fall fell, sewing projects, fuckery, October skies

Our first real cold front blew in last night bringing us lows in the 40s and 50s and highs in the 70s for the next week and another clear blue sky day today. It’s still very breezy out there. Did I say breezy? It’s windy out there.

Sorting through stuff. Went over to the studio to get my gold and metal leaf and the box of acrylic and oil paints I have but never use. Might get rid of the oil paints, probably will since I have no desire to use them, too messy, but the acrylics can be used in the art journal along with the metal leaf. Haven’t started another page yet so I’m trying to decide if I want to take care of some other small projects as long as I have my sewing stuff out, one of which is making a new curtain for my little closet.

When the house flooded after Harvey and I had to remodel the two rooms and the little bathroom, the configuration of which is a short hall (about 5' which opens into the bedroom) with the bathroom on the left and a storage closet of all shelves on the right and the back wall of the room was a closet the width of the room and only one window to let in light. That room was dark and claustrophobic even though it is a large room. So when Rocky was working back there I had him take out the large closet and rebuild that back wall to accommodate the etched glass panels that used to be the entrance to my old shop and turn the storage space into a closet. The only way to put a door on the new closet though was to install a bi-fold door which because of the off size of the opening would have to be custom made so I just hang a curtain on a tension bar there instead. Right now I’m using a shower curtain but I have three saris that I’m thinking using one for a new curtain.

Back between my first and second marriage I was involved with a guy for a short time who went to India and brought me back the saris for which to sew something for myself, something I never did.

Part of the problem is I don’t know what they are made of or how to wash/clean the item once made. I’m pretty sure the green one with the gold threads is cotton and the purple with the now tarnishing silver threads I think is maybe silk, the third one on the right I have no idea, silk maybe, but it is so light the whole thing (approx. 4’ x 7’) probably doesn’t weigh more than a large feather and that’s the one I’m thinking of using.

Another project is making a small pillow out of the cross stitch piece that Pam did that I have.

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You can skip the next two paragraphs if you don't want to read about some of the current fuckery.

Fucking Ken Paxton, Texas’ Attorney General, is once again wasting our taxpayer money on one of his frivolous lawsuits. Now he is suing the makers of Tylenol claiming they hid the risk of autism and ADHD to fetuses when taken by pregnant women, another one of “we’ll get the proof (ie manufacture)” RFK Jr.’s brain worm fever dreams. There is zero proof or credibility to that claim but that doesn’t stop our Kenny and of course Trump bought into it. What makes this particularly ridiculous is that republicans don’t believe in consumer safety, constantly slashing oversight and consumer protection regulations.

And in just a few days, SNAP payments will be suspended, not just reduced but suspended. The republican excuse is because of the government shut down they refuse to negotiate an end to, preferring to blame the democrats for not caving on taking healthcare away from many Americans by allowing the ACA tax credits, which make it affordable, to expire so that they can give bigger tax breaks to the rich, people that obviously don’t need it. The USDA, the agency under which SNAP falls, has about $6 billion in reserve for this very contingency and they also have the power to transfer already allocated funds from one program to another but they are not going to use that money. Why? Because Trump told them not to. They are fine with children, the elderly, the disabled, and our veterans and active duty personnel of the armed forces going hungry in a bid to force democrats to fold. So basically republicans are saying you can have healthcare or food but not both. Federal workers suspended from getting paychecks because of the government shut down are already straining the resources of food banks. It’s going to get much much worse. Explain to me how this is making America great.

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And so to end on a better note, more October skies, 24th - 27th.

art, rain, more art, weekend activity, and yes, October skies

I finished the red bud leaves card Friday

and Friday night the seemingly impossible happened. It rained! Finally a storm big enough happened. Didn’t give us a whole lot, maybe 1 1/2” and in the middle of the night with wind, lightning, and thunder and the attendant neurotic dog preventing me from sleeping which was sort of ok as I listened to the rain with the window open and the earth sighing. 

Saturday I picked up over 5 gallons of pecans. Added to the handful or two or three I’ve been picking up the last few weeks I now have two full boxes. The one the right was Saturday’s haul.

