sewing, arting, remembering, and more October skies

It’s been a busy few days starting with Thursday when I have to get up early, have my coffee and breakfast, showered and dressed and out the door before 9 am to get to SHARE. And busy at SHARE, not overwhelming but steadily refilling baskets with the appropriate amounts of an assortment of canned goods (meat, vegetables, beans, fruit, soup, ravioli, pasta sauce, tomato sauce), raman, crackers, mac and cheese, juice, spaghetti noodles, instant mashed potatoes, snack bars, and instant oatmeal. And that’s just part of what they get. The guys that fill the orders add rice, dried beans, snacks, drinks, cereal, milk, eggs, desserts, bread, fresh produce (depending on what gets donated that day), coffee (if we have it), meat, and other miscellaneous things. There is a shelf where people can select three items that has things like ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, peanut butter, salsa, cooking oil, flour, sugar, cake or pancake mix, miscellaneous donated canned goods, etc. Another shelf of personal hygiene items like soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, deodorant, etc, where they can select two things. The families we serve can only get the full complement of food once every three months but by law anyone who asks for food gets food from the very limited USDA list. We also provide clothing, sheets, blankets, pillows, appliances (one a year), and miscellaneous household goods like dinnerware, glasses, anything and everything that gets donated when people are clearing out a house.

Friday I finally started on making Paisleigh’s long skirt that she wanted because her Granny and her Gramma both wear long skirts sometimes, a simple gathered skirt with pockets. 

I got it gathered with the waistband sewn on and one pocket pinned on so when she and her dad dropped by that late afternoon I held it up to her to check the placement of the pockets which was fine except even though I measured her waist and added two inches, I wasn’t sure the waistband was big enough. Damn. So Saturday afternoon, I undid everything I had done Friday and sewed the pockets on (easier before gathering), regathered the skirt, and cut another longer by another two inches waistband and sewed it on, ran the elastic and finished except for hemming for which I need Paisleigh to get the length right.

Saturday morning I also had to be up early fed, dressed, and out the door before 9 am for the art journal workshop I had signed up for at Hesed House. The woman who was putting it on provided the mixed media sketchbook, paints, markers, glue, magazines, stencils, stickers, etc. She planned for us to do three pages each using different techniques. The first page was picking out an affirmation from a set of cards she had or some other thing like a favorite scripture and write it down with black permanent marker. Then we wet the page and just splotched watercolor on it letting it spread however. My first page:

The second page was going through the magazines and cutting out a word or words and pictures and doing a sort of collage in a horizontal format using the things cut out and decorative tape, stickers, colored markers, whatever. My second page:

The third page was picking out a stencil and using a sponge brush with acrylic paint (one color), picking a watercolor  color and painting a repeating shape (circle, square, rectangle), then use markers to draw on it, then pick out a smashed bottle cap (the point being to show how to include bits of trash) and glue that on (I didn’t want a bottle cap so I used a sticker), and finally to spritz diluted paint in spray bottles over the whole thing (I used a brown that was so diluted it’s hard to see). My third page:

Since we still had time, she showed us a fourth technique for making a background. Water soluble markers colored on a piece of foil, wet the page with water from a spray bottle, place the foil color side down onto the wet page and press it down transferring the color to the page. I intend to draw over it but time was up.

Sunday, we drove into the city for our friend Dick’s memorial gathering held in the event room in Kathy’s residential building. So many people we haven’t seen since the covid lockdown and the last open house, since Dick’s health started to fail and they worked in the studio less and less; the other artists who participated, other artists who worked in other media who always came, collectors who came every year to see what was new and to maybe buy, those who came who were neither artists nor collectors but friends and familiar faces. So many people we hadn’t seen in nearly six years and likely will never see again, too many other deaths reported of spouses and in one case a daughter, the community we had been a part of for 25 years. Dick and Kathy were the magnet that drew us all together.

And once again, more October skies, 13th - 15th, blue sky days.

short stories, part whatever and more Oct. skies

Steve of Shadows and Light wrote that the parakeets that come to his bird feeder are molting, losing old feathers and growing new ones, as all birds do. It made me think of trees which also ‘molt’, losing old leaves and growing new ones. And then of humans who do not molt though hair and skin cells are constantly shed and replaced. Which got me to thinking about hair and how long an individual hair lives since some women who have never cut their hair from birth have extremely long hair. So I looked it up. A human hair lives and grows on average 2 - 7 years before the resting phase and finally shedding and can reach a maximum length of 3’ - 6’ or about half as long as the person is tall depending on the individual, genetics, breakage, and relative health of the hair. There are exceptions of course as there are in all things, some women have/had hair down to their ankles which must be a nightmare to wash.

