drawing in progress and cats

I finally stopped dicking around with the violet drawings and plunged ahead with a colored pencil version. I’ve been working on it for an hour or so at a time. Usually until I reach the point where I’m not happy with my progress, can’t seem to get it where I want it (this is a typical stage for me whether I’m drawing, painting or sculpting wax models) and I put it aside. When I return to work on it again it’s never as bad as I seemed to think it was. Except with the sculpting. I always hit that stage where I think I’ll never get it right usually about midway and then it all starts to come together. I think I miss the model making the most about not working in glass anymore, the working in 3 D. Anyway, I’m pretty happy with the way this first drawing is going. Since I haven’t been able to print the picture out that I’m using for reference, I’m working on the drawing in front of my computer.

Edit: as requested by Codex, I’ve added the photo of the violet I’m using for reference.

Not much to report, short forays out in the yard watering pots and moving the sprinkler around. Picked up the pile of tree debris by the driveway and tossed it in the truck on Saturday, then drove it over and picked up the tree debris from Gary’s work and the boys unloaded it onto the burn pile for me. Sunday I mulched two of the front flowerbeds with pine needles after watering them. We had a small brief shower that barely got the ground wet but was very noisy with thunder rumbling so I suppose somewhere was getting a good rain.

When I went across the street late afternoon yesterday to feed the cats Momcat followed me home and if I had given her even half an invitation she would have come in the house. 

She did that Saturday too. Friday morning when I went out Lovey was on the driveway 

and after I came in I looked out the window and there was Twin. Last night when I went out to close the garage not only was Momcat still there but Lovey was too. And this morning when I opened the garage door, Momcat and Lovey were right outside under the car. Cat is not pleased that Lovey is hanging around. 

Some of you may remember that these are the cats that live under my sister’s old house, the one we put on the shop yard for her. The summer before Pam died Momcat showed up and had three kittens over there and Pam started feeding them but she didn’t intend to keep them. She expected that the local animal rescue would help her find them homes. She did trap Momcat who we think was dumped when it became obvious she was about to drop a load of kittens, and got her fixed but couldn’t get any help getting rid of the kittens that were living under her back porch. And then my sister died when the kittens were about 5 months old so I started feeding them with the same intent but the local rescue is less interested in cats than it is in dogs, preferably puppies. I did, over the next few months get them to trust me enough that I managed to get the three boys fixed and by that time they were a bonded trio and I was sure that if I tried to split them up and find homes for them, most likely as barn cats, they would run off and become feral. Plus while they now let me pet them and cuddle them they are distrustful of any other humans other than me and Robin who feeds them on my yoga nights. The boys, Handsome Boy, Lovey, and Twin, are two years old this summer and live under Pam’s house. I lifted one of the skirt panels enough so that they can go in and out for shelter. Momcat, who is not attached to her sons at all, roams a little more but it’s also her home base. And the feral male Ghost who first started showing up last year and now makes himself at home though he still won’t let either of us touch him, so we feed him too.

Thunder was rumbling in the distance when I got up this morning and three hours later the sky was dark and the lightning was, if not right over us, very near with the flash and the bang happening almost simultaneously. Now, an hour later, it seems to have worn itself out. It’s quiet and the sun is shining. Did it bring us any rain? 

No. 

Oh, and I told Blondi Blathers that I would post a picture of the morning glory bush so here it is.

who is that person in the mirror?

I think all my wrinkles underwent mitosis the other day.

I did take the truck over on Sunday and gathered up all the pruned branches off the white orchid shrub and the tallow tree and the vines of the virginia creeper and Eric emptied it onto the burn pile for me. Eric works with my grandson Mikey at the same auto repair shop and he and his wife rent a room in my daughter’s house (long story about how that came to be but it’s working out well for all parties) and so Eric is often over at the shop too after hours and weekends. Works for me. The boys are quick to help me with whatever I need. And since Paisleigh was also there on Sunday she tagged along with me. We ‘played chalk’ and she’s getting better at drawing a hopscotch and writing the numbers with a little help and guidance and then we came in and played doctor with one of the stuffed toys. Then she wanted to look at some pictures on my computer and when we got to the picture of the carrots I pulled the other day we went out and she pulled a carrot for her Pop Pop (my son in law) for him to cook and eat.

