signs

photo via http://s594.photobucket.com/home/hrodriguez_photos/allalbums

I know summer is ending because the days are getting shorter

and the hummingbirds are migrating through

and the tufted titmice have shown up

and the butterflies are more abundant

and the leaves on the tallow are dropping

and the squirrels are starting to test the pecans

and the corn fields have been razed

and the pampas grass is starting to bloom

and school has begun.

I know summer is ending for all these reasons as I stand outside continuing to swelter in the 97˚ heat and humidity.

summer reads

I realize it's not quite the end of August yet, still three more days but I'm not likely to finish another book by then. In fact, I can't believe I read 14 this go round, especially since this quarter included all the g'kid visits and I only read during meals and before bed. Oh and then there's the sleepless nights. I read then too. Guess I've had a lot of sleepless nights this quarter.

So here's my take on some reading which I know you are waiting for because my opinion is, of course, intensely interesting.

Judge And Jury by James Patterson and Andrew Gross – I actually liked this one a lot. Better than I thought I would. A gangster is on trial and manages to escape after having the entire jury killed and there follows a manhunt by the FBI agent and the lone survivor of the explosion that killed the jury and her son.

Kite Runner by Khalid Hosseini – it's very rare these days for me to get a book I have a hard time putting down, but this was one. Located in Afghanistan, it is the story of a rich (by comparison) kid and his servant/lesser caste best friend, his betrayal of same. He and his father leave Afghanistan for America when the Russians move in. Eventually, as an adult he returns and finds that the two families lives were entwined in more ways than one.

Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides – interesting read that covers three generations of a family of Greek descent who immigrate from Turkey. The storyteller is the daughter/son, the third generation, a hermaphrodite, genetically male who was raised as a girl, thinks of herself as a girl and discovers during puberty that he is not. It's his story but he starts with his grandparents who are actually brother and sister.

Mystic Rebel by Ryder Syvertsen – I was enjoying this little story about an American who agrees to fly medical supplies and money into Chinese occupied Tibet, is shot down, rescued by Tibetan nomadic freedom fighters who he lives with while he learns the language and comes to love the country. Then it turned kind of stupid when he is dug out of an avalanche by an evil worshipping cult who attempt to turn him into an assassin to send against the Dalai Lama, blah blah blah. It has an OK ending.

A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khalid Hosseini – Another tale that takes place in Afghanistan, same time frame as Kite Runner, but this time about two women, girls really at first, and their lives. Not a pretty picture although there is a happy ending for one of them but only after years and years of misery.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards – a very ponderous read. Page after page after page of the father, mother, son going on and on and on about the distance between them. OK, ok, I get it, the secret destroyed the very thing that the father was trying to save. Now get on with the story. Which is that a doctor unexpectedly delivers his wife's twins one snowy night with the help of his nurse. The second baby, a girl, is born with Down Syndrome and he hands the baby to his nurse with instructions to take her to an institution and tells his wife the baby died. The nurse cannot leave the baby at the institution and leaves town with the child and raises her. She sends updates and pictures to the doctor but refuses to tell him where they live. It's a good story but I would have enjoyed it a lot more without all the constant mental anguish.

Demon Seed by Dean Koontz – stupid. Stoo-pid. A computer AI takes over a computerized house with plans to take over the world after it becomes born into an altered human body.

The Honey Thief by Elizabeth Graver – unsatisfying. I wanted a better ending when it really had no ending at all, except maybe a glimmer of hope for better for the characters. About 3/4ths of the way through I'm yelling at the mother to get over herself, get a freaking grip. Maybe I need to go back to popular culture paperbacks for a while instead of literature.

What The Dead Know by Laura Lippman – I enjoyed this one. It's sort of a mystery. Two sisters aged 11 and 15 disappear one day from the local mall. Thirty years later a woman involved in a traffic accident claims to be one of the missing sisters and then clams up to protect her privacy and leads the police on, giving them information that cannot be backed up or checked out. Eventually the story unfolds but it has a little twist at the end that I did not anticipate and a good resolution.

Nights Of Rain And Stars by Maeve Binchy – one of my favorite authors, I love the way she weaves her characters together and then weaves her books together with these characters. The books are not sequels but independent stories. This one was the back story of a character that featured in the previous book of hers I read. It takes place in a small Greek village on a small island.

Altar Of Eden by James Rollins – a fairly entertaining story about genetic experimentation gone bad with a little romance thrown in. A ship full of 'altered' animals is found floundered on the bayou coast of Louisiana and before more than a few of the animals are removed, it explodes. Then begins the search for the perpetrators who are ruthlessly covering their tracks.

Sizzling Sixteen by Janet Evanovich – the further misadventures of Stephanie Plumb, bounty hunter.

The Ark by Boyd Morrison – an OK read about a madman who wants to purify the earth by wiping out humanity, except for his chosen 300, with a genetically engineered plague.

The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver – A story about a missionary who takes his wife and four daughters who were totally unprepared for what was to come to the African Congo to live in a small village for a year's post to raise up the heathen. Caught during the political upheaval of the Belgian withdrawal and the American political games in the fledgling new government, the father refuses to leave when all white people are urged to evacuate. It's the story of the four daughters and the mother primarily and their struggle to survive and their eventual desertion of their zealous father/husband and their long walk through the jungle. One child dies, two stay in Africa and two return to the United States. The book continues to follow the girls and how that year and a half impacted their lives and changed them forever. It's really a very good book but I thought it sort of just petered out at the end.

submerged

in progress

Stuff is pouring out of me. Unfortunately, it's not stuff for my blog.

