all done, signs of summer's end, beautiful but deadly

I’m home. The procedure went well but once again had to lay flat on my back for six hours and an overnight stay in the hospital. Discharged in the morning and home by 1 PM yesterday. Another week of taking it easy slowly easing back into my regular routine. Still have to have another transesophageal echocardiogram in 45 days to make sure the device is still in place and stable. The shield is made of a sterile gortex like material with little titanium hooks that grab onto the heart muscle so now when asked if I have any metal in my body, the answer is ‘yes’ and I have to carry a card with me at all times saying I have this device in my heart with instructions on safely administering an MRI if I need one…specifications about static magnetic fields, maximum spatial gradient field, whole body averaged specific absorption rate. Have yet to find out if I’ll set off a metal detector.

Wednesday when I walked around the yard there was no sign of the ox blood lilies. This is what greeted me when I got home on Friday.

Once those two weeks of triple digits were over the weather has cooled quickly, the next two weeks of highs in the 90s changed to highs in the 80s a week later, partly cloudy/overcast with rain predicted all this next week. The change has been sudden and very welcome. Besides the ox blood lilies, other signs of the end of summer and approaching fall are emerging. Marc says the pampas grass is blooming though I haven’t seen any yet. The tallows continue to drop their speckled red/yellow/orange leaves and now the oaks are starting to drop some of their tired foliage. The days are definitely shorter, nearly full dark at 8:30.

I heard some clanking in the garage. One of the puppies was stealing empty dog food cans (rinsed clean) out of the box where I put them before it all goes to the metal recyclers. Minnie and I went out and there he was under the magnolia tree, she’s barking madly standing beside me and the goofy dog is not the least bit intimidated gently trying to get nose to nose with her which they did for a moment and then Minnie started barking again so we came in and I let her out in the little backyard where she continued to bark ferociously at the puppy on the other side of the fence directly opposite her, laying there wagging his tail. Puppy just wants to be friends. 

You might remember that I got stung by a wasp a month or so ago when I was working around the spot in the front yard where a pine tree used to be that died and the rotting roots have made a hole in the ground. A few weeks later I was using the trimmer around that same spot and saw a horde of wasps start to boil out of that spot and I ran like the wind and escaped getting stung. So last week, walking around the front I went over to check it out expecting to see a large paper wasp nest but what I found turned out to be a huge yellow jacket construction (no wonder that sting hurt all week). At first I thought it was a wild honey bee hive until I took a picture and zoomed in. Those were not bees. 

Definitely have to get rid of this, first on my yard to do list when my week of recovery is over. Even so their construction with the nest inside is really amazing and quite beautiful with the different colors and layers of chewed up and exuded wood.

drawing

I’m a lazy artist. If I can trace something instead of drawing it, I will. Often I will take a picture of something, print it out, and then transfer the outlines to whatever paper the finished drawing or painting is going to be on. I transfer the lines by using a pencil to scribble on the back of the paper, placing it scribble side down on the other paper and then tracing the outlines on the front. 

I have picked the picture for my next painting 

but my old printer won’t talk to my new mac mini. I haven’t bought a new one yet so if I want something printed out I have to send it to someone with a functioning printer that’s not out of ink. Unfortunately the two people I would ask, of which my grandgirl Robin is one, their printers are out of colored ink. So I have bought ink for Robin’s printer which arrives tomorrow. In the meantime, while I dithered about buying ink or buying a printer, I wanted to get started. 

I actually drew the leaves, proving to myself that I can still draw.

I’m going to do a colored pencil drawing first and then the painting. I’ve transferred the outlines to a page in my sketchbook

and put in a base layer of yellow in one of the leaves

but now I have to wait until the ink comes and the picture printed out for color reference while I finish the drawing.

My reds, yellows, oranges, and browns. 

Tomorrow I go in for the last medical procedure, then another week of laying around in recovery and I will be so glad to have all this behind me.

charm bracelets

When my mother was in high school the trend was, not just charm bracelets, but a specific charm bracelet. The girls exchanged silver hearts. My mother had two of these charm bracelets, both full of hearts, no two alike except for one heart of which there are three. Most of them have the giver’s name or initials engraved on the back. I tried in vain to get a picture of the back of one with the name but no luck. 