Then we looked at more pictures and then she wanted to write with my keyboard on the computer and this is what she wrote:  l pxooxaos-0qs0iqi  q os oq  iiufhofofooioir4utlkkhdjjcjkjkkjksjkjglllhskslljfojf’lofjrfhfljj. Then we played taking a nap and after that I took her back to her dad over at the shop so that I could go back home and take a shower and an actual nap. Only I sat quietly and read for a while instead.

I caught my neighbor Gary on Monday coming back from his evening walk and while he doesn’t have a pole chain saw he has a pole saw and he said he’d come cut the branches for me the next day, which he did Tuesday morning cutting more of the high branches above the weatherhead and some that were close to the end of the house. 

So already I have another load of branches to pick up and haul to the burn pile including a pile at my house from Monday when a windstorm blew through bringing a little rain that dropped a bunch of small to medium branches and one fairly large limb. I love that my house is surrounded by trees but why do they have to all be ones that self prune and drop branches all the time! 

Small forays out in the yard Wednesday, watered the plants in pots in the morning then later dead headed the zinnias which are still blooming but waning. Flowers are smaller and some of the smaller plants have died back. Pulled a few weeds. This will be the modus operandi for the foreseeable future entering the dog days of summer. 

Last spring you might remember that I moved a bigger table into the barn to keep my gardening and potting stuff on and put up a small shelf which almost immediately wasn’t big enough. I cut a longer shelf board a while back and today I finally put it up where the short shelf was and then put the short shelf underneath it. 

The mexican bird of paradise, also called pride of barbados, is still blooming as is the rangoon creeper,

the morning glory bush, 

the aforementioned zinnias, and the yellow bells.

On a closer look this young lady was looking for her next meal. She’s only about 2” right now but will get much bigger.

what I've been reading

I’m surprised I have 10 books on my review list since I last published what I’ve been reading. I thought surely some of these I had already published but according to my archives, it’s been three months. Here’s the first five. 

Order Of Swans by Jude Deverauz - sci fi fantasy. Unknown to Kaley her mother was from another planet, Bellis where people have extraordinary abilities. When Kaley was three years old Jobi, family friend who had sensed that Kaley would be important to the survival of his people and planet, effected Graceen’s ‘death’ and put her on the ship back to Bellis leaving Kaley behind to be raised by her Earth father and grandparents. Jobi had a plan and returned when Kaley was 26 to train her and bring her back to Bellis although without telling her she would be traveling to another planet. When Kaley’s dissertation on fairy tales was rejected by her advisor Jobi used that to trick her into visiting his home for the summer, a trip that actually takes three years, putting her into a deep sleep for the journey. Once on Bellis she meets Tanek, a Swansman who is tasked with being her guide on a different island so Kaley can collect the tales from Bellis. Accompanying them is Sojee, her bodyguard since the island they are going to is men only (the women live on a different island). In actuality, the mission is to find the kings errant son and bring him back for an alliance marriage. From the beginning Kaley exhibits powers of her own and encounters real life fairy tales while her and Tanek’s relationship evolves from antagonism to love. There’s so much more to the story. It ends on a cliffhanger and dammit, nowhere on the cover or the inside flap did it say that this was part one of two. So now I have to wait and see how everything resolves.

The Blue Hour by Paula Hawkins - Famous artist Vanessa Chapman died of cancer and left her estate to the Fairburn Foundation created by her estranged galleriest Douglas Lennox, naming her companion Grace as executor of her estate. While most of Vanessa’s paintings and ceramics and sculptures and diaries have been turned over, Grace has held back some resulting in years of acrimonious charges involving lawyers. When Douglas is killed in a hunting accident and one of Vanessa’s sculptures on display at a museum is found to contain a human bone his son Sebastian sends James Becker, their art expert and specifically an expert on Vanessa Chapman, an artist he has been enamored of since he was a child and his mother bought one of her small paintings, to Eris Island, Vanessa’s home and studio that is only accessible at low tide, and now the home of Grace, to deal with Grace, to determine more about the bone before the assemblage is dismantled and the bone tested, and to get the remaining bits of Vanessa’s estate. Becker’s approach is to make friends with Grace since the threats of the previous years did not resolve the standoff but the more Becker digs, questions arise concerning the disappearance of Vanessa’s husband and her cancellation of a show days before the opening, and Grace’s secrets start to emerge. Hawkins is an engaging storyteller, this is the third book of hers I’ve read, and I enjoyed this one even though it didn’t end the way I would have wanted.

