Month: May 2026

Life Inside A Painting

A morning view from my desk. It is a very much like an E.J. Hughes painting. I live here!

On Sunny mornings I look out from my desk and realize that my view is a stunning live E. J. Hughes painting. The hard morning light on sparkling water, greening leaves, several varieties of fruit blossoms, bird songs, boat traffic and a hidden water tower on the ridge that glints in the light. I think of all the poor folks who never have the luxury of even thinking of a scenic view and I wonder at my decadence with such a panorama.

Our front yard welcomes you. We’re very fortunate.
As if we don’t have enough flowers outside there are a few inside as well. Our sinus’s scream.
All in a long day’s work.
Downtown in the evening. That’s me in the room with the plywood in the window.

Isn’t it funny how one thing leads to another? Last blog was about the new gazebo. There’s more. I can’t abide having something completely generic. I need to add something or modify things to make it uniquely mine. First I installed some overhead hanging lights. The eves of the new edifice neccesarily tuck themselves beneath the soffits of the house. You know what happens when it rains. A gazebo with runnin g water. My solution was to install rain gutters beneath two sides of the edifice to direct the runoff overboard from the deck. They had to be innocuous. That meant installing them as high as possible which in turn meant cutting down a drill bit to fit the narrow gap I had to work in.

Rain Chain. The end of a process that involved assembling a gazebo and then finding a new window. I think of the child-slave somewhere who assembled this lovely copper spirals.

That process sent the severed bit pinging off like a bullet, right through my shop window. Fortunately the old window was tempered glass and in slow motion collapsed in a heap of jagged crystal shrapnel. I had trumped myself.The gutter job slid to the back of the stove while I spent a very long time collecting all the crumpled bits of glint. It is not good for the dog’s feet, or mine.

The new doowindow. It almost looks meant to be. That extra workbench outside is a grand idea. It helped sell me on the house.

Then began a quest for a replacement glass. God forbid I spend more money! Amazingly I found a pair of sliding French doors a few blocks away free for the picking up. Git ‘er gone. Now I have the sexiest shop window in town. With all its small lead-framed glass panels it is much safer from the whirling mad blacksmith inventing stuff inside. “Like a bull in a sex shop.” Of course after all that, with the next rain, the gutter leaked. I fixed it.

There is one more anecdote about this online-ordered gazebo/shelter/pergola/pagoda. The shipment came in two awkward huge boxes weighing about two hundred pounds. One box finally arrived, sitting sadly on its own on the front step out in the rain. Days later, we finally called to inquire.The other box was out there in the ozone, we were not having an uncommon experience apparently, it would arrive. Jill employed a high charm setting and were subsequently told an entire replacement unit was going to be shipped. “No, no,” we responded “all we need is one only, box 2 of 2. Apparently that does not compute. A second order was being expedited at no extra charge, don’t worry about the missing box. Hmmmm!

Several days later, box 2 arrived, lugged to our door by a lady driver working alone. Next day, gazebo 2 arrived. Both of those boxes were each carried by two burly men. (Just making note!) To bring this story to a conclusion let me simply say that a nice lady is now the happy owner of a brand-new gazebo at a very fair price. Of course so are we! I am still waiting for an invoice for all of the entertainment.

Almost paid for. This mid-sixties Mercury even has a complete second for spare parts. Damn! They were ugly!
High water slack. Both vessels are beginning to turn as the tide goes to ebb.

Spring is indeed in the air. The lilacs are producing an industrial-strength perfume that tingles in my sinus cavities and leaves me gasping. The dogwood blooms are suddenly everywhere, flourescent day and night. The sun now rises almost forty five degrees further north than in winter. Each day begins with the soft chanting of morning doves, swallows pelt through the air and baby birds hop across the lawns. Still people bitch. There’s always something to find wrong but I like to point out to folks that if you’re truly unhappy here, the nicest thing about our country is that you are still free to leave. Piss off! It’s that simple. Maybe should you go spend a week in Gaza or the Ukraine or Iran. They’re not free to leave and the notion of a holiday is totally abstract, a decadence beyond imagination. Interestingly, while the price of fuel is a howler, folks still drive like demons and burn fossil fuels as quickly as they can. As Donald Trump said on a Sixty Minutes interview last night, “There’s a lot of crazy people out there.”

Knotweed. It is so a bloody weed! It is insidious, very aggressive and relentless. This a fully severed 2″ piece of root that survived the winter and then began to sprout. I swear you can watch the stuff growing and trying to strangle every other plant.
Bikes and boats. Once in a while I get out on the trail. I am trying to teach myself to ride again after fifty years away from it. I’m not intrepid any more but you can’t take the boy out of me.
Life is a journey. Try not to crash.
Trying to prove to yourself that you still have full mojo is tough when your joints feel like this!
Fawn Lilies. Beautiful but fast and fading.

God is a name we give to the blanket we throw over mystery to give it shape.

(Quote attributed to an AC/DC roadie)