Thursday, 11/20/14 12:44 pm

The Wrimoer was just sitting down to her writing while also listening to a radio call-in program about current ‘tech’ questions. They just talked of a GoKo(?) video camera that was quite small. It sounded intriguing though she had not properly heard the name of it. She did not know if she would be able to do the writing because she just really wanted to listen to the program. Her attention was too split. So she would stop for the next few minutes.

12:49 pm break to listen 92 words

12:57 pm resume

Now she hoped she could concentrate, but first she needed to get up and turn off the radio, another interruption.

1:01 pm proper resume

The radio was off. The alarm was set so that she could do her periodic standing up from the chair ‘exercises”. Earlier she had been looking through all her journal writing for the month of November, as well as the fistful of lists she had made during November. There were about 52 pages of longhand journal writing. If she found herself really desperate for word counts, she could as a last resort, mine that. She was not yet willing to do it. Besides, she felt even more as if that would be cheating for this writing challenge as she had it set for herself – it was a personal challenge probably more than it was a challenge involving anyone else. Neither was it just a challenge. It was an experience that created its own set of effects that were beneficial she felt. There would be no point to cheating. It seemed a bit like cheating at solitaire. 

She had played solitaire a long time ago for a while as an adolescent. She could not remember how long she had done it for. She did not think she did it for that long. She had just found it too frustrating. Did one ever win at it? She had tried the cheating route but could not see the point in that. Her mother played solitaire constantly. Her mother had a set of small cards from Germany that she used. They were called ‘Patience’, but that was pronounced differently in German or French – ‘passiance’. The Wrimoer only knew her mother called it by that name and had just assumed it was the German name for the game. It could have been the French name for it the way it sounded. 

The Wrimoer remembered when her mother received a new set of these small beautiful ‘Patience’ cards from Germany. She thought it was her grandfather who had sent them to her mother. Perhaps she just assumed that because of his involvement with collecting antique playing cards. His playing card collection went to some museum at some point after he had died. For some reason the Wrimoer thought that might have happened fairly recently, but she did not know any details. Who had handled this transference? Where had the card collection been all this time? Her mother had gotten excited a few years back to find out about this, and had wanted to be in touch with the museum. The Wrimoer had not paid much attention to the whole question. Had it been that her mother, upon finally getting a computer and the internet, had discovered a bit about ‘googling’ and then looked for information about her father?

She had also tried to find a little book he had written and illustrated, and perhaps self-published, that was about the section of Hamburg Germany he grew up in. He had been an architect by training and a city planner. His illustrations for the book were of buildings and streets in the town. The Wrimoer remembered when her mother had come home from a trip to Europe, bringing that book. Her mother had later bought copies for the other children, but had never given one to the Wrimoer. They were quite expensive little volumes. The Wrimoer had never said anything to her mother asking why she was not given a copy. When her mother died, the Wrimoer had looked for that book among her mother’s possessions, in hopes that she could finally have a copy. She almost could not find it as she was remembering it in a completely different form. There had been another similar book written and/or illustrated by someone else, and this was the book the Wrimoer had remembered as being the work of her grandfather. This was among her mother’s possessions, and the Wrimoer got to keep that too. Her own paintings of her local area were all along the same theme as these two books. They were an…

1:31 pm alarm rings stand-up 3x good  783 words

…. They were accounts or illustrated journals of one’s environment. Her own had started in such an unintended manner. It was only because she was showing a friend a little pile of the recent paintings she had been making of a specific area, that she had seen this pile as having the possibility of being a book. She had, so many years and hundred of paintings later, yet to make such a book. Each group of four related pictures had become a little note card or greeting card collection that she had sold through little craft and flea markets. She manufactured the cards by hand – by hand gluing reproductions of the painting onto cards – rather than having the cards printed either at a printer or through a home printer. This was still the cheapest way to do it in terms of upfront cash outlays and profit margins. The whole thing had become such a burden when she allowed herself to be talked into selling wholesale. There was still a profit built into the production of it, but she just hated the process when it was for wholesale. Then she was doing factory work, even if it was her own factory. She felt the work was also too dangerous because of the spray glues for her to be able to farm out to anyone else. Where she lived when she used to do this card making she was able to get the cross ventilation needed just by keeping certain windows open. She knew it was not good though.

The only way she made the cards was by eyeballing where the images got glued. To do this by measuring would add too much extra labor and time to the process. This was not a task that someone else could do she believed. She had seen what happened whenever friends had helped her in cutting out the images, (which also had to be cut out by hand). They could not cut them evenly enough. She had just assumed it would be too hard to find anyone who could do this hand production. So she had kept on doing it herself. 

Gradually she had been able to get away from wholesaling. The first year she had tried to tell her biggest wholesale customer that she would not be doing it anymore. The customer had ignored what she had said and ordered anyway. The Wrimoer did not know what to do. It had been hard enough to say in the first place that she could not continue. Instead she had been very late with the card delivery and had only delivered some of the customer’s second order for the season. The Wrimoer had long ago forgotten what the actual events had been for what she’d been remiss in when. The customer had been annoyed that the Wrimoer had never completed the order, and chided her periodically about it. It was as if she had never noticed that the Wrimoer had told her in the first place she would not be doing wholesale orders. The Wrimoer could not remember how they had finally called it quits. Perhaps the customer just finally understood and did not order again.

