Monday is Mow the Lawn Day

In case I had trouble getting the cats in from their evening stroll in the backyard, I bought some tapioca pudding. You know, the kind in those little lunch box cups. Cruiser goes nuts for tapioca pudding. All I have to do is pop open the lid and he comes running. Once Cruiser comes in, Spit follows, if she isn't already in. I fight Cruiser for the first big spoonfuls and then he furiously licks the inside of the cup. Spit comes over to see what the fuss is about, but she's not interested in tapioca. Spit more likely starts prancing and talking for her evening brushing. I don't know where Cruiser's tapioca thing came from and sometimes I wonder if he would like vanilla, but I like tapioca.

I looked all over for 1/2 an hour for the Health and Welfare manager's phone number so I could call her today and it wasn't until I finally found the 1st manager's number that I realized I never got a card from the 2nd one. So, I sent an email and received a prompt response that they are still in the process of filling the position, will keep me posted, and thanking me for my patience.

I looked up Art Galleries in Idaho and found one that looks decent in Boise and a nice one in Sun Valley. When I was unpacking, I found some old promo pieces from someone I went to Art Center with and so I looked him up on-line to see if he was doing anything. He was much older than me and now that I think about it, I don't know what he ever did for money. Turns out, he went to school in Idaho ten years after Art Center and earned a Master's degree in Art. That was weird. He now exhibits in San Francisco and a gallery in Sun Valley, which is the nice one I found. They are not taking artist submissions, but I think I will call them and ask if they will look at my work, maybe throw around my Art Center buddy's name. I don't think he is still in Idaho and I could not find an email for him.

The Art Museum of Eastern Idaho also has an ARTmart that starts in November. This is for work that sells for under $200. I can submit 3 pieces at a time and they sell them in their Studio Gallery during the holidays. I just have to be a Museum Artist, so I need to call them and find out what that means. The only problem is that they are 4 hours away.

I researched jobs at Hewlett Packard and updated all my resume and contact information on their website, but I have not submitted anything yet. I also found one job at the VA, but applying for Federal jobs is so complicated that I'm not sure it is worth it.

Monday is mow the lawn day, so I went out this afternoon and mowed the lawn and got a workout and some sun. It appears that once I brought up the cold summer, So Cal started a furious heat wave. Yahoo Weather says the high today in Simi Valley was 101 and 106 in LA, but I read elsewhere that it was a record 113 in LA today. It was 90 in Boise and just perfect, although a bit hot for lawn mowing. In the middle of mowing the lawn, my other neighbor introduced himself. His name is Kurt and he recently quit his truck driving job. He was gone all the time and said he could not see himself sleeping in his truck in Montana in the dead of winter. When I talked about trying to pay the rent while doing what you really want, he laughed like he could relate.

I like mowing the lawn, especially here where I know lawn mowing season is short, but I keep forgetting how much work houses are. The automatic garage door reverses itself on a regular basis and on Sunday it would not close at all. I had to look up what the sensor lights are supposed to look like to refresh my memory and worked on it for half an hour. There was nothing wrong with the sensor lights and I finally concluded that at certain times of the day, the sun shines directly into the main sensor and it either won't work, or falsely thinks there is an obstruction. The sun stays pretty low on the horizon here, because we are so far north, and the garage door faces south, sunrise directly into one sensor, sunset into the other. The post man said he rang the doorbell last week, but I didn't here it, so I tried the doorbell and that doesn't work, either. I don't like doorbells, so I'm not fixing it, but if you come over, be sure to knock.

Kurt asked me if anyone had given me a hard time about my California plates and encouraged me to get some Idaho ones. He said there are some Idaho natives that hate Californians more than anyone else. And where is Kurt from? Los Angeles via Eureka, California, although he has been here since the 70s. Some biker guy I met last Saturday was also from California somewhere around Newport Beach. He's been here since the 80s, although he said it took him 10 years to get here once he decided he wanted to move to Idaho. I told him it took me 4 months. (Because he was kind of a jerk.)