not politics and the moon

You might have noticed I haven't been writing about the travesty that has befallen this country in the form of it's present president (and the GOP in general) lately. Several reasons for that, the most obvious the flooding from Hurricane Harvey at the end of August and the demolition and continuing reconstruction that has followed. Another reason is that it's time consuming to collect one horrible incident or appointment or tweet after another and write them down and right now my time is divided between the remodeling going on and trying to get the 7 pieces we did manage to get cast finished in time for the open house the first and second weekends in December and time is running short. Probably the real reason is that for the first time in my life I've had high blood pressure recorded at all the doctor office visits this year and had a freaky bout of rapid heartbeat that spanned two weeks and to tell the truth it's just getting more and more depressing to keep up with it. This country is going to hell in a hand basket and while I will continue to vote and voice my opinion that's pretty much all I can do so I've succumbed to cynicism and accepted the fact that I'm living in the end times of this country. Once I get my house put back together I'm going to work on getting the shop fixed up and then my gardens or maybe my gardens and then the shop and I'm going to just make stuff whether anyone wants to buy it or not.

Like this one. I'm almost finished with the edge work on this one and I've been pondering how to present it, either on a stand or mounted for hanging on a wall and I finally decided to have a stand made for it. Unfortunately, Chuck, the metal artist that creates my stands, is also consumed with work and the aftermath of Harvey and though his house didn't flood, his shop did and no way he can make it for me in time for the open house. So I will still show it with a sign that the stand is forthcoming. This is a stand for something else (Chuck did not make this one) but I can gerryrig it a little better to at least display this piece.

When it first came out of the kiln and was de-molded, with all the plaster chunks and residue still on it, it looked as if the piece had failed, that the amber was too dark and it didn't glow. It's always a crap shoot since I only do one of a kind pieces these days.

One more decision to make re my studio in the house...paint.

continuing train wreck, tomatoes, and snakes

I'm trying very hard not to be consumed with what's going on at the White House and our government but how can one not be?! Still, re my last post title, I figured everyone was getting tired of the political stuff when I posted that and the next day things just basically blew up...again!...with the appointment of the Special Counsel to continue the investigation at the FBI. I'll spare us all the ongoing blow by blow and just do a re-cap later. I don't know about you but I need to think about something else for a few days so I'm glad it's the weekend.

Now for something completely different...yesterday I put up 6 3/4 cups of tomato sauce (for a total of 17!). This was my third effort at tomato sauce. The first one I pureed the tomatoes and garlic and spices and then cooked it down to about half but it never got as thick as I felt it should be. Gave up and froze as is. Next I tried slow roasting the tomatoes and garlic and basil for about 3 1/2 hours and then pureed it and it was perfect and very tasty. 

pre-roasting and slightly out of focus

So I did that again. While the tomatoes were roasting I put up 6 cups of skinned cut up tomatoes (for a total of 26!) and I still have 32 tomatoes to deal with and they are still ripening on the bushes.

Last week when I laid out the limestone slabs I aggravated an old back injury so I haven't been doing much out in the yard, well, I haven't been doing anything out in the yard. I thought it would be better in a few days but it has actually taken all week to subside. So of course we had a small job to do early last week, nothing fancy, just sandblasting a shower enclosure, but it entailed lifting and moving heavy glass. Probably one of the reasons it took my back so long to get over it.

And speaking of work, an art consultant who has not contacted me for the last 7 years has asked for a proposal for a project that won't happen til next year so we are in the very early stages of budget proposals. I used to get a lot of work from this company and the jobs were always very nice ones that I enjoyed working on but they moved on to another glass art company that does a wider range of technique than we do including color. I figured they weren't even showing our work to potential clients anymore so it was a pleasant surprise and sort of ironic since I had finally voiced the idea that I was actually completely retired.

I was dog sitting my sister's dog this week while she was out of town and Wednesday, both dogs were doing that cautious curious stance they do when they see something they aren't sure of looking at something behind the bucket of parrot feather at the edge of one of the flower beds so I went over to see what they found...

an adult coral snake

Coral snakes, the most virulent of the vipers with the exception of the black mamba, prefer to hunt in the mornings or evenings, and are shy, non-confrontational, and reclusive. They have small rounded heads and even smaller mouths and it is rare for them to bite a human. Most bites occur when people try to pick them up but because their venom delivery system in not very efficient they basically have to chew on you awhile to get enough venom to do harm. As such, when I run across them I generally let them alone. This one I poked with a stick to get it to move deeper into the foliage out of reach of the dogs.

This morning while I was watering I happened to notice this...

