just another day or two in the life

 
Another warm hot and humid day Saturday and while I didn't get over to the shop on Friday I did on Saturday for a couple of hours. Poured another wax log since the first one had little bits of wood imbedded in it that transferred from the latex mold the first time but I didn't like this one any better for a different reason so I'm going to try again. Third time's the charm, right? And I mixed up the pink and white modeling glass and rehydrated the mink (sort of a pale pinkish brown kind of like some of the tones in the picture below) that I'm going to need for this piece. I think anyway. I'm not satisfied with the test colors I already did for the lichen. I know, shop talk.

the evening sky last Saturday

The other thing I did on Saturday was wage war on the flies in the house. There must have been 100. Well, not a hundred, 75. OK, probably not 75 but at least 50. I do think I got them all chasing them around from window to window and then I had to clean all the windows and window sills of fly guts. I don't know how that many got in the house. I do keep the back door open when the weather is nice and there isn't a screen but this isn't something I've just started doing. We've never had 50 fucking flies in the house like this. It was sort of like that horror movie where the family moves into a house and there's one room that is always infested with flies no matter how many times they kill them.

Saturday was also our Farmer's Market, the fall version. It runs six or eight weeks in the spring and fall and was dying a slow death when someone took it over I guess, moved it back to a previous location and there have been many more booths. So far this fall, no fresh produce. People have planted their fall gardens but it's still too soon for any harvest so it's crafty stuff and baked and canned goods basically. We usually go for homemade tamales (sold out by the time we got there Saturday) and honey. I was trading a clean quart jar for an empty large squeeze bottle. I buy local honey in the quart jars but didn't have anything more user friendly for dispensing. We also return the canning jars to the lady we buy our pickles from and she gives us a dollar off. I haven't seen the noodle people so far who I buy homemade noodles from.

Sunday we finally got a cool front in that lowered the temperature and humidity instead of just lowering the humidity and so I got out in the ditch and did two more sections of the front fence, just six more to go. 

Then I bathed the dog, clipped her toenails, and poured another wax log.

Yesterday, two more fence sections where I rousted out this little garden snake.

Now just four more to go but the dead debris on those is sparse enough to only amount to two mildly dense sections. I might get it all done today but maybe not. I did pull the third wax log out of the mold and it was even less satisfactory because the cheapo latex mold I made to use just one time is continuing to deteriorate and mis-shape so I picked all the tiny wood bits out of the first one.

section of oak branch, mold, and wax model

Last Thursday, the morning of my supposed dermatologist appointment so I wasn't there that day, my neighbor told me they decided to have another meeting at SHARE this morning to revisit the decision to re-open December 1^st. It sort of slipped my mind this morning and I didn't get up and moving soon enough to get out the door in time so, not going. I trust they'll make the right decision without me. Besides, I'm getting my hair cut later this morning.

My hair has not been this long in decades since I missed my spring cut (you might remember I only get one haircut a year, sometimes two), it's thin and lank and always in my face so it has to be pulled back in a bun or ponytail. I'm going to a new stylist, the one my sister goes to. I'm not dissatisfied with the cuts I've been getting from the woman I usually go to but she talks non-stop with a long litany of one complaint after another.

Signing off with this monarch I found sitting in the street while walking the dog the other evening. It looked newly hatched, it's colors vibrant. I carried it over to a neighbor's flower bed and left it there.