more progress and what's blooming

Another 4 hours or so on Saturday and I'm done with this model. I could probably fiddle with it another whole day but doubt any improvement would be worth the extra time.

And I forgot to put this picture in my last post, some of the tools I use for carving wax.

Minnie goes where I go but she is bored silly after a couple of weeks of spending 3 to 5 hours in the studio nearly every day with the air conditioner thunking away. Her internal clock tells her when it's lunch time and dinner time and she will get up from her bed over there and tell me. The past several days she'll get up after an hour or so and go to the door. I'll let her out and she'll go about 10 feet and when I don't follow she heaves a big sigh and comes back in, or she'll sit in the sun for awhile and then want back in.

Before I went over to the studio Sunday to start on the next model I got out there early, well, early for me, and cut back all the gone by purple cone flowers in the front flower bed scattering seed as I did. I didn't purposely scatter the seed but every time I cut a handful of bloom stalks I could hear the seed falling. I really don't need more cone flowers in that bed. And while the mosquitoes weren't bad (!) by the time I came in after about after 45 minutes I was dripping sweat.

And then I went out after I had cooled off to walk the big backyard, something I haven't done in several days, and was surprised by the swamp lily which has put up a bloom stalk

and the pink ginger is finally blooming. 

Some of my zinnias have finally started blooming but not very profusely

and the morning glory seeds I planted last early spring and were slow to start are growing madly now but I haven't gotten a single bloom and no buds apparent today either. The tall orange cosmos is out of control growing everywhere but few blooms. The mexican bird of paradise is blooming though.

And the black and blue salvia with a little green spider.

A couple of hours on Sunday in the studio and then Minnie let me know it was her lunch time. Instead of going right back, I got the ladder out and raked as many of the fallen leaves and branches off the section of roof on the driveway side of the house as I could reach without actually getting on the roof. Then I picked up the armloads of branches big and small on that side and tossed them in the truck and then I got the long handled nippers and pruned off all the new branches that had sprouted on the trunks of the two tallow trees by the driveway after the deep freeze and tossed those in the truck. There were a lot. These two trees put out a lot of new growth because a lot of the upper branches died back from the extreme cold. There's a lot of maintenance I haven't been able to do in the yard because it's either been raining or I've been working in the studio so getting these three chores done was good.

I put in another hour and a half and here's my progress for the day. Maybe this one will go a little faster.