After our mother died Pam had Mother’s charm bracelets and her own charm bracelet, since they were still a thing when we were growing up and even when my daughter was in middle school so I suppose they still are a thing for girls, arranged in a shadowbox that she hung on the wall. Several months after Pam died I began to wonder what had happened to our mother’s charm bracelets. I didn’t recall seeing them after she moved into the house across the street which made me try and remember when the last time was I had seen them. I don’t remember seeing them in the yellow house where she lived before she moved over here. So I started asking her daughters and granddaughters if they had them as I would like to have at least one of them. No one had them or had any idea what had happened to them and so I gave them up for lost. And then about three weeks ago I got a text from Denny with a picture. She had put something in her safe and poked around to see what all was in there and she found one of them. Her mother had sent her one and she had completely forgotten she had it or even when she received it. So she sent it to me and we assumed her sister had the other one and had also forgotten she had it.

I had been planning on doing a post about the bracelet but just hadn’t yet so when Linda Sue did her post on Saturday about her mother’s charm bracelet I went in search of the one I had in middle school and high school. When I opened the box it was in, there was the other silver heart bracelet. I had completely forgotten I had it and also when Pam gave it to me. So now I have both my mother’s charm bracelets.

This is mine. 

All but a few were given to me by my parents. The scissors (they open) because I was very into sewing and making my own clothes, a dollar bill folded up in a box so that I will never be broke, a heart with a pearl, a bull for the summer my sister and I spent 3 weeks in Mexico with friends of our parents, a Christmas stocking that opens and Santa pops out, a little cameo from a pair of earrings that I lost one of, a heart with a key that maybe a boyfriend gave me, an ivory elephant because ?, a circle with 13 for my 13th birthday, a drunk leaning on a lamppost for the summer I spent 2 weeks in New Orleans with friends of my parents when I was supposed to be getting painting lessons from the artist father that neither of us were interested in doing, a paint pallet because art (all but two of the enameled colors are gone), and a Texas Tech charm that I guess my sister gave me from the year she went to college there.

outdoor work and outdoor kitties

I spent a little over an hour and a half outside yesterday. First I emptied the truck onto the burn pile and then swept out all the small twigs and leaves so that Marc can go get it inspected and I can take all the accumulated metal down to the metal recyclers. Then I got out my little baby chainsaw and started on the other pecan tree with the hanging limb cutting away the now very dead canopy. There’s not much of the limb still attached, just a thin strip of bark. 

The only thing holding it up are the weight bearing branches dug into the ground. While it was overcast and only (!) 90˚ when I came in at 12:30, it was humid and my ball cap was soaked, my hair was soaked, my shirt was soaked, my underwear was soaked and there might have been some areas on my shorts that were still dry. Did I mention I was sweating profusely? 

I splashed cold water on my face and then stripped down naked and stood under the ceiling fan on high with arms and legs akimbo like da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man until I was dry enough to put on a lightweight dress that is so loose it only touches me on the shoulders, got a glass of ice water and sat under the aforementioned fan until I cooled off enough to take a shower.

I repeated it all again today sans emptying the truck but I only lasted a little over an hour. I’ve made a big dent the last two days in clearing out the small branches on the pecan tree by the back of the barn making three big piles since instead of four limbs I’m only dealing with two. And got bit on the neck by a tree ant for my trouble.

Here’s a before picture though it’s a different angle.

It’s been awhile since I posted pictures of the outdoor boys that live under Pam’s house. These are the kittens that were born last July under my sister’s shed, making them a little over a year old now. Pam started feeding Momcat and trapped her and got her fixed which left the three kittens that she was feeding with the intent of getting help from the local rescue group to have them fixed and adopted out when she died last November. I didn’t want the kittens wandering off before I could get them fixed so I continued feeding the little feral beasts. I eventually got them to trust me enough to be able to pet them and even pick up two of them and got all three fixed though the third had to be trapped and he is still wary. So here they are…sweet Handsome Boy, a brown tabby with gorgeous green eyes,

affectionate Lovey with his yellow eyes, who purrs readily,

and standoffish Twin who will sometimes let me pet him but not for very long.