A similar thing had happened with a regular yearly custom Christmas card and painting commission order that the Wrimoer had been doing. Every year the Wrimoer found it a torture to start this project. The customer wanted a scene painted from her property, a place she only visited a few weeks out of the year. It was not….

2:01 pm alarm rings 1376 words, stand up 3x

…. a place she particularly cared for. It was in a ritzy development. There were some scenic views, but it was mostly wooded area overlooking water from a cliff. The place gave the Wrimoer the creeps if she was there alone. She was always afraid of what could happen if she fell. There was no one around. If there were vacationers in the house, then she was probably an intrusion. One could not just pop in at any time convenient to oneself. They had worked it out that the Wrimoer would know in advance when the place was unoccupied. The property faced the eastern waters, and with all those woods got most of its sunlight in the morning The Wrimoer was never up early enough to get there then. The few weeks that the place was empty, other than winter when she certainly was not willing to go, were so unpredictable between what the weather would be on any given day that the Wrimoer might be available to get herself up to the property just to take photos. She never drew and painted on location there anymore. The photos she took seemed to be the same photos every year. She had run out of scenes to paint. 

The painting she had done two years previously, the Wrimoer had felt was such a traditional scene and painting. It was very skillfully executed. A path to the lookout bench through the sunlit woods, with shadows dappling the path. What the Wrimoer had liked best about the painting was the little bluejays she had put in it. They were small because of the overall scale of the painting. She did also like all the patterns and the coloring was nice too. She had been so sure she would tell the customer this was the last time she would do these commissions. 

This time the customer had called her just to thank her for that year’s painting. She had loved that one the best of all, and it had gotten responses from some of the people who had received it. The Wrimoer never heard anything else about these cards. No one ever got in touch with her about them. To her it was as if this work was for one person, and basically done to show off where the customer vacationed, had a vacation home. The Wrimoer always felt as if it was all about status, rather than any kind of values. She did not like that she was by her painting supporting what to her where false values. 

When the customer had called her to thank her profusely for that year’s image and cards, the Wrimoer had apologized for how she worked, but had warned the customer, “I hope you will be able to deal with how I work going forward.” (or something to that effect). They had joked that in the future the customer might have to get her working on the art months in advance somehow. She did not understand that the Wrimoer just never did things that way. She did things when they were needed. Whenever she did them in advance, she would forget she had done them and end up doing it again.

The previous year Wrimoer had made a painting she had liked. It was a summer scene, as the customer had requested. The dates available for the property had completely missed when any real color was out. She and her watercolor student had gone down to take pictures. There had been workmen – gardeners

2:31 pm alarm rings (always a shock). 1975 words

caretaking the place. The gardener told them that the flowers were out in June. The Wrimoer had found it difficult to find a scene in the many photos she had taken that made her want to paint it. 

It was rarely that way with photos though. She never really wanted to work from photos. Once one got going it was ok, and then it eventually became really ok. It was always a harrowing stress to work with that kind of deadline. What could be a lovely drawing when it was simply a linear design, might not translate well into a color image. One could not know until one got to that point. One did not know what kind of design problems one would find. The Wrimoer only did this once a year; she never got that much chance to improve her skills in designing for these kinds of scenes. She would never get the chance to improve these skills because she did not like what she saw as the whole purpose of these jobs - the reason that most people wanted such paintings. She felt they were wanted for egotistical purposes, to enhance the customer’s status. 

The scene the Wrimoer had chosen for the previous year was the apple tree in the yard carrying its full load of ripening apples. They were still green at that point. The whole painting was a study in greens. It was a summer scene in that respect, as the customer had wanted. The Wrimoer had found all sorts of animal imagery hidden in the patterns of the apple tree and woods foliage. She had loved drawing that as they were beautiful lines and shapes, (and creatures). 

Her mother had warned her several times about paintings that were all green. She believed, because of something someone like her first artist husband, or her father the architect, had told her, that a basically green painting just did not work. One had to make sure there were at least a couple spots of other color in it. Now the Wrimoer wanted to know just what it was her mother used to say about ‘green’ scenes. It had been a critique her mother had given her one time when the Wrimoer had come home from a day painting a basically green landscape, when she was still an art student.

Had the Wrimoer put other colors into this green apple tree painting? She would have to look back and find out.

When it came time to invoice for the previous years Christmas card commission, the customer had written the Wrimoer to ask for the invoice and to let her know that she could no longer go through this. (The Wrimoer had always wondered how the customer had kept on accepting the agony of having to wait for the card delivery.) At last the customer was stepping away. The Wrimoer had not been able to say no herself. The customer told her that unless the Wrimoer could guarantee getting the cards to her by the middle of November, she could not continue. She had gone on to say that the Wrimoer had many months to think about it. In the next line the customer had said something to the effect of “Have a nice life”. The Wrimoer, all these many months later, had yet to invoice for that job, even though the customer had requested the invoice those many months before. 

The Wrimoer really needed to do that invoice now though, as she was really out of cash. That was another thing she hated about doing commission work. She hated having to deal with invoicing. It was probably because it just did not happen often enough to be a routine thing.

3:01 pm alarm rings 2601 words. Stand up 3x

Each alarm interruption had been about 2 minutes