around & about #YumaCO & back to the #Manor Tuesday #sol17

…started with going out my back door past the rosebush (last year's photo) to walk to monthly #LYC meeting this morning at the Rural Communities Resource Center (RCRC or just "Resource Center). LYC or Linking Yuma County is an informal group of county organizations, agencies and volunteers sharing information and coordinating efforts. 

Afterwards, I stopped by Hardware Hank's across the street to add a small cultivator to my minimalist gardening hand tool collection and pick up something for the geriatric rosebush outside my back door. I'm not a gardener, but the rosebush and a companion with cream roses have been here longer than any current resident and survived two years with me. Time to step up my game. 

aging is as aging does #sol17

While most teachers in the SoL blogging community are dealing with the end of the school year and planning summer, I have no student work to process, and summer is just another season for the retired. So I enrolled in a Future Learning online course, Strategies for Successful Ageing, from Trinity College, Dublin. That last should explain the spelling anomaly. 

Find out how staying happy, healthy, socially-connected and active can help you age successfully, with this free online course....This course is relevant for adults who wish to acquire strategies for successful ageing. No previous experience or qualifications are required.

(mis)adventures with an iPhone Tuesday #sol17

I'd tell you more about them if, a) I had started sooner, and b) I weren't still having them.

The short version: my son gave me an iPhone 5s. Although I have been online since the early 90s, blogging since 2006 and social media soon after, this is absolutely my first mobile device. Not even an old style un-smart cell phone. Everyone I knew online had one and many may have assumed that every else did. I didn't because I couldn't afford but one device. Wrong side of the digital divide. I managed OK, most of the time on dial-up at that.

Anyway as I am about to cross the divide...misadventures, of course. Monty Python gets connected.

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.