because I can't think of a catchy title

I trust everyone had a good Thanksgiving Day with family and friends and no mention of the horrendous future of our federal government. We went into the city to our daughter's house...us, the kids, the grandkids...and had a fine time. Not everyone is in the picture, the other two men, Mike and Mikey, were in the living room.

Friday, my sister and I went to see Fantastic Beasts which we enjoyed very much except for me in the last 20 minutes or so when I really really really had to pee. I was out of that theater the moment the first credit popped up.

This is the time of year when the sun comes blasting in right in my face through the leafless tallow tree in the mornings as it rises. The weather here has been getting down in the 50s/60s at night and 70s/80s during the day. I'm happy to report that in the last week I've seen some chickadees and titmice and even a little warbler and a white wing dove and a cardinal was just on the totem bird feeder but they are still scarce. Just about everything has stopped blooming, even the orange cosmos almost which are looking very scraggly, except the roses and the morning glory bush and the shrimp plant and the milkweed.

Pecans have been falling steadily, still, not nearly as many as the year before last when I shelled until I was sick of it, sold over three hundred pounds of unshelled nuts, and still had a box of nuts left over.

Very windy out there today. Not sure what I want to get accomplished today. Usually I'd be out in the yard but I still have to finish the leaf plaque and revamp my display before next weekend. Or maybe I won't do anything but sit on the couch and read.

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getting ready

Wednesday. Tomorrow is Thanksgiving. My contribution is the dressing and cranberry sauce. I made the cornbread yesterday and set it and the white bread out to get stale. I'm going to get up in a minute and cook the bacon and start chopping stuff and cook down the cranberries but I probably won't make the dressing till tomorrow morning. Getting all the prep work done today will save a lot of time tomorrow.

I'm also going to try and get some more work done on the leaf plaque and the moonflower. It still isn't finished but I did go talk to a metal artist I just discovered in one of the next little towns over about making the stand for it for me and he's going to have it ready for the Open House, which means that I have to get busy and finish the cold work and get it glued together. He's also making a stand for me for an older piece that I had initially hung on the wall. I'm thrilled to find this guy and he's so very close, 10, 15 minutes tops.

As for the wider country and world out there, I'm trying to keep informed but keep it at bay for a few days and since I have a lot to do still before the first weekend of December. I'm going to focus on that.

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. 

this and that

I'm not talking about politics today even though the situation is just as heinous as it was two days ago. Well, one thing, Hillary has now won the popular vote not by a few hundred or even a few thousand but by over a million votes. The electoral college that was founded for the purpose of preventing the people from electing someone who was completely unqualified or dangerous could end this nightmare but they won't have the courage. The patriarchy will not allow a woman to be president even though she clearly won the election. Not this time, not this woman.

OK, on to other stuff.

Where are the birds? I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the birds seem to have all gone. I had run out of bird seed but that has never run them off before. Now the seed I have in the totem bird feeder is still mostly there after 3 days. In the past three days I have seen one cardinal, one bluejay, and one little warbler (I think). No doves, no titmice, no chickadees, no wrens, no mockingbirds, no sparrows even. We usually have a large population of birds that winter over, others that never leave, but gone they are. Now that I write that I just saw a couple of bluejays and can hear some other bird out in the Wild Space but still, a dearth of birds.

I did have a red shouldered hawk come visit the other day. It sat on the gate to the Little Backyard casting it's eye over the turtle pond and Big Mama's posse of goldfish. I took this picture from where I sit through the screen door on high magnification. 

A few days later I was working in the garage/shop when I heard a sudden loud flapping noise and a strangled sort of squeaky cheep and went out on the drive to see a red shouldered hawk up in one of the oaks. As I moved around to try and get a better look, it flew off with something big and black in it's talons. A bird, obviously (so I know where at least one of my birds has gone), but I couldn't tell what kind. Black. Could have been a crow I guess or a grackle or a cowbird but I haven't seen any of those around either.

And speaking of Big Mama's posse, one of the gold fish has turned a very pale orange.

The cosmos and plumbago are still blooming but just about everything else has finished up. Most of the butterflies have migrated through but I'm still seeing monarchs.

And then there was this guy.

And this sky.

I've been dog-sitting the past two weeks for my sister while she has been out of town. Between the two dogs and the cat, I'm pretty much pinned down in the evenings.

And very last, I finally heard from the art consultant about the A&M job...three weeks later! The client is very happy with the work. The art consultant did mention the flaw but the client was unconcerned and so they told me to go ahead and submit my invoice which I did one week after the install. Now I'm just waiting for the check.

two reports...one progress, the other not...guess which is which

I'm still spending too much time on politics and I imagine most people have hidden me from their newsfeed on FB by now but this train wreck just keeps on crashing. By all accounts team Trump is in chaos, they seem totally unprepared to make the transition much less govern. Stories of back-biting and jockeying for position and infighting and fawning and sending people packing. Apparently the main (and only) requirement for a position in his government is complete and total agreement with all things Trump. They were shocked to find out they have to replace the West Wing staff and they are having a terrible time finding people willing to work for them and on top of that Trump doesn't seem to understand why he has to live at the White House instead of his gold plated NY apartment. In the meantime, he's giving his children who have never engaged in public service or served in the military important positions and wants top secret security clearance for them and the people he has announced so far are all virulent racists, bigots, and misogynists and the hate and verbal and physical violence against blacks, latinos, muslims (and while I have not seen any reports about vandalism and violence against jews, it won't be long), other gendered, and women have exploded across the country while the media attempts to normalize this man and his racism and his admitted sexual predation. On top of all that, his daughter seems to think that presidential interviews and press conferences are the proper venue for hawking her products.

