Working.

I have been bit by the same bug that bit my sister and i have done nothing but clean house today, except for when I went to see my SPN and went grocery shopping and walked the trusty four footer. That was in between big showers that poured out of the heavens like torrents of rain and threatened my carefully coiffed hair and artfully decorated face.

Now I am taking a break and I am deliberating if I should wash the insides of the windows, if I am struck by that bug that much or if it can wait. It is a dubious case and unresolved.

My minion cat is sitting on my lap and is making love to the keyboard, making strange things happen that I have to fix. She is such a lovey dovey cat, putting her claws in me out of affection. I really want to be liberated of this much love, but she needs it.

I am going to make a deal with the Exfactor. I don’t seem him carrying 20 some boxes of stuff with shelfsystems with him when he moves from one anti-squad house to another, so I am letting him keep most of it with the shelf systems in the work room. He can take the things he really needs, like the coffeemaker and the TV and the bed and his chair etc. That’s enough stuff to haul around, I think. I haven’t told him this yet, but I think he will be happy with it. When he gets his permanent place to live in, he can come and get all of his stuff for good. I will postpone turning that room into a spare bedroom until the Exfactor is settled somewhere permanently.

In return, I will, of course, ask favors of him. One hand washes the other, but I will be reasonable and not overstep any boundaries. I think we need to help each other out when ever we can. He is going to be here at three and I think I will have him take apart the bed, so that I can wash the bedroom floor and get that job done. I can sleep on a mattress on the floor until he takes the bed tomorrow.

Details, there are so many details! I had to get insurance that covers me against liability and theft and fire for 16 Euros a month, which I guess is not bad. I arranged it by phone with people the Exfactor had his insurance with.

Okay, I am going to mention Nora’s Weblog now for the people who used to read me, but whom I could not reach when I suddenly switched. I know I had my loyal following through Statcounter and I had no way of reaching these people to let them know where I went. So, I hope some of them are still looking for Nora’s Weblog and will find me this way. I am not afraid of the Exfactor and his Paramount finding me now. They have stopped looking, as far as I know.

Oh, my SPN always asks me how I am and I always say I am good, so today I said that we should not do this every week anymore. So now I am seeing her in two weeks and after that it will be every three weeks and after that, who will know? She says I am in a good period now, haha, she ain’t seen nothing yet. Wait until I’m really settled down and have come into my own. Is nobody curious why I am suddenly in a good period? Analysis people!

She also asked me what I thought of the daytime therapy and I told her the truth, that I thought it was kind of boring, but I made her promise not to tell anyone. We have an evaluation talk with all concerned in September and then the monkey will come out of the sleeve. Will the true Irene please stand up?

They have a program for people whom they support going back into the workforce at different levels of their ability. Now, I am interested in that! I think my abilities lie high, my ambitions certainly do. I have proved that I am capable of carrying out stressful complicated tasks.

I just have to keep that old ogre depression at bay. I don’t want him showing up throwing soot in the meal at any point. I’ll have to proof that I can stay on an even keel all year around. Just give me one year and I will be fine. Just to prove my point.

Alright, enough of this mesmerizing meandering bullshit. I am going to wash tow windows to start with. That’s ambitious enough and then I’ll see what happens.

Have yourself a merry old day.

Ciao…

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Self Absorption.

Eduard has arrived home safely from his Grand Tour, He arrived home a little after seven pm. I had mixed feelings about seeing him, because by the time he came home, I had convinced myself that he had not gone on his tour by himself. It had been a thought that had played in my head all day long and became very strong at three pm, when I had my regular falling apart dip. I took an oxazepam then, but it didn’t help much and the thought grew very strong and convincingly in my head.

I called him at 6:15 pm to find out where he was. He was in Malmedy taking a break and said he would be home in an hour. My stress and insecurity increased only more and I took another oxazepam and waited for him to get home. When he did, I gave him a very lukewarm welcome, so he knew right away that something was up. I explained to him that the situation had been untenable all day long and had become especially stressful at the end of the afternoon, because obviously I didn’t trust him anymore and that this bothered me very much. I told him of the stress and insecurity I felt and he was very much alarmed by this, because he could not prove that he had been alone on his tour.