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Last Friday was Paisleigh’s 4th birthday and her party was Saturday afternoon. The child has a playground in her backyard. For her 2nd birthday she got a full size trampoline, 3rd birthday a bouncy castle and a play set that consists of a strap anchored between trees with a swing, hoops, ladder, and some other stuff I can’t recall descending from it. This birthday she got a treehouse with two slides (fast and slow), a climbing wall (about 5’ at a slant), and a zip line. At 4 Paisleigh already knows the proper response to any present she opens whether she fully understands what it is or not. She gasps with delight. Unless it’s the third gift of clothes clothes, oh, another shirt though she did like the new jacket that is so heavy it might get cold enough this winter for her wear it a day or two.

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If you’ve been reading me for a while you may remember the dust up with the then new neighbor, the gun nut with his chickens who would shoot at stray and neighbors' dogs who came into his yard chasing his chickens, chickens he made no effort to contain and let go into neighboring yards. One day he shot at the neighbor's dog in its own yard because it had been in his yard and the bullet whizzed by that neighbor. Big confrontation and the chicken man finally put a fence around the property. Well he died of a heart attack about five years ago, the chickens all finally died or were killed by other critters. Last year the widow got more chickens and although the property is still fenced there is a low spot where three or four of them get out under the fence every day and they strut around in the ditch and in other neighbor’s yards and she makes no effort to prevent it. I’ve chased them out of my yard. Second part of this, another neighbor who generally has a big dog or two who are well behaved and stay in their yard, had surgery on his neck that didn’t go as well as hoped and is undergoing PT in Sugar Land during the week so no one is home and the scraggly male big dog and two puppies there currently are roamers. Yesterday they knocked over my neighbor on the east side’s trash can and spread trash around and this morning when that neighbor was mowing his yard the dog trotted down the street with something big and brown in it’s mouth followed by the two puppies. I hollered at my neighbor, what did he have in his mouth? A chicken. Life in the country.

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Another interesting article from Nautilus…an interview with author Kieran Fox, a neuroscientist, of a book about Albert Einstein, I Am A Part Of Infinity, The Spiritual Journey Of Albert Einstein, and worth the read. A few quotes from the interview/book:  

“Reading Kant, I began to suspect everything I was taught,” Einstein said. “I no longer believed in the known God of the Bible, but rather in the mysterious God expressed in nature.”

“Not long after, in his early 20s, while Einstein was putting together the ideas that would revolutionize the physics of space, time, and matter…he kept exploring this other conception of the divine. He read the philosophical reflections of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw that the radical religious ideas of thinkers…that nature and God are somehow One—mirrored similar notions in the oldest sacred Indian scriptures.” 

“At age 51…he explained his own contact with the divine. “I will call it the cosmic religious sense.”” and nine years later “Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution or destiny; only being.” 

“How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.” 

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More October skies, 7th - 12th.

pecans, bookcases, feeling invisible (not me but some people), and the October sky

Our week of lower temps and low humidity, mornings with the doors open, a little taste of fall, are over. Monday the humidity was back with temps climbing. Back to summer and still no rain. Until today. This morning was nice and cool, low humidity. Forecast is lows in the 60s, highs in the low 90s for the foreseeable future but still no rain. The low humidity has caused the pecan husks to start releasing the mature nuts. I’ve collected a small box worth this past week. I’ve also already dumped a 5 gallon bucket worth of bad ones on the burnpile and started filling it again so it remains to be seen how many good ones I’ll get.

Did some house cleaning across the street last weekend while Robin was out of town and finally moved the chair in my bedroom back over to that house and moved the bookcase I wanted over to my bedroom. I didn’t need the chair because Jade is storing her twin recliner loveseat, which seems to be permanent, in my bedroom. I have three bookcases in the in house studio/office, one has books and our LP collection and some miscellaneous stuff. Another had books and CDs on the top three shelves, miscellaneous hardware and collected seeds and other stuff on the bottom three. The third bookcase held my art supplies and sketchbook, sewing stuff and sewing machine, a box of glues and tapes, and a box of miscellaneous repair stuff, all very crowded and messy, and now much more organized with room to spare.

So the books and CDs got moved from the one to the bedroom, 

old seeds and other stuff cleared out from the same and the stuff from the third is now spread out between the two. 