I didn’t get a picture of Momcat but she’s still around though she doesn’t show up every night while the boys are always here. She’s very friendly and loves to be pet but can be kind of a bitch, hissing at the boys if they get too close. We think she was dumped when she got pregnant because we hadn’t seen her around until we saw her moving the kittens one day.

the last one, puppies, and a bare hint that summer will end

Bearing down on the end of August and the end of summer as if the end of August is the end of summer here. Alas, not. But next week, the last week of August is also the last week of the summer of medical issues. Hopefully. For a while anyway. The Watchman procedure, the one that will close off the little pouch on the side of the left atria that will get me off the blood thinner, is scheduled for next Thursday. Then one more week of resting and recovering and I will finally be able to be over it all! 

One of my neighbors had acquired two big dogs via family members, a german shepherd and another of indiscriminate heritage but equally as big, and they had four puppies. They are not restrained by a fence or other means and the adult dogs kept mostly to their yard. The puppies however, playful and joyful, would roam and mom or dad or both would follow to keep an eye on them. They often found their way to my yard because I’m not that far and Minnie would go berserk barking trying to chase off them off. The more she barked and ran at them the more they were convinced she wanted to play. Apparently, two of the puppies have found new homes and the remaining two are old enough now that mom or dad don’t follow. And these two puppies are huge. They are going to be very big dogs. 

This summer has been hot and dry lately and they discovered my small kidney shaped pond several weeks ago that was filled with water plants. Was, past tense. The pond is just the right size for one puppy to get in and get soaked, then the other gets in. 

They show up every day, get wet and go romping around the yard while Minnie goes engages in outraged barking. If I let her out she tries to run them off. She’ll chase them off a short way and then they will chase her back. They’re monsters as far as she’s concerned but they’re just big golumping puppies, not even a year old yet. Yesterday when Minnie retreated to the front of the garage where I was standing one of them came up to her, kind of bowed down and whined at her. Minnie was having none of it. I keep telling her they just want to play.

Yesterday evening I tried to get some pictures of them just outside the gate into the little backyard but they were like perpetual motion machines. So this is what I got.

Back to the end of August and the promised end of summer. While we will still have hot weather for the month of September, the crepe myrtles and the tallow trees are starting to drop their old tired foliage. This is usual and a sign of the coming change of season though it will be months before those trees lose all their foliage.

barn doors and heat loving flowers

Rocky spent two and a half hours over in that hot shop yesterday morning trying to fix the bay door. Operative word here ‘trying’. He finally, after tightening things over and over, unhooking and re-hooking the cables to no avail, determined that the main springs at the top were bad and needed to be replaced. Or he could dismantle the bay door and put a man door in the space or we could replace it with sliding barn doors which sounded good to me. And then he happened to look over and see that we already have sliding barn doors in the shop that close off what had been a storage room that I have never once closed off. 

So barn doors it is. He’s going to replace the bay door with those barn doors.

While he was doing that I had gotten up early, and by that I mean 7 AM, and went out before coffee or breakfast and mowed the little backyard with the small electric push mower and then used the trimmer to do the front yard with a cooling off break in between til I ran out of trimmer string, then a trip to the library and the Evil Empire. The big backyard is in even worse shape and I was going to get out there this morning with the trimmer but we’re supposed to hit triple digits today and tomorrow and two days in a row without coffee and breakfast wasn’t going to happen so it will be Friday and the weekend before I can get out there again when it cools off some (ha ha) to the mid to low 90s.

At this point, I’m really missing the shade we used to get from those two pecan trees. Some of my flowerbeds back there are getting almost twice as much sun as they’re used to and the things growing there are not happy at the sudden change in the middle of high summer. I’m going to have to rethink some of the stuff planted there. The orange cosmos doesn’t seem to mind though. It’s been blooming sparsely and is getting taller than I am, getting ready, I hope, to bloom in the fall when the butterflies migrate through. And the mexican bird of paradise will probably like the extra hours of sun too. This is the one behind Pam’s house that gets full sun and always blooms better than mine.

I’ll have to plant a yellow bells back there because they like the sun too.

finished painting, naked tree fingers, and other miscellania

I’ve finished the painting, 9" x 6", signed it, removed it from the board. Looking at the last image I posted I’m thinking maybe I should have stopped there. This painting is from a photo David took and posted on his blog Travels With Birds months ago. I thought I still had the image which I downloaded but apparently I deleted it after I printed it out.

