Sunday, February 8, 2015

Art Shopping

Barbara and I are at Fox Hill Village warm and cozy, looking out the window and watching it snow (again). No wood stove or fire here, but also no need to go outside or shovel any of it. We have been here since last Wednesday and will remain until next Wednesday when we will return to Meredith and see how buried we are up north. Actually, there is more snow here in Westwood than in New Hampshire. Go figure.

The cancer numbers we got so far at the last Dana Farber visit were up a little more, but the doctor told us not to worry about that. According to him, it is OK as long as the numbers are not more than 25% higher than the lowest number and we are not yet to that level. It has to do that twice before they will want to change treatments.  But still they gave us a couple of clinical trial descriptions to look over in case the numbers don't start coming down - or at least stabilize. So for now at least, things are reasonably stable.

I had planned to do a good bit of "bowling" during this visit, but so far I have not had time. Yesterday, I was all set to head down to the wood shop, But Barbara reminded me that I had agreed to go "Art Shopping". I had thought that once the redecorating of our apartment was complete, I would be done with things like going to kitchen stores to look at counter top materials and sink faucets. Silly me. You can imagine how excited I was about "Art Shopping". To make matters worse, "we" had hired an "Art Consultant" who we would be meeting in Boston. It turns out that Walmart and Target were not on our list of art stores. No black velvet. No Elvis. Not even dogs playing poker.

I could have dealt with that, but my tastes run more toward sailing ships or possibly Currier and Ives renditions of fox hunting or winter farm scenes. Barbara and our consultant had more "modern" tastes that I feared would involve random blobs of color. Very expensive blobs.

So we drove to Harrison Ave in Boston where there is an unfortunate collection of art dealers. We visited galleries that had "art" that Barbara liked and that I thought I could maybe live with and still keep my eyes open while in the apartment. Barbara had promised a hard limit of 2:00 PM when we would be allowed to leave for home. This was fortunate because by then it had started to snow. What was unfortunate was that the art followed us home.

That's right. Just when I thought I was escaping, I was in fact being followed. We had picked out several works that we thought we might like. The dealers and the consultant thought we should see them in place and were happy to lend us the pictures. So we spent the rest of the day until 7:00 PM installing the art.

At the end of the day, there was good news and there was bad news. The good news was that Barbara had picked out four pieces that she really liked. That was also the bad news if you know what I mean.

But now, I am going to let you all in on a little secret and you have to promise not to tell Barbara. As much as I was dreading spending the day looking at art, I actually really enjoyed it. I got totally into it and the whole time\ Barbara was telling me what a good sport I was being. But I was secretly enjoying it. And I also really like the art she picked. It was much more interesting than looking at shower heads and faucet fixtures.

But as much fun as Saturday was, Friday was even better. I found an interesting adventure on GroupOn. I bought a half hour in a helicopter flight simulator. I have never even been in a helicopter, but there I was sitting next to this instructor in a simulator and I was flying the thing. Or at least trying to. There are about 10 things you have to keep track of and I could manage to think about maybe two or three things at a time. There are three controls. As soon as you change one, at least one of the other two goes haywire and needs to be adjusted and as soon as you adjust that, the other two need adjustment and so on. After a half hour, I could keep the thing sort of going. It was really fun and I didn't die even if I did start to get a tiny bit airsick.

So that's the latest update. We hope all of you are doing well and enjoying Winter. We are just hoping that the snow stops before the next update.