Peggy's Jibber-Jabber: Quiet

My days are quiet lately and that’s just the way I like them, however, it doesn’t make for an exciting read for you, my dearly loved family and friends.

“What’cha been doing?” I know you wanna know.

What have I been doing?

Mostly... now that I think about it, I don’t really know where my week has gone. The few things that I’m going to talk about certainly didn’t take up all seven days, totaling 168 hours, 10,080 minutes, or 604,800 seconds. Granted, I slept for 41 hours 52 minutes of those seven days. My Fitbit tracks my sleep and I averaged about six hours a night.

Reading took up a few of those hours. There have been a few nights when I’ve read till well past midnight.

“What are you reading that’s so consuming you?” you ask.

I’m reading The Women by Kristin Hannah. It’s about Frankie, an Army nurse in a MASH unit during the Vietnam war. It showcases the horrors of the war, how she dealt with it, and the appalling way she was treated when she came home. The story doesn’t end there, though, as she struggled with a little-known health disorder called PTSD, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. There’s an underlying love story and even though I’m not quite done with it, I’m rooting for a happy ending.

Any good author will do research for their books. That’s often why you can learn things from reading non-fiction. Kristin Hannah mentions that Frankie was reading a newspaper article that reported the first American woman killed in Vietnam as First Lt. Sharon Lane, killed in a rocket explosion.

That piqued my curiosity. Is it true? Was First Lieutenant Sharon Lane the first American woman to be killed in Vietnam? I decided to check and see if it was true.

It is.

Sharon Ann Lane, a U.S. Army nurse, was tragically killed during the Vietnam War. On June 8, 1969, the 312th Evacuation Hospital in Chu Lai, where she was stationed, was struck by a salvo of 122mm rockets fired by the Viet Cong. One of these rockets hit between Wards 4A and 4B, where Lane was working, causing her to die instantly from fragmentation wounds to the chest. She was the only American servicewoman killed as a direct result of enemy fire during the Vietnam War. Her bravery and dedication to her duty have been honored in various ways, including posthumous awards and memorials.

I didn’t check any of the other places or battles or peace marches that she talked about. There were a lot of famous names mentioned in the book including Richard Nixon and Martin Luther King, Jr. but I’m going to guess that even though this novel is a work of fiction, there’s a lot of truth behind it.

I’ve spent some of my time this week painting. Every morning, after feeding cats and birds and husbands — okay! okay! Not husbands, one husband! After everyone is fed and I’ve got my coffee, I sit at my computer and tap out a quick love note to my morning peeps. I’ll check my email accounts and scroll through Facebook for a few minutes. Not long, though. Especially not as long as I sometimes do. Since discovering the joys of watercolors and quick five-minute paintings, my fingers itch to paint something. My paints, my favorite brushes, and my sketchbook are all sitting right here, close at hand. All I have to do is get a little water. Easy-peasy-lemon-squeezy! I’ve painted something every day — sometimes more than one something a day. My second and last sketchbook is almost halfway done. My thoughts are turning to getting a couple more. I think that for right now I’m happy with this small size but eventually I’ll buy a larger one.

Most everything I painted this week has been Christmas themed but not everything.

I painted a cat.

And a bird.

“Peg, what does Bird Dice on the bottom of the painting mean?”

Oh my gosh! It’s the most fun thing ever! Lacey, one of the people I follow for quick watercolors, has a paper with a bunch of categories and descriptors. I printed the paper, scratched around until I found a die, and made my first roll. It came up as a three. Oval vertical was to be the shape of the head. On the second roll I rolled another three. The body is oval also and I made it a bigger oval than the head. Next, for the tail, I rolled a one. Short flat. I don’t know what that’s supposed to look like, so I made mine like this. I rolled small hook for a nose and for colors, I rolled twice getting blue and yellow. And voila! Here’s my cute little bird and I didn’t even have to make any decisions about how to paint him. Well, except you have to decide how many colors you want and where you’re going to put them. It’ll be fun to see what kind of a bird I create next.

But, like I said, most of what I painted this week was Christmas themed.

You may notice that the Grinch hand looks different from my other watercolors. That’s because I didn’t use watercolors. I made it with Pasco paint pens. These pens are very expensive. I bought a basic set of eight and it set me back almost twenty dollars. I found out later I could’ve gotten them a little cheaper if I’d’ve bought them on Amazon. I didn’t spend any time detailing this so it looks rather cartoonish. But I wanted to try the Pasco pens and it’s in my sketchbook so it’ll be alright.