Last week, my sister’s friend and our ex-employer from the antique store, Donna, came and got three pieces of furniture of Pam’s that we wanted to get rid of. She no longer has a store but has a space in an antique mall in Rosenberg. Friday she brought one of them back, a large chest with four drawers that are divided that my sister used as a jewelry box (my sister had a lot of jewelry, costume and otherwise) because on second thought she didn’t think she could sell it. I had asked her to bring it back if that was the case rather than set it out for trash. Since Robin didn’t want it back in the house, I decided to put it in the shop for now until I decide what to do with it.   

The plaque on it says ‘The National Cash Register Co.’ and now I recall that it was part of an old cash register. There’s a slot cut out on the top for the mechanism that pushed the drawers out I assume. The actual cash register sat on top.

Robin’s bf Evan was helping to get it out of Donna’s car but first we had to lift the bay door in the shop. It’s been probably 6 months since that door was lifted and it was balking about 2’ up but between the two of us we got it all the way up but then it wouldn’t stay up so I had to prop it up with a 2” x 4”. Obviously, something was broken and we probably broke it forcing it up instead of looking to see why it was balky. Anyway, we got the chest in and went to lower the bay door and now it won’t close all the way leaving about an 18” gap. Upon further inspection I saw that the cable on one side had become disconnected. Rocky came and looked at it this morning. If he can’t fix it he’ll disconnect the cable on the other side so that at least I can get it to close all the way. We’ll still be able to lift it with brute strength but it will have to be propped up every time. I have too much other stuff to deal with to worry about fixing that bay door right now.

And speaking of other stuff, I finally finished cutting away the canopy of the pecan tree closest to the house last week, ending up with four piles that have to be hauled to the burn pile. Today I emptied the truck on the burn pile and then refilled it with two of those piles of tree debris. I have to burn before I can add that load. But now those hanging branches look like a multi-fingered hand digging into the ground. 

I might have mentioned that I saw some plants just under the back porch of Pam’s old house that I thought were hostas and that I was going to dig them up and move them over to my place on the shady side of the house this fall. Well, they bloomed and they aren’t hostas at all but hidden ginger. 

I’m still going to move them because I’ve lost all my white butterfly ginger and most of my pink butterfly ginger from the well blow freezing winters and the horribly hot and dry summers of the past three or four years. I still have lots of the yellow butterfly ginger but they haven’t bloomed the last two years and don’t look like they’re going to bloom this year either.

more work on the tree debris and the painting

This surprised me yesterday when I went out to water the plants in pots. It didn’t bloom at all last year.

I finally got out there Saturday morning cutting more tree branches and hauling my three loads to the street. And again Sunday only by the time I had three piles, I was done. Figured I’d get them to the street later. I’ve been working on the pecan tree closest to the house, the one that has four major limbs broken at the top and hanging down, either not completely detached or just not fallen yet. I’ve been cutting away everything 4” in diameter or less that I can easily reach that are not weight bearing, basically what was the leafy canopy. I don’t want to cut away anything that might shift the weight and bring the limb down on me. I’ve not quite finished this tree, one more day I think, and have barely touched the other pecan tree by the barn that’s in the same condition.

Well, those three piles will not be getting hauled to the street because the county showed up early this morning and picked up everything that I already had out there. The guy working the scooper was amazing. He had a very light touch, picking up the smallest stuff without disturbing the grass or dirt. Everything else from here on will have to go on the burn pile.

I’ve worked on my painting Friday, Saturday, and Sunday. I’ve got the fallen tree in, though I want to add another small branch, and most the shadow/reflection of same in the water. I still need to work on the water adding in some reflections and finally some small twiggy stuff in the foreground and on the left.

The only other thing going on here is streaming. We finished watching the first season of FallOut on Amazon which we liked. It’s been renewed for a season 2 but it’s not projected to be available until early 2026. Then we started watching Good Omens, a fantasy comedy also on Amazon, about an angel and a demon who have become fond of life on earth and team up to try and prevent the looming Armageddon, based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett of the same name. How can it not be good? I’m enjoying it immensely.

Today no work will get done on the hurricane damage or on the painting as I’m accompanying my friend undergoing chemo to her doctor’s appointment to try and find out why her platelets are so low that she has not been able to get her chemo treatments for the last two weeks. It’s a two hour drive there and a two hour drive back from Galveston which is where she is being treated.

on painting

I didn’t work on my painting Monday. My hour and a half/four cart loads just wore me out. By the time I cooled off, showered, and had lunch it was mid afternoon so we sat down and watched the last episode of Outer Range and the the first episode of Fall Out, also on Amazon. Fall Out is a post apocalyptic sci-fi series. It starts out with a rich kid’s birthday party with the world on the brink of nuclear war and as they are serving the birthday cake mushroom clouds start blossoming across the landscape, then jumps to 216 years later.

