through that one at the end without worrying about missing my deadline.

I’ll finish this one in a day or so and give you an update.  It’s a pirate story and you know how I feel about pirates.

Yo ho ho.

Not so long ago I told you about my cooking challenges.  This is something that I’m not proud of necessarily, but I still don’t care enough about my shortcoming to do much about it.

Tonight, My Honey seemed especially beat.  I could tell, because when I got home from work, he was sound asleep and the children and the dog were running amok.  I took it upon myself to make dinner.  I expect some sort of reward, by the way.

I deviated ever so slightly from my normal routine of spaghetti.  I am very proud to tell you that I made ravioli.  I’m really branching out, huh?  Anyway, I was just tickled with myself.  I remembered to put the garlic bread in the oven.  I even remembered to take it out before I set off the smoke detectors.  I made a lovely garden salad and even chopped up onions to put in my husband’s because he loves them so.  I set the table – with ALL of the appropriate silverware.  I remembered to get everyone a beverage.  This is significant because usually the drinks are forgotten altogether. 

I sent my darling Bandit off to rouse his father while I dished up the food.  I was damned near gloating because I pulled the whole thing off without a hitch.

And then I realized I never made any sauce.  Damn it!