Speaking of art, Barbara Rogers of When I Was 69 shared this video of an installation Andy Goldsworthy did in a gallery in England. He is one of my favorite artists and this short film is about putting together this installation as well as his thoughts on his work in general.

Back to the mundane, Sunday I finally took care of two things, first I cut a piece of 1/4” plywood and glued the four tiles I got in Portugal lo those many years ago. Now to attach the hanger on the back and put it on the wall. 

Of course now I'm thinking I should have done this configuration. Easy enough to redo it.

The other thing I did was cut two pieces of 3/4” plywood to replace the wood shelf on this little potting table under the eave of the barn. The original one is rotted. I had to cut two pieces because I didn’t have a piece of plywood wide enough but that’s ok because I plan to cover it with a piece of vinyl flooring leftover from the bathroom remodel in the hopes that it will protect the new wood from rotting, or rotting as fast.

This morning I cut the vinyl and tacked it on. Those white spots are glare from the sun.

And more October skies, 19th - 23rd.

misc pics, some good news among the bad, more art stuff, more October skies

A few miscellaneous pics that have been piling up to start. Cat draped across my leg while we watch tv in the hour before bed.

Goldenrod.

Leopard frog rescued from the probing paws and nose of Cat. This one was in the house, stunned but unharmed.

Once again my inbox is overflowing with no desire to wade through all the horror. Delete, delete, delete. I don’t need to read ten essays on something I’m aware of and have no control over. And speaking of that continuing horror, Trump, not satisfied with destroying the economy, terrorizing the undocumented population we rely on for so many things, punishing blue cities and states for not voting for him by withholding federal funds, punishing his outspoken critics by having the DOJ file frivolous lawsuits against them, ending scientific research, trashing relationships with our allies, slashing access to healthcare and the social safety net, refusing federal aid for disaster relief, and destroying overseas markets for our farmers has bulldozed the East Wing of the White House without going through the lengthy process of making changes to the People’s House to replace it with an enormous garish fake gold plated unnecessary unwanted ballroom because he’s jealous of the one Putin has at the Winter Palace. Turning the Oval Office into a bordello and paving over what used to be the Rose Garden just didn’t do it for him. I did read one analysis yesterday that this ‘movement’ will all collapse within months of Trump’s death. I just hope I outlive him and am here to see it.

So on to better news, fellow blogger Joanne of Cup On The Bus, that wonderful weaver of kitchen towels, my friend who has suffered trauma after trauma after trauma and who resiliently always perseveres, who last posted August 1st is accounted for. Her long absence from blogging had me concerned and I emailed her October 13th. When she didn’t reply within the next day or two as she usually does I began to think maybe the worst had happened. Those of you who also follow Joanne will be relieved to hear the worst did not happen, just more trauma from which she is stubbornly working her way through. She replied to my email Tuesday. She resolved the pain in her leg issue with a minor (as these things go) vascular surgery and two weeks of rehab. However, four days after getting home she fell and broke her hip so is currently back in rehab flat on her back with weeks still to go. “Not wonderful but I can get through it”, she wrote.

Very busy yesterday at SHARE and I expect next week to be just as and next month more so when the cuts to SNAP take effect. No money to feed American citizens who are suffering from Trump’s ‘economy’ but $20 billion to bail out Argentina because their president is a wannabe Trump.

Ok, ok. Enough. After finishing Paisleigh’s skirt sans hem I got my mending done, patching two bottom fitted sheets which had tears and worn through spots. The first time this happened I consigned the fitted sheet to garden use covering plants and kept the top sheet (remember the extra top sheet from when I cleaned out the linen closet? Yeah, that one) but since then two more sheet sets tore. I know my heels are calloused from the cheap outdoor gardening sandals I wear but really? So I used the extra sheet for the patches. Now my tan and maroon fitted sheets have big blue patches because I wasn’t tossing them. Good sheets are expensive.

I’ve also finished the fourth page in the art journal, the one with the background done by transferring the color from foil. Can’t decide if I want to add watercolor over the marker leaves or leave it as is. Probably as is and can try that on another page. 

