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.