finishing up

I gave my back and legs a workout Sunday and last night I was feeling it. It was warm with a nice south wind and I put on shorts and went out and cleared the rest of the gone by field sunflowers and grasses out of the wildflower spot. Now is the time to spread seeds.

I picked one of the last confederate rose blooms and brought it in.

This is a volunteer from the parent bush which has some weird thing wrong with it and it grows all deformed so I don't let it grow any longer, snapping off all the new growth sprouts that are still coming up from the root. The flowers on parent bush opened pink and got darker but the ones on the new bush open white and turn dark pink by the end of the day.

Monday morning, it was still warm so I made a small mountain in the back of the truck from the two piles I had made the day before and drove it across the street to the burn pile over there. That one is our official burn pile now. The one behind the house is on land we have poached from the 13 Acre Field. After loading it all in the back of the truck I went in and changed from my jeans into the shorts I was wearing Sunday so I was standing on the tailgate pulling and shoving dead and dried plant debris out and onto the new burn pile. It was very dark to the northeast and suddenly the air went from warm to chilly. The temperature dropped that suddenly. Guess I was a little hasty in my change of clothes and changed back into my jeans when I was done. It rained the rest of the day so I worked on the peach pit waxes, getting them ready to send off to be cast in bronze.

Today I picked up what may be the last bucket of pecans. The leaves have pretty much finished falling in the last week and the trees look pretty empty. The leaf cover was so dense on the ground, I quit looking until Marc mulched with the mower. Same for the ginkgoes and tallows. Nothing but empty branches out my window now except for the evergreens.

Standing in the street I noticed how the three trees leaves are different colors changing from brown to red to yellow to the still green grass beyond...hackberry, cypress, ginkgo.

I'm sort of goofing off today since I got all the cold work done on the cast pieces last week and I will be working all weekend at the open house. We set up on Thursday and then the preview is Friday evening and then all day Saturday and noon to 5 on Sunday. Tomorrow the frames are supposed to be ready for the lizard on the leaf and the bee on the bark so I will be busy finishing up those, getting them mounted.

Here's the finished pieces except that the two aren't finished until they are in their frames.

2” x 5”

4” x 4”

2” x 3”

2.5” x 5”

4” x 7”

2” x 5”