Queen Mediocretia of Suburbia

Putting the TMI in absentminded

Month: July 2020

  • Zoom Makeup

    I was on a zoom meeting with just one other person, and she was wearing makeup. Not cool. All the other women in our team have stopped wearing makeup or styling their hair entirely. But in the meeting was this one woman in her little screen panel all dolled up, while I was in the…

  • Trumpet Music

    I have practiced all the tunes in the guitar books I bought thirteen years ago – the ones I can play, anyway. (Why does BNL write in the key that has five sharps? (Still don’t know the key names. Clearly I did not get very far in my music theory book.)) I needed new music.…

  • Skunk Encounters Of the Third Kind

    Late last night I was playing my guitar. I was just sitting there in my room: playing, relaxing, breathing; and then suddenly: playing, gagging, crying. I had taken a deep breath of skunk. A recently discharged skunk must have just walked under my front window. “GARY OH MY GOD GARY COME IN HERE AND SMELL…

  • Unimaginable

    I think back to the days when I was first married in the mid 80’s, when I realized someday it would be the year 2000. I remember I wondered if I would have a house in the suburbs when we rolled over to the new millennia. I wondered what grocery stores and technology would be…

  • Lone Elk Park: Coronavirus Edition

    One of my favorite places to go in Saint Louis is Lone Elk Park. Gary and I visited there last weekend. It’s the perfect place to go in quarantine: a wildlife park you drive through with the windows rolled up. No exposure to any humans. I was concerned that everyone else would have the same…

  • Weekly Paint Progress: 7/16

    This week the crypts went from this … to this: The light is different because I thought I’d move it upstairs where the tape is. A friend asked me if I was drawing it from a photo. I answered that using tape to make straight lines can’t really be considered drawing. The seascape went from…

  • Step-by-Step, Bit by Bit

    I’ve really exhausted all the paintings I want to do from my step-by step book. Either all the others have results that are too specific (Portrait of a Random Businessman), too easy (Hot Pink Peony Closeup) or too difficult (Portrait of a Kitten Detailing Every Hair). I like learning from books, and I think it…

  • Rewriting the Novel: July

    “I will work on Jerry’s novel when I take vacation in July.” Nope. I spent a lot of time not working on it, but I also spent time thinking about why I’m not working on it. I have determined that I need to recalibrate my expectations to line up with my other artistic efforts. If…

  • Do Re Mi

    So, sometime last week I said I was going to try to up my guitar skills by training my ear and perhaps learning some music theory basics, like why you never have an F sharp and a B flat in the same song. Somewhere buried in YouTube videos about megahertz and chord roots I saw…

  • What Threw Me Down the Rabbit Hole at 3:30 Last Night

    Last night I woke up at 3:30 — that special hour when your brain chemistry dips and your bladder fills and your REM cycle skids off the road. When this happens to me I play a crossword and do some light “reading.” Reading so light that it really needs those quotation marks. Not just Facebook…