And I’m starting another art card of red bud tree leaves and I think I want to do one more bird, a wren or maybe a tufted titmouse and then I think I’ll be done. I got all the previous ones packaged.

And more October skies, 16th - 18th.

sewing, arting, remembering, and more October skies

It’s been a busy few days starting with Thursday when I have to get up early, have my coffee and breakfast, showered and dressed and out the door before 9 am to get to SHARE. And busy at SHARE, not overwhelming but steadily refilling baskets with the appropriate amounts of an assortment of canned goods (meat, vegetables, beans, fruit, soup, ravioli, pasta sauce, tomato sauce), raman, crackers, mac and cheese, juice, spaghetti noodles, instant mashed potatoes, snack bars, and instant oatmeal. And that’s just part of what they get. The guys that fill the orders add rice, dried beans, snacks, drinks, cereal, milk, eggs, desserts, bread, fresh produce (depending on what gets donated that day), coffee (if we have it), meat, and other miscellaneous things. There is a shelf where people can select three items that has things like ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, peanut butter, salsa, cooking oil, flour, sugar, cake or pancake mix, miscellaneous donated canned goods, etc. Another shelf of personal hygiene items like soap, toothpaste, toothbrushes, shampoo, deodorant, etc, where they can select two things. The families we serve can only get the full complement of food once every three months but by law anyone who asks for food gets food from the very limited USDA list. We also provide clothing, sheets, blankets, pillows, appliances (one a year), and miscellaneous household goods like dinnerware, glasses, anything and everything that gets donated when people are clearing out a house.

Friday I finally started on making Paisleigh’s long skirt that she wanted because her Granny and her Gramma both wear long skirts sometimes, a simple gathered skirt with pockets. 

I got it gathered with the waistband sewn on and one pocket pinned on so when she and her dad dropped by that late afternoon I held it up to her to check the placement of the pockets which was fine except even though I measured her waist and added two inches, I wasn’t sure the waistband was big enough. Damn. So Saturday afternoon, I undid everything I had done Friday and sewed the pockets on (easier before gathering), regathered the skirt, and cut another longer by another two inches waistband and sewed it on, ran the elastic and finished except for hemming for which I need Paisleigh to get the length right.

Saturday morning I also had to be up early fed, dressed, and out the door before 9 am for the art journal workshop I had signed up for at Hesed House. The woman who was putting it on provided the mixed media sketchbook, paints, markers, glue, magazines, stencils, stickers, etc. She planned for us to do three pages each using different techniques. The first page was picking out an affirmation from a set of cards she had or some other thing like a favorite scripture and write it down with black permanent marker. Then we wet the page and just splotched watercolor on it letting it spread however. My first page:

The second page was going through the magazines and cutting out a word or words and pictures and doing a sort of collage in a horizontal format using the things cut out and decorative tape, stickers, colored markers, whatever. My second page:

The third page was picking out a stencil and using a sponge brush with acrylic paint (one color), picking a watercolor  color and painting a repeating shape (circle, square, rectangle), then use markers to draw on it, then pick out a smashed bottle cap (the point being to show how to include bits of trash) and glue that on (I didn’t want a bottle cap so I used a sticker), and finally to spritz diluted paint in spray bottles over the whole thing (I used a brown that was so diluted it’s hard to see). My third page:

Since we still had time, she showed us a fourth technique for making a background. Water soluble markers colored on a piece of foil, wet the page with water from a spray bottle, place the foil color side down onto the wet page and press it down transferring the color to the page. I intend to draw over it but time was up.

Sunday, we drove into the city for our friend Dick’s memorial gathering held in the event room in Kathy’s residential building. So many people we haven’t seen since the covid lockdown and the last open house, since Dick’s health started to fail and they worked in the studio less and less; the other artists who participated, other artists who worked in other media who always came, collectors who came every year to see what was new and to maybe buy, those who came who were neither artists nor collectors but friends and familiar faces. So many people we hadn’t seen in nearly six years and likely will never see again, too many other deaths reported of spouses and in one case a daughter, the community we had been a part of for 25 years. Dick and Kathy were the magnet that drew us all together.

