I arrived home yesterday in the late afternoon. I was on the road for 26 days. Do I even have to say that I am tired and so very, very happy to be home? No, I didn’t think that I did.
I have many, many posts floating about in my head. Some are nearly fully formed and I will just have to open the gates and let the words flow. Others are more amorphous, almost like new recipes with the ingredients defined but the proportions between them as yet to be fully determined through tasting, and simmering or baking.
I will definitely create a post later today on how to create a following which will probably focus on how following is different from simply having lots of followers. I also have developed a bit of a passion for the need for a light rail system here in the U.S., and more than one post will draw from my Amtrak and rental car experiences during this past month. Travel and destination blogging have resurfaced as an interest for me, but only as a category within this blog.
The concept of home has also been in my thoughts a great deal during this trip, as has friendship. Identity, and career were also important but nearly dwarfed by the more personal experiences from July/Aug 2012. More will follow on all of these topics. And of course I will also have at least one BlogHer ’12 retrospective post.
Home feels very good. If only my husband wouldn’t have decided to start the redecorating process when he arrived home before I did… bless his heart. There is no place like home, even without a couch…
Retro Nuevo Pointillism on the Way to BlogHer12
I’m currently sitting in the members lounge at AIC for a brief respite while enjoying some good coffee before I return to my attempt to visit all my favorite paintings, artists and areas.
I’ve sighed at haystacks, marveled at Seurrat and smiled at the thought of my husband’s obsession with Bernadette Peters while thinking of Sunday afternoon in the Park with George, and also even thought of an old love at the Caillebot’s ever so precise depiction of rain in Paris over a century ago.
My obligatory trip to the textiles area to honor all the women who have come before us and who had to express themselves through impermanent domestic art.
When I first traveled to live with my, now, husband, I ran to the AIC from Amtrak at Union Station for a quick view of a Gauginexhibit and had a profound reaction to a painting, I believe it was called, Girl with Eggplant. I cried. I have always equated it with the end of my “youth” and what within a month would become my journey into motherhood.
Taking pictures via phone to jog my memory when I flesh out this later this afternoon or evening.
Letting someone, a woman who is headed for a plane, use my iPad charger for my iPhone… my good deed for the day.
I hope to get to the Giftshop, but so much more to do… Lichtenstein and 20th Century American Art… I hope to see Night Hawks (263), Black Cross (265), and more O’Keefe. I’ve already paid my respects to Clouds. I want to find depictions of Kuan Yin (101a) or Guanyin too. The helpful gentleman in the Members Lounge said most of these were from the 1926 donation of the collection of Guy H. Mitchell.
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later at the Amtrak area of Union Station
more on the exhibit
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I was far more impressed by the Roy Lichtenstein retrospective, largest ever, to date, than I anticipated I would be. I would have tweeted about it but my phone died the second I tried to take a pic of a no photography item by accident. (By the way, the one working outlet in the Union Station waiting areas or food court, that I could find, is on the wall opposite the locker rental #6 station in the South Gate C & D area.) I had always equated him with Warhol but no more. I am so impressed that I bought the catalog for the exhibit. I rarely do this. But the art of his I’ve rarely seen is amazing, “Haystacks” moved me to tears, but they are wont to do that.
The app of the week is the AIC iPhone and iPad member app. Check it out.
Now I have to find some wifi for this iPad.
You can follow my adventures on Facebook nfhill and twitter where I tweet at @nerthus for the next day or so as I won’t have wifi.
Another F Word Day – Friday Finds
Collected thoughts and unfinished masterpieces from the past week or so, that are MUST reading, that probably should have been tweets, and that show the true depths of the disorganized mind.
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MSNBC: I like NOW with Alex Wagner. Haven’t watched the new cable show they just hyped, but I want to watch The Newsroom on HBO. I need to automate the process of turning the TV on and off so it is off unless I’ve scheduled a program into it that I really want to watch. I do not want to record it. I wonder how I do this?
The partisan Bull Pucky that is the Republican Party”s refusal to govern and to just be all political all the time has to stop. The partisan crappola is supposed to stop the Wednesday after the election.
I wish I could like Nancy Pelosi, for the arm-in-arm walkout yesterday, but her taking the investigation of the Bush Administration per its behavior in Iraq off the table after the election in 2008 makes it impossible for me to trust anything she does.
Finally actually purchased my Amtrak tickets to and from BlogHer ’12. Been wanting to take a mini-sabbatical and write for several days without the concerns of animals, house, and husband. I need to have some uninterrupted time just working from the bloggy lobe and the writer’s neural net in my head. No, I’m not afraid to fly. I just enjoy trains. The trip I took to the first BlogHer BET in March of 2011 was by train from Tucson to San Jose. The leg of the trip from L.A. to San Jose along the coast was amazing! I’d do that trip again in a heartbeat. The Texas Eagle that I will take from Chicago to Tucson is NOT a scenic route, but I still plan to enjoy it to the fullest and take advantage of the time to write.
The corporatization of almost any public institution leads to evil.
I have so freaking much to do in the next couple of weeks….but I will conquer my lists, tasks, and so on and have a great visit with family, a productive BlogHer conference, and an amazing writing journey on the train home.
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Don’t steal content!
The featured image is from a professionally purchased graphics pack, that allows commercial use of imagess, that was gifted to me by The Hubby, bless his pointed little head, somewhere in the far past of “like ten years ago.” I enlarged the sign the woman in the image is holding and added the text on the sign using GIMP.
Thanks to The Word Nerd for reminding me that we should talk about this issue on our blogs.
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