a quiet day

I’ve made no secret of the fact that I don’t do christmas. There are many reasons and evolutions of my dislike of the holiday. I’ve written about some of them in the past and may do so again in the future, but not today. In a way, now, it’s one of my favorite days. Weird, right? But it’s a ‘dead’ day. It’s a day in which there are no expectations, no demands on my time or attention, no things that need to be done because the country has basically shut down, quiet and still. I couldn’t get anything done even if I wanted to. It’s a day when I can do whatever I want or not do anything. 

So what did I do yesterday? I wrote some, sort of a chapter in the biography of my life which I may add to at some point and I may or may not ever publish. I worked on my painting finishing the last tree and starting on the background,

I made an apple crostata with some of the apples from SHARE. 

I fed the outdoor cats and gave them their daily dose of affection. Even Twin who now lets me pet him fully with long strokes before I put out the food instead of just his head while he eats though I have to approach him slowly. It took almost a year for him to trust me enough for this while I’ve been able to pick up and cuddle the other two for six months.

And now that the day is over I can post a picture of my latest drawing. I did it as a gift for my brother. He and Pam exchanged gifts every year but it’s been decades since I sent him anything even though he always sends some edible goodie to me. But Pam is gone, the glue that held us together so now more effort is required of me to have a better relationship with my brother. So, one of the things my brother does is keep honey bees, hence the subject of this drawing. The bee itself is 3" x 3", colored pencil.

Speaking of bees, this bumble bee was burrowing deep into the throats of the pink trumpet flowers.

snippets of life around here

Happy Halloween! I did a post in 2010 on the kids' Halloween costumes spanning 10 years, almost all of which I made, so if you want to see their choices, go here.

More butterflies out there Sunday on that clear blue sky warming day. Not nearly the quantity but nearly the same variation as last week, mostly fritillaries, monarchs, 

and long tails but also pipevine swallowtails, a giant swallowtail, a very tattered buckeye, a gray hairstreak, a great purple hairstreak that flashed iridescent blue in flight (first time to see this one),

cloudless sulfurs, skippers, a julia, definitely a queen, and one or two others, maybe a different long tail and a silvery skipper neither of which I could get a good picture of or the queen or the giant swallowtail. And bees, lots of bees including this different one, also not a very good picture as it moved just as I tapped the button.

Speaking of bees, these tiny things were all over the sword leaf blooms and while they look like bees they are actually hover flies.

This caterpillar was crawling across the mat outside the garage door. I have no idea what it is but it was over 3” long. The closest I've come to identifying it is an imperial moth caterpillar.

Moving on from butterflies to a succulent bloom about an inch in diameter.

The confederate roses are almost done.

Cat wants to be part of the puppy pile but Minnie is wary. That lump to Cat's left is Minnie under the blanket. Cat has curled up touching us both. All is well until Minnie realizes that it is Cat up next to her.

Moving on from the natural world to the unnatural world, WTF are they thinking? Do clothing designers just hate women? A dress at the Evil Empire. What you can't really tell is that the neckline has a ruffled collar and the bottom 12” of this shapeless sack is a ruffle.

I have a new pair of yoga pants that is black with turquoise insets but no top to wear with them so while I was there I thought I would look to see if they had some kind of matching top so I could be chic and fashionable and I found this on the clearance rack, cost me all of $2.

Spied at SHARE, a donation from the Evil Empire (yes I have to give them credit for donating the stuff not fresh enough to sell instead of just throwing it away), a salad kit, see how nice and green the picture is,

flip it over and see what it really looks like. 

the butterflies

I had a little better luck trying to get pictures of the butterflies later in the day on Tuesday and I saw two more that I hadn't seen in the morning, a crescent which is familiar to me and a julia which I have never seen before.

It was so delightful to stand there while all these butterflies fluttered around me. Some of them looked brand new and some were so tattered I'm surprised they could still fly. I saw several more of the pipevine swallowtail, all tattered like the one this morning.

Here are the pictures I managed to get:

julia (a member of the brush foot family and ranges from Brazil to Texas and Florida)

gulf fritillary

white striped long tail

painted lady (not a very good picture but the only one I was able to get)

white striped long tail and gulf fritillary

pipevine swallowtail

cloudless sulfur

monarch (same picture as last post)

gray hairstreak (this pic is from a different year)

butterflies weren't the only things all over the cosmos.

Here are pictures of the ones I couldn't get a photo of (all lifted off the internet):

buckeye

snout

queen

crescent (this is a Texan crescent which I see frequently but I'm not sure which one I saw the other day)

black swallowtail (again I'm not sure which one I saw but these are common around here)

skipper

If the queen was indeed a queen and not a fritillary then that's 14 different types of butterflies.

Skippers, hairstreaks, crescents, snouts, and long tails are small; painted ladies, buckeyes, and sulfurs are medium on the small side; fritillaries, queens, and pipevines medium; julias, monarchs, and swallowtails being the biggest.

The next day, Wednesday, there were just a hand full of fritillaries and a pipevine swallowtail. Thursday I was gone and Thursday evening clouds started moving in and today is overcast with the threat (promise?) of rain. No butterflies evident today. I guess the migration blew in on the cold front, tanked up, and continued their journey south.

The promised rain is here and really coming down!

