Have you ever been camping?

Oh I have been camping…

I have camped in many famously beautiful places. I have enjoyed many camping moments, and truly I love nature , but I’ll admit, I’m not much of a camper. Campers know things. Maybe they grew up camping? I did not. We had a cottage. We stayed in hotels. I never saw my father build a fire, or fish or hike Or even wear a wrinkled shirt. I didn’t grow up learning any basic survival skills.

I remember every camping trip I’ve been on because of all the extremes.

Fun can turn on a dime. Weather in the mountains is unpredictable. Just because it’s a sunny warm day, doesn’t mean your water won’t freeze solid over night. Being in the rain makes every tent , (even the nice ones from REI) feel flimsy and inadequate. When the sun goes down it gets really dark. After the fire goes out, there are many many long cold and extremely dark hours to endure before it comes back up again. A headlamp is key, I didn’t know this for most of my years.

Campers know what to do with themselves. They don’t get bored because there are things to do, if you know what you’re doing. Camping with a baby and/or toddlers does pass the time, you do have somethings to focus on, but unfortunately most camping fun is a little dangerous. And dirty. No amount of baby wipes can get a crawling baby clean after one afternoon near a fire pit. Once they discover one, you can not keep them out. Unless there’s a fire in it. My kids had that Margaret Mead sense about a few things. My boys climbed out of any pack and play thing and easily transitioned to trees or fencing pretty early into babyhood. Some kids just love to climb, mine all did long before they could walk. So I spent many camping days running and plucking them out of one crazy thing after another. A head light would have come in handy back then.

Camping with teenagers kept me busy as well. Just feeding them was an all day adventure. Cook, clean up, cook, clean up, get the snacks out of the bear box, put the snacks back in the bear box, cook again, clean up again, then everyone wants s’mores. Huge clean up in the dark. Again with the headlamp. (G and I took eight teenagers camping for two nights. Afterwards he called his mom to thank her for all the work he never noticed her doing on camp outs when he was a kid). We were both exhausted afterward, but it was kinda fun.

Real campers can sleep. How they do this well past dawn is a mystery. I measured how many days I could camp by how many nights I could go without sleep. I was better at it during the baby years. Three. I could feasibly endure three nights without sleeping, I knew this because of the stomach flu again with little kids. After three nights, I can’t promise a good attitude. I hear of people camping longer, but without kids to distract me, I’m not sure I could manage my brain for all those hours.

Also, it seems that I prefer a real bathroom with a less outdoorsy shower.

I’ve had some fun camping adventures. I don’t regret any of them, though I never really mastered the art. I always wanted to be like one of those bohemian girls who are good at being coolly bored. They are usually great in any burning man kind of experience, I wasn’t born with that level of outdoorsy coolness. Or even a campers constitution. I like comfort. I do better in comfort. I do enjoy a trail run or walk or ‘hike’ but then I like a hot shower a nice meal and a comfortable bed.

When do you feel most productive?

In the morning

What are your favorite emojis?

😬🧡🤷‍♀️😎🤪👍

What topics do you like to discuss?

My best friend and I talked several times in a single day. We’d talk in the morning, we’d talk through our workout, we’d talk as we cleaned up our kitchens after getting our kids off to school. We’d talk on our errands, we’d talk while making supper and sometimes, when it was super important, before heading off to bed.

WHAT did we talk about?!

Pretty much everything. Every next step, our kids, friends, baseball, my job, books, life. It seemed like every decision or dilemma either of us faced required both of us to make or solve.

Baseball was a hot topic for us and it was ongoing. Her youngest son, who I‘be known since before he was born, little miracle baby that he was, loved baseball. He played on every kind of team. Travelball, Spring ball, fall ball, pick up, any chance to play, From the earliest age he loved everything baseball. If he wasn’t playing, he was watching his favorite team and memorizing stats. Back then, I had a very limited knowledge about baseball, but that didn’t matter, because what we talked about were the politics, the parents, the coaches. Unfair this and coache’s son that.

As the years went by the discussions became more intense. Thomas went from a cute little guy who loved everything baseball, to a high schooler who needed a college baseball scholarship. Wendi was negotiating with three top schools and finally settled on Pepperdine.

