so this happened

Caithness, Scotland

Late January or early February, my friend Paul Tarlow who owns Helios, a glass studio and Bullseye Glass resource center in Austin, posted on FB about a 9 day residency he and artist Jane Bruce are doing in North Lands Creative Glass in Scotland next year. This is a place that I have been wanting to go to for some time but financially, it hadn't been possible...til now. Or rather since we cashed out our property in the now stupidly valuable inner city neighborhood where we lived and worked for 40 years. So I signed up.

Then 9 days ago, I got an email from Jane. She was inviting me to participate in her 4^th International Artist Symposium and Retreat on the recommendation of my friend Natali (who may or may not be able to participate), 9 days and basically the same dates only this year. No way I could afford both so I had a decision to make and I chose to go this year, not that I think Paul's residency won't be wonderful, which it will be, but I thought the one this year would be more interesting with the international aspect of it (and maybe getting to hang out with Natali) and I knew Paul had a waiting list so it wouldn't be difficult for him to fill my spot.

It's been a little nerve wracking. The fee for the symposium, the air fare, the lodging, and meals sans dinners is going to cost about $4000. I hate spending money, well large sums of money. And I rarely never spend large sums of money without thinking about it hard and long over a long period of time, a habit born of being a working artist living hand to mouth for most of my life, and this, basically, had to be a snap decision for me.

So for the past week of days, I have been busy getting my deposit transferred over from one to the other, making flight reservations (3 flights to get there, three to get back), and getting my passport renewed which doesn't actually expire til August but it needed doing anyway.

my passport photo from 10 years ago

my new passport picture (however, by the time I leave, I'll be sporting my summer hair cut)...I could have looked a little happier I guess.

I still need to secure my lodging while there but I'm working on that, waiting to hear back from a bed and breakfast there.

North Lands Creative Glass is about as far north in Scotland as you can get and even in summer it's wet, windy, and cold. I'll be packing all my winter clothes I guess plus my wind pants and dry shirt from my river guide days. Now that I've made the decision to go I'm trying not to dwell on the cost and I am looking forward to it.

I've never been overseas before.

eating the dead

My sister and I go to estate sales on Thursdays or Fridays though we limit our area to about a 30 mile radius. Sometimes we find some neat stuff and sometimes we come away with nothing. They're all basically the same...all the accumulations of the deceased laid out on tables and counters...china and crystal and pottery, collectibles, books, decorations, pictures, jewelry, watches, records (I'm always curious what music they listened to), furniture, clothes, linens, whole kitchens, yard tools, tools, even down to their personal grooming items and cleaning supplies. Sometimes though, you come across a picker's dream. Last Friday we went to one in a blink of a little town, two houses, one of which used to be a church converted into a residence, full of gorgeous antiques and just all kinds of really neat stuff plus a shed, and a big barn. I could have done a whole post on just this one house if I had thought to take pictures. I spent about $40 and this is what I bought:

this very cool pitcher

and this juicer

4 glass knobs

this small wood printers tray

a tabletop table saw

and a wine bottle opener (I broke mine recently) and a putty knife. We had planned to go to a different one but my sister and our boss at the antique store went to this one on Thursday where Donna bought some gorgeous furniture for the store and Pam convinced me that this one was worth going back to. She was right.

I got a lot of the glassware I used in the totems at these sales. I have things I look for like wind chimes (they usually need a little bit of repair).

I  especially like the one above. I had to completely restring it and come up with a substitute for the small glass tube 'ringer' as it was missing and I had to make new thin cardboard 'vanes' and paint them gold as the old ones were torn or missing. It hangs inside just inside the door to the garage and when it's open or the other back door is open, the air coming in will make it tinkle.

And birdhouses

and certain tools. I've picked up some nice wooden spoons and small kitchen knives and a really nice 10” cast iron skillet and I finally got a three tiered hanging wire basket set for the root vegetables. I've been looking out for one of those for a while. My sister was quicker and she got the first one we came across.

Occasionally I run across something that is too good to pass up like this antique lamp for $35 that I have no idea where I am going to put.

winter reading list

Another short list but in my defense, my last (current) book is 870 pages. I was hoping to get it finished before the end of this quarter but, alas, I still have about 170 pages to go.

Code Of Conduct: a thriller by Brad Thor - A formula novel with totally cliched characters male and female alike. Ex super SEAL operative working for a private company with close ties to the government is assigned to go find out what happened to a jungle clinic in the Congo. They find a purged facility and a pit filled with burned bodies. Meanwhile, the Israelis are zeroing in on a prime suspect but even they don't know what he really has planned. Can the good guys figure out who the bad guy is and what he is up to before he carries out his heinous plan? The answer is yes and no. They figure who and what and why but too late for when and where. The plan is launched but fizzles, the bad guy escapes but is caught. It was a good enough quick mindless read.