He talked about what he had done that day and how the trip had gone and slowly I started to realize that maybe he had been on his own after all. Before he had come home, I had thought that maybe we should separate, so I wouldn’t have to keep living with this amount of insecurity anymore. It eats a way at me making me a very fearful woman. A somewhat unreasonably thinking woman. A very insecure woman. I don’t want to live like that.

After we talked for a while, I started to feel more relaxed and more sure of the situation, but I had questioned the whole preceding week. Every good deed Eduard had done had become suspect. Every loving gesture and every loving word. It all had started to look false and insincere. Do you think I am getting paranoid? I think when my mood falls apart I do. I think I become every suspicious and anxious. I don’t know how to get over it.

I wish I could turn back the clock to when I had none of these feelings, but it can’t be done. I have to live with them and somehow get over them.

I love Eduard obviously, but he lives under the misguided impression that when the storm has blown over, he and miss X can be buddies again and hang out and work on the motorcycles together and make trips together on the motorcycles. He doesn’t seem to understand how impossible this is from my point of view. How hurtful this is to me. He has convinced himself that he is no longer in love with her and that his interest in her is purely platonic now.

Can you imagine this? I live with fear in my heart. In my mind I see her with her blond curly hair and her long braid down her back and her tough clothes and her motorcycle that is so attractive to Eduard. I see my enemy. Eduard doesn’t understand this. He thinks we can all be reasonable adults together. Well, I am not a reasonable adult and I would never trust the situation again. I would forever feel threatened and mistreated.

So, Eduard went on his tour by himself, that much I believe now after one whole day of doubt and stress. I don’t want to have a day like that again. No more tours for right now. I felt like running away from home today and disappearing somewhere. I wasn’t sure about where I was to go. There aren’t that many options.

I am full of oxazepam now and kind of sluggish. I am under the influence of drugs! It certainly has lowered my anxiety. It’s ridiculous that I have to take 25 mg of oxazepam every time I fall apart, but it can’t be helped until I find a better way. On Tuesday I have my first appointment with my SPN, we’ll see how much I can air my feelings there. I have to be stone sober when I go there. I can’t be all befuddled like this.

Well, this was me airing my feelings now. I feel sort of relieved for having done so. It is like talking into the ether and hoping there is a listening ear that will catch my words. I am sure there is.

Ciao…

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Van Gogh 4 Images number 2

Just a short little in between post. It is dinner time now and Eduard is eating pasta with a steak, It smells good, but it isn’t something that I can eat. He is very generously sharing his meat with the animals. I am having a piece of Maasdammer cheese, or Dutch hole cheese, as it is also called. Everybody is always joking that the holes are the best. The dog and I don’t think so! We like the solid stuff in between.

At noontime today I felt very down. I wanted to vacuum and had to very desperately, because there was dog hair everywhere, but I just didn´t have it in me to do it, I felt totally defeated, so I laid down on the sofa and took a nap. Yes, when all else fails, take a nap. I woke up at around 3 pm, just when Eduard came home and I made myself a cup of Senseo to give myself the opportunity to see how things were. I smoked a cigarette and slowly came to my senses.

Then I made up my mind to get the vacuum cleaner out and to just start vacuuming, so that is what I did. There was so much hair and it was very satisfying to suck it all up with the vacuum cleaner. The sofa was a bit of work, but I got it done in the end. Then I took that stupid vacuum cleaner and stuck it back into its closet where it belongs, but the apartment is clean for now and I can only hope that it will stay that way for a day or two. And then the whole battle will start over again.

I can´t say that I am brimming with enthusiasm. Sometimes my moods take me really down and I take an Oxazepam and wait for it to do its job, But I am not feeling happy like I was before, not even when the Oxzaepam works and I feel calm. I am afraid that this is the beginning of my famous winter dip. All I can do is prepare myself for it mentally as well as I can and to not let myself be caught off guard by it. It is as it is. I take my medicines and I use my lamp and that´s about it. My attitude has to be right, of course, and I have to try and keep some momentum going. But I do notice that it is important to sleep when I need it, no matter what time it is.

I am not throwing in the towel, don´t think that I am doing that. I am facing up to the reality of the thing. The beast with the downhearted smile on his face. the one who rains on the party. The one who makes it hard to write sensible things about what you mean to say and about what you actually end up saying. Eduard has been warned and he is as lackadaisical about it as I am. Wel, that may not be quite the right word, but it roughly describes our attitude, because this has happened often. We know hat we face and we know roughly what to do.