Who would have guessed that all these years later, Thomas would be drafted away from college, move up quickly to triple A and now be a top pick for the cardinals MLB team. Who would guess that I would marry a Red Sox fan and learn baseball as a sport AND culture Who would have believed Wendi would be gone.

I spent years rolling my eyes over yet another conversation about baseball. What I wouldn’t give to have just one more with my friend now.

I miss my best friend. I miss ALL of our topics of discussion. It’s not the topic for me, so much as its the person I’m talking to. G taught me everything I know now about being a real sports fan. He taught me player by player, play by play. He made it interesting. I think I like discussing a lot of things if I enjoy the person I’m talking to.

When is the last time you took a risk? How did it work out?

Again with risks. Am I risking now?

Every time I start planning a new project and then start running through the steps of doing it. Even just setting up to do it. It all feels like I’m risking something.

My own approval maybe?

The approval of others?

I’ve know for a long time that you can’t please everyone. Art is an extension of that. All aesthetics are. Everyone has preferences and no artist should attempt to do art that appeals to the masses. I think I need to keep learning this even though it’s one of the most obvious lessons that I learned in art school. A funny side note about art class in college is that in the lower division classes, the way to get top grades was to appeal to the instructor’s preferences. I’ll never forget painting over a whole section of one assignment because I hadn’t learned yet that this professor didn’t like yellow. He suggested that it should be gray. I didn’t argue, I just did it. When I figured this out about art teachers, I felt like I cracked the code.

I cringe a little over that, but I was bearly 18 at the time. I had little to no art in high school (my school was heavily academic), so I was mostly leaning on my very raw talent and what I’d learned in middle school. I really didn’t know how to be an artist at that point, all I knew was that grades were important. Or thought I knew…

Risks are decisions. Decisions are risks. Any time I embark on a new creative goal, which is usually born from an idea which came from a bit of inspiration, I have a bunch of decisions to make which initially seem exciting. That’s the part that pulls me forward. Being excited will cancel out fear for me.

I suppose I’m always risking, but when I make up my mind to do it confidently, I forget riskiness a little. When I doubt and question myself, anything feels risky. When I move forward calmly, my projects propel me. When I doubt and fear I feel stuck.

This has been an interesting post for me to ponder. When I think of risks, I usually think of rock climbing or hang gliding, as in death defying risks, not the usual day to day kind. Art overlaps so much of my life that I sometimes miss the metaphors. It’s not just with art, it’s with all of my life. Calm confidence is something I keep getting reminded to practice. Practice practice practice…

Describe a risk you took that you do not regret.

I wouldn’t consider myself a risk taker, but sometimes, I can’t help myself.

Once I bought a house in a place I had never lived. I’d visited. The house was hundred years old and adorable, but nothing much had happened to it, besides shag carpeting.

Gs friends and family lived nearby, and had fixed up old houses so…what could go wrong? Oh, a lot.

I don’t regret any of it because I’d always wanted to fix up an old house and we made it look amazing. Unfortunately it had structural issues that were beyond our budget and didn’t increase the home value, so we sold our cute little four square house.

I can’t tell you how much fun I had picking out tile and reconfiguring the kitchen. I loved refinishing the hardwood floors and choosing paint colors. Friends in CA saw it and wanted to use some of my ideas in their homes. It led to helping people with design ideas which led to me staging for a real estate company. Which led to more staging for more companies.

That house helped me feel confident in my design decisions . I learned that I could trust G to pull off all of my nonconforming ideas. He learned that he could trust my eye. I saw how good he was at nailing paint color.

We now work together on many projects. Sometimes he just brings me in to trouble shoot when a client is making complicated decisions. Often we work together to bring homes to new levels of aesthetics.

Even though that project seemed crazy. and WAS challenging, I love that I got to do it. In the end we sold it in three days. It fell through when rain filled the basement on the day of inspection. It sold again in a day, then a third time. We had to disclose all its flaws, of course, but it showed so well that until water was obviously filling the basement, people just wanted it.