And once again, more October skies, 13th - 15th, blue sky days.

short stories, part whatever and more Oct. skies

Steve of Shadows and Light wrote that the parakeets that come to his bird feeder are molting, losing old feathers and growing new ones, as all birds do. It made me think of trees which also ‘molt’, losing old leaves and growing new ones. And then of humans who do not molt though hair and skin cells are constantly shed and replaced. Which got me to thinking about hair and how long an individual hair lives since some women who have never cut their hair from birth have extremely long hair. So I looked it up. A human hair lives and grows on average 2 - 7 years before the resting phase and finally shedding and can reach a maximum length of 3’ - 6’ or about half as long as the person is tall depending on the individual, genetics, breakage, and relative health of the hair. There are exceptions of course as there are in all things, some women have/had hair down to their ankles which must be a nightmare to wash.

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Last Friday was Paisleigh’s 4th birthday and her party was Saturday afternoon. The child has a playground in her backyard. For her 2nd birthday she got a full size trampoline, 3rd birthday a bouncy castle and a play set that consists of a strap anchored between trees with a swing, hoops, ladder, and some other stuff I can’t recall descending from it. This birthday she got a treehouse with two slides (fast and slow), a climbing wall (about 5’ at a slant), and a zip line. At 4 Paisleigh already knows the proper response to any present she opens whether she fully understands what it is or not. She gasps with delight. Unless it’s the third gift of clothes clothes, oh, another shirt though she did like the new jacket that is so heavy it might get cold enough this winter for her wear it a day or two.

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If you’ve been reading me for a while you may remember the dust up with the then new neighbor, the gun nut with his chickens who would shoot at stray and neighbors' dogs who came into his yard chasing his chickens, chickens he made no effort to contain and let go into neighboring yards. One day he shot at the neighbor's dog in its own yard because it had been in his yard and the bullet whizzed by that neighbor. Big confrontation and the chicken man finally put a fence around the property. Well he died of a heart attack about five years ago, the chickens all finally died or were killed by other critters. Last year the widow got more chickens and although the property is still fenced there is a low spot where three or four of them get out under the fence every day and they strut around in the ditch and in other neighbor’s yards and she makes no effort to prevent it. I’ve chased them out of my yard. Second part of this, another neighbor who generally has a big dog or two who are well behaved and stay in their yard, had surgery on his neck that didn’t go as well as hoped and is undergoing PT in Sugar Land during the week so no one is home and the scraggly male big dog and two puppies there currently are roamers. Yesterday they knocked over my neighbor on the east side’s trash can and spread trash around and this morning when that neighbor was mowing his yard the dog trotted down the street with something big and brown in it’s mouth followed by the two puppies. I hollered at my neighbor, what did he have in his mouth? A chicken. Life in the country.

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Another interesting article from Nautilus…an interview with author Kieran Fox, a neuroscientist, of a book about Albert Einstein, I Am A Part Of Infinity, The Spiritual Journey Of Albert Einstein, and worth the read. A few quotes from the interview/book:  

“Reading Kant, I began to suspect everything I was taught,” Einstein said. “I no longer believed in the known God of the Bible, but rather in the mysterious God expressed in nature.”

“Not long after, in his early 20s, while Einstein was putting together the ideas that would revolutionize the physics of space, time, and matter…he kept exploring this other conception of the divine. He read the philosophical reflections of Arthur Schopenhauer, who saw that the radical religious ideas of thinkers…that nature and God are somehow One—mirrored similar notions in the oldest sacred Indian scriptures.” 

“At age 51…he explained his own contact with the divine. “I will call it the cosmic religious sense.”” and nine years later “Life and death flow into one, and there is neither evolution or destiny; only being.” 

“How can this cosmic religious experience be communicated man to man, if it cannot lead to a definite conception of God or to a theology? It seems to me that the most important function of art and of science is to arouse and keep alive this feeling in those who are receptive.” 

