Excellent June

Coffee outside in the still-cool morning, on the shady north side.  Temps have been nudging 90º (32C), but pleasant when the sun is not high in the sky. I miss when we used to get weeks of 60s and 70s---now our weather jumps from freezing to burning. But it's been pretty nice lately.

I've signed the lease for my second year at Apartment 320 (moved in last July 1). I'm so happy here--it's a touch beyond me financially, but worth it. And the landlord kindly only raised my rent $5/month even though I know his expenses have gone up more--heating costs especially. Of course my workplace is not raising our pay again, since they'd had to raise it last year to meet the city's legal minimum wage of $15/hour. We'll be paid that until kingdom come.
But I do get most everything I need from the store free (with our monthly store credit) or cheap (we get 25% off if we use up our store credit), and that's a huge benefit.

I'm going to work but I have no social plans today—nice. And nice partly because both friends I socialized with this week, two in a row, are people who have consistently done their own work, and they inspire me to do mine. I hope to work on a collage this evening.
One friend, Jody Williams, is an artist; the other, Allan K., an archivist of art, they’ve not been derailed. I’ve known them for thirty years and they’ve simply kept at it all that time (with breaks for life events such as deaths of parents, a cancer diagnosis, etc.).

In fact, it made me regret, a little, having deleted my Instagram because that had been a five-year record of my work with girlettes. If I’d seen these friends last week, I’d have had time to save that account, and maybe I would have. 

I’m glad I didn’t. My problem was that looking at others playing on Instagram was such a fun diversion, I wasn’t doing my work/play. As with the ebike, I turned down something good and seductively easy for something good and a little bit harder—because I know myself:
If there are cookies in the house, I will eat them.
(Blogging doesn't interfere because it's become a slow backwater, which I like.)

I'm not in danger of having a too-active social life, but I do need to leave empty time or I will not do anything I want to do--which these days is to mess around with toys.
I don't do a lot, and I don't do it fast, but as Jody said yesterday, "That doesn't matter, you are doing something."
Yes, I want to leave time open so I keep doing my some things.

I think I posted everything on IG here too, so I do have a photo-record of the girlettes on this blog––––but I don't show my blog to most people. Certainly not to coworkers, when I complain so much about work! (I will probably delete recent complaints--I've done that before--but I do want to feel free to write them out here. Writing out my frustrations helps me understand better what's going on and what I want to do. I got the idea to write sonnets during staff meetings when I was blogging about how annoyed I get at the meetings.)

It occurred to me I could set up a separate blog to archive all my toy photos. Then I'd have that record to share. Big job, but maybe I will.
I'd thought about the value of having an art site because Jody has been living with incurable cancer for years, is on almost constant chemo, and has to shepherd her energies and protect her immune system, so I hadn't seen her since before Covid. But she knew what I'd been making because she saw it on Instagram.

I'd set up an Instagram for Mr Furniture's art a while ago, and he is always showing it to customers. A local gallery/political space asked him for photos, and he could show it to them too, and now they're talking about hosting another show of his work. I hope so.

Mr Furniture and Emmler are the two people at work who SHINE THROUGH. They both live/d in violence and deprivation, and they both keep making their quirky creations through it all.
Do you know what I mean about shining through?
Some people have an excellence about them.
If you looked at them in human terms, maybe you couldn't see it on any given day, but if you had a magic radar and you scanned any group of people, they would register as especially radiant.

Funny example of excellence shining through--yesterday was the Feast of the Visitation, when Mary, pregnant with Jesus, visits her cousin Elizabeth, pregnant with John the Baptist. When Mary approaches, John leaps for joy in Elizabeth's womb. (Luke 1:39-45)
It is not recorded, but I bet fetus Jesus leaped too, or at least waved back.
"We're in for a wild ride, cousin--see you on the other side!"

ABOVE: "Visitation" from Altarpiece of the Virgin (St. Vaast Altarpiece) by Jacques Daret, c. 1435, via Wikipedia "Visitation".
(The kneeling guy is the donor.)