Surreal Georgia

Bad Cold - Still Busy

I don't feel well. I've got a bad cold. But I'm still busy. This time there is a lot to do for my job, but I'm nearly done now and can perhaps have at least a few hours for resting.

When I went through my archives I found some old pictures I once drew of my favorite town Münster, where I studied at the university.

It's so long ago, during the 80ies! Punk music was up to date and we got the first personal computers. I wore black mini skirts and tees and pumps in neon colors. Unbelievable! I wish I had time to simply sit anywhere like then and draw, draw, draw. 

Because there is never enough time my drawing style changed a lot. I'm very out of any training and it's the same with a drawer as it is with a musician: You lose lots of your skills. Additionally I don't find enough time for drawings like these above, so I make do with some quick sketches like these below:

Mostly I only use such sketches to combine them with stories like these one with a story about some surmised burglars: I suffered a lot, when my mother had dementia and always thought some burglars would be in her house, robbing coat hangers, forks or using laundry. The funny story about her personal burglars Emil and Egon and the sketches were my way to cope with this traumatic period of my life. Maybe I can translate it once for my blog. It's in German.

But I wish I could go back to real drawings and painting. - Once, when the house renovating is done.

At least I made a coffee mug today:

 

Photo Challenge: Body Parts

Me, part by part....

 

 

 

 

 

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Regular participants are:

• Ree
• Lisa 
• Taia

and me.

Feel free to join us!

Blue(s) - Photo Challenge

Blue - blue is a color, but it can also mean a sad feeling. It's also part of the word "Blues". By the way my favorite kind of music.

Blue(s) - this is a picture I wore a blue night dress and it was the saddest time of my life, shortly after my father died. I felt so sad that I thought I had to die of sadness. My heart was heavy. It felt like a stone in my chest. Blue(s)... The world looked strange to me. It looked the same as it always looked, but my father was missing in this world and so it was a strange world to me.

Blue(s)...

A blue picture of me.

 

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Regular participants are:

Ree

Lisa 

Taia

and me. Feel free to join us!

 

 

Happiness - Photo Challenge

Believe it or not, but the happiest moment today was when I sat down at my computer after I had painted 4 doors, 4 doorframes, 2 chairs, two dressers, installed a lamp in our new bathroom and removed all the dirt, debris and junk from the construction site upstairs and downstairs. I can't tell you how happy and released I am that the bathrooms are nearly done now and that we will get the house cleanded again in time before Easter. Maybe I don't look happy, but I am!

And I am also very, very released that Anna is feeling better and that we have paid all craftsmen now.

I am dirty, I am tired to my bones, I am looking terrible, but - I am happy!

 

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Regular participants are:

Ree

Lisa 

Taia

and me. Feel free to join us!

 

Beauty (Photo Challenge)

This topic isn't easy for me. What is beauty? For me it is not what most people think it would be, like a model or an actor or maybe Miss World. Just the opposite. For me most of these "beautiful people" aren't beautiful, but boring and empty. I am often scared about the way young people perceive other people. They can describe a person only by very superficial and outwardly qualities. I am scared about how few they notice of a personality. And what many of them take for beauty looks in my eyes a lot like Barbie and Ken. And Barbie and Ken are in my eyes everything else, but not beautiful.

Barbie is handicapped: She has crippled feet and hands, a crippled lower body and an overdeveloped breast. This breast is so oversized that it causes severe back pain. Barbie has got a much too long neck and the worst of all: She suffers from microcephalia. Look, she hasn't got any space in her skull for a brain. There is only the forehead. The rest is severely underdeveloped and can fulfill only one purpose: holding the hair. Also her brain skull is crippled. Nobody has got such a small nose! So how can Barbie be beautiful and a role model for beauty!? Don't get me wrong, for me handicapped people can be very, very beautiful, but not Barbie. And it's the same with Ken. If this is the role model for women, I must say that this is a very sexist role model. No thank you! A lot of us women are different, thank goodness! And they are all much more beautiful than Barbie with their wrinkles, their birth marks, their extra fat on the hips, their cellulite...., because they are able and honest persons.

For me beauty is totatally different from mainstream. For me it comes from the soul and from experiences people made and how they coped with them. It comes from being grown up and maturing, it comes from being an honest person.

Here are people who are very, very beautiful to me:

 

 

Granny

 

 

Grandpa

 

 

Papa

 

 

For me the most beautiful picture of my father is this one, because it shows my father's soul. He is the small man on the left side. He was the boss of more than 1000 workers in a steel mill, but never was a cocky person but stayed the boy from the country with a deep understanding for the problems and needs of the workers who they committed to him. These men next to him are also beautiful to me. I know each of them, all honest and rooted to the soil. They became friends to us. This kind of working world is sadly gone long ago.

My dogs were all beautiful to me.

My parents - the last picture of them together. Beautiful.

 

Of course also things can be beautiful, but in a very different kind of meaning, when they are functional and esthetic at the same time or full of good  memories. Nature is beautiful.

 

Well, I think I'm very sad today. I miss my father and I must stop now and do something different, painting another room, because I'm starting to cry and it hurts so badly, more than I can stand. Work always prevents me from thinking and remembering. So I'm working all the day. I think you got an idea now why I am working round the clock. I'm still grieving.