Well, now I have to go do my favorite job and that is making cigarettes. Just kidding! I do have to make them though. Wish me luck with this down turn, I will try to turn it up as often as I can.
Ciao…

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Picasso 2 Images number 2.

I am feeling a bit lost and lonely after I really had a good day. A mood has struck me and it won’t let go. I feel a bit of despair and it is a familiar feeling, like I want to cry and kick and scream at the same time and then hug somebody really tight. I have just taken a second Oxazepam in an hour’s time and I hope for it to start working soon. I had fallen asleep on the sofa and woke up this way. I said to Eduard, “To the left or to the right?” I said it in French and what I really meant was, where is my mood taking me? But I don’t think he understood what I meant and I didn’t explain myself. Maybe I didn’t quite understand it yet myself.

There needs to be a helpline for people who’s moods are going the wrong way. So they can be talked into the right direction again. I imagine saying to someone, “My mood is kidnapping me and taking me places I don’t want to go where it is dark and full of despair, please talk me out of it.” And this person would say, “I will light a candle and show you the way back into the light.”

I had such a good afternoon too, I was happy and things went well, so why this turn for the worse? Why is it Scary Hairy time again? If you all could send really good vibes my way now, maybe that would help and maybe that would cause some change in my universe. I would say,”Light a candle,” but a strong wind may blow it out. I must believe in the power of positive thinking and see the glass half full, when it was completely full just a while ago.

I hope you don’t mind if I share these moments of despair with you. They are awfully familiar to me and I recognize them so well. They are my old enemy, my old adversary, the one who always comes back to haunt me when I least expect it. It’s the Old Testament God back for the trials and tribulations.

But you know what, maybe by tomorrow this will all be gone again. Maybe this is just a momentary dip in the road. A minor inconvenience reminding me not to become too complacent. That there will always be a fight and that there will always be a struggle, no matter how well the pills work. I am never out of the woods completely am I? That’s where the wolfs are howling.

A man I don’t know personally, is going to commit suicide this week. He has saved up all of his pills and he hopes he has enough to end his suffering. I hope he has enough too and that he won’t wake up in a hospital bed with his stomach pumped and his life ‘saved’. That’s pretty heavy, isn’t it?

I feel a lot of compassion for him and think about him a lot. I hope he makes it with dignity. The best thing you hope for is to live with dignity and if you can’t have that then, well…

I am going to add some especially nice images to this. Let me see what I can find. Something dark and dignified.

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Painted Hummingbird Images number 5

I am getting ready to go to bed now, so I want to leave you with a few more images. I do it for my own satisfaction as well as yours, because I like seeing them posted on my blog. I get a much better idea of what they look like when they are on my blog. I am becoming more critical with each set I make and less enchanted with the older ones and I don’t want that to happen, so I am not only going to post the ones I just made.

So here we have the painted hummingbird again, or a version of it. Let’s see if I can be as happy with it now as when I first made it.

Goodnight, dear people, ciao…

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Gaugin’s Chair Images number 1.

I have been sitting here cleaning up my images files, getting rid of stuff I wasn’t happy with and organizing the things I was. Adding an image to everything that I like better, which was quite a bit of work, but I think I have the final series worked out now. I like being this organized, I think especially when I go into my hibernation mode, I have a tendency to take care of the little details like this and let the big work lay by the wayside. I can be so caught up in doing the little detail work, that the world around me stops existing, my coffee gets cold and my cigarette burns down to nothing without me smoking it.

The trick is to find good images, they have to have potential, then the trick is what you do with them, how you manipulate them, and I am getting better at that every day. I have to build up quite an arsenal, because I have big plans for the future. Here are some that I have made of Gaugin’s chair as painted by Van Gogh. You will notice that the green color dominates even though there are other colors in the painting and I added a colored border to it before I started manipulating the image.

I still have to work with the lighting a little more, there is some more experimenting I need to do with that. It is a never ending lesson, but so much fun to learn. A lot of this is done instinctively, although there is a little bit of a formula, but not everything works the same for every image. A lot depends on the variety of color and the amount of space a color takes up in the image. A very colorful picture may make a very lousy end product, you never know. Something simple can turn out beautifully. You learn to look for the right ingredients.

