eric135

How I almost eff'd up Thanksgiving...

Sedona Rocks
Seonda, Arizona, USA
Moleskine Watercolor Sketchbook
Schminke, Utrecht, Da Vinci tube paints
November 23, 2017

    I hope everyone has had  a nice Thanksgiving. I am a bit amazed that I am not at work this evening. Since I'm working Christmas Eve and New Year's Eve, the most difficult shifts to cover in the hospital, I decided to take Thanksgiving off. I'm still surprised that I didn't get a frantic call at 5pm that they were short due to call-outs and such. But then again, that doesn't usually happen for Thanksgiving. That tends to happen more often on Christmas Eve. 

    So it's been a quiet day. I switched my sleep around, so I slept last night, and didn't bother to set an alarm for Thanksgiving morning. So I woke up on my own at about 930am, and have spent most of the day just lazing about, watching TV, casting YouTube video's, and painting. Our only definite plans today was dinner at 7pm. I was able to talk Brent into eating Thanksgiving out this year, and thus avoid the ridiculously huge amount of leftovers, and the week of overeating that always happened after Thanksgiving. We're both sort of struggling with our health this year, with my kidney stones and his back pain, and I'm glad we're limiting the Thanksgiving gluttony to one evening. So Thanksgiving Dinner this year will be at Buca di Beppo. It's an Italian restaurant, but one of the restaurants in our area that is serving a traditional Thanksgiving menu. But the really cool thing is that the restaurant sells itself as comfort family food, so we don't have to dress up (which we - especially me - are loathe to do). 

    We did hit a snag at the restaurant. It turns out that I had made our reservations for the 22nd, not the 23rd. There was a huge line to get into the restaurant, and when I got to the reservation desk, she couldn't find our reservation. So I (haughtily) took out my cell phone, pulled up the screenshot of the reservation confirmation, and held it up in front of her. That's when she politely informed me I had reserved for the wrong night. The crowd of people around me let out a gasp of astonishment, and I humbly retreated, and had to tell Brent and a friend joining us that I had basically Fucked Up Thanksgiving. I had resigned myself to a Whopper Combo via the Burger King drive thru, when Brent managed to quickly get on his phone and made a reservation for an hour later at the other Buca Di Beppo, which ironically is much closer to our apartment. So we did get a traditional Thanksgiving dinner, where we gorged ourselves with turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, green beans and pie. When I got home, I promptly took my pants off and slipped into my robe, I was that stuffed.

    I don't have anything special planned for the rest of the evening. Brent and friend are putting up the Christmas tree (they hit another snag, a string of dead lights, so they are presently at the neighborhood Target... on Thanksgiving... I hope to see them again at some point). I'm going to paint some more. I've been on a roll, painting about 2-3 paintings a week. I have found that this has greatly improved my technique. I sometimes don't get to paint for extremely long periods, sometimes going for more than a year without painting, and then I basically have to start from scratch regaining the muscle memory, and figuring out what has worked in the past. The painting above is in an old Moleskine watercolor notebook that I had abandoned more than a year ago. I didn't like the landscape format of the pages, and had switched to pads and blocks, but for some reason, this notebook was what I chose when I painted my first plein aire painting a few days ago. I find that, unlike my other watercolor notebooks, this one lays really flat, without much wrinkling of wet pages, so I'll probably use this notebook more than my Stillman Birn, or Handbook notebooks. Their paper is nice enough, but when I turn the page after a completed painting, the left panel is often too bowed and warped to take a wash properly. I don't seem to run into this problem with the Moleskine notebook.

 

Red Rock National Park, en plein aire

 

Red Rock National Park
Sedona Arizona USA

    I have always wanted to try painting en plein aire but never was able to get up the nerve to actually do it. I've gone places with plans to pull out my watercolors and paint something, but the idea of someone coming up to me and looking at my painting always kept me from actually painting. I'd usually draw a sketch of my subject, and then work from a photograph at home.

    But I decided I really wanted to give it a try, and so we got into the car and drove 90 minutes north of Phoenix to Sedona Arizona, and spent a couple of hours in Red Rock National Park. We were able to find a spot near a bubbling stream. I had packed a bag with all of my portable supplies (of which I used only about 10% of the items), and had also brought along my folding chair to sit in comfortably while I painted. I had planned on doing 2 or 3 30-minute sketches, but ended up spending 90 minutes on just one, and felt I had gotten over the plein aire fever, at least for the day. 

    We plan to go back to Sedona soon. We had been up there only once or twice in the 17 years we've lived in Phoenix, but we took a friend along who knew the area really well. We visited a Buddhist stupa (the Great Stupa of Dharmakaya), had a tasty late lunch in a deli, and then walked around the big tourist shopping mall, Telaquepaque. This time, we were able to discover the strange energy of this city. Many artists live and work in Sedona, and the city is surrounded by incredible red rock formations that are a part of the Grand Canyon geography. A totally different vibe than the one you get living in Phoenix.

Day One Entry: Nov 13, 2017

Day One
I’ve been using the journaling app, Day One, since December of 2014. I had been looking for an electronic journaling program, that I could use to record personal thoughts that I wasn’t ready to share on my blog. Things like interesting (funny, painful, educational) clinical cases that I wanted to record, but posting on a blog would be unprofessional, and a violation of privacy laws.
So for many months, I wrote occasional posts here, and write more private thoughts into Day One.
Now it seems Day One has enabled exporting of Day One posts into a variety of formats, including email. So now, I’m able to do all of my writing in Day One, and then exporting appropriate posts via email to Typepad for publication. I don’t have to remember to write blog posts. Plus I’ve figured out how to post pictures from Day One and exports the pics to Typepad. I’m hoping the convenience will increase my blog posts.
The watercolor is of the patio of the house where my parents live, in Kalibo, Aklan, Philippines. It was painted from a photograph taken in January 2016.



Sent from my iPhone

Kidney stone- induced isolation... West Fork Trail, Sedona AZ

Sedona
Watercolor, 9 x 12, assorted tube paints

   

    I've been in seclusion for the past 6 weeks. I had a bad case of kidney stones back in September, and I ended up in the Emergency Room twice, and was admitted overnight once. I guess the many years of handling these kidney stones on my own (with occasional visits to the ER for pain management and maybe dehydration) are too much for me to handle on my own anymore. So I have a new Urologist (Academic Urology, Phoenix Arizona). After all the fuss, I admit that I feel better now that I'm seeing a Urologist. I still have a stone in my right ureter that is just stubbornly meandering leisurely downward toward my bladder, but I've been pain free for about 6 weeks, and my Urologist is telling me that I don't have to be so paranoid about getting stone pain; that I should go about my usual activity.

    I haven't been able to do it yet. During the 4 weeks when we didn't exactly know what my stones were doing, and whether my immediate future would include a lithotripsy, I remained almost exclusively indoors on my days off, rarely leaving my apartment unless we needed to some some quick errands. I've sort of gotten used the entertaining myself at home, and have started pulling out my tubes of watercolor. But I can't hide away in my apartment forever.

     It as been a while since the last time I took out my paints. I was saying how I wanted to visit Sedona Arizona, about an hour north of Phoenix. I have been wanting to see the leaves turn Fall colors, which doesn't happen too much in Phoenix. I was looking for cool places to hike, and we plan to visit the West Fork Trail, near Sedona. I ended up watching a bunch of YouTube video's and decided to paint from memory after watching several YouTubers on the trail. It will be a lot better when I have my own memories of the hike to paint from (I doubt I'll be able to paint plein aire).