Masquerade by O.O. Sangoyomi - set in 15th century West Africa. Ododo, a young woman, is a member of the blacksmith guild in Timbuktu where she has lived all her life, daughter of the head of the guild. Being a blacksmith, or a witch as the rest of the population calls them, is the last refuge of unwanted women, turned away by the men in their lives or their family. In Ododo’s mother’s case, raped and pregnant as a teen. Ododo makes flowers that she sells in the market and on this particular day, a new warrior king has conquered the city and incorporated it into his vast kingdom. Also on this particular day she is making a flower and singing in the back court when a raggedy man stops to talk to her and she gifts him the flower. The next day she is kidnapped and taken to the capitol city of Sangote where she learns that she is to be the bride of the Alaafin, the king of Yorubaland and that raggedy man was none other than him. She is smothered with luxuries and raised to high status but not everyone is happy with the king’s choice. Ododo has no intention of being sent back to her previous miserable existence and must learn to navigate the currents in the royal city, making allies, determined to be more than just a wife, which she considers another form of subjugation, and finds the power of influence and advisor to the king too much to resist. I’ll leave it at that. I really liked this book and the last few pages surprised me.

Pitch Dark by Paul Doiron - One of the wardens calls Mike Bowditch, a game warden investigator in Maine, about a possible missing person and whether or not to institute a search. The possible missing person, a man named Ammond who is asking around about a man and his 11 year old daughter who might be hiding out in the wilds of Maine has rented an ATV and hasn’t been heard from in two days during some really bad weather. Mike makes some calls and learns there is a man with a daughter, Mike and Cady Redmon, who is building a cabin in a remote part of the woods and makes plans to visit him and find out if he knows the man that is looking for him. When Mike and his father in law Charles are flown to the site by Josie, for whom the cabin is being built, all seems fine and well at first. But Mike feels something is wrong and as his questions get more pointed, the room gets fussier, and he wakes up to find the three of them bound to trees, stripped of their weapons, while the Redmons make their escape into the wilds of the Maine woods. When Josie dies from the drug, Mike takes off after the Redmons determined to catch them armed only with a flare gun and a pocket knife before they can cross into Canada. Mark and Cady both are deadly adversaries and are not who they claimed to be.

The Witches Of El Paso by Luis Jaramillo - Nena, the youngest of three sisters, suffers from visions and premonitions. At 18, she spends her days in El Paso TX taking care of her sisters’ two children and wishes for more from life. One night Nena is drawn outside where she is somehow transported back in time to El Paso del Norte in colonial Mexico where Sister Benedicta has come to fetch her. Nena is taken to the convent where she learns that some of the nuns also experience La Vista, the force or magic that underlies the power of existence. She joins their aquelarre where she learns to control La Vista instead of it controlling her and the enchantos or songs that call La Vista to them. Mostly what Nena wants is to return home back to her time but when smallpox runs through the convent and El Paso del Norte, she is expelled from the convent, sent to heal Sister Benedicta’s brother with the brebaje, a sort of magical food, that Nena caused to be made at the meeting of the aquelarre because the other nuns feared Nena’s power would draw unwelcome attention to the convent. The story shifts back and forth in time, from Nena’s childhood to her days in El Paso del Norte to her return to her time, and the present when now an old woman, Nena enlists the aid of her great niece to open the door to El Paso del Norte one last time. 