Something I see on SM is older women feel like they've become socially invisible. Some women are just fine with that but I guess others feel isolated. I’m 75 and I have never felt invisible. I think maybe part of that is that those who feel that way stop engaging, waiting to be noticed. If I want to be noticed I speak up, make eye contact, exchange pleasantries even if it’s only offering the nod of ‘I see you’ as you pass. People regardless of age or sex respond. If I’m feeling anti-social, which happens, it’s my choice to not engage and they are invisible to me. Anyway, what got me thinking about this is that yesterday evening when I was trundling the trash can over to the shop drive which is the address the trash service has for pick-up (an arrangement made when Pam was alive and the water to her house came off the same meter as the shop so we paid the water bill and she paid for trash service that we both used; now of course we pay it but haven’t changed the address) a blue pickup turned the corner onto my street and when the driver came abreast of me he stopped. I stopped and looked at this very attractive younger man (late 30s early 40s I guess), longish blond hair kind of windblown, gorgeous ice blue eyes (I mean swoon worthy), big smile, elbow resting on the open window kind of leaning out asked me how I was. Fine and yourself, doing well. Then I asked, do I know you because I couldn’t place him. He says he did some work in the neighborhood. OK, now I know who he is, he did the work on Montreal’s old house that the woman who bought it now rents out. Sam, right? I asked. Yes. We chatted a bit. You live around here I asked. No he lives in Beasley a small town between here and Rosenberg, was coming back from a job in Blessing, a very small town about a half hour from Wharton in the other direction. We wished each other well and off he went.

I found this whole thing a little unusual for two reasons. One, he had no reason to be driving down my street because Hwy 59 would take him from the cut off to Blessing bypassing Wharton and on to his exit for Beasley so I figure he wanted a drive by to see how the work he did was holding up or maybe the woman who bought the house, who also lives in Beasley, asked him to just get a look see. The other thing was that he remembered me and stopped to chat instead of just driving on by. We only had two face to face encounters that I remember. The first when he and the woman were at the house right after she bought it and he introduced themselves after I crossed the street from the shop, eyeing strangers there before I knew Montreal had sold the house. The second time was when Sam came to our door to ask if he could get a bucket of two of water to prime the pump for the well and septic. Maybe waved to each other a couple of times. So yeah, put a big smile on my face that this good looking younger man who I had had a minor encounter with well over a year ago stopped to chat a bit when he saw me walking down the street.

I’ve been taking pictures of the sky every day this month. It can change dramatically during the day and depending on how many pictures I take on any particular day, sometimes hard to choose just one. Here are the first six days. I only took one picture Oct. 5 and it’s not in great focus but you get the idea.

one more, a task, and abundant blooms

I have to say I was very surprised by all the positive comments about the willow card, so, thank you all. I finished the red oak leaf and I think I’m done for now. 

I may do more in the future but I have cleaned off my small work table, put the watercolor pencils and crayons and paper and brushes away. I have some sewing things that need doing so that’s what I’m turning my attention to now.

I spent the day Friday doing house things. First I cleaned out the linen closet which hasn’t been done since we first moved into this house about 15 years ago. 

I emptied it…extra pillows, blankets, sheets and pillow cases, air mattresses…and spread it all out in the hall: five sets of sheets that we currently use ( two of which the bottom fitted sheet needs some repair), one set of flannel sheets that we haven’t used in 20 years probably, one extra top sheet, and 21 pillow cases not being currently used including 6 extra long ones from early in our marriage when we had extra long down pillows and five flannel ones; three blankets, one lap blanket, a bedspread, a tattered quilt, a hammock, 4 pillows, a heating pad, and an extra shower curtain. I weeded out 16 pillow cases, the lap blanket, the quilt, the flannel sheets, and the lone top sheet. I'm donating all that except the quilt and lap blanket to the Austin animal shelter where Jade works. She says they use it for bedding for the animals. Then I rearranged it putting the air mattresses on the top shelf getting them off the floor. 

And because that apparently wasn’t enough work for one day I vacuumed the whole house and mopped the kitchen, the hall, and the dining room area (well, I used a Swiffer).

I had to stop and pull into the driveway of the shop on my way to SHARE last Thursday to take a picture of the morning glory bush. I can see it over the fence and it was just magnificent. I’ve never had one bloom this profusely, like bouquets, so you're getting three pictures.

Speaking of blooming profusely, I noticed a couple of weeks ago that the night blooming cereus was putting on another round of blooms. Last week I stopped counting the buds at 30. Thursday afternoon I counted 35 that were on the verge of opening. I went out at 10 pm with the flashlight and no, not that night but def the next. 

So Friday evening I set my alarm for 11 pm but went out with the flashlight at half past 10 and whoa! All but two of the 35 had opened, some in clusters the buds were so close together. She certainly earns the name Queen of the Night.

Hard to pick just a few.

 

weekend activities and a rainbow bracelet

Fall blooming bindweed in the ditch in front of Pam’s house.

