Hi Michelle, I'm healthy and happy to help you with anything you need.

The furniture and walls blend together to make the room feel larger than it is. It would look very different if that were, for instance, cherry or mahogany against off-white walls. I once also had a tiny square office, with a corner cut out for a closet. My husband had the wall to the right of the door, me to the left. My 4+' desk filled the little wall between the closet and the window, with printer, computer tower, and all office supplies tidily on shelves in the closet. I don't normally like to face a wall, but the outside was right there with a little glance to the right. An orange tree with honeysuckle growing through it was just outside, so close that (without screens) I could have reached out and touched the butterflies and hummers flitting around several months a year. Both were lessons I took from that little rental of things that really worked nice for me. Even including facing a wall in the right conditions. Here farther north, it's a bird bath under a small three the birds take their turns from.

michael/brushworks, I looked at the clips, thanks. There's no doubt rock and roll and other sub-types of modern music are vegetable soup, blends of many different influences in different proportions without any one predominant source. I can't go along with the premise that any one element had disproportionate influence, such as Native Americans as this program seems to suggest. You might be able to trace influential African American blues or R+B musicians as having Igbo ancestors. Or Mandinka ancestors. You get the picture - folks would say, so what?. The people in the pockets where local music evolved and ultimately contributed to a great fusion represented the melting pot of backgrounds that were present in each area. They learned and fed off of one another over time and all were influenced in music by the multitude of traditions they encountered.

I never correct people who are speaking to me in person (or on the phone) and consider however they speak to be part of their personality. I do, however, criticize newscasters and instructors on TV, as I hold them to a higher standard, and there is nothing personal between us. My grandmother was an English professor, and she was very bad about correcting everyone's grammar. I doubt any of her students liked her, and she had a reputation for being very strict. Growing up in Texas, I was also forced into seeking a career/education that was considered more masculine than I really liked, but once I finished my first B.A. (which was in German/English literature), I decided to do instead what I really wanted and started designing and making clothes, even though I had on formal teaching. Basically, I learned from reading instructions on patterns, and then I started making my own patterns, once I understood clothing construction and how to use a sewing machine. My youngest brother was interested in drawing from the time he could first hold a pencil, and some of his earliest drawing are really amazing. However, our father told him that he should not pursue a career in art, but it was not what men were supposed to do. I don't know where he got that idea, but my brother listened to him and studied electrical engineering for four years before changing his major to art, and then he had to spend another four years to finish a degree in art. After that, he went to graduate school and got his MFA. I went back to university to get a design degree when I was almost 35 and was older than some of my instructors. Most professors liked having older students in the classes, however.