By all possible standards this has been a thoroughly wretched day. It began this morning,
early, when Sam got word that his older sister Marian, who’s been in ICU for the past week in a hospital near her home in Kent, Washington, took “a turn for the worse” last night and isn’t expected to live out the rest of the day. The siblings hauled it into high gear and made their plans to get to Seattle as fast as possible. Unfortunately, it’s 9:30 p.m., Sam is stuck at McCarran Airport in Las Vegas waiting for his connecting flight on Southwest, and Marian most likely will already be gone by the time he lands in Washington tonight at 11:45.
Yes, it takes fucking FOREVER to fly Southwest from Dallas!
As for
me, I’ll be alone here for the rest of the week and promised Sam before he left that I would stay safe, not do anything risky, walk around only as much as I needed to and keep myself highly medicated. (Personally, I like the “highly medicated” part.) I finished a long afternoon nap on the chaise around 8:30 p.m. — which is the last time I spoke to Sam from the airport in Las Vegas — and then ate a pleasant little tub of Maruchan teriyaki noodles at my desk in the study. For your possible interest I’m in serious pain as I write this post and might not be able to sit here much longer without screaming my fool head off. (It’s the burning skin on the back of my thighs again and those goddamn leaking pressure sores.) The following Shit-O-Meter readout says it all, folks.
The situation with Marian is not helping my overall mood at all. I actually feel sick to my stomach right now.
Maybe writing about one of my principal addictions will distract me for a while. A couple of days ago I bought the Supermassive Bundle of 1600 backgrounds from
Creative Market, a purchase so enormous — 11.75 gigabytes! — that it took
two days to download the files from an online drop box. Here are a few samples in case you give a crap, okay? The various themes include grunge, watercolors, spotlights, abstract art, outer space, blurry things, smeared black ink (seriously, this is a “thing” now), textiles and geometrics. I don’t especially like the textile images ... it’s mostly just a bunch of wrinkly fabrics.
Meh.
A quick peek at the two files I didn’t especially like. The collection included 25 images of smeared black ink and 100 wrinkled textiles.
You may also recall last week when I wrote about the Ultimate Gold Box ... 120 stunning gold backgrounds that I bought from
Creative Market for a measly ten bucks (on sale), which also included at no extra charge the same identical 120 images in
rose gold. But wait ...
there’s more! The designer (a nice dude named Charlie) decided to expand his collection to include copper and blonde gold, too, and also provide monthly updates (in all four colors!) of 30 to 50 additional backgrounds ABSOLUTELY FREE FOR AN ENTIRE YEAR.
This is so amazing I think my brain might explode! Here’s the same image in all four colors so you can see what I’m talking about.
The blonde gold was actually the result of a casual suggestion from
yours truly, believe it or not! I sent Charlie an email to ask if he ever considered the same images in platinum or silver, and he said it was too difficult to do that kind of color conversion ... but would I be happy with something like
blonde gold, and he sends me a sample.
Naturally I said HELL YES because nobody with a brain ever turns down free things, and an hour later he emails a download link for 120 images in blonde gold! Holy crap. Are these gorgeous, or
what?
It’s almost midnight and I haven’t heard anything from Sam (or any news about Marian) so I guess I’ll just continue on with my Howdygram post. Ironically ... the next subject is our latest dead celebrity — Madeleine Lebeau, 92 — who was the last living cast member from
Casablanca (1942), playing Rick’s obsessed ex-girlfriend Yvonne.
Lebeau’s life actually mirrored the story in the movie ... in 1939 she was a young Jewish actress fleeting Nazi-occupied France, wound up in Lisbon trying to get to America with a forged Chilean passport and then almost got sent back to France until the Canadians stepped in. Oy.
Scary! Lebeau finally made it to the United States in 1941 and continued her career in films.
Lebeau was married to screenwriter Tullio Pinelli, who died in 2009. She was living in Estepona, Spain, at the time of her death. I’ll never forgot how she sang “La Marseillaise” in
Casablanca. Those tears were REAL.
The answer is ... THIS! It’s a 28-inch diameter wall clock for the foyer that I’ll be able to see from my favorite spot on the chaise in the family room. A few months ago I decided our fancy-shmancy mantel clock above the fireplace is cute as hell but awfully hard to read when I’m lying down; when I finally mentioned it to Sam he agreed we needed something bigger.
And this is definitely bigger! I’ll post a picture after we get it hung, okay? This could take a couple of weeks, depending on when Sam gets back from Seattle and feels like hanging a clock.
I’d better take my night-time meds and shoot some insulin so I can shlep myself back to the family room before Sam calls again. Thank you for stopping by and shalom to you and yours.
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