brain block

I’ve been working on the 1/3 scale drawing for the entry doors and side panels for a new chapel for the past week and for the past three days, I have made no progress whatsoever.  If I add something one day, I erase it the next.  I don’t know why I’m having so much trouble.  Maybe it’s the fact that I don’t like to do landscapes and that’s what this is.  Or it could be that I’m having trouble reconciling the scale of each element to the others.  I’m working larger than life size and I’m worried that in the main element, a dogwood tree, I have made the flowers too big which affects everything else.  I put some wild violets at the bottom and then realized, in relation to the dogwood flowers that they would be giants.  Erased them.  I want to put a rabbit nestled in the grass next to the tree trunk, but it makes the rabbit look enormous or else it’s a sapling of a tree.  I’ll probably make the dogwood flowers smaller when I do the full size drawing, but in the meantime, I’m having a hell of a time.

Yesterday I finally just gave up altogether and cleaned up the room where my drawing table is figuring that maybe my brain block was due to the clutter on my drawing table.  I barely had room for the drawing and could not find anything for all the piles of stuff.  Then I started on the living room.  I may not have made any progress on my drawing but at least I got something productive done yesterday. 

sitting in the hero's pose

Sitting in the Hero’s Pose makes my feet cramp.  And sometimes my calves too.  I have no trouble flexing my feet the other way.  I can do a flat footed Downward Dog no problem.  So I’ve been spending some time every other night or so (or so) sitting in the Hero’s Pose trying to get my feet to be comfortable.  I’m doing this because I go to a yoga class with a small group of friends every Tuesday evening.  And every Tuesday evening, my feet cramp.  

I like yoga, have been doing more or less yoga off and on since I was in my early 20s, but I seem to have a hard time committing to yoga.  I just haven’t been able to set up a daily practice but I will attend a weekly session faithfully.  It’s good to stretch, to twist, to bend, to balance, sometimes to contort.  It keeps me flexible, an opposite to the weight training.  I always leave yoga feeling taller.

cat TV

I put together a funky little birdbath out at the country house a couple of weeks ago.  It’s been very dry.  The whole state is pretty much in one degree of drought or another.  So I put this together out of some bricks and a blue glass dish that was left behind by the previous owners and I put it on top of the access to the septic tank pump, which is in the little fenced area just outside the back door.  It probably goes dry in two days.  It’s always dry when we get back.  But, when I’m there, I keep it full of water.  

It’s become quite the popular place.  The little birds are more daring than the big birds.  The chickadees especially are fearless.  They’ll come to it when I’m sitting about 15’ away, or if my back is turned, even closer.  There’s a little type of sparrow, I think, that comes a lot too.  And a female cardinal that likes to bathe in the morning.  A mockingbird comes, but not if you’re outside.  Bluejays too.

The cat, Emma, also likes it.  She’ll sit near me when I’m out there but when I’m not, I’ve seen her out there about 3’ away.  I’m not worried about the birds.  No self-respecting bird is going to go to a birdbath with a cat sitting right next to it.    Emma hasn’t figured this out yet.  

feverish

I’ve been sitting in the sun getting my vitamin D for the day.  I also call it doing my lizard act.  But what it really is, is spring fever.  We are having glorious weather this week...sunny with a cool breeze and dry.  It keeps enticing me outside when I should be working.  That it’s Friday only makes it worse.  

The cycle of blooms has started with the earliest pear trees and the tulip trees.  In a couple of weeks, the redbuds should start emerging.  Already the baby-blue-eyes are blooming in the easement and the wild ranuculus are starting up.  There’s a sunflower out there too, a holdover from last year.

shedding

My house in Houston is a mess.  Well, my house is usually a mess because housekeeping is low on my priority list.  It’s a mess now because I am sorting through 34 years of stuff.  You can accumulate a lot of stuff in 34 years especially if you only add stuff and never get rid stuff.  So I have packed boxes of stuff I’m keeping sitting around on the floor.  Open boxes of stuff I’m not keeping sitting around on the floor.  Books we’re not taking sitting around on the floor, like a set of 26 year old Encyclopediae Brittanica and a 56 year old set of World Book of Knowledge encyclopedia.  Books, knick-knacks, kitchen stuff, clothing, old luggage, furniture; all are getting winnowed.  Like the loveseat with the broken springs, thanks to my 150 lb son (referred to around here as ‘the boy’) who would throw himself into it while he was still living at home.  And the funky old unpainted furniture chest of drawers that my mother painted lime green which came from the beach house when we sold it.  And the Ikea wardrobes since the new house has closets, unlike this one.

I am, in fact, enjoying this process.  The grandkids come over and go through the boxes and cart stuff off.  What doesn’t get taken by the family or sold in a garage sale that I am still fantasizing about will get donated to some agency or other.  But more than that, I am looking forward to a less cluttered existence.

harbinger

I saw the first mosquito hawk last night.  Mosquito hawks are my personal harbinger of spring.  I know when they emerge, bountiful flowers and new green will follow soon after.  There are other portents, like the tulip tree down the block that has been in full bloom for the past week and the pear trees on Shepherd St. that are always eager and first to bloom, but flowers can be fooled.  Give them a couple of warm days and they run out like giggly school girls.  Not so the mosquito hawk.  Already the birds sound more cheerful and my mood has improved.  Now I will enjoy the final cool days instead of wishing them away knowing that summer always follows spring.

eating local

Back from the country.

One of the reasons we are moving is to be able to grow some of our own food.  That and be someplace where we can buy locally grown food.  It’s an agricultural community out there.  That and cattle.  At the end of our little street are fields just about as far as you can see.  Last year they grew cotton, the year before that, corn.  Our nearest neighbor has an incredible garden and he often times gives us food from it.  He brought us a cauliflower a couple of weeks ago that was twice the size of one you can buy in the store.  We’re looking forward to our own gardening bounty and to that end, we started getting the ground ready this weekend.  We had really beautiful weather for it.  Cool, but sunny.

According to the local paper, Wharton is famous for it’s sunsets.  I don’t know how true that is but we do get a lot of beautiful sunsets out there and we have a great view.  Last year we dragged the bench seat from our old pick-up truck out underneath one of the pecan trees.  That’s where we sit to watch the skyworks.