Quail.
Quizzical Quizzicism: Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy??????!!!!!!!
Obstacles, Obstinance, Optimisim…Context…Courage.
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It would seem I’ve been to the Silicon-Valley-of-the-Shadow-of-Death-and-back in the past twelve hours and am still somewhat uncertain if I’m out of these dark, dark sandy, woods!
After a wonderful three days of reconnecting with my cousin, Laura, after not seeing her for three years, I returned home last night already resuming my anxiety over the vast amount of needful promotional work and other projects to resume focus on, to find my main business computer apparently dead-as-a-doornail.
But first, the quail.
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Over the weekend my cousin’s husband came back from a hunting trip and had some quail, and I was sent home with a Ziploc bag of several little (literally little) quail breasts to cook and taste. Yesterday Laura was boiling these to make some quail pies and showed me a tiny quail heart around the size of a nickel.
“Look…it’s a little quail heart…” she said, tenderly and sensitively, holding the small, red organ that had been beating inside this living creature just days ago in her hand, in the kitchen, as this creature’s skinned breasts, along with several others, were being boiled in hot water.
I love creating visual (and word) images, and unfortunately my cell phone was not within easy reach and it just seemed a little too much to ask her to wait a moment with the little heart in her hand while I fetched my camera, so with woeful artistic disappointment, I watched this little heart be discarded into her kitchen trash…
I suppose that in itself is a lot to think about, ha.
It was arguably a beautiful-but-visceral image.
I suppose “visceral” has been in my mind, somewhat, ever since her husband painted a live, quick-portrait of me Saturday morning and of course, being a fellow artist who knows what it is like to capture someone in motion, I intentionally gave him a hard time, ha ha, with a stream of somewhat comedic questions (I wanted to challenge him a bit and make sure he got me talking, lol… for some added fun), and quizzical comments, which ventured into dialogue over naming our favorite painters…to conversation about The Scream by Edvard Munch (he pronounced the name correctly – and corrected me, ha ha – and confidently stated the original was in oil, to which I still want to Google since I believe it is a woodcut…but…I could be and probably am…wrong…ha…I am certain he is more expert than me! And, Tilghman is correct!!!)
During this conversation in which he did not have a favorite painter, I named Andrew Wyeth as mine and as I would expect, he said he would prefer NC’s work over his son, Andrew’s…and he asked why I liked Andrew Wyeth’s better.
I said “because it is so visceral” and I connect with these images somehow probably going back into my childhood’s imaginations and melancholy…he said, “what do you mean, visceral?”
Ha ha! I’m thinking….“Come on…you HUNT and you don’t know what I mean by the visceral quality of Andrew Wyeth’s melancholy portrayal of rugged farm images?!!”
I said, “Imagine painting the intestines of a field-dressed deer. THAT would be pretty visceral!”
I should have said, “That painting of Karl Kuerner laying as a dead corpse coming up through the grass with snow melting in the spring on his farm land…I’m not sure an image gets more visceral than that!”
My cousin’s husband, Tilghman (whose work can be seen here and her work can be seen here and their son William’s work can be seen here), said that his favorite Andrew Wyeth is the boy selling chestnuts. I’m not as familiar with this one, immediately, but had an image in my mind’s eye of a boy with furry hat on. (seems this is a different image)
When asked my favorite Andrew Wyeth, it is definitely Snow Hill. And there was some discussion of those images.
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It took him a good forty minutes (thanks to my interferences!) to do his normally twenty-minute-quick-oil-portrait of me and I think he did a wonderful job of capturing both my quick likeness and essence – which seems to be in bubbly, talkative motion! Ha ha. Something about it reminds me (somewhat) of one of the faces in the famous Norman Rockwell painting called The Gossips (which according to this linked article is Rockwell’s wife, starter of the gossip, ha!)
On my last day there I attempted to capture my cousin, Laura, using his oils but didn’t fare as well, perhaps. My style is much different, and we spent about two hours. She sat watching engaging YouTube videos while I worked.
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But…QUAIL.
Though I can remember having a taste of squirrel at another friend’s house about fifteen years ago (her husband came back from a hunting trip with squirrel and my friend would not taste it, ha ha- but I was game!) – I really doubt that I’ve tasted quail in over 40 years.
I doubt I could remember with any certainty at all the last hunting trip my father might have made and brought quail home… my memories are pretty furry how often he went hunting toward the end of his life in 1979.
Venison, duck, geese, rabbit, squirrel, pheasant and quail might certainly be the correct question-answer to some strange Jeopardy category “Eileen’s life in the sixties and seventies.”
With the non-question response “quail” prompting the following quickly rattled-off question:
“What is for dinner tonight?!”
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So as I unpacked a few things last night (and I honestly can’t recall if I put the quail into the refrigerator first before trying to start my office computer or vice versa…) the image of a non-booting-zero-response-flat-line-2011-custom-well-built-computer-still-running-on-Windows 7 with two internal hard drives and one external hard drive was calmly captured in this short video (below) and accompanied a Facebook post I left up long enough for one friend to “like” and another to “heart” before I hid it from my timeline, thinking this is silly and just too much to put out there, though in my own small world it was calmly and viscerally horrifying in some sense!