Likely the same one, getting a drink from the water lily pond.

It has been so dry here, haven't had rain in weeks, that the bees are swarming the same pond and it's filter.

One last picture...

toad in a hole

rain and cold and recycling and art

We had our first real cold front blow in this weekend, preceded by a most welcome rainy day on Friday, after weeks and weeks of temps in the mid-80s. It was supposed to get down to 38˚ in the wee hours of this morning. Don't know if it actually did but it was cold enough in the house when we got up to turn on the heater which we did for the first time since we turned it off last spring.

Today would be a good day to work in the yard especially since I didn't get out there last Sunday but instead I'm driving to the city to take a truck load of recyclables (remember all those boxes of glass?) to a collection center and then head over to my daughter's house to help her get ready for Thanksgiving which we have been having at her house so the son and daughter-in-law will come.

I have all but finished all the little pieces I was working on for the two weekends in December, even got them photographed. I spent that rainy Friday making a photo box and then tried it out and it worked great! Better pictures than I had been getting and I didn't need to tweak them much if at all. Now I have time to work on my display which is pretty amateurish compared to the more sleek set-ups of some of the other participants.

After the open houses, I'll be starting in earnest on my next body of work...groupings of larger wall hung pieces that are variations on a theme. The first two are feathers on the beach and the moon. They're going to very different, I think, than what I have been doing. I'm also going to do some smaller framed pieces at the request of a gallery in Dallas that has three shows next year that they want to include our work in. I have 5 leftover frames from the Botanicas so I'm going to do pieces that will fit in them.

Well, I need to get on the road, the day is wasting. 

more of the same

It's been almost a week since my last post...sounds like I'm in a BA group - Bloggers Anonymous...but I haven't been doing anything out of the ordinary. Just working, finished the model for the feather on the beach and then put that stuff away to start on the intermediate sized 24” wide drawings for the A&M job. Finished one, started on another, and I figured y'all are probably tired of seeing these models and drawings over and over but here's the pictures anyway (and before anyone gets all excited about how great the drawing is, I traced it from a photograph onto mylar from which I will get a print).

Saturday I worked at the antique store and sold a sweet little dresser that I really liked. It came in just after I bought the larger striped oak dresser and if it hadn't been about the same size as the one I replaced I would have switched the new one out for it. But the whole point in getting a new dresser was getting a bigger dresser. Anyway this lady came in and just loved it but it was twice what her budget was and wanted to know if she could get a 25% discount. I confabbed with my sister and long story short, I offered her 25% off but she had to buy it right now. If she decided to look around and then came back, the price would be higher, still discounted, but higher. So she went for the deal.

Speaking of deals, my sister and I went to an estate sale up the road last week and I got 6 wind chimes/bells for $6 each but they aren't the cheap cheesy mass manufactured kind but, all bar one, artisan made. I'd take pictures but it's raining outside. Been raining all day so far. It started yesterday afternoon depriving me of my dedicated day out in the yard but we really need the rain so I don't really mind. It gave me some time to make progress in the book I'm reading.  well, the rain let up enough for me to run out and get these pics...

   

Recognizing that the rain is good, still it has me in a funky mood and I've made no progress so far today on the second drawing. I've been trying to put together a political post for weeks, months even, but the whole sorry spectacle is just too fucking depressing. Not just the candidates but the general nastiness that passes for social interaction these days. My poor little psyche can't take it. It makes me want to retreat even more into the natural world and my non-political-without-content art.

onward through the fog

Well, I see I had already covered that voter ID ground before...twice and just last July. No wonder so few of my vast barely interested audience read it. Oh there she goes again on that subject. Especially since I said essentially the same thing as before. Oh well. I'll try to remember that in the future.

I seem to be doing that a lot lately. What with the models and the pecans.

The brain, she forgets.

So. What else?

I finished cleaning out the garage today that I started yesterday and swept out all the daddy long legs cobwebs and many daddy long legs went to meet their maker but not by intent. It was the broom. Really, all I did was put some stuff away, throw some stuff away, moved some stuff around, and sweep. Swept out the aforementioned cobwebs and a mountain of leaves. OK, maybe not a mountain but definitely a small hill.

Then I finished the finish work of the finished small botanicas and discovered I didn't have as much to do as I thought. So now the frames are ready and 5 pieces are ready so tomorrow I'm going to set them in their frames with silicone.

And yes, I finally finished the last of the models for the Botanica Eroticas. Now I have seven new models to cast. I expected to feel something...elation, relief, a let down, something. Nope, nada, nothing. I was just done.