 

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 Photo Challenge!

http://margareetaville.blogspot.com/

http://bustershouse.wordpress.com/

http://jayahrsblog.blogspot.com/

 

 

Sentimental Journey

 

I'm getting sentimental today. Thinking of my first love. It was in 1973. And whenever I was thinking of him I could have used Ray Charles' words.

Don't know why I am thinking of him today such intensely. There is still love, sorrow about what didn't happen then, joy of having found a grown up way to manage these old feelings and still being his friend in a different way. He was always on my mind.

Favorite Place (Photo Challenge)

 

 

You might ask: Is this really your favorite place!? Yes, it is one of my favorte places outside. If you walk along the cart track behind our house, which is confined by apple trees on both sides, you come to this hill with mighty and old beeches on it. Their branches reach to the ground so that you can sit under those beeches as if you were in a hut made of the leafs of the tree. And when you are sitting there you can overlook a wide area.

 

 

You can see the apple tree alley and our small village...

 

 

... or the rolling hills beyond the valley of the river Diemel....

 

 

... or the old, old volcano, the "Desenberg", how it is called and the small town Warburg at the horizon. Nature here is breathtaking, much more beautful than these pictures can show.

I have been loving this place since I was a little kid. Once, when I was 11 or 12 I was there with my friend Elke during a holiday vacation at my grandparents' house (Yes, at that time it wasn't my house, but the house of my grandparents. I sometimes can't believe it myself). We carved our names into the wood of the biggest of these beeches and you can still see our names there. This place was our hideaway and we used to stay there for hours every day. When the church bells were ringing we had to come home, which was at noon and at six o' clock in the evenings. Sweet memories...

 

 

I took a closer look for you, Lisa. This is our house (red arrow) and in the center of the picture you see this old volcano. It hasn't been active for a long period of time, since Tertiary to be precise. But geologists found out that there is still magma below the surface and that it can erupt at every time. Well, at every time means perhaps in 10000 years. Geolgists count in different periods of time than we usually do. - The volcano belongs to a system of volcanos which reaches until about Frankfurt south of us. I once wrote an article about the geology and archeology of this area, which you can read here. We also have volcanos near Cologne, which are still active but have been also quiet over a long period of time like the Desenberg. Read my article about them here. - On top of the Desenberg-volcano there is an old Medevial castle, which once belonged to the Knights of Spiegel, who are ancestors of nearly all famous and reigning European noble families with their kings and queens or dukes and duchesses. They lived there in the 14th century. Today the castle is a ruin and looks like this:

 

 

My favorite place inside the house is currently this: The veranda. Well, at the moment it's to cold to sit there, but I'm looking forward to the spring sun I can enjoy here sitting in the chair.

 

 

The third favorite place is of course my cozy bed! And hopefully it will look in our new old house like it looked like in the other house soon.

 

 

Another favorite place is an old graveyeard. But at this time of the year it is too cold to go there, so here is picture I took in summer:

 

 

These are the remains of a Medevial ghost town. When people moved away only the church and the graveyard remained. It's a quiet and idyllic place where you can sit and hear the birds sing for hours without a single person coming along.

 

******************************************************************************************

 Photo Challenge!

http://margareetaville.blogspot.com/

http://bustershouse.wordpress.com/

http://jayahrsblog.blogspot.com/

Morning

Mornings are good when I have got enough sleep and there is time for two cups of coffee. Needless to say that this is only on Saturdays or Sundays. 

Mornings are bad when you have to get up at 5 o'clock and it looks like this when you look out of the window:

Pure darkness! I hate it. I use to get up in the dark and I use to come home from work in the dark. When does spring come!?

Happiness

I thought and thought what photo to take. Happiness - I couldn't find any situation the last years that made me feel really happy apart perhaps from short moments I felt wind blowing through my hair or warm sunlight shining on my skin. But really happy? We suffered a lot the last years, really sad and bad times are behind us and we still don't know if they are really behind us. We hope so.

My father died nearly 5 years ago. I lost a person I dearly loved, my father and my best friend. It was so hard that I litterally felt the pain in my heart. After his death nothing was right, it was all wrong. I don't want to tell much about the last 5 years, it's too painful. My mother's dementia grew worse and worse. She lived in a retirement home the last year of her life and it was not easy for none of us, because she was aggressive all the time and this hurts badly, when you love your mother. We suffered beyond any imagination until her sudden death nearly one year ago. It was a really bad year 2011 with millions of problems, hard work, lots of worries and no time for any things like having fun. No, I'm not happy at the moment. I'm fighting.

So I chose a photo of the last happy period of time we had, when my parents both were still alive and when we had good times together, when life was so much easier. I chose a picture of my daughter's 18th birthday in 2006.

Inside My Bag

This photo challenge is getting funny. Don't laugh, but this is really in my bag. This and nothing else:

My wallet, a stone-age-cellphone (I only need it for calling people, so it's serving all purposes; I don't need a smartphone), some shoe polish because I hate dirty shoes, a lighter for the candles on the cemetery, a small bar of chocolate someone gave me before Christmas, a slip of paper with a dictum on it (some of my pupils gave it to me long ago), pills against migraine and two big bunches of keys, one for work, one for the adjoining rooms in our house and a third big bunch is currently plunged in the lock of the front door.

No lipstick, no make up, no mascara....I'm unpretentious.