Saturday I finally got out there and trimmed the yard and my arms were sore for two days afterward. The trimmer is only about 9 1/2 pounds but holding up 9 1/2 pounds for 45 minutes, it gets heavy. I did that after breakfast and then dug the thorny dewberry vines out of the long daylily bed in the big backyard in the afternoon. They’ll all be back though as the roots go deep, too deep to really get them out and everywhere a vine lays on the ground long enough it sprouts roots. Last summer when I couldn’t work in the yard recovering from one procedure or another and when I did it was cleaning up all the damage from Hurricane Beryl, they colonized three of my flower beds. So now it’s a constant battle. Of course where they’re growing they don’t get enough sun to actually make berries so they are just a big pain in the ass for no reward.

Sunday I set the sprinkler out moving it every half hour and intended to only go around and pick up loose bricks laying around. When I had a wagon full I pulled it to the front and I thought instead of stacking them in the barn right away I’d shorten the arm of the big flower bed in the front yard because when Marc mows he knocks the bricks askew and add those bricks to the wagon. Except, after I dug up the society garlic and shortened the arm I thought why am I taking these to the barn when I can just finish lining this flower bed, something I had never finished. So that’s what I did, pulling grass and crabgrass out and I only had to scrounge up about 5 more bricks.

Now I’m inspired to finally do this one (these were already here when we bought the place).

Later in the day I collected Paisleigh and I taught her to play dominoes with the set of Disney princess dominoes I got from another donation at SHARE (we can buy donated stuff (garage sale prices) that’s not food). When she tired of that we colored with the sidewalk chalk and then painted with the watercolors. Then we went across the street and she helped feed the four boys and Momcat and then we walked Minnie and I delivered her back to her parents.

More watering yesterday, it is still so dry, and finished the willow card and abandoned the bamboo. All the trees I’ve done so far; the gingko, pecan, maple, are in my yard, the willow grows at the end of my street. No bamboo in the vicinity. I decided to do a leaf off the red oak tree by my driveway instead.

Yellow bells and rangoon creeper in full bloom over at the shop yard.

This morning I had a rainbow bracelet. 

cooler weather, impending yard work, fall blooms, and a great score

A cool front was supposed to come in on Wednesday and bring us some rain. It did bring rain but not on us. I swear there’s an invisible dome over Wharton. While the temperature did drop a bit Wednesday eveningish we didn’t get the full effects until Friday morning, cool enough to have the doors open in the mornings. And the sun is shifting into prism casting mode through the crystals hanging in the windows, little rainbows across my hand and keyboard. When the tallow finally loses all its leaves they will be cast all over the room.

The white Philippine violet has suddenly come into full bloom 

but the fall blooming orange cosmos have yet to be putting on buds. Very few oxblood lilies this year I suppose because it’s been so dry. My friend Cora says the same at her house. And the surprise lilies that gave me 14 blooms last year only put up one though I did get two in a different spot that didn’t bloom at all last year.

I don’t know what this plant is but it’s taller than I am and it freezes to the ground every winter. My sister planted it beside her shed. It blooms sparsely in the fall and has the most wicked thorns. Some of those are over 2” long.

I’ve spent the last several days sketching bamboo and willow leaves for two more cards, not well satisfied with either composition so far though I think maybe a second look at the first sketch of the willow may work if I shift it over to the right. When I get those two done, I think I’ll be done with the whole project. Here’s the most recent completed one. Wasn’t particularly happy with it at first but I think it’s ok.

More yard work planned for this weekend especially now that we are having a little break in the heat. Need to finish weeding that back flower bed and trim the yard, mow the little backyard. I’ve been picking up the bad fallen pecans still in their husks, the ones that got that fungus earlier in the year, so I won’t be fooled later on when the husks pop off and the mature good nuts start to fall. I’ve picked up almost a five gallon bucket’s worth so far. I think, hope, I’ll have an adequate crop from the looks of the nuts high up in the trees. 

Thursday at SHARE right before we were closing up for the day someone brought in two cast iron skillets, old, well seasoned and no crud built up like many old ones, bottom and sides milled smooth which they don’t do on new ones anymore, one large, one medium. I have two old large skillets, a small one, and a bigger but still small skillet. The medium was a nice intermediate size between my smallish and large skillets. I snatched that baby right up, put $5 in the can and brought it home.

Now I have to adjust the hooks to make room for the new one, shifting them over to the left and a little closer together. My large RevereWare skillet usually hangs on the right end hook. I know the new one on the far right doesn’t look much larger than the one on the far left but it has a much larger bottom surface area because the sides of the one on the left slant down instead of being straight up. (My smallest one is not in the picture.)