 

now I'm ready for a nap

I finally got out in the yard Friday to do some maintenance which is constant around here. I have been needing to clear the spray nozzles from the septic system of grass and weeds. They sit inside a concrete donut and one of the spray heads needed to be replaced which was done last week. So I got my trowel and nippers and a bucket and a shovel for something else and headed over to the shop yard. Audra was over there with the great grands while she detailed a car and when Paisleigh saw me she came running with open arms…Gramma! She helped me pull grass and dig with the trowel. 

When that task was done we pulled all the roots and weeds from a pile of dirt from when Mikey dug a little trench in front of one of the bay doors to help with drainage so rain wouldn’t seep under and into the shop. Then we transferred the dirt to the bucket, me using the big shovel, Paisleigh using the trowel, and used it to fill one of the holes in the flower bed around the fringe flower tree that I had weeded and bordered with bricks previously at my house. After that it was time to come in and cool off and then a run to the Evil Empire.

I have another couple of chores to do over at Pam’s house this weekend. The tallow tree that grows on the fence line needs to be pruned back because the branches have completely swallowed the weatherhead on the power pole that brings electricity to the house and Virginia creeper has grown up under the house and is coming out at the top from under the siding. 

I’ve already been out this morning at my house cutting down all the water sprouts from the four crepe myrtles in the front yard.

Last night after getting hot and sweaty during the day I wanted something easy and light for dinner. I paged through my binder of accumulated recipes twice and the penne pasta with grape tomatoes, olives, and spinach was the only thing that appealed to me. No after picture but here’s all the ingredients waiting to be combined in the skillet. L to R front row: pasta water (only used about 1/4 cup), red pepper flakes, garlic thinly sliced, coarsely chopped kalamata olives, fresh basil leaves; middle row: vegetable broth (also only used 1/4 cup), black pepper, salt, grape tomatoes halved, parmesan; back row: olive oil, penne pasta cooked al dente, baby spinach.

I sat down after lunch on Friday and made another stab at the other violet drawing and I’m much happier with it now. I didn’t erase the whole thing just most of it to get it back to where it started from and then went from there. It’s better. I’m happy enough with it.

Later…I am too damn old to be crawling under that house on my elbows and knees. But first I pruned the white orchid tree, a volunteer from mine. I gave it to my sister who planted it in the ground next to the house and while it freezes down to the ground every winter it comes back bigger and bushier than the year before. It’s more like a shrub than a tree so about twice a year I have to prune it so the branches aren’t rubbing up against the house. Then I cut back all the Virginia creeper that was growing among the bulbs she planted along the front of the house. And then I raised two of the skirt panels on the end of the house so I could get under there and cut away all the Virginia creeper growing under there and up under the siding. I had to crawl under the struts and beams more than halfway down to get it all.

After that I got the 12' ladder and cut as much of the tallow branches as I could reach around and over the weatherhead. It's clear for now but I need to see if one of my neighbors has one of those pole chainsaws to get the branches hanging higher above it. All that debris can just stay because after an hour and a half my hair, sweat rag tied around my forehead, clothes, panties, all soaked, not to mention dirt encrusted knees and elbows. I'll drive the truck over tomorrow and haul it all to the burn pile. 

 

white flowers, purple pencils, pink sky, brain remembers something obscure and forgets something important

The white orchid flower tree in a pot this morning.

This is how crazy my brain is. I woke up in the middle of the night with an earworm refrain from Sledgehammer by Peter Gabriel. Do you know how long it has been since I heard that song? Decades, so long I can’t tell you how long. Seriously, where did that come from, dredged up by what?

I’ve done almost nothing the past four days. I went to yoga Monday night and tonight and grudgingly did the week’s grocery shopping yesterday. That’s the most ambitious I’ve been especially since I completely forgot about my primary care check-up yesterday morning. Even after getting the bloodwork done early and did the check-in online on Saturday, checked my calendar Monday to remind myself of the day and time and still I completely forgot until almost noon. Damn it. So now I’ve rescheduled for the end of August.

I liked the drawing of the woodland violet so much better after I worked on it while looking at the image on my computer that I decided to do the same to the other of the four violet drawings I did that I plan to go forward on, rejecting the other two for various reasons. Did it come out better? Oh hell no, in fact it’s worse to the point that I’m discarding the whole thing. It’s beyond repair at this point. Better to start over. I guess, maybe, I don’t know. I’m just disgusted with it right now.