I have not worked out in the yard since Monday because we’ve been having high 90s temps and it is just too damn hot even in the morning, besides Tuesday was grocery shop day and my night to fix dinner. Plus I was still contemplating the next step, how I want to add the skeletal trees in the distance, thinking I may work on the overcast part of the sky a little first so that it’s not so stark white. And adding the trees will be something that I can’t really change or fudge a bit if I don’t like what I’ve done. I did work on the sky, adding some gray tones, though it’s very subtle, and lightly penciled in the trees. Jade was here Wednesday so I only got one or two of the trees done and today I added the rest. May add more after I get the big dead branch, the main focus of the painting, put in next. The colors come out a little darker in the picture than on the actual painting.

So about painting…in my late teens and early 20s I made an attempt to become a painter because that’s what artists did, right? I had oils and acrylics, stretched my own canvasses, but it never really grabbed me. I had never taken any instruction in oils or mixing colors or shading, I wasn’t inspired, I had no skills, and I wasn’t very good and eventually gave it up altogether. I only have three paintings from that period that I kept because I like them regardless of lack of skill.

In college I took drawing, color/shape/form, ceramics, sculpture, textile design, etc., but never a painting class. I liked to draw but then I got married and had to go to work and really stopped doing art at all. After my divorce and being unemployed at the time, my nude modeling phase, I stumbled on etched and carved glass which captivated me and launched my career as an artist. It allowed me to use my drawing skills, I didn’t have to worry with color, and I could translate my drawings into a large and light filled medium. I considered myself a sculptor even though the third dimension was very shallow and then years later when we started doing the pate de verre cast glass I was working fully in three dimensions and it also forced me to deal with color.

After we retired the etched/carved glass studio I had the opportunity to take two watercolor classes from a local woman so now, nearly 50 years after I stopped any attempt at painting here is where I find myself. Perhaps if I had been introduced to watercolor back then I might have become a traditional artist, or not, who knows. I find it kind of ironic really that here at the end I’m back to a medium I rejected so long ago, not oils or acrylics, but still painting.

 

cutting and stacking, watching, painting

I spend an hour or an hour and a half every day cutting and carting broken branches to the street. About four mounded very high cart loads a day. Saturday my four cart loads were the branches scattered on the back half of the big backyard behind the destroyed pecan trees as Marc was mowing back there. Yesterday I only did three, being Sunday and all thought I would give myself a break, working on the smaller end branches of the huge limbs hanging down. The task seems endless. 

After I came in Saturday and cooled off sitting directly under the ceiling fan on high, I worked on my painting putting in the foliage in the distance on the far side of the lake. It’s a little dark I think and I may lift some of the pigment later. We’ll see. Plus I need to fudge the horizon line of the lake so it’s not such a straight hard line but I’ll do that after I do the wash of the blue sky reflecting on the lake which is next. I smoothed out the sky a bit by using a wet brush over the blue of the sky moving from left to right and I like it better.

9” x 6”

Saturday afternoon and early evening we binge watched Outer Range. We had already seen the first episode of the second season and we watched all but the last episode. Unfortunately Amazon has not renewed it for a third season even though it rates pretty high, apparently because it’s budget exceeded it’s financial return, so I don’t expect the last episode will resolve anything which is unfortunate because I really like it. It’s sort of sci-fi about two feuding ranch families with an anomaly on one of the ranches, a big black hole that comes and goes involving time travel and a mysterious mineral, and how these individual interact not only in present time but also in the past. Hard to explain and a lot of the time hard to know exactly what’s going on. But the second season has been really good so I’m very disappointed that it hasn’t been renewed.

Sunday I worked on the painting some more, not only reflecting the blue part of the sky but the whole lake surface. I need to add a little more blue tones in the gray part under the foliage line but I’m pretty happy with it so far. I do think the green line is a too dark, which is kind of ironic because when I was taking the class I had a hard time getting the colors dark enough, but I’m not sure I can do much about it. I tried lifting some of the pigment but it doesn't seem any lighter. Next I’m going to work on the bare trees in the distance.

Well, another morning’s work outside awaits after breakfast.