signs of the end of August but not necessarily the beginning of fall

yellow butterfly ginger

We got an easy pass from both storms heading this way last week. Marco barely made Cat 1 hurricane then fizzled back to a tropical storm before it made landfall Monday night in Louisiana and Laura, which strengthened into a Cat 4 and maybe even a Cat 5 hurricane which made landfall Wednesday night pretty much near the border of Texas and Louisiana for which we are grateful, not that it hit them but that it didn't hit us. We got neither wind nor rain from either storm but we also didn't get a break from the heat and humidity. And I have to tell you, I am tired of sweating! I stand outside for 5 minutes and sweat is beading up on me and by that I mean wiping it off my forehead sweat. If I engage in any minor activity for 10 minutes or more sweat is dripping off me and when I come in I continue to sweat for at least 10 minutes! It's probably too much to hope for that we might have an early fall but the clump of pampas grass at the other end of the street is starting to put out its plumes,

the snow-on-the-prairie is blooming in the pastures (I called it a field and my retired farmer neighbor corrected me...fields are for crops, pastures are for livestock),

the tallows are starting the slow shed of their leaves.

and of course it's cotton harvest time.

Did I mention we won't be having our annual open house this year in December? Because of the virus, of course. None of us are thrilled with the prospect of visitors in close quarters, having to insist on masks. The other art/craft show that people we know participate in is also not happening, well, not live. The Height's Artisan Market is going virtual this year. The organizers are building a website and inviting artists to participate. Each artist will get their own page with up to a dozen images and a link to their selling site, website, or email and each artist will be responsible for handling any sales. We've never done the HAM which is only one day as we are always committed to the open house but they invited us to participate and I accepted. So to that end, I was working on my website again this week and only have the two gallery pages and the news page to update, also get my images ready and sent in.

And Friday I finished boxing up two pieces to send to the gallery for their anniversary show that will get sent out on Monday. And I'm sort of starting to move the glass related stuff out of the house and into the new room over at the shop, well, one box of jars of frit and powder anyway.

   

My sister is still slowly packing and moving boxes from the old house. She's sort of down to the stuff she wants to keep but doesn't know where she's going to put it all. I imagine a lot of it will go in the shop until she can get herself a small storage building. The realtor wants to put the house on the market mid-September so there's a new urgency to get the rest of the stuff out and the house gussied up a little and we haven't even started on the yard yet, moving all the yard art and plants in pots and digging up other things she wants to take not to mention the estate sale the second weekend in September to get rid of as much of the stuff that she isn't keeping as she can. We spent the afternoon over at the old house Friday moving from room to room emptying them completely and moving all the boxes and stuff that are going with by the garage door and the stuff for the sale to the eat-in kitchen. We got the bedroom and the guest bedroom and more than half of the extra room done, emptying the closets and taking down the rest of the pictures, hauling box after box and stuff not in boxes and pictures through the house to the staging area. Saturday the bathroom got cleaned out and another car load moved.

I don't really have anything to report about the pandemic besides more people are dead and more people are infected and the CDC, under pressure from Trump who is over the whole thing and wants testing stopped, announced, unknown to Dr. Fauci while he  was having surgery, that non-symptomatic people who have been exposed to COVID-19 do not need to get tested. They are exactly the people who need to be tested so that they can self-isolate if they test positive and not spread it around. And of course Republicans continue to claim that this whole pandemic thing is made up by the Democrats to scare people into not voting while they themselves engage in voter suppression. I'll wait another week and will probably go bi-monthly from now on.