We made our errand run earlier today. The Michael’s only had two of the five of the purple pencils I wanted but I selected 8 more of various colors I didn’t have just at random.

The display for the pencils was about half empty so maybe later they’ll have a better selection. Then onto the liquor warehouse where besides vodka, tequila, and whisky, we also bought some of those new THC beverages (and so of course on the way home the news reported that the Texas Senate approved the second reading of a bill to ban THC products with the final vote on Friday. Our governor has already vetoed one bill to ban those products telling them to regulate them, not ban them so we’ll see what happens). Then it was on to Costco and I saw there was a Michael’s across the street in the shopping center which I knew was there and forgot. That bigger store in a bigger populated area would probably have had a better selection of pencils. Oh well, might have to make a special trip out there. Anyway, our small freezer and the pantry are now stuffed. 

And once again the coolant in the car AC has all but leaked out, each can only lasts about two weeks so I hope Mikey can get to my car this weekend.

Tonight’s sky.

good things and horrible things

Fridays sunset. It was just past peak before I could get back out there with my phone to take a picture.

I’ve been seeing juvenile cardinals at the bird feeder; small, slender, don’t have their full adult coloring quite yet, unsure, looking around for mom or dad to feed them before tentatively pecking at the sunflower seeds but getting bolder. Just now a juvenile male and an adult female, mother and son?. He is spotty with color, raggedy looking fluttering his wings at mom, beak open. She turned her back on him, it’s right there in front of you son. Finches, sparrows, juvenile cardinals tussling for position until an adult male cardinal flies up and they all scatter.

It rained Friday, maybe about an inch, and a short shower today but still overcast and thundery, so it’s been relatively cooler. Yesterday was overcast and only got to 90, relatively being the key word here. Haven’t really been working out in the yard this week though I did dead head the zinnias again and moved some concrete mortar bricks to the barn, moved the white orchid tree in it’s pot to a shadier area. The pot it’s in is too small and it dries out fast in the sun. I’ll repot it this fall. Did a little weeding. These less hot days would have been good to be out there doing stuff but I just didn’t feel like it.

I’ve been working on my violet drawings, still in the pencil stage. Enlarged one in a 4” square and transferred it to the sketchbook. Been reworking another paying more attention to the whole photo and I’m liking it a lot better, also in a 4” square. New version looks much like the previous version. 

When I did the initial drawings I cropped the photo on my computer to a 6” square, made four copies and then cropped each to one quadrant and that’s what I looked at when I did my first small drawings 2.5”/3” x 3”. I probably need to do that with the other one too. I need more variations of purple pencils before I do it in color so when we go to Costco next Wednesday I’m going to stop at Michael’s on the way. Last time I was there they had a fairly large selection of individual Prismacolor pencils so I made a list of what I have and the ones I want.

My daughter and Paisleigh came over Saturday. Paisleigh, who will be four in October, wanted to paint so she and I got out her watercolors. She has a box here that holds her paints, crayons, colored pencils, sidewalk chalk, her own little art box. The first time we got out her watercolors I taught her to clean her brush between colors and that way the colors wouldn’t get all muddy. So I asked her if she remembers what to do, how to paint and she said yes, to clean her brush between colors. The child is so sharp and she’s very good at doing just that. There was some discussion of which brush she wanted to use. My good brushes are not an option so I held up brushes until she finally chose one. Others rejected for various reasons, one because it looked like a makeup brush. 

The wolf spider living in my bathroom has regrown its leg. I looked it up and yes they can regrow legs if they are not fully grown, are still molting, but I’m pretty sure this one is and was grown when I first spotted it and it was missing a leg so who knows, maybe it was just tucked away where I couldn’t see it. It seems to like being in the trash can as I find it in there often, though I don’t know if it can get out once in as the inside of the trash can is very smooth while the outside has some texture. Anyway, I will generally scoop it out when I see it in there.

