finally fall

Last Thursday evening a storm front blew through here with gusts of up to 40 mph. The trees and shrubs were thrashing around and the temperature dropped over 20 degrees. The sky was dark and rumbling with thunder but the rain didn't make it this far.

Well, we had a rain of a different sort as the wind shook loose all the dead branches out of the trees. Since we had to spend the day in the city yesterday today we play 52 pick-up.

Today it's nice and cool out. It's enticing me out doors. There is so much work that needs to be done out there besides picking up the debris from the storm but collecting pecans is not one of the chores. No new pecans, green or otherwise, have fallen for weeks and I can't see any up in the trees. A slim crop this year from the drought and the squirrels seem to have gotten every one. I won't miss shelling pecans night after night but I'll sorely miss the nuts.

The work drought continues as well but I have renewed hope that it may lift soon. The art director from the church that has the two proposals has been in touch and hopes to have good news for us before the year is out.

Later...

I spent most the day outside, flitting from one little task to another. The day is just too nice to be indoors. Among other things we raised up and leveled the front yard bird bath. It wasn't high enough for me to be able to see the birds from my end of the couch.

We keep our eye out for our neighbor Frank. He's 83 I think. His wife and life companion for 64 years has been sick, in and out of hospitals and nursing homes for the last year or so, and she died last week. He's sort of lost. One of his grandsons is staying with him for now and his son comes over every day. One of us tries to go over and chat every day when we see him out in the yard.

He's always been out in his yard a lot tending his wonderful food garden or any of the many fruit trees he has or the roses that she loved, mending and doing repairs but now I see him out there just sitting sometimes. I went over to visit the other day.

I don't want to be inside, he tells me. I guess inside is too painful right now since she's not there. She's not there but her presence is all around him. Outside is better.

The next day...

It's downright chilly out there today and the morning is full of birdsong. Hard to believe just last week we had temps in the high 90s. This week mid to high 80s and still dry as a bone. I've never experienced a year so devoid of humidity here as I have this year. My aging skin which has always been on the dry side now looks much like parchment. Or perhaps leather with all the fine and not so fine wrinkles and cross hatching.

Another day to be spent outside after that long miserably hot summer.

Another day to watch for my neighbor Frank.

castings

I've been trying to work more mindfully, more hours, more often on the cast glass. I'm still a long ways from having any body of work done to the point that I can look for placement. And I've made at least one decision about who to approach with the boxes. None of the galleries that already carry my work.

I am going to approach a particular gallery in Los Angeles, one that I had an opportunity to send a few things to ten years or so ago and let it slip through my fingers, even though they are not a 'glass' gallery. In fact they specialize in turned wood, small intensely worked pieces. Beautiful pieces. They do handle a few artists that do not work in wood and I think the boxes, at least, would be a very good fit.

Anyway. The boxes are almost done (not done as in not making any more but done in that when I finish the ones in process, I'll have enough to make a good showing) although there is at least one more I want to make that I haven't even started on.

So am I working on getting the last few details of the boxes done? No. I'm working on the small 4” square botanica erotica series. The first three are cast and cleaned up but haven't done the finish work yet. And I have the next three wax models made. I still haven't decided how I'm going to display them. I have several ideas I'm working with. Keep in mind that these are 4” x 4” x 1 1/4” - 1 1/2” thick.

One is to stack them up (glued together) like children's blocks.

Another is to set them individually or groups in a frame or shadowbox and hang on the wall.

Another is to just keep them as individual pieces that can be laid flat like a paperweight.

Or, back to the wall, affix a small french cleat on the backs and hang them up frameless in groups.

Here are the first three cast pieces (cleaned but not finished). The one with the purple petals is the one I showed in this post on filling the molds.

And these are the waxes for the next three.

things the rain brought

Last Saturday and Sunday it rained. And then on Monday we packed up and went to the city for the week.

I like home coming. The cat likes home coming. She bounds down out of the truck as soon as I open the door and then she makes herself scarce, coming in only to eat, maybe an hour or two in the evening and then she wants right back out.

Now that the weather is cooling off a little and it's amazing what a difference 10˚ makes when it still gets up to the low 90s˚ and you are thinking that it's nice out we've been opening the doors and turning off the AC til about 3 PM. I actually got out there and did a little weeding and grass pulling in part of one flower bed today. Still needs to done be earlier in the day though.

I guess you could say that's one thing the rain brought, some cooler temperatures.

I like coming home because all my stuff is here and although the bed there is comfortable, the real bed is here.