I just arrived home after a wonderful 3-day visit with my cousin Laura and her husband and others.Like a good girl, I completely shut down my computer before I left.I don’t know what is wrong but it will not turn back on. Jonathan built this for me and very well from scratch in 2011.I fear it is dead. I do have my files backed up on Carbonite but this is a major setback to say the least.Please pray that tomorrow I will figure this out and God will take care of this situation somehow.
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I say calmly because I seem to have a great capacity to remain calm and not (fully) panicked in any given crisis, with only a mere ongoing low level anxiety that might flame up quite high on any given ordinary day before and after this seemingly unending onslaughting stream of micro/macro crises!
I plugged the machine into a different outlet to make sure there wasn’t any issue with the battery backup hub it was plugged into (along with two printers and other essential silicone-valley-paraphernalias).
Because I thought I heard a slight strange noise coming from this hub, but maybe it was only my imagination!
Nothing.
I hit the button with the light touch that usually triggers the blue light and the whirring sound of the Windows 7 boot-up.
Nothing.
Gave it some further button pushes that were held in just a few seconds longer before the release.
Nothing.
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As my mental cogs were turning with what to do the next day I readied myself for bed at an early 10pm. In the big scheme of things this probably doesn’t qualify as a true crisis but in my small world I was thinking… “This is like the point in a chess game when you’ve got all kinds of stuff in play elsewhere on the board and suddenly you find your king is in jeopardy…you simply must figure out what to do.”
If the king goes, the game is all over.
Without my main business computer, game over for me in continuing to walk through this terrifying-at-times post-divorce recovery route which last night, once again, I likened to a mental image of walking across the dry sand of the Red Sea while gazing into unnaturally parted tall, towering walls of water on either side of me… wondering if and when at any moment they could-or-would suddenly stop being held back by some invisible Hand and wash me away in its endless crashing tide…
How easily we forget, time after time, being in this place over and over again and seeing the biblical manna and quail with precise timing in unexpected ways, yet wondering if this will be the time nothing comes.
I have observed myself with an unnatural or supernatural peaceful and joyful calm lately in the face of continued difficulties…observing with growing interest my perceived moves/small and large, unprovable/undocumentable acts of God in very personal ways, prompting me often and increasingly to wonder…huh…I wonder what will happen next in this complicated adventure I call life???…
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I decided my only real move at the moment would have been to show up at Staples the next day (today) and hope to be able to get new essential equipment on some type of payment plan – which in my mind was simply not a move I wish to make at this moment, in the messy chess game!
When I arrived home last night I also noticed the downstairs temperature was 42° and the upstairs 50°. When I had left for my trip on Friday it was a beautiful, warm day and we had experienced several in a row during this mid-February, despite the groundhog having seen its shadow.
I did not check the weather forecast but assumed that if I shut all the heat off in every room the cats would survive just fine and it couldn’t possibly hurt anything and might save a small pittance on my electric bill.
So of course after putting the quail away and the few other things I did last night, turning on electric radiator heat or hot air blowers in each room of the house was high on my list in my preparation to return to normal non-visiting time and demands.
By the time I layered up and crawled into bed with my laptop, which also has some major processing slow-down issues probably greater than my main computer, I noticed the upstairs temperature had risen to 57°.
Many things were going through my mind about this experience I had suddenly and unexpectedly found myself having to participate in – and of course my mind, as it often does, ventured into the comedic mode of processing and coping, and I was inventing some funny and imaginary dialogues in my mind between myself and God!
Quizzicism!!!! :
Whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy????!!!!
Followed by funny and quirky things I might have God affectionately tell me like, “Because it’s Valentine’s Day, and I love you!”
Ha ha ha….
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I mean, the answer of “why” is probably obvious. A no-brainer:
The computer is old. I’ve been told the C drive is a Western Digital C drive and that brand is prone to failure. It’s been making strange sounds on and off for months and months prompting me to buy me lots and lots of Terabytes on an external hard drive last June and try, as best I can, to move my many files to this device just as a precaution and hoping to help the C drive along somehow…
Really the only thing left on my C drive are my main website files, since moving them presents some other technical issues for uploading through Microsoft Expression (no longer supported but still usable) which expects them to be referenced on the C drive… other than that there’s just about 30 programs I would have to reinstall plus my entire operating system… easy peasy… and about a month ago when I had a technical issue after purchasing an Adobe subscription to one particular software and learning that it will no longer run on Windows 7, having a tech person tell me “you can get Windows 10 for free” (as though this would be a simple feat for me and not cause me massive massive headache, so they wouldn’t need to refund me on the subscription and cancel asap)…. I mean, reinstalling a whole operating system and all my programs and retrieving all my files that are thankfully backed up to Carbonite daily is just routine small potatoes stuff for me.