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Just a few of the myriad horrors here: Ghislaine Maxwell, a woman who procured and abused children for Epstein’s rape culture and who lied on the stand and was charged with perjury along with sex trafficking of children was interviewed for two days by Trump’s ex personal lawyer now 2nd in command at the DOJ in an effort to ‘get the truth’ and dispel the controversy surrounding Trump’s participation and the client list while Trump dangles the power to pardon her. And why wouldn’t he? He’s already pardoned other sex traffickers and criminals. 

It’s costing us $10M for Trump to go cheat at golf for 5 days at his club in Scotland but there’s no money for food assistance for hungry people here in this country, all that has been slashed. And get this, he thinks the Palestinians suffering from starvation should tell him thank you for food they aren’t getting because Israel is using starvation as a weapon. FEMA has designated $608M to states to build detention centers to hold people whose only ‘crime’ is being here and not being white after denying aid to Americans in several states suffering from devastation due to natural disasters because Kristi Noam already blew through the DHS’s budget for ICE raids.

I commented on a post on SM about why people are distancing themselves from friends and family if they had voted for and support Trump. Someone called foul on that, that you shouldn’t cut off your family over politics. My comment was that it wasn’t about politics but a difference in morals. One guy replied that if Trump was so immoral why did so many people vote for him? Unfortunately and sadly, the answer to that is self evident. 

 

busy start to the week

Saturday’s sunset.

Another weekend of working outside in the yard. Not on the wild space though. Saturday I finished weeding the area around the Chinese fringe flower tree on the front east corner, dug up some of the easter lilies and planted them closer to the tree but kept others to plant elsewhere where they will get more sun, got the tomato cages cleared of vines and hung in the barn, drove the truck over to the burn pile and Mikey and Eric emptied it for me, pruned off the low hanging branches off the crepe myrtles along the side of the barn. Sunday I set up the sprinkler moving it every thirty minutes. Even after all that rain we got in June and early this month the ground is already dry and cracking. I mowed the little backyard, finished putting bricks around the fringe tree, still have a couple of holes to fill where the pine tree stumps rotted away and spread pine needles. 

Monday I hardly went outside. I had an early appointment at the lab in town to get blood drawn for my upcoming PC appointment next week. When I got there there were three people waiting outside and the place was closed. One of the people waiting happened to have the tech’s phone number and learned that she was going to be out until Thursday, that she had told them so but no replacement had showed up on Monday. Well, damn. Went home and got another early morning appointment for today (Tuesday) at the lab in Richmond, about 30 minutes away. So I got up early, again, jumped in the car and now I’m home having my coffee. No time to fill the empty bird feeder before I left and a cardinal just came and fluttered in front of the window right in front of me. So, yeah, now the bird feeder is full.

What I did Monday was work on resizing all the images I had previously sent to my friend who is writing the book on pate de verre. Turns out the ones I sent previously while they were all 300 dpi and big enough length and width they were all in the kilobyte range and she needed megabyte range for publishing. Don’t ask me to explain any further because I can’t. I had to find the raw images from when I took the pictures and figure out how I could crop/resize them without dropping in the KB range. I won’t go into detail but I did manage to crop and save most of them between 1.2 MB and 1.6 MB which she says is big enough. I had Photoshop Elements 11 but my new computer doesn’t support it and it would cost me $80 to upgrade. Worked on more today so hopefully she has enough the right size to pick from.

Today the faucet in the kitchen finally broke completely. It was one of those one handle things that swivels from side to side and back and forth for temp and flow and it’s been leaking for a couple of months getting worse and worse and last night it was gushing water from the swivel part but I could still turn it off. This morning it could no longer be turned off. Marc took it apart to see if it could be repaired but, nope. The weld that held the pin (that the handle attached to) to the ball completely broke so we went out and got a new set and Rocky is supposed to come by in the morning to install the new one. 

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As usual, I wrote all this off and on during the day yesterday and never got it posted. Rocky is in the kitchen, head buried in the cabinet under the sink getting the new faucet installed. Yay! New faucet.

One last picture. The pinecone ginger, also called shampoo ginger, that Mary Moon sent me the roots for is blooming. Later when it’s done sending out the small creamy little flowers the cones will turn red.