I am going to be sitting here for a while longer, there are some things I still need to finish before I move on to whole new images. Sometimes you get in a grove and things just turn out right.

Ciao…

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Painted Beach Images number 7.

I fell asleep on the sofa and when I woke up I had no idea for a minute what day it was or what time of day. The TV was on and a movie was showing, but I didn’t know the movie. The dog was walking around restlessly, as if something had just woken him too.

Slowly it dawned on me that it was Thursday morning and that I hadn’t done a thing yet and that I should get the show on the road, but the computer was still on and I decided to leave some comments, which I had not done yet.

And you know, one thing leads to another and now I am having my second cup of Senseo in order to wake up properly and to really postpone going to the kitchen to clean it up.

Of course, I had to post some more images, as I’ve got so many that I can post and the possibilities boggle the mind. I am just having a bit of a hard time keeping track of what I have posted already. I should write that down somewhere.

But now I really need to get going, I can’t postpone it any longer, woe is me! Ciao…

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Tropical Fish Images number 5.

It’s after seven o’clock now and the world is starting to wake up. Neighbor’s cars are starting and people are getting ready to go to work. Eduard’s alarm clock has just gone off. It is the end of self contemplation and the beginning of the day. Shortly, I will do all my usual chores and maybe put on my face and jewelry, it depends on my mood. It has been nice to hang out here with just a well scrubbed face, but less attractive, of course. I have to make a decision about going into town this morning, but knowing my mood, I’ll not do it again. I have been cloistered to the apartment and very happily so. I find such coziness inside. I light candles by the children’s photographs and teach myself some Paintshop. Yes, I am a dull customer now, but a very mellow one and anyone is free to come and visit me if they are so inclined. I can guarantee a nice cup of coffee or tea, but no cookies to go with it.

I had to give the other tropical fish a go, I had made a bunch of them, so there was a choice to choose from. These may be more pleasing to the eye, No distracting lines, Anonymous! I could sit and make these things forever, some images are just really good to work with and give you a lot of satisfaction. I still want to make better mandalas, I will work on that today, see if I can give them a bit more substance and look at those of Sue O’Kieffe and see what she does to hers.

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Rose Images number 5.

I picked these out because they are so delicate and the kind of material that Norah’s summer dresses may have been made off. Can you see her walking in a dress in a summer meadow with lush grass and wildflowers in it and in the distance a forest and a small stream trickling through the meadow ending in a small pool of water were damsel flies and and butterflies flutter by and the bee buzzes in the clover? And Norah, with red cheeks from the heat and hair piled loosely on her head, but come undone a bit, striding through the tall grass, causing little flying creatures to scatter around her and humming a song under her breath because she is happy. For that brief moment, on that summer afternoon, she is happy. She has forgotten all her worries and feels nothing but joy in her heart for that brief period of time. And in the distance the church bell strikes the noon hour.

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Bouquet 1 Images number 5.

Well, you can see that I can’t leave well enough alone and I just have to add some images for those off you with a short attention span who can’t sit and read the whole post down below. I am actually sitting here behind the computer feeling very sleepy and I may drop off to sleep in mid sentence. Quick, get me another cup of Senseo. Just pour that stuff straight into my veins where it will do the most good.

I just tried to do something with Paintshop that I have done in the past and now I can’t remember how I did it and it is very frustrating. Amazing how bits of knowledge get lost in the undecodable maze in my head or call me Sponge Bob For Brains, that would be just about right. Why can’t I suddenly do a simple thing that I could do before? Is there a name for this disability? Something like the Lost Wax Method, but then the Lost Ability Method? Dyslexia for recently required bits of information? Alzheimer?

I hate to be called a Dumb Blond, but I sure do show the characteristics of one sometimes, “Breathe in, breathe out.” Back to the Paint Shop Pro book to make sense of it all again, oh horror.

Anyway, up above is what happens if you take a very nice bouquet of flowers and play with it a lot. Unleash Paintshop on it. I was trying to create some images to work with myself when dementia struck, so I was forced to work with already existing images, which limits me somewhat in my creativity. If any of you come across interesting images, feel free to email those to me, they can be fragile or bold, colorful or monochrome. Whatever you think is interesting. My email is in my profile.

Thanks, ciao…

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