 

short stories, part whatever

The neighborhood roaming peacock was somewhere behind us or the Wicked Bitch of the West's property. I thought I heard it screaming when I was closing up the other night but didn't see it. Marc had gone out the next morning and saw it strutting through the WBotW's lot but by the time I got outside it was almost to the street, too far away to get a good picture as it crossed the street and into a neighbor's yard so forgive the terrible picture on max magnification. It lives four streets over I think but is not contained. Mostly it shows up at the other end of the street. Another neighbor halfway down the street has a peacock caged and the roamer often comes to visit.

The little calico cat that has been hanging around here for weeks finally let me pet her Friday morning. I'd been putting water out for her not knowing if she lived nearby but she's been here every day for several weeks, pretty much stays under the house. She's unafraid of the dog. I finally put some food out Friday evening and she ate it right up so now I'm feeding her.

Barn swallows built a nest on the light fixture a couple of doors down from SHARE. It's full of babies and the parents did not like me taking their picture.

Last night I absentmindedly brushed my right foot over my left big toe and brushed the remaining excruciatingly slowly diminishing scab off. Hooray! I was sick of looking at it, didn't think it was ever going to come off. Seventy eight days, 2 1/2 months, from the day the toenail was removed to the day the remaining scab came off. New nail growing in, redness is slowly diminishing. And ignore my dirty foot.

My neighbors, third property to the left, keep bees. They brought me two half pints of honey on Saturday, said it was the least they could do since it's my flowers the bees are visiting. How cool is that! I get to eat honey made from my flowers!

more molds and little lives

We got more rain Thursday night, or rather early in the morning, which is good. Friday mid-morning in the 80s which was a much appreciated break from the mid to high 90s we've been suffering through except for one thing, the humidity. With the high temps and no chance of rain the humidity had been staying fairly low, mid 40s%. Friday it shot up to 91% before it dropped to the 60s%. This Saturday morning it's 83˚ and 89% humidity which basically makes it feel like high 90˚s. Can't win for losing. Even when the temperature is tolerable it still feels oppressively hot.

Yesterday 7 of the molds got steamed out. By that I mean the investment aka mold material, which is a plaster/silica flour mix, with the wax model encased is placed open end down over a pot of boiling water, the steam rises up and melts the wax out of the mold.

Once that's done I inspect the molds, clean them up, rinse them out and then do the volume measure so that I know how much weight of glass it takes to fill the form. I do that by weighing a container of water, pour some into the mold filling the form of the model and then weighing the container of water again. Subtract one from the other, multiply by the specific gravity of the glass, 2.5 in my case, and it gives you the weight of glass needed in grams.

I'm going to set these aside for a week or so to let the molds cure while I select the colors as well as decide to use transparent or opaque glass, frit or powder (I won't bore you about why these choices matter). Two more molds got made today, next week the last four.

Here's half the frivolous post, the little creatures who live here with us.

This honey bee seemed a little confused about which part of the flower she was supposed to go to as she explored the ends of several petals on the white orchid tree flowers.

This tiny gecko which couldn't have been longer than 1 1/4” head to tip of it's tail and looked to be just hatched was on the wall in the bathroom and we have no idea how it got there.

This little golden orb weaver is young, her body is only about 3/4”. She'll get much bigger.

Big Mama, our 32 year old red ear slider, felt it necessary to remind me she hadn't been fed today.

And last a little tree frog hanging out on the molding of the back door. I took this picture through the glass. First one I've seen this gray color.

 

miscellania and heavy karma

New AC is in and instead of the round condenser it's rectangular.

All those little peaches are ripe. I took some to my neighbor who babysits some of her grandkids and I also made this Monday night.

After reading about the high price of tomatoes and so no tomato sauce this year, my friend Debbie brought me these from their garden, not pretty she said but they taste good. Guess what I did yesterday and what I'll be doing today.

I also did the week's grocery shopping, put up 7 ears of sweet corn that my neighbor gave me from his brother's farm, and made a pizza for dinner. Needless to say I was very busy yesterday and did not work on the box.

I got my summer hair cut last week.

Random thought from the other day...This country is engaged in a big karmic adjustment I think. If countries have souls of a sort, this country was brought into being through genocide and slavery and repression (which continues to this day). The US is too far down the rabbit hole now, not just guns but weapons of war and violence, we increasingly turn our murderous tendencies on ourselves unable to accept that all people are created equal and have the same rights. We are frozen, incapable of, unwilling to stop it. Who and how much do we sacrifice before the debt is paid? Can the debt be paid? That doesn’t mean we of good heart should give up the fight. That’s part of our karma.

Republicans are pretending to care and negotiate in committee on some common sense restrictions like raising the minimum age to 21 to buy an assault rifle (banning them won't even be considered) and institute a waiting period, ban high capacity magazines, expand background checks to private sales, and institute a 'red flag' law, none of which will prevent anyone from buying these weapons but may prevent mass shootings and yet, these very same republicans will vote against any bill that makes it to the Senate even though the vast majority of Americans are in favor of more regulations. After Matthew McConaughey addressed the nation at the White House press conference on gun violence, a Newsmax reporter accused him of grandstanding.

The January 6^th Committee is starting their public hearings tomorrow and Fox has said it will not air them even though they aired Benghazi ad nauseum. Republicans have announced they will launch counter programming and already have their disinformation machine and Trump's staunch allies churning out lies that the committee is illegitimate. They seem determined to keep citizen against citizen, to destroy the rule of law, and to grind our democracy into dust.

So I don't end on such depressing thoughts as those here's a few picks from around the yard.

Hairstreak butterflies were migrating through. They are so tiny, this one about 3/4”.

Thirsty bees drinking from the small pond full of parrot feather.

A little tree frog on the side of the house.