Bachelorette for a week

My beloved spouse left this morning for a conference in San Diego. He'll be gone until Monday night, so I have a whole five days of being a bachelorette, or "batching it," as my family says. I was going to get up with him and make him coffee and see him off, but he got up before his alarm went off and snuck out without waking me. I'll have to fuss at him for that.

I'll miss him, but while he's gone, I've got a ton of things to keep me busy. There is always house-cleaning (blah), but I also need to get my home office ready for the fall semester. I've got to start class prep. Yesterday I checked online and my classes are full. Happily, I'm teaching all three of the English 150 classes in the same classroom, so there won't be a lot of running around campus.

I also need to go through my wardrobe and weed it out. I don't know why I tend to keep clothes that don't fit or that I don't like. I've got to learn to be like a surgeon. And after all, if I donate to Goodwill or Salvation Army, then someone else gets a chance to wear things that I don't wear, just store.

And I need to catch up with the newspapers. I haven't read a single daily newspaper in over a month. I won't read them now, either, except for the comics. Then I'll toss them into recycle. I've decided to stop doing the crossword puzzles for a while. That's the way my interests go: wax and wane.

My cousin Mary sent me some wonderful photos of my dear Aunt Susie. Before the semester begins, I need to get that portrait sketched onto canvas. I want to try a new painting technique: kind of flat, no attempt at shading and rounding (chiarascuro), outlined in a dark color, or maybe in Titian red. Several artists I know of have used this technique--Modigliani, for example. (See photo above.) It seems a perfect technique for Aunt Susie, who was a plainly spoken woman who lived a simple good life, with undercurrents of complexity. And of course, with paint, there are always undercurrents of complexity. Of course, I won't give her an unnaturally long neck like the ones Modigliani gave his models

So now I need to get busy! S.