I have been holed up in the studio and am really involved with the wax and model making. I would have thought that after two years, I would find it balky to work with but whatever skill I had achieved before is still with me. Nice to know.

The first things I did were to finish the two projects left over from before. I attempted to make a teapot that would go with my teabox but found I wasn't really interested in doing that so it became a box. It morphed into a piece I had already attempted to make once and didn't like. This one I like. Then I constructed another box that I really like, the one with the wren that is the experiment with the inlay idea.

Now I am working on the first of three pieces that will be a tryptic.

I am so happy to be working in the studio again and that the waxes, at least, seem effortless.

late summer day

Standing at the back door, I look out into the small fenced part of our yard. Beyond that is our neighbor's empty half acre and the road that marks the edge of our little neighborhood. Beyond that are the agricultural fields filled with cotton as far as I can see to the treeline on the horizon. My drawing table is along the same wall that the back door is in and when the door is open, I can see the little birdbath in the fenced yard from where I sit. Also along this wall is a bank of windows I gaze out of.

Now in the heat of the day all I can see are dragonflies patrolling the empty yard. All else is hunkered down waiting for the sun to get lower in the sky. The bluejays that hang around all morning are nowhere to be seen, the small white herons gone to other fields. Even the hawks have found retreat from the heat and the cicadas are silent.

As recent as last week, the heat was oppressive at 7 AM. Two days ago when I opened the back door I thought I sensed a slight change, not pleasant exactly but perhaps a hint of things to come. Today there was no doubt, pleasant with a slight breeze that was just a memory by 9 AM. By 2 o' clock, 102˚. At 4 PM I venture out to water some pots and standing there holding the hose I am covered in sweat.

Behind us at the end of our mowed back yard is a thick wall of grass taller than I am like the edge of the Red Sea parting to provide passage. The 13 acre field has not been mowed once this year. Earlier in the summer a dead tree fell at the edge of our property. The wild grape vines and trumpet flower have covered it, draping the dead branches with finery. Another task awaiting us for when it cools off.

A single crow is perched in the dead branches of a nearby tree calling attention to himself. I fill another small bucket with dropped unripe pecans, their pungent antiseptic odor wafting up, and toss them on the burn pile.

At 7 PM I walk out to catch the clouds reflecting the late summer sun. I am standing there at the back edge of our property gazing up at the sky and turn to look behind me and see a rainbow arching across heaven. It has been raining further away.

9 PM. It's dark now and the only things I see are the silhouettes of the trees against the cloud covered sky, the moon not yet risen or well cloaked while the night creatures sing their lullabies. One more day done and summer's end one step closer.

a country tale

photo via http://www.flickr.com/photos/50084831@N00/2163695984/

The pecan trees have started to drop their immature fruit.

Baby toads are everywhere outside and I'm wondering how that can be.

The ground is dry and cracked.

A family group of blue jays has been monopolizing the birdbath.

Two days ago it pretended to rain.

The driveway barely got wet.

No rain for weeks and the cotton is taller than I am.

But the corn has gone completely brown.

I saw that the farmers are starting to cut it down.

The hay fields are being mowed.

And the tallow is dropping leaves from the lack of rain.

Or perhaps the wheel has turned a little.

in the groove

It's been a long time since I have spent this much time in the studio. I guess the last time was the first half of 2008 when I was preparing work for our one person show at our local gallery. I've done less than half a dozen pieces in the two years since. With the crash of the economy in late 2008 and our expectations of finally breaking the collector barrier dashed and the gallery that had been taking our work to the big shows dropping us from the repertoire, well, it took the wind out of my sails. That and having racked up a considerable debt going to these shows for the previous five years that we no longer had expectations of paying off with the cast work sent my focus back to the etched architectural work. Fortunately we had some of that to focus on.

Two years. I wondered at one point if I would ever get back to it. I made a few half hearted attempts but quickly lost interest. Today though, I see the work stretching in front of me. I have a growing pile of finished waxes and more still to complete and many more to start. I'm working on a small box right now that I am trying out a new approach on. I've been trying to come up with a way to do some larger pate de verre boxes without a lot of grinding and recasting and I think I have a way to do it using inlays. I've done this on a few pieces, very simply, with good results. This little box will be a bit more complex. I also have two other series of pieces I have started on. I might even try a few more sculptural vessels, a form I abandoned years ago for a variety of reasons.

I'm not sure what I am going to do with all the finished work once I have it. It will take some time to complete. The shop is still spread out between here and Houston but I want to start casting the small components. I guess we'll be making a foray into the city pretty soon, if for no other reason than to get the materials to start making molds.

river vignette 8 – the Pecos

Still immersed so here's another moment on the river.

*the sketches that accompany these vignettes do not illustrate that particular moment or even reflect that particular river.

We stop at a ravine and pull up the boats. We climb up the side canyon through this ravine filled with boulders and scrub. The white thorn acacias are sharp. Everything green seems to be prickly. We get up to the shelter known as the Ingram site. There on the canyon wall before us, are enigmatic paintings some thousands of years old. They are beautiful and mystifying. In the narrow ledges along the base of the shelter are smooth rounded depressions in the rock where the painters ground and prepared their pigments. The cactus wrens are building nests in the limestone above us. They hop around giving us the eye and sing now and then. We spend some time here, pausing in the shade and shadow of the past.