Nothing visceral about this prospect.
Right?!
I mean I could do that (for this old computer probably soon needing ultimate replacement) in a mere, leisurely hour after having my coffee and eating some Popeye spinach for breakfast and then spend another 12 hours figuring out WordPress stuff, and trying to clean up and catch up on all my other clerical, promotional and current work orders and punch out of some imaginary clock at 5:00 p.m. and say… Wow, it’s been a great day! I think I can rest now like some “normal person” with a “real” job.
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As my mind was filled with some funny quizzical dialogue about this situation, and I deconstructed with somewhat hilarious potential answers from my imaginary conversation with God himself over why this happened at just this moment in temporal time… I also noted to myself that if I were to write this imaginary conversation out a number of people might have responses other than laughing out loud! Responses ranging from tearing their religious garments while shouting at me, “This is sacrilege!” to…um…“Are you…like…um…okay??!!!”
I consoled myself by remembering the great scene in Fiddler on the Roof where Tevia is questioning God in a number of funny and underlying profoundly personal ways when he launches into his discourseful soliloquy, which culminates with him dancing in his barn singing “If I were a Rich Man!” and quizzically telling/asking God, “Lord who made the Lion and the Lamb, you decreed I should be what I am…would it spoil some vast, eternal plan…if I were a wealthy man??!!!”
I went from that place in my mind to the Barenaked Ladies’ hit song from many years ago that contains the greatest line about what they might do if they “had a million dollars” – which would be to buy even more Kraft dinners but with the fanciest little Dijon ketchups!!!
Browsing a few things on my laptop before bed (in very slow fashion of course), I glanced over at my most favorite (graven image?) of Jesus, lover of my soul, that sits on my nightstand.
I think this image is just fantastic not only for its personal history and connection to me from childhood, (a Catholic woman in my neighborhood who babysat me when I was around 8 to 10 years old had once sat me down at her kitchen table and asked a bunch of questions about my mother and home life and sent me home with an 11×14 framed picture of this Sacred Heart of Jesus image and some religious pamphlets and encouragement to read the Bible – and not my children’s Bible but a regular Bible – and to pray to Jesus for protection)… I love this image for a number of reasons but also artistically, the ambiguous expression on the Savior’s face lends itself visually at any given moment, at least in my mind’s eye, with any visual communication of expression ranging from sadness, care, concern to deadpan humor.
I glanced at this image and for a moment, imagined Jesus asking me, “Tell me again, why aren’t you running Windows 10 yet??!!!”
To which I looked back at my bogged down, slow old laptop and formed my imaginary response! :
“You mean You do not know??!!!”
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I think I fell asleep around 11:00, slept deeply and awoke unnaturally around 5:00 a.m. wondering if I should get up or try to sleep longer.
One of my first thoughts upon waking was maybe I should open the case and dust it out. Since this wasn’t anywhere near my first thought of what to do about this situation, I half-expected that maybe this was some Divine, revelatory reminder that would reveal that my 2011 custom built computer yet had some life in it.
I lay there ruminating about the entirety of the situation and in my mind, though I know the context is trite compared to the profound sufferings in this world, I began to think about The (Silicon) Valley of the Shadow of Death.
Computer people talk about the blue screen of death which I wasn’t even fortunate enough to see last night, since the thing wouldn’t even boot up with any indication of power entering this magnificent Tower of Everything in the Modern World and My Business.
Around 6am I put my feet on the floor and walked into my office… stared at the thing… glanced into the airflow holes to see if they were full of cat hair… contemplated what it might involve to open up the case… and in a millisecond before my volition was set to go make coffee… reached out my right hand and gave the power button a quick push and…. Huh.
Blue light comes on….
I hear the familiar whirring of the normally abnormal(?) boot-up sounds….
And I stand there gazing at it, after letting out a gasping few words… words of puzzled quizzicism mixed with internal happy dance perhaps…. shook my internal metaphorical head back and forth a number of times like a Labrador walking out of the waters of the Red Sea…. and thought to myself….
“Sometimes there are just no answers to ‘why.'”
Carry on!
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As I have dictated this blog post while leisurely drinking my coffee and it is now 7:15 a.m….. I have intentionally refrained myself from Googling whether computers will not boot up when the temperature is too cold in a house…
Because, that thought also crossed my quizzical little mind last night as I stood there in my cold office…contemplating this situation.
The answer is….(see below…along with other images that should go with this piece!)
I’m also still thinking about quail and quizzical quizzicism and a song I don’t think I’ve thought of in nearly 40 years that popped into my mind this morning… called “Then the Quail Came.” I went on YouTube and learned it is actually a Noel Paul Stooky piece.
Huh.
Happy Monday… I mean Happy Tuesday!!!
Because as always I’m at least a day behind…and after being out of town for three days, today is my “Monday” of a shorter work week…somewhat…
Ready, set…recombobulate…
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Enjoy! Crouble now sitting atop my warm, running computer tower, taking in some fun music!
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