And it's only been a week.

However I have also been spending a lot of time in the shop working on small castings for the upcoming two weekends in December while actively avoiding all my neighbors and town folk. I did venture out yesterday though, went to the library and visited with the neighbors at the other end of the street while walking the dog. To my great relief no one mentioned the election because if they had I would have to tell them what I think and it wouldn't be pretty.

So here's what I've been doing...

I got all the finish work done on the heart-weights and face-weights and the small ring dish (for lack of a better descriptor),

I filled the molds for the small bee sculpture, the platform, and another heart-weight which came out of the kiln yesterday,

I've ground most of the excess glass off the bird skull and feather,

and today I'm going to start on the finish work for the last three castings...the bee/flower sculpture, the heart-weight, and the platform for the bird skull et al.

4”l x 3”w x 2.5”h

heart to heart

Last Thursday I made the 2 and a half hour drive to Austin to meet up with my friend and spirit sister Reya who lives in Washington DC. Reya, massage therapist, reiki master, shaman, was in Austin for a workshop on bones to further her education and ability to help her clients. I drove to the little 'carriage house' as she called it what we call garage apartments where we came face to face for the first time, both of us wearing pants, t-shirts, and canvas shoes, wild haired and no make-up.

“Reya”, I told her, “you are so much bigger than your pictures”. I wasn't referring to her physical size. We hugged hard and long and started in as if we had known each other all our lives. Maybe we have, this life, past lives, we knew each other.

The neighborhood where she was staying reminded me a lot of my old city neighborhood before the gentrification, only more affluent. The house had pecan trees front and back and a fabulous crop of nuts lay on the ground. I couldn't believe it that they weren't collecting them. It was all I could do to not start picking them up myself.

It was lunch time when I arrived so we walked a short seven blocks or so, stopping repeatedly to take pictures, talk, hold hands. Of course we talked about the election but we didn't dwell on it as we had so many other things to say and stories to tell.

After lunch we had coffee at the carriage house where she reikied the mark of the chicken though she said it didn't need it as the energy was moving off to other parts of my body, though I swear that last hard numb part really feels much better, and continued to talk until it was time for her to prepare for and walk to her class.

It was tough to leave the warmth of her energy and the pool of serenity that we found in the midst of all the angst of this election.


edit: I guess I neglected to say that I met Reya through blogging and while she doesn't blog anymore we remain connected via FB.

making stuff

I thought about deleting my last post coming so soon on the heels of the previous one but I am still deeply ashamed of those of my fellow citizens that voted for Trump, actually more like 25% of the population since about half of us didn't vote which makes the ones that didn't vote, not culpable exactly, but untrustworthy when push comes to shove. I won't be expecting any of them to come to my aid if need be.

But, until he actually takes office and we see what his picks are for his government so far the names floating around are a continuation of this nightmare...Sarah Palin?, I'll focus on the work at hand.

So here's the post I had prepared before the shit hit the fan:

Since I finished the A&M panels, I've been working on things for the upcoming open houses the first two weekends of December. While I was cleaning out and straightening up the garage in an effort to give myself table space to work...garage is sort of a misnomer as we don't put any cars in it. It's basically a workroom for messy stuff like the cold work I do on the glass or outdoor oriented stuff and it's where the bottles were collecting that we had a grand vision of building a bottle wall or arch or something with but I have decided that we are probably never going to actually do that and so I have sorted all the bottles by color ready to take for recycling...

But I digress.

While doing all that I came across a half dozen or so or very very old molds, 10 years at least, maybe older, probably older, that just never got pitched out. What the hell. I cut chunks of solid color glass in some (the hearts) and did pate de verre in others (the faces) and we cast them.

Then I worked on a few quick waxes, a bird skull and a feather and a platform all to go with some broken egg shell pieces I already have and I found two very very old waxes, very early stuff, at least 15 years old, just sitting in a box, waiting. What the hell. We are going to cast them too.

I wanted one more really nice but simple small sculpture, a bee piece so I started on one. Simple, right? One bee, one flower. Hahahahahahaha. I crack myself up sometimes. After spending the better part of a Tuesday working on a wax the whole time thinking this is going to be impossible to fill this mold, the next day I dismantled it throwing away everything but the flower. I spent the next three days on it.

I'm done with wax work for now and am waiting for the finished molds. Hopefully, by the time these pieces are ready for cold work, I'll be done with all the other stuff.