Knowing what bed I am in is important and as it happens, I have four 'beds'. Since I've been having a relationship with insomnia for at least part of about two or three nights a week for a couple of years now, I sleep on the couch a lot. Plus, I stay up later because I have found that, if I can stay up til midnight, I can usually sleep through til 7 or later. But staying up til midnight usually means sleeping on the couch til midnight. What can I say, it's a comfy couch.

So I need to know where I am when I wake up in the middle of the night...country bed or couch, city bed or couch. Knowing what bed I am in tells me where the furniture is and in which direction lay the bathroom.

Seeing where I'm at in the city shouldn't be that big a deal considering the city's need to highly illuminate my block, especially right in front of my house but by then I'm usually trying to stay asleep so I open my eyes only as much as absolutely necessary.

You're probably wondering what this has to do with what the rain brought and I can tell you this...

absolutely nothing

But this does.

Once back home, we walk around the yard to see how things have fared in our absence.

These miniature amaryllis that pop up out of the ground unnoticed in the fall are always a delight.

The oxalis were not blooming when we left.

The pink and yellow rain lilies were blooming in Houston and I dug up some of them as we were leaving.

The little yellow ones I dug a small clump up out of an easement by a nearby street years ago and they have multiplied nicely. I have planted three little plugs around the country house and added more pink ones.

And we have a new resident in the turtle pond. Actually the rain didn't bring him, at least not last weekend's rain because I have heard him out there before, but today was the first time I have seen him, nestled in the pot of elephant ears. Eventually I annoyed him enough taking pictures that with one great leap, he jumped out of the pot, cleared the turtle pond altogether and landed in the space between it and the fence.

All righty then.

Haven't seen him since and have no idea how he found his way here in the first place.

A young bullfrog.

so long, farewell, auf weidersehen, goodbye

Here we are, back home after 4 days in the city. Well, 3½ since we didn't get into Houston til about 4 PM.

Monday night we had dinner with our son, Aaron, and daughter-in-law, Leesa, before their going away gathering on the back deck of a neighborhood bar.

My son and his wife have decided to move to Oregon. They are young yet, in their 30s, and they are going for a change. They are attracted by the community, however job unfriendly it is, and the weather, after this exceptionally hot and dry year, looks good to them. They have visited Portland before and really liked it. The whole urban thing, being able to walk to what you need, not needing a car because there other good alternatives; fresh food markets, a green mindset, recycling, politically like-minded to themselves. And she lived in Olympia for a time previously.

Actually Olympia was their first destination but for whatever reasons they changed their minds and decided on Portland. I like Portland. I know some other glass artists who live there and I 'know' other bloggers in the area as well and my niece and her husband live there. My brother and his wife live in the Seattle area. So that is Aaron's and Leesa's destination. They will stay with his cousin until they settle in.

They have no real plans besides getting out of Houston. There are no jobs waiting for them, no house or apartment. They have rid themselves of most of their possessions, keeping only what will fit in a 12' box truck and have thrown their fates to the wind.

Leesa is an artist and freelance illustrator and now that she is getting fairly steady work she wants to give Aaron the same chance he gave her. His G.I. Bill is going to run out and he wants to take advantage of the education funding, going to college or maybe taking a printmaking class or some other more creative endeavor besides managing a copy shop.

I've known about the move for two months but I haven't been able to write about it. When he called, he said he had some news. I was in a particularly good mood at the time so was expecting to hear something good. I was not expecting him to tell me he was moving 2,500 miles away.

After the stunned silence wore off, I cried.

I'll never see you again.

Yes you will, besides I hardly see you now, he says, since you moved.

I only moved 55 miles away. One hour away.

Well, I've gotten used to the idea now. I still don't like it, but I'm resigned to it.  Anyway, I understand and I hope they have fun on their big adventure. If we were young and childless, we might do something like it ourselves. Well, I guess we did do something like it. Old with children grown, we moved out here.

But still, big bear hugs from my boy are going to be few and far between now.

rain, glorious rain

image via: http://celebsio.net/actors-24_Rain.html

It rained!

Over the course of the last two days and nights, we had five (at least) rain showers and it was overcast all weekend. It started with our usual (lately) 10 minute light shower but on Sunday it rained for almost an hour, not heavy, but not light either. Most important was the length of time. I can't remember when it last rained more than just a sporadic 10 minutes, few and very far between.

A drop in the bucket though as we are 20 inches behind in our annual rainfall.

This lack of rain has weighed heavily on my spirit.

But already the grass is greening up, the bindweed is suddenly covered with flowers, the pampas grass is putting up it's blooms, the air is heavy with humidity and everything looks so much happier including me.

It rained.

R is for...

Before too much time has passed, I want to thank everyone who commented on 'an unpopular position'. Just...thank you.