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More October skies, 7th - 12th.

pecans, bookcases, feeling invisible (not me but some people), and the October sky

Our week of lower temps and low humidity, mornings with the doors open, a little taste of fall, are over. Monday the humidity was back with temps climbing. Back to summer and still no rain. Until today. This morning was nice and cool, low humidity. Forecast is lows in the 60s, highs in the low 90s for the foreseeable future but still no rain. The low humidity has caused the pecan husks to start releasing the mature nuts. I’ve collected a small box worth this past week. I’ve also already dumped a 5 gallon bucket worth of bad ones on the burnpile and started filling it again so it remains to be seen how many good ones I’ll get.

Did some house cleaning across the street last weekend while Robin was out of town and finally moved the chair in my bedroom back over to that house and moved the bookcase I wanted over to my bedroom. I didn’t need the chair because Jade is storing her twin recliner loveseat, which seems to be permanent, in my bedroom. I have three bookcases in the in house studio/office, one has books and our LP collection and some miscellaneous stuff. Another had books and CDs on the top three shelves, miscellaneous hardware and collected seeds and other stuff on the bottom three. The third bookcase held my art supplies and sketchbook, sewing stuff and sewing machine, a box of glues and tapes, and a box of miscellaneous repair stuff, all very crowded and messy, and now much more organized with room to spare.

So the books and CDs got moved from the one to the bedroom, 

old seeds and other stuff cleared out from the same and the stuff from the third is now spread out between the two. 

Something I see on SM is older women feel like they've become socially invisible. Some women are just fine with that but I guess others feel isolated. I’m 75 and I have never felt invisible. I think maybe part of that is that those who feel that way stop engaging, waiting to be noticed. If I want to be noticed I speak up, make eye contact, exchange pleasantries even if it’s only offering the nod of ‘I see you’ as you pass. People regardless of age or sex respond. If I’m feeling anti-social, which happens, it’s my choice to not engage and they are invisible to me. Anyway, what got me thinking about this is that yesterday evening when I was trundling the trash can over to the shop drive which is the address the trash service has for pick-up (an arrangement made when Pam was alive and the water to her house came off the same meter as the shop so we paid the water bill and she paid for trash service that we both used; now of course we pay it but haven’t changed the address) a blue pickup turned the corner onto my street and when the driver came abreast of me he stopped. I stopped and looked at this very attractive younger man (late 30s early 40s I guess), longish blond hair kind of windblown, gorgeous ice blue eyes (I mean swoon worthy), big smile, elbow resting on the open window kind of leaning out asked me how I was. Fine and yourself, doing well. Then I asked, do I know you because I couldn’t place him. He says he did some work in the neighborhood. OK, now I know who he is, he did the work on Montreal’s old house that the woman who bought it now rents out. Sam, right? I asked. Yes. We chatted a bit. You live around here I asked. No he lives in Beasley a small town between here and Rosenberg, was coming back from a job in Blessing, a very small town about a half hour from Wharton in the other direction. We wished each other well and off he went.

I found this whole thing a little unusual for two reasons. One, he had no reason to be driving down my street because Hwy 59 would take him from the cut off to Blessing bypassing Wharton and on to his exit for Beasley so I figure he wanted a drive by to see how the work he did was holding up or maybe the woman who bought the house, who also lives in Beasley, asked him to just get a look see. The other thing was that he remembered me and stopped to chat instead of just driving on by. We only had two face to face encounters that I remember. The first when he and the woman were at the house right after she bought it and he introduced themselves after I crossed the street from the shop, eyeing strangers there before I knew Montreal had sold the house. The second time was when Sam came to our door to ask if he could get a bucket of two of water to prime the pump for the well and septic. Maybe waved to each other a couple of times. So yeah, put a big smile on my face that this good looking younger man who I had had a minor encounter with well over a year ago stopped to chat a bit when he saw me walking down the street.

I’ve been taking pictures of the sky every day this month. It can change dramatically during the day and depending on how many pictures I take on any particular day, sometimes hard to choose just one. Here are the first six days. I only took one picture Oct. 5 and it’s not in great focus but you get the idea.