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For the past few years, I have tried some crossword puzzles in the local papers from time to time when I feel like sitting down to rest during the day.... It's kind of an interesting thing to do which they recommend for older people to exercise their brains! For me, it reminds me of words in English, and the occasional word many Americans know from other languages.
Some phrases are also included, and some were more commonly used a few years or decades ago.
I don't remember seeing "I'll go along with that" in a crossword puzzle, but it might well have appeared when we didn't have a subscription and only occasionally picked up a paper at the local store.
Now we come to the original titles of this week's post:
Aikido, Art, Carpentry. The point of view was to be the loft my husband and I had for a couple of years in the late 1980's. I had originally hurt my knee in 1986, while I wasn't training, and had the bright idea of teaching people with injuries in a spare room at the art loft. Actually it wasn't my bright idea, it was Linda, who had gotten a shoulder injury . Our old loft and other work spaces were in Westchester and she was working at a hospital in Westchester, and was living in the border town of Byram, actually a part of Greenwich CT. So we were in the Byram-Port Chester area pretty frequently, and I think we saw Linda around there a couple of times, and each time she asked about Aikido. She had only Tuesday evenings off from work, and couldn't attend the local dojo in Stamford anyway, which at the time didn't have class Tuesday evenings. It turned into a very interesting small class which I will write about later. After a few months we ended up with about five people.
But more on that later. My husband loved painting large abstracts, in strong acrylics like orange and bright green and aqua. He also did a few almost cartoon style on rough plywood that had been lying around the loft for years before the artists took over. One of them I named "Robin Masters' Ferrari" from the TV show Magnum P.I. with Tom Selleck, which we used to watch when we were in an old sea captain's house that was our house share with a landscaper and another artist in Byram. The painting vaguely looked like a red sports car. Oh, well, I even gave the carpentry tools nicknames, like Sawfish for the Milwaukee Brand "Sawzall" reciprocating blade saw.
This tendency to give nicknames dated as far back to college days, when I had heard of Uchimata the judo throw, although I don't think we had it in our regular women's judo classes. I called it inside outside upside downside throw. Those of you who have seen it probably realize how I might have described it that way. Some of the judo throws were labled Inner and outer and so on, so my nickname for it wasn't all that far fetched.
I guess this is just an intro to the general topic of the title to this post. You never know what you might learn if you go along with other people's interests. I ended up painting fantasy characters I made up on surfaces I found lying around in the hallway and I just brought one of them to our high school reunion art show. Some people loved it. Since the subject was somewhat Japanese, it got some of my classmates interested in talking about Japan, some had visited there, and thanks to email we are continuing many different conversations, including about Japan and Aikido.
Hubby dear, without whose influence I might not have gotten back into art work, needs the computer to check out the cycling races, so I'll go along with that....
06-16-2012 07:23 AM 