Church Of Marvels by Leslie Parry – The Church of Marvels is an attraction on Coney Island. Was an attraction on Coney Island. It burned down before the story starts in 1895 killing Friendship Church, the proprietress, and several of the other living attractions, leaving her 17 year old twin daughters alone and bereaved. Belle, the perfectly formed sword swallower and contortionist, disappears with her grief leaving her crooked sister bereft and working alone at another side show with the knife thrower. Eventually Odile receives a letter from her sister Belle and leaves for the Lower East Side of Manhattan to find her following what meager clues she has from the letter. Meanwhile, Sylvan Threadgill, himself abandoned as a child (he thinks as he has no real memories of the time before) and taken in and then orphaned as a young man, who works as a night soiler finds an abandoned baby in a privy. He takes the baby home and sets out to try and find out who might have abandoned her. And then there is Alphie, thrown out of her house at 14 to fall prey to the sex market, who makes her living making the drunks and opium addicts look presentable on their way home, now rescued and married to the local undertaker hoping to keep her secret hidden, who wakes up in the local lunatic asylum with a head wound and no clear memory of how she got there. Odile, Belle, Sylvan, Alphie all have their stories to tell as their lives intersect and their secrets unfold. And at the very end, even Friendship Church's secret is revealed. It's a good story well told with unusual characters from the poorer and seedier side of life.

The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency by Andrew McCall Smith – the first in this long series. Mma Ramotswe, upon the death of her father and the sale of his cattle, buys a house and a building, opens a detective agency and sets about to solve the problems of her clients. Set in Botswana, Africa. Quick enjoyable read, I look forward to others in the series.

Among The Ten Thousand Things by Julia Pierpont – This is a story about Jack, a NY artist, and his wife Deb, a ballet instructor for aspiring young women, herself a retired dancer, and their two children 11 year old Kay and 15 year old Simon, and the dissolution of their family. One day a woman delivers a box to the doorman for Deb. When Kay comes home from school, he gives her the box to take up for her mother. Kay looks at the box and decides that since it isn't sealed, just tucked, it would be alright for her to peek. She takes it into her room and inside is all the evidence of a year long affair with another woman, page after page of all the printed out flirtatious and sexually explicit texts between her father and his lover. Kay shows her brother before their mother gets home and when Deb arrives, all hell breaks loose. The kids are hurt and confused as they wait for Jack to come home. Deb, who has known about the affair for months and that it was ended, is now forced to take active control of her life as she tries to decide if she can continue to live with the infidelity now that the kids know. The bulk of the book covers this three week period while Deb takes the kids to a vacation house they co-own with Jack's best friend in order to be able to decide what she wants to do without pressure from Jack. Most of the story isn't really about what Deb is going through so much as the other three others so we read about Jack and Kay and Simon and how they are reacting to the situation. It ends abruptly with two short sections that outline the future, one of which occurs right in the middle of the story.

where was I before all this wild dog business?

The past couple of weeks I've been bringing in yards of dirt to fill the raised bed that finally got built. This will be the first garden we have had since we bought the shop in the spring of 2014. Our garden spot at home was in shade by 3 PM (which wasn't always a bad thing long about August but then the only thing still producing in August is okra which loves the sun and heat), so we decided we would build raised beds over at the shop which, when we bought it, was an acre and a half of nothing but grass. I have since put in some flowering shrubs and recently planted a purple orchid tree and have a tiny little volunteer red but tree that I dug up out of the flower bed to plant over there and the peach tree which I plan to get planted today.

Anyway, yesterday we shoveled and raked part of the third yard of dirt into the one 4' x 16' raised bed that we had managed to get built and got it filled with about half of the yard of dirt left. There was really no spot to put the rest of the dirt over at the shop for future use that the grass and weeds wouldn't grow into it. We could have shoveled it out on the concrete apron in front of the barn but then we would have to cart it all over to the shop yard again once we had another raised bed built. Or we could build a 4' x 4' bed real quick and fill that.

So that is what we did. Only instead of a 4' x 4', he built a 4' x 8' which the remaining yard of dirt only partially filled. We're chasing our tail, he says. Uh, yeah. So I need to get another yard of dirt which will fill it with only about 5 cubic feet left over. I will have spent $140 on dirt. It will take years before we get $140 worth of vegetables out of it, but I did get my tomatoes and two bell pepper plants in and I'm headed to the feed store later today to see what they have in the way of vegetables.

