the serendipity of yellow umbrellas and paying attention, #sol17 Tuesday

…I was going to write about paying attention on a walk, but a thunderstorm struck. So I returned to this Tuesday's prompt page, re-reading and connecting rain, yellow umbrellas, paying attention, and random acts of kindness (RAK). 

Serendipity. 

My own umbrella is Tiffany blue, but the color doesn't matter, not as much as the rest. Kindness emerges from paying attention and vice versa.

Who hasn't seen the bumper stickers, tees, tattoos, memes, lists and articles, a foundation and a national day The complete quote is actually, "Practice random acts of kindness and senseless acts of beauty." I first saw it in Davis, CA, 1993 as a bumper sticker on a VW bus.

Vanessa Helder, #artist, my mother's mentor

…and today's #sol17 post topic. Until this lighthouse painting showed up on New Deal of the Day, WPA art and history blog, I was torn between an ongoing Manor drama (better later with camera and more leisure) and new Manor pictures, here and here.

"Alki Point Lighthouse," a watercolor painting by Z. Vanessa Helder (1904-1968), created while she was in a New Deal art programs, ca. 1935-1938. See Wikipedia biography. Image courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

A drifting day, Tuesday #sol17

I will finally be getting a cell phone and taking pics around the Manor and on Yuma walkabouts -- connected but not so tethered to the internet that I miss surroundings. In the meantime, 4-H season is upon us and youth across Yuma are starting their projects. Here's a picture of my grandsons' 2017 4-H pigs arriving.

Last year I started a Pig Brothers Brown pigboard (a digital pigzibit) for them (and me too). Although my taste in pig pics runs more to the quirky, as shown by the picture below, I promise a pigboard as comprehensive as it is eclectic.

OMG Tuesday #sol17 already, other blogging, poetry #NPM17

Damn I posted something else to another blog just after midnight, one I'm not on deadline for. If not for my inner owl, that would feel like two posts in one day, which I'm trying to avoid. Yesterday I posted to precarious faculty blog for the first time, not counting drafts, since October 2016. Ignoring the over-sized baggy monster I abandoned in drafts the day before, I blogged a Dear Reader ramble about changes, not really addressing adjuncts, academic labor, organizing, academia or any of the formerly usual suspects.