It's HOT, so I'm reading and creating...

I woke this morning looking and feeling like Charles Laughton in a dressing gown. I don't know if it's the heat and humidity, but I haven't been able to roust out of bed until almost 7:00a.m. of late--maybe it's the heat and humidity? So Un-Minnesota like, our weather. At least the Asiatic Lillies in the back yard apparently like it. They've popped out in the last two days. As for me, I am GRATEFUL for air conditioning. I don't want it on all the time, but when I do, I do!

 

I'm still slogging through Winds of War. My ipad reader says I'm 61% done. I'm not complaining; it's a good book. I'm learning more about WWII and specifically the German personality. At least from Wouk's view. One Year to a Writing Life goes back to the library today. I may buy it. (can't check it out for an entire year, ha ha ha). It's quite good. Linda thought so too, and wrote it in her little book of to-reads, to-dos, to-sees because in less than a month she'll be RETIRED. Yay for Linda.

Next in my reading stack is The Obituary Writer and I'm thumbing through The End of Overeating and so far, I can't say I'm learning much I didn't already know. I have several books going at the same time, which is weird I admit. But I've always done it. It's a mood thing.

Working on another Alabama Chanin garment--which is tedious and time consuming but it's a pain I must enjoy because I keep coming back to it. This one is so different even though I'm using a stencil I've done before, because the black and white knit is such a contrast. Not sure I'm going to love it.

This is on my work table as well...an Anna Maria Horner print from Crafty Planet.

 

So Laura is home tonight, be so good to see her. I have to dream up something good for dinner. It's the end of dining on popcorn with Jameson and ginger ale for me. Well, the popcorn, anyway.

 

Lucky Me

This was how I felt earlier today when I found out the person ahead of me in line at Target purchased a $20 gift card to pay for a portion of my groceries. The cashier said she told him it was her birthday and she wanted to do a good deed. So THANK YOU dear stranger and Happy Birthday! 

My favorite artist

On this day in 1907, Frida Kahlo was born in Coyoacan, Mexico. She is my favorite artist. Flamboyant yet reserved with an air of fragility, she must have had the heart of a lioness. Her works seem to emit a loneliness most of us know by heart. Someone once told me, "Much of life is lonely. You have to work it out on your own." Boy, howdy.

I love The Wounded Deer. 

So Happy Birthday to Frida. 

For me, her art expresses the pain we find in life and but also the beauty in her imagery and colors, her depiction of birds and animals, florals and her famous self portraits.  

The Walker Art Museum in Minneapolis hosted a major exhibition of her work in the winter of 2007-2008 and I consider it one of the most emotional things I've ever seen. Her very energy leaped from the canvases, like opening a door into another dimension and en masse they were almost too much for the senses. It was the difference between sitting on a boat dock and getting into the water. Everything looks entirely different--you understand what being wet is, of course you know what water is, yet looking at it and being wet, keeping afloat, swimming for your life, looking up at an immense sky, well, it's another thing completely, isn't it?

"Art teaches nothing except the significance of life." Henry Miller