Day Two of the Great Northwest Stuttering and Stammering Experiment.

Good morning again. It's Friday and I'm trying to organize my day.

Yesterday I painted a picture of the tree in the field in oil on an 8 x 10 canvas. Then I took a picture of it with my iPhone and uploaded to Facebook. When Susan walked into the room I said look at this and she said, yeah it's a tree. Well, there was no arguing that point with her, it was a tree, in the field. Then at some point I looked at the picture that I had put on Facebook and I saw that it was a tree in a field and there wasn't much else to it.


But when I went back and looked at the picture again, I still liked it. It was a little bit cartoonish, the edges of the tree were a little bit too round, just stuck on the trunk. It was supposed to be an oak tree. And I actually looked at a few pictures of oak trees to make sure that I was in the right ballpark and not just doing another one of my cartoon trees.

I had spent a bit of time on the sky and the field. I wanted to try and show that "Impressionist view óf movement in the grass. I think I did pretty well with the grass, I wouldn't say that it's the best thing that I could've hoped for, but I did okay. I would have liked to have had at least the commitment to make it a little larger field and have some areas of sun and clouded shade, but I did the best I could.

Still, throughout the night I thought about that picture. I thought about going back and making the edges of the leafy part of the tree a lot more ragged. I almost dreamt of taking the putty knife to it, scraping off all the old paint as far down as I could get to start again. When I came out to the office this morning and looked at the picture, I still liked it.

Now I don't know if that means that I should leave it alone or mess with it some more. It's not like it's fine art than needs to be protected from any lessening of its value. It's all just practice. I tried something a little different with this one. I started with a background layer of acrylic just to make sure that the canvas was covered with roughly the right colors before I began with the oil and I think that worked out well. But to say that the picture was underwhelming, I think would be an understatement.

I'm not really sure that this speech recognition dictation is actually speeding up my blogging but I will keep trying longer and see if I can teach this program how to understand what I'm saying. It also teaches me to think about what I'm going to say. Overall and over time, I've found that Dragon speech recognition works best if you keep up a little faster pace than I have been doing over the past two days.

I don't know why I can't turn my mind free to think of clever things while I dictate. It seems much easier to do that when I'm typing. I seem to have a different mind and other people, and not in all that good a way.

When Peter was down a few weeks ago for the day for a visit, at one point Susan came in and sat with us and talked and we spoke about reading, and I learned something very important. 65 years old now, I never realized that other people don't read every word in their mind when they read a book. I had no idea that they saw groups of words and didn't say them in their mind when they read. It explains a lot. For instance, it explains why they could read so much faster than I could and why speed reading courses worked for them but not for me.

It was really quite a finding. I was amazed that it never even occurred to me that people's experiences were that different than mine. It made me wonder how many other types of informational experience were different for me than for other people. And it explains a lot of the trouble that I had getting through reading assignments in the way I tackle them.

I obviously need to think more about that as I believe it's an important difference between myself and most of the rest of the world. Why I struggle and stumble and scramble and practically dig my way through some things. It explains why I have a huge stack of partly read books sitting next to my chair in the front room while Susan goes through 40 books a month.

Looking down at the little dictation box, I can see that I've got quite a bit of editing to do to make this blog postable, so I better get started now.

More later,



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