And while there still seem to be plenty of pecans up in the trees, the main harvest is done. The huge wind and rain storm the Monday and Tuesday of last week sent pecans raining down almost faster than we could pick them up. Now we are getting a couple of handfuls a day. Shelling has commenced.

And, the home repair turned out to be pretty simple. A new washer in the water valve and new innards for the toilet.

So, I spent the day yesterday and Sunday putzing around in the yard until I finally surrendered to the mosquitos and fire ants and came in. Repotted some things, tidied up the Little Back Yard, trimmed the branches off the shrub outside my window that were rubbing against the eave of the roof, cleaned the filter for the turtle pond, got about a hundred fire ant bites, two splinters, one thorn, and a small cut.

Tomorrow I go see the dermatologist.

model making and other stuff

We decided to come home a day early this week, on Wednesday instead of Thursday, because we were not going to finish the little commission and would have to go back next week any way. We could have finished it but we opted to go out with friends we haven't seen in many months instead.

So that meant I didn't get the stencil finished Tuesday which meant that Marc didn't get the stencil marked up which meant that by the time I finished and he finished on Wednesday, it was too hot to start sandblasting and one day, Thursday, wasn't going to be enough time to complete the work so...

We're very good at rationalizing.

I worked on the new model Thursday,

finished yesterday.

Starting a new one today.

While I'm otherwise occupied with this work, here's a peek from around the yard this week.

a new bromeliad erupting from the base of it's dying parent

what passes for fall color around here

a mockingbird singing his little heart out

the white butterfly ginger liked the rain

zinnia so intense it almost vibrates

winner/loser

I was unfriended yesterday on FB by someone who is sick of political posts. It's not the first time I've been unfriended, well the first time for this reason, but it was very sudden and, I feel, a little harsh. It was a short association, made through a high school group page that I found myself added to a while back but I enjoyed our little correspondences, a friendly person even though I have no clear memories of him from back then.

I made a post about, well, here was my post:

I don't understand why everyone says Romney won the debate. What is that based on, being aggressive and running rough shod over the moderator? Why does that make him the winner, because he talked louder, more forcefully while he was lying about his policies? Sheesh. How about honesty for a benchmark. How about not telling a bunch of lies and contradicting everything else you had said in your campaign previously as a mark for who wins? Calmly stating your policies and how they have helped raise the country from the cesspool he inherited (even with some exaggerations) means you lose? There is something seriously wrong with this country and I'm not talking about the politics.

While this seems on the surface to be about politics, it really wasn't. The politics was just the arena that this little act played out in. Yes, I support the imperfect, stretching the truth Obama and yes I did represent Romney as lying and contradicting all his previous policy statements, but I didn't make that up. It's been fact checked and in the news and even his campaign people had to make a correction to some of what he said.  But really, I could just as well have said Bozo 1 and Bozo 2.

Because what I was really trying to get at was the criteria upon which Romney was declared the winner of the debate. My point was directed more to what our culture considers a 'winner', that demeanor was more important than content.

The debate was framed as some sort of contest where there must be a clear winner and a loser. Why, first of all, does there have to be a winner or a loser instead of two people talking about their positions, making their cases, when the winning or losing will be determined by the election.

It seemed to me that the winner was declared the winner not because his arguments were better, his politics were better, but because he was more aggressive and forceful and I think that is a cultural condition, perhaps even a human condition, deeper that Dem vs Rep. It might be one reason why this nation is always at war, has been at war with few exceptions, since it's conception.

And we have, you know. We have been involved in one war or another and many times more than one at a time for nearly every year of our existence. You can look that up. We have the largest military, spend the most on warfare, have armed forces stationed in over 150 countries.

And that's what I think is wrong. The aggressive forceful guy, the bully if you will, gets called the winner over the thoughtful calm guy. Apparently, right or wrong, truth or falsehood, doesn't enter into it.

Content doesn't enter into it.

attempting resuscitation

Did I mention that my son and DIL are moving back to Texas? They decided that Portland was not the place for them. Their plan is to move back to Houston for several months while they reconnoiter Austin with the intent of settling there. Instead of moving cold like they did to Portland, they want to line things up beforehand so they asked if they could stay in the Houston house for a while.

Which is fine. No problem but you know, right, that we still use the city house when we have work, not that we've had that much work in the last two years but we are hoping that will change and soon. So we will still need to stay there when we have work.

The old house in the city sits vacant now that we don't live there and I don't call our days in when we have work, living there. We don't do housework, cleaning, or cook. And we don't do maintenance. A house as old as ours, and I would put it at between 110 and 115 years old but could be a little older, needs constant care and when no one is doing that, it tends to fall apart at a faster pace.

