Eva Berger 1927 - 2009

My mom died last week on Thanksgiving Monday, Oct 12. She was 82. "That's young" says a 101-year old aunt. I think she was just tired of fighting. It's been 5 years since my dad died, and despite the joy of a new grandson, her heart was still with him. They met in Poland in May of 1945 at the end of the war. My dad, with false papers giving his name as "Josef Boguslawska" served in the Polish army. My mom's false passport gave her name as "Sofia Pokora" a Roman Catholic, which enabled her to work as an au pair. He thought my mom was the last Jewish girl left in the world. They married in October of 1945 and were together til his death in 2004.
That's where my summer went, driving back and forth to Winnipeg. My house is full of stuff I need to sort through and do stuff to before I can put it somewhere. My head is full of stuff that needs time to go through it. *sigh*
Art. Art is panacea and consolation and escape. Trading cards, yes, but painting, too, even if I have hit a snag in my Iris watercolour (i.e. don't like the way the centre flower works). Solution? Fix it!
I'm in the mentorship program in Carfac for a year and I love it. Suddenly there is a target for the future and new vistas have opened up. Something to do with my time.
Rest in peace, mom & dad. I love you very much.

Life between my toes

Just because I like to share...
Other people's pictures can be so interesting, so I decided to choose my perspective. Here it is! Enjoy!


Upstairs from my desk and Winnipeg - The Forks

More reasons to love Mozilla

My computer! It's ALIVE!!!
It works, it's cleaner, peripherals installed (discovered the loose extra USB cable was for my webcam - no wonder the silly thing wasn't working :-o) and most of my favourite software has been reloaded (MS Office, CorelDraw, Firefox, Skype, Trillian, Irfanview, AMP Font Viewer, Adobe reader, Media Monkey, Symmtime) and all my fonts (links-only to the Windows directory).
The biggest hitch was that Netscape (yes, I was still using it as my mail client) would NOT install. It wasn't that I particularly liked Netscape, it's just that after using it for so many years, all my mail and folders, which I do use, were only accessible in it.
Well, I had to bite the bullet, and installed Mozilla Thunderbird. Did it, got both accounts created - then dicovered how to import ALL my mail and folders from Netscape without screwing up the new mail! Woot! Woot! Links in email now open a new tab in Firefox automatically - no stupid IE launch. So beautiful. So easy. *happy sigh* So easy to switch between mail, website links, research tabs - and not get screwed up when interrupted by a phonecall! I feel so productive!
Maybe it's time for a nap :-)

ATCs

Some of my recent ATCs - Artist Trading Cards for those who haven't heard of them. Just love making them!

Secret of Motivation

Some people suggest that the secret to getting motivated to get something done is to have a deadline. That can work, but an even more effective one, is to have something you want to do even less. Suddenly, the previous mountain doesn't seem so high, so to speak. This may explain the times I've ironed (which I hate).
My work life abounded with corroboration. If it weren't for disagreeable jobs, nothing would have gotten done at all!

bereft!

My desktop computer is at the computer doctors. Long overdue visit, but do I ever feel deprived! All I'm getting done is having my hard drive copied to my new (well, it was new in March) external drive, and my dvd burner and player cleaned/fixed/upgraded. I hope I get it back on Monday. Using my laptop at my desk feels odd.
i suppose the big question is: will I ever get around to rebuilding my home system? There is so much gunk in it, I'm ashamed. but I love it :-)

done today

The most exciting thing I did today (other than convincing my son to vacuum, make fruit salad, and sweep out the garage on his day off) was to carve 2 rubber stamps. I'm working on a serendipity piece, and an image of a birds nest stuck in my head. Since I don't have a stamp with the image I wanted, I made two of them, one 2 1/2" across, the other 1 1/4". I used the "graphite pencil on an image" transfer method, and it worked a treat. Of course, the resulting stamps don't resemble the original image, but that's the charm of hand-carved. Of course, the piece is not done yet, but that's also part of the charm. Let it evolve!

Day 1

There's a peculiar activity I do that seems to take up most of my time. No I don't mean sleeping. It's called "cleaning my desk". Since my computer is there, & when I sit there I am surrounded by art supplies, that's where most stuff that needs to be handled gets put.
There's a peculiar dialog that plays in my head when I'm there, that goes like this. "Today I'd like to make art, but first I have to clean up my desk. *picks random object* Why is this here? Where does this go? What do I have to do so that I can put this where it belongs?" and I'm off to the races. At the end of the day, I get a lot of stuff done, amazingly enough have usually made some art and even more amazingly, have an amazing feeling of satisfaction from getting stuff done.
But oddly, there's also usually a lot of stuff on my desk. new stuff. I'll deal with it tomorrow.

eh?

first post -now what?