R is for...rituals, reckless, reality, river, reincarnation, rubbers

I could do my R post on rivers but I've already written so much about being on the river.

I thought about writing on reincarnation, which I subscribe to, but I'm not feeling especially esoteric right now.

And I thought about writing about the most reckless thing I ever did, which was to take some pills that I didn't know what they were that my date gave me which knocked me out for about 18 hours which freaked out my roommate at college because she couldn't wake me up and made everyone think I had tried to commit suicide because I had just been kicked out of school. Whew! I hadn't, tried to commit suicide that is, but I was lucky to have woken up just the same. But that's just one part of a much longer story.

I could write about my concept of reality, which is that this is all just a figment of our collective imagination and thought is energy and energy manifests. But you all probably know all about that already.

Or I could write about my disconnect with rituals except that would bore even me.

Lastly I thought of doing a post on my friend's amazing condom collection but I was sort of grasping at straws using the slang term. So I decided I'd rather just do a post on it separate. So watch this space...

Then I racked my brain for some kind of 'R' connection, some word that would set me off on a memory or idea or something! Nope, nada, zip.

And it's holding me up cause I've got a great one for 'V'.

So this is my R post.

R is for all of the above.

If you're new around here and want to read the rest of the alphabet posts, there's a link on my sidebar.

a city tale

We're back in the city again working on the second of two shower enclosures, a job we got last spring but the contractor has been extremely slow. Finally the glass was delivered to us the Friday before the twin's Bat Mitzvah and last week we finished the simpler of the two designs. I didn't photograph it and won't. It's wrapped up and ready to go.

Driving in our luck finally ran out and we were caught in a traffic back-up on the freeway. In the four years since we've been driving back and forth this is the first time we've been caught. Fortunately the wreck was in the right lane and cleared quickly. We crept along for a while but didn't have to sit at a standstill. The cat was not pleased. Slowing down is her signal that we are nearing our destination.

Coming in past Memorial Park, I was heartbroken to see how many more trees had died. The dead trees now outnumber the living trees, at least the ones that are visible from the freeway as we skirt around the park on our way to the city house. The 1500 acre heavily wooded park in the inner city, bordered on one side by the only natural bayou left and the inner loop on two other sides, has large sections that remain undeveloped providing much needed habitat for all kinds of wildlife. Paddling down the bayou at the edge of the park, all noise from the city disappears and it's easy to imagine that you are far away.

Arriving at the house, I bring the cat in in her carrier. Used to be I would just open the door and let her jump down. She travels calmly. We keep her open carrier on the wide armrest between us in the truck. She doesn't mind laying in it when the door is open. It's her safe place in the truck. But she also will sit out on the armrest, usually coming out when we exit the freeway. She looks out and if we vary our route, you can tell she's anxious because she doesn't recognize her surroundings. Lately she's taken to stretching forward, putting her paws on the dash and sniffing at the air conditioner vent. We get a lot of surprised looks from people who happen to notice we have a cat sitting up on the armrest.

Anyway, I used to let her jump down when we arrived but the the kids got a dog. He's not two yet, and came as a small puppy, the runt of the litter. He's a sweet dog and has a cat of his own who will still get up in his face and he will sit on the cat and they chase each other about. But he's a big dog with a big head that is all mouth and when he sees Emma he wants to play. Emma sees a big dog that is all mouth running at her. She tore holes in three of my shirts before I quit carrying her in. Not to mention the holes and scratches on me. She's happily an indoor cat in the city.

There's no fence between the kid's house and our house. We used to own both properties and so the two places are enclosed with one fence. We're OK with that. The g'kids use our house sometimes when we aren't here. They'll watch something different on TV or seek a quiet place to do their homework. I'm sure they ferreted out any secrets we left behind long ago but they seem to love us anyway.

I see the city and the neighborhood differently now that I don't live here. If I was young and single or married and childless I would want to live here. The changes I have decried I now see as desirable, if I was young and unattached or newly attached. No yard to speak of, bike path through the adjacent neighborhoods that provides a kind of highway, a new sort of hippie hip center, some quirky street art. I'd have to have a good job to afford it though. Truth is I've always liked this neighborhood. Even when it was working poor. It's not now, of course, and I'm not young but it looks like fun.

Travel days, that's really all we do. Close up one house, load the truck, make the drive, open the other house, unload the truck. And then again in reverse when we are headed home.

It's kind of like camping here at the city house. We bring certain necessities back and forth with us. Our pillows, a few kitchen items, food. We don't keep any food here in the city besides basic staples or stuff we bought at some point and then never used.

After dinner, someone brings up donuts. In the country it would be said wistfully and that would be the end of it. But we're not in the country.

So there's a box full of donuts on the table.