Santa. I somehow got a red dot on my background and decided not to worry about it.

Candy canes. I didn’t want to fool around trying to get straight lines with free-handing so I paid for the pattern. It wasn’t much, less than two dollars. I guess wonky candy cane lines wouldn’t’ve been the end of the world, but don’t you think my candy canes came out nice?

Of all the Christmas pictures I’ve painted in the last two weeks, which one is your favorite?

I think I’m done with Christmas themes — but truth be known, I said that a week ago.

I’ve started painting Christmas cards. I’ve got one done. I don’t know how many I’ll actually do, but guess what?

I’ve discovered that I’m a lot more picky when I’m doing art for someone else!

I’ve learned a couple of other things this week, too. For one, I learned that Tiger isn’t interested in drinking paint water without any paint in it. Silly cat!

I’ve also learned to put my wet paint pans away. Tiger’s favorite perch is either in Mike’s lap or on top of my desk where he can nap or watch the birds.

And he has a food dish on my desk, not that he’s spoiled by having his own private dish of food or anything. He has jumped up and landed right in my wet paint pans a couple of times now and got paint all over his feet and consequently, all over the place! My desk, the floor when I toss him off the desk!

I don’t need to pull my keyboard desk out all the way to use my keyboard, so there’s plenty of room for my wet paints to sit back there and dry.

“Peg, why don’t you just close the lid?”

I did that once. Closed the lid before the paints were dry. The next time I opened it, my paints were moldy. I lost a lot of paint washing the mold out.

Speaking of Tiger, he likes to get between me and the monitor when he wants something. His food freshened, a treat, or a chin scratching — and he won’t get out of my way until he gets what he wants. I try to work around him and he watches my cursor go across the screen as I pick out pictures for my letter blog and work on them.

I remembered that they had a program for cats that watch the screens. There’s all kinds of critters, spiders, bugs, mice. But he likes the one with ants best. I have to disable my touch screen or he’ll end up buying something on Amazon.

I finished a stained-glass commission for my friend and editor, the Kipps’ daughter, Jenn. She’s home for Thanksgiving this week so I took it down and left it with Miss Rosie for her.

“Oh that’s cute!” Miss Rosie said.

“It was a pain in the ass!” I told her. “All those little pieces!” It’s around six inches tall.

“I guess that means you’re not making me one?”

“I really don’t ever want to make another one!” I told her. But if Miss Rosie really wants one, I’d really make her one.

The birds have been hitting the feeders pretty hard here lately. These guys especially. I had ten Blue Jays out there one day and filled the feeder three times. They’re gonna eat me out of house and home! Meanwhile, if the bullies of the bird world eat all the seeds, there’s nothing left for the smaller birds. I dug a couple of feeders out of storage that the big birds can’t land on.

Even though the Orioles are gone for the winter, I keep grape jelly in the feeder. Other birds, like this woodpecker, eat it.

Every time I cross our pretty little creek I look to see if I can see the beaver. I haven’t seen him but I do see water is coming over the top of the dam now.

“He’s not taking care of the dam,” I told Mike.

A couple of days later, even more water is coming over. The dam is falling apart. I’m guessing our beaver has decided not to stay here and he’s moved on. Otherwise, he’d be taking care of the dam.

We had snow! Not a lot. I measured under an inch on my snowboard. By the time Raini and I went out for snow pictures, the snow had turned to a drizzly rain. I took pictures anyway.

Coming back from our walkabout, a splotch of orange stands out against the snow. It’s Raini’s pig. When we first got it, Raini seemed to enjoy it, so on two subsequent trips to the store, we bought her others in different colors, a green one and a purple one. But the orange seems to be her favorite.

It’s a fun toy because unless she catches it just right, it’ll bounce off her snout and she has to chase it. If I toss it beyond her, its bounces are unpredictable which makes it more fun. This toy is one that she’ll sometimes whip back and forth.

Raini isn’t into destroying things, like some dogs. Very, very seldom does she chew anything up. Eventually, orange pig got a small hole in his rump. Eventually, a little piece of stuffing started to poke through. Once Raini spotted that, she had to worry it, pulling stuffing out and making the hole bigger. Then it started falling apart as she whipped it back and forth, little pieces dropping from her mouth as pig went flying. But she still loves that orange pig so when she brings it to me, I toss it for her.

She’s whipping it back and forth as she brings it back to me.