How D'You Do? @notacostoday - Tumblr Blog

Bryan Cranston as Hal Wilkerson in Malcolm in the Middle (2000—2006)

Sometimes you buy a little plant in a four inch pot not thinking that it's going to grow up big and strong and three feet tall and you'll have to move it every time you want to go out on your patio to water your tomato plants

inkskinned

i keep thinking about the number of parrots and mimicking birds that say love you! as part of their vocabulary. how often they must hear that in order to learn it as a song.

when i was a child and learning how to train dogs, we were warned against using puppy too much around the dog - it might get confused and think the word puppy was a name. we were supposed to use mostly command words - keep it simple and clear.

but when my dog is in the middle of a nightmare, i say i love you to him, and he calms down. i say i love you! and he starts wiggling, delighted. when i first rescued him, i love you got no reaction. he understood i love you! before he understood what stairs are. the first thing i ever trained him to understand, maybe, before even his name: i love you.

my sister used to say i love you! and her cat would come running. he knew his name, too, but her voice saying i love you was enough.

there's some debate about how many words our pets understand. maybe they understand the tone more than the actual word. science almost always seems to be coming out with new exciting information about just how much animals can learn and understand language. it often more seems that the only true barrier is that we don't understand them when they answer back.

goblin doesn't know it yet, but for the last 3 days, i've been telling him about the new bed i bought him. i had to save for a while in order to afford it - but it's specifically for big dogs like him, and (supposedly) won't flatten out after 6 months. it was twice as expensive as my own mattress, and i'm way-too-excited to give it to him. i keep reading him the stats - it says it'll help any joint pain! and one more sleep until it comes! he wiggles in joy at the tone in my voice, this thing i know i'm not really communicating, but something he seems to understand-anyway.

as of 7:30 AM today, the new bed is on the way. goblin is asleep on my couch, happily snoring. the truck is two towns over. i keep refreshing the delivery updates.

something about telling these creatures in our lives i love you, even knowing they can't understand exactly. even knowing each word in that phrase holds a concept maybe-outside of real communication's possibilities - to understand "i/you", to understand love, to understand holding love and passing it through you into something else. knowing, really, we've probably trained them with this phrase comes petting. and then saying it, over and over and over through the little lonely hours of our day.

hoping, with repetition and action and practice: we'll find a way to tell them anyway.

birdingbasics

i know we’re not talking about rizzo the rat from the muppets when we say ‘the rizz on that man.’ of course i know that. many phrases in modern vernacular have nothing to do with the muppets at all. and when people say rizz i don’t picture the rat for even a moment. i am never thinking about the rat when people use phrases i do not understand. i know it’s not about the rat now. i know we are not discussing the rat

catchymemes

thecollectibles

Cats painting studies by Paul Rabaud

tunisian

coughloop

Just realized I have a spare coffee table I could totally set up to do like a puzzle on or something and I actually have the floor space to do it now oooog fuck I'm about to become a puzzler

coughloop

alice-of-the-castle-deactivated

I have never heard of Norman Rockwell. I don’t understand anything about art. But this picture shook me and caused a storm of emotions. It is called Breaking Home Ties, 1954

The boy is going to a Uni and wearing his best outfit; the Uni sticker is on his luggage, even his tie and his socks are the colours of the sticker. He is excited and impatient. The father - obviously a farmer, is sitting at the worn farm truck with a flag and a storm lamp, because their place is so small the train won’t normally stop there, so the father will need to “catch” the train and signal with the light and the flag for it to stop.

His son will never come back to the farm.

I think I understand why this picture sold at 15,4 million dollars in 2006.

millie1098

Great paintings by Norman Rockwell of everyday Americana.

striving-artist

Norman Rockwell specialized in exactly this, OP. You can look at almost all of his paintings and find a story in it. Some are sweet, some are poignant, some just show family. They are all stories, and they all have story woven into every single detail.

And because it is my favorite, this is “Shiner”

lankyguy

Rockwell’s mentor was A.C. Leyendecker best known for his illustrations of the Arrow Collar shirt man. The model was Leyendecker’s lover. Rockwell was a pallbearer at Leyendecker’s funeral.

vaspider

Rockwell’s paintings also dealt quite a bit with social issues as he got older and after the Saturday Evening Post made him remove a Black person from an image bc Black people “could only depicted in service jobs”.

As a result he left the Post & created (among other works) The Problem We All Live With and Murder in Mississippi.

petermorwood

OP post “Breaking Home Ties”.

Look at the dog.

Oh boy…

brsboyer

For those who don’t know the problem we all live with :

wanderinggrizzly

It’s also very fun to add that during WW2 when the government put out a call to commission artists to create a poster to inspire woman to fill in service roles and feed the war effort, Normal Rockwell was one of the artists who entered. The famous picture of Rosie the Riveter is known to every USAmerican student, and known throughout the world over. But what’s not as commonly known was Rockwell’s submission, which was denied by the US government for portraying the wrong kind of American woman and not something that would appeal to their femininity. Basically, it fucks too hard and the government got scared. But Rockwell was no such coward to give a woman a sandwich and a strap