It's first and main problem is termites but short of tenting they can't really be dealt with and tenting for termites for a house we don't live in is way down on the priority list. The second big problem is the plumbing which was probably last tended to in a significant way back in the 50s and some of it could possibly be older. There are several major plumbing issues that need to be addressed before they move in.

And since we decided to wall off a little studio apartment for ourselves (the two smallest rooms in the house and a bathroom about the size of a postage stamp), the first order of the day was to get a functioning toilet in what would be our bathroom. It used to have a toilet but it broke and we never replaced it and ended up using the second bathroom as a storage closet for our camping and boating stuff.

So. That is what we did this week. We took the toilet out of the one bathroom and moved it over to our bathroom. You'd think that it would just be simpler to go buy a new toilet except that we had to take it out anyway because it had sprung a leak at the bottom and rotted out the floor underneath. It was like being on a rocking horse. So now we can repair the floor in the other bathroom and then put a new toilet in there.

I say we, Marc did it except for an occasional hand from me. He also repaired the pipe from the sink in what had been the laundry room and is now to become our little kitchenette (hot plate, coffee maker, and sink). It was rotted out and just drained under the house. Now it drains into the sewer line.

I wouldn't want you to think that I was just lolling around waiting to lend a hand, I was out clearing out the ditch in front of the house which had become overgrown, filled with leaves, and filling in with wild petunias. I do love the mexican wild petunias, they are kind of old fashioned and when they go through their bloom cycle they are gorgeous. But they get tall and reedy and they are highly invasive and you can't just cut them down. You have to pull or dig them up. So that is what I did. I cleaned out the ditch.

We still have plumbing issues beyond the bathrooms and the sink. The kitchen sink is completely stopped up (which is why we don't cook there) and if you turn on the cold water you won't be able to turn it off. You can see, we have, ostrich-like, been ignoring the ancient plumbing for a long time.

Another thing on the to-do list is to hang a door between the kitchen and the back hall. Then we can each be completely closed off and our comings and goings will be easier and they won't have to host their parents/in-laws for three or four days every week (it could happen when we're working).

They are arriving the end of this month so I hope we can get all the basics, at least, fixed before their arrival but next week is spring break and the grandkids will be here Sunday thru Thursday. So, we'll see. We may be in each other's pockets for a few days.

life goes on

I've been trying to catch up with everybody's blogs today as I've been a little preoccupied lately. I hate it when I get obsessed with the train wreck we call our political system. I've got one more bone to pick (not today though) and then I'll put my head back in the sand.

Railing against the machine isn't all I've been doing though. I've been trying to get my marketing efforts back on track, looking for data bases and adding new names to my newsletter email list every day.

I've also started to write my book about our pate de verre work and technique. I've gotten a lot of positive feedback about the idea, so outline completed, I'm trying to work on the text every day.

The weather is finally starting to cool off some to the point that it's downright pleasant in the mornings and evenings even though it is still getting into the 90s every day. But the 90s is not triple digits and so the molds I filled last week are now in the kiln (currently at 1025˚). And I've started on the models for the next group of three 4” square 'botanica erotica' pieces.

It's very windy today and hazy, almost overcast even; the only effect we're getting from tropical storm Lee. Would that some of that rain would fall on us. It's like there is some kind of huge invisible deflector out there that is pushing every hope of rain away from us.

It's been an exceptionally windy summer this year and while we always get nice breezes from the open fields around us, this summer it's been a near constant hot dry desert wind which sucks out every drop of moisture that the unrelenting sun may have left behind.

Can you guess where the drain field to our septic system is?

I have the door to the little back yard open today. It has one of those glass storm doors with a panel that can be raised so that it functions as a screen as well. It's the first day in about two months that I've been able to have it open (the door, not the screen panel) without having the heat radiating in through it. I have sorely missed the daily show that centers around the turtle pond and birdbath.

I looked out earlier today to see that the red shouldered hawk was perched on the gate to the little back yard and peering intently into the turtle pond. I got my camera and tried to get close enough to the door to take a picture but as soon as I got within 3 feet of it, he snapped his head around and looked straight at me. I froze until he looked back at the turtle pond and then tried to creep a little closer. Snap! That head came around and he looked right at me again. Then he gave a little leap, spread his wings and flew off to the tree line.

That's the second time I have seen him on the fence near the turtle pond. I'm thinking maybe he's interested in having some goldfish for dinner. Yesterday he was in the pine tree in my neighbor's back yard calling loudly.

And in case you were wondering, yes, I'm still doing this.