Thursday, January 14, 2016

Cats and Horses - Changed Plans

 Kitten Kyra ATC colored pencils on paper

Horses page, large Moleskine watercolor journal, coffee and watercolor

Well, plans change! Sorry I haven't been posting. I have barely been online since I moved on December 18th, 2015. Running aronnd offline traveling across the continent and then getting all my stuff sorted out meant very little online time.

My original plan was to stay in my daughter's house for a few days, at least till after Christmas, then rent a house at the amazing low rate of $200 a month and live comfortably on my disability payments, reduced by local cost of living adjustment. That budget does work in my favor, because the California increase was not adequate to the real costs of living in San Francisco. My budget here would have been better even in the house with all the bills. I used the last California-sized check to buy furniture for the house.

Then the owner decided not to move to New Mexico after all. Meanwhile I'd been out to the house and daunted by the fact that the driveway had a gate in it down a long rutted country lane that I could not walk that far on a good day to let in a guest, plus they'd have to phone me to get me out there to do so. Forget picking up mail, there wasn't even a mail box. Just some more lane going past a single neighbor's house that opened onto a real road right next to the post office. The people who live there do a lot of hiking.

I do not. I would need to use my power chair to go that far if it was paved, which it wasn't. I'd also need it to get from one end of the way too large house to the other and be heating or cooling enough house for half a dozen people on one disability check when I'm too sick to handle either extreme cold or heat. It would be a wonderful deal for a spry, healthy person who likes hiking and has a strong constitution for weather, plus a car. For a can't drive mobility impaired guy it would have created total dependence on my daughter every single day for everything and if anything went wrong, having to go out in Weather to get a cell phone signal. It was a nice house, but I could not live there anyway. There was no way to tell till I got here. 

So I moved into my daughter's house. I've been doing horse drawings and occasional chickens since I arrived. Yesterday we finished the massive task of unpacking everything in the stuff from the horse trailer and getting it sorted into the shed, the house or the attic. Some things I'm just sharing with the family. My five glass vases are up safely out of cat range with her glass pitchers and vases, seen and not wrecked in the kitchen. Kitchen stuff is stored or shared. Clothes in a tub tucked out of the way.

Art supplies amazingly mostly came inside after everything was said and done. I've got a few things out in the shed but all oils and acrylics are in here, all stored art is in the attic with framed pictures, almost all pastels, colored pencils and oil pastels are in here with me. I'm pretty sure all watercolors are too. There's stuff stored in the attic that I was planning on unpacking over at the rental house, but that's all staying in the attic. Anything that cold or heat would permanently damage is inside. 

I'm not sure if the spray fixative cans survived being out in the cold. One can of fixative that got left by a friend in a car after an art meeting during a Kansas winter became unusably cloudy after the freezing and thawing, but if they are, I can replace them. I should check them before I place my next Blick order. Pretty sure the Spectrafix doesn't work that way, but will find out. Everything else came through pretty well. There were a lot of things far more expensive than fixative cans that I was worried about cold, heat and moisture damaging that came through all right. Some papers and books seemed slightly damp but nothing got too warped and it'll flatten as it dries.

From several days before the move till now I've been overdoing it, on my feet too long doing too much every day. I can finally rest. Will get back to blogging regularly from here on out, back to daily as soon as I can. Now that I'm all in one place I can start working on having a set of habits again!

The posted art - little Kyra is Ari's new friend, a several months old kitten found and rescued at the rental house. Best thing about the rental house thing was finding Bumble Kitten. Ari cat loves her and he plays with her often. Colored pencils on paper. The horses are from life from riding along on my daughter's horse riding trips. I finally got coffee dark enough to give me a good mid value by using boiled down coffee that got left on the coffee maker too long! It's probably even darker now that it's evaporated for some days. Loved coffee paintings but had never successfully gotten dark ones done before!

6 comments:

  1. Best of luck on your new beginning.

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    1. Thank you! So far going great even if I'm having trouble making time to go online.

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  2. Robert, wishing you the best. Culture shock for sure! Arkansas is a beautiful state.

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    1. LOL oh yeah, in so many ways. Arkansas is gorgeous though. The skies are incredible even in winter. The trees and hills sing to me. And there are so many cats!

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  3. So glad to see your postings. love the horses and Kyra :)

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    1. Thank you! I plan to draw the bumble kitten again often and see horses almost every day, so they're my new theme!

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