It's hard to believe it's that time of year again! It seems like only a few weeks ago Mitch was nagging me to help get the garden ready for planting. Just kidding, he never nags, although apparently I do. (By nag I mean ask him to do something a second time, since he didn't do it when I asked the first time. That's nagging. I mean, what should I do, just ignore it? What if it's something that actually needs doing, and I can't do it, like when the floodlight in our side yard burns out. I'm certainly not climbing up 20 feet on a ladder--I have a bit of a "height thing." But Mitch is fine with heights, yet I have to ask him like ten times before that bulb gets replaced.) Anyway, this year, besides some other things we grew tons of tomatoes, peppers, and eggplants. I swear, I must have eaten two tomatoes at every meal for the entire summer, they were so good. And then we made tomato sauces too, so we are stocked for the winter.
I finally pulled up the ugly carpeting in my studio last spring, and it really made a difference. (Wall-to-wall carpeting is never appropriate in an art studio, anyone will tell you that.) After it was gone I felt so free to make a mess that my work improved quite a bit, and I finally found a gallery that wants to include me in a show next January, which is pretty exciting. Too bad I will have to pay for framing eight paintings--two are quite large--and will probably sell zero, and even if I sell any the gallery keeps half so the whole thing will end up costing me money, and I won't even have those paintings anymore, so how good is that? Oh well, it is what it is.My arthritis seems to have cleared up nicely, enough so that I cancelled my hip replacement surgery scheduled for next month. It turns out my condition was being aggravated by eating so many tomatoes and peppers and eggplants; apparently they have some chemical that makes arthritis worse. Who knew? Anyway, when I told my surgeon about how my pain disappeared almost immediately when I stopped eating those "nightshade vegetables," he said he had never heard of that. Imagine--and he does like 95% of all the hip replacements in Maine! (It's funny the things they don't teach you in medical school but then you find them all over the Internet. Go figure.)
Our next door neighbors are moving, which is really sad since they are like the only people we actually have anything in common with in the entire state of Maine, not counting family of course. I hear the new people who bought the house have little children. How nice for them.
We took some trips this past year--to Chicago and New York, and a week in Florida last February. It rained the whole time, which was a bummer, but I still reunited with one of my best friends from high school and that was great fun. Mitch and I also went to Indiana one weekend to visit friends and saw the drought up close--rows and rows of earless stalks of corn. That was pretty interesting, although quite dusty.
Like everyone, my cats are a year older, which makes them 18. I'm pretty sure Gizmo is totally blind and Daisy has Feline Alzheimer's, if there is such a thing. (I know if she could talk she would not be able to tell you her name or what year it is.) They both still eat and purr, which is really all you can ask, and Lurch is still young and so makes up for the other two. That's about it. Oh wait--my mean old aunt finally died which was great news since she ruined the second half my life, but then I found out my sister, who ruined the first half and who I thought was dead since she stopped calling and asking for money, is definitely alive, or at least she was in March. Oh well--you win some, you lose some. But she lives at the beach, directly in the path of Hurricane Sandy, so now who knows.
Here's hoping you and yours have a happy holiday season!
Love from Andrea, Mitch, Daisy, Gizmo and Big Lurch
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