A different sort of lunch date

Alberta hit a high in terms of new Covid cases today (406)and with that we get closer to increased restrictions. I was thinking of what I miss and don’t miss about life before Covid. I don’t miss the busyness. Even a retired person can run around frantically trying to do too many things. I very much like staying home in the evenings especially now that the weather has turned wintery. During the summer we enjoyed the occasional yard visit either here or at friends’. That’s not going to be happening now for a while so I guess I’ll be putting in a bit more Zoom and Skype time. I do miss eating out. It’s a chance to get out of the house, have someone else do the cooking and the clean-up, and just chat with each other. While restaurants are open for in-person dining, we haven’t felt comfortable going into a restaurant and with the case numbers on the rise we won’t be going anytime soon. So what do we do instead?


Mostly we get take-out and eat it at home. Today Richard suggested that we get take-out and eat lunch somewhere with a view. We ate our Vietnamese subs in the car at the top of Battalion Park. Even though I managed to get sauce on my down jacket, I enjoyed watching the cars come and go on the newly-opened south part of the ring road and the familiar shopping centre looks very different from above. I think we will have to make a concerted effort this winter to do different things or to do things differently. Who knows, I may even be seized by an attack of tidiness and systematically deal with the various nooks and crannies in the house where overlooked stuff has taken up residence. I know some of you are laughing at that possibility and, if I were you, I wouldn’t hold my breath. Still, these are unprecedented times and unprecedented things happen in unprecedented times. I’ll keep you posted.

A bit of excitement

Today was an exciting day. Well, no, that’s not quite true. I got excited today about an idea. One of the things I loved about teaching was getting together with other teachers and planning. Someone would have an idea and someone else would build on it. Then someone else would tweak it and so it would go. I love that kind of stuff but there hasn’t been very much of it in my retired life and, particularly with Covid 19 causing me to be less mobile, I confess to getting a lot of my mental stimulation from YouTube. Of course, there is a lot of interesting content there and also a ton of crap. Yesterday I decided I was wasting time looking deeper and deeper into my feed trying to find something interesting instead of just shutting down the computer and going and DOING something interesting. YouTube and Facebook are a bit like playing the slots but that’s for another post.

In 2013 and 2014 I became fascinated by mandalas and even provoked the tendon in my arm because I did so much work with coloured pencils. After a while I didn’t draw mandalas anymore. I still liked them but other things took my time. I decided to fish out the coloured pencils and have another go. I got started on a mandala design and enjoyed it just as much as when I worked at them before, but making mandalas isn’t the reason I got so excited.

As you know I’m learning to build ukuleles and as Jake and I work together more we find that we spontaneously build on each other’s ideas. I travel once a week to work with him and in between times we often text about what we’re up to. This morning Jake sent me a text of his work space commenting that it was messy. Well, my bench in the shop is relatively tidy at this moment but my desk is another story. I have the huge box of coloured pencils taken apart and spread over the desk. There are pencils, erasers and various drawing tools to complete the chaos. I decided to send Jake a photo of my mess.

He commented that the mandala sitting in the centre of the mess would make a great design for an instrument's sound hole. Since I blend two or three colours in each of the segments, I didn’t see how it would be possible to replicate the mandala or part of it using traditional inlay techniques and I dismissed it - for about 2 minutes. Then I got to wondering, what if I designed a mandala-like circle to go around the sound hole, coloured it with coloured pencils and used epoxy over top to seal it and to give enough thickness so it could be sanded along with the instrument’s top. The card stock I use is fairly substantial and acid-free. I think my set of pencils is of archival quality and if they’re not I know I can buy ones that are.

First attempt

I was off on a rush of possibilities. It’s not the traditional way to make rosettes but it’s still original art. Each one would be unique. What fun it would be to have all those colours at my fingertips when making a design to go around the sound hole! I left the original mandala and started to play with circles about the size of the sound hole in a tenor uke. It’s easier to start bigger and figure out some of the logistics, then I can adapt to smaller sound holes. I decided to use warm colours because they are not as common as the greens and blues of the shell traditionally used in inlay work and I wanted to emphasize, in my own mind if nothing else, the difference between what I was doing and what is traditionally done. I ended up introducing some cooler colours and I don’t much like the first attempt. I’ll let the ideas percolate for a couple of days and then try again. In the meantime I can experiment with an epoxy coating on the first one. I think we can find a way to get this to work and I’m pretty excited about the possibilities. Stay tuned.

Reading over the blog books

During our first camping trip this year and in a peaceful setting, I reread all of my blog posts in book form. I’m happy to say that they weren’t too cringe-worthy. There were more errors than I would have liked but I knew that was going to happen. A strange quirk of the formatting means that sometimes there is no space at the end of a sentence. Some of that may be my sloppy keyboarding but even that doesn’t adequately explain the frequency of the quirk. Some of the pictures aren’t the ones I would have chosen for a full-page spread, and again, that’s the result of choices made by the program as it translates blog posts into books. I’m prepared to live with it.

I’m relieved that there is less repetition that I anticipated, although I never again get to say that the only serious mistake is one from which you learn nothing. I counted that particular phrase in three separate places. I was pleased with the books as a record of the day-to-day events since I retired. It is much more concise than my regular journal and it is easier to find things. I can see doing one of these books every year or two so Richard and I can have them as a reference. It was fun looking back on the travelling we have done and it was nice to be able to put dates to particular holidays. Sometimes I remember the year of a holiday and sometimes I don’t. If you don’t mind the errors, making a book from a blog is much easier than creating a photo book from scratch. Maybe I’ll just have to do a better job of proofreading as I go.