Elsewhere in the yards, it's spring!

dog story, part whatever

Well, life is back to normal here...almost. I enjoyed my four days of solitude. I got most of the tomato plants planted and a purple orchid tree planted (but not the peach tree yet), I made headway in the 850 page book I'm reading, I cooked a little bit, I finally got the magnolia leaves all put together (no picture yet). Mostly though I didn't do diddly squat.

The quiet ended Friday evening when I drove to the city to pick up grandgirl Jade who wanted to come spend the weekend. Saturday morning, I was standing out in the Little Backyard and saw the two big dogs trotting along the edge of the Wild Space toward the road and cast my gaze to my own Big Backyard and there was the puppy, at the back edge of my property out in the open, big dogs a good distance away. I opened the gate and ran towards the puppy who saw me and started trotting towards the Wild Space and it and I reached the edge at about the same time. It cowered under some scrub and started yipping and when I reached for it it started crying. Took me a few tries before I could grab it by the scruff of it's neck (didn't want to get bit), at which point it started shrieking and I took off running back to the Little Backyard and the safety of the fence. I didn't look to see if the adults were coming after me, just hoped I got there first. You would have thought I was torturing that puppy from the sounds it was making. Pulled Jade right out of bed to see what was going on.

As soon as I put it down it ran behind the turtle pond which is snug up against the fence in the corner. Jade started trying to coax it out when I went in to get it some food and water.

It wasn't long before it's hunger overcame it's fear.

SPOT (Stray Pet Outreach Team) was having an adoption event that morning at the Junior College so we shut the puppy up in the little bathroom

and went to see what they wanted me to do with it, where to take it. We did see four of the other puppies. One has already been adopted out and another had just left with someone who is fostering it until it gets adopted. They asked me if I would please keep it over the weekend as the vet was about to close for the day but if I ran by there right away they would give me some flea and tick repellent/killer which we did.

We came home and I gave that dirty smelly dog a bath and Jade took him outside to dry in the sun before I put the flea stuff on him.

It didn't take that little dog long to decide that being around humans inside with food and water and affection was far better than the life he had been living. Later in the afternoon, he was exploring around the house and climbed in the box for paper recycling and took a nap.

Minnie spent most of the day Saturday either barking at the puppy or being annoyed when he would take her toys and chew sticks.

I let him use Minnie's little bed which she never gets in anymore but he ended up sleeping with Jade Saturday night. Sunday morning, her dad showed up, who is a sucker for puppies, to go work on their property and within 10 minutes he's got Sarah on the phone telling her about the new dog. I could hear her on the phone...NO NO NO NO NO. They already have two dogs and two cats and are getting ready to move this summer and, as she says, she's having a hard enough time finding a place with the animals they already have. A few hours later, after I returned from picking Marc up from the airport, my daughter showed up with the other two grandgirls and one of their friends and that puppy's butt did not touch the ground again until they all left.

Last night I closed him up in the little bathroom when I went to bed and of course he started crying and then Minnie started barking because his crying upset her so I ended up opening the door and sleeping in the back bedroom where I could talk to him until he settled down.

He's a smart little dog and except for a couple of instances right at first, he does his business on newspaper during the night and outdoors during the day as long as he has access to it so I am keeping the screen door propped open. Good thing the weather is nice.

And he and Minnie are getting along. She wants to play and he does in his clumsy puppy way while she bounces all around him.

The cat, however, is not amused.

I'm taking him to the vet today and dropping him off. The people at SPOT have asked me if I would consider fostering him until he gets adopted out, about 4 – 6 weeks currently she said as puppies adopt out faster. I have considered it and as long as I had a house full of teenage girls to deal with him I thought I would but cooler heads have prevailed and to tell the truth, I don't think I'm up to house training and socializing another puppy. We're going to be starting that big job soon that I keep talking about as we have received our purchase order and are just waiting on the deposit check and when we do, I really won't have the time or attention for a puppy.

dog pack update

I called the county sheriff's department earlier this week just to confirm what I already knew, that there is no animal control in the county. My only option, they said, was to call WCSPOT (Wharton County Stray Pet Outreach Team). I didn't do that right away because the last time I called them about five chihuahuas, one with puppies, they wouldn't help out because they were at capacity. Fortunately, my sheriff deputy neighbor found homes for them all, or perhaps he got SPOT to help out after all. Anyway, I finally called them yesterday.

I hadn't seen the dogs since Monday (been raining), and haven't seen the mother for days before that, and I walked along the edge of the Wild Space looking for them and about halfway between my property and the road, I saw the male that's been getting in my pond and tearing things up and one puppy so I tossed a few firecrackers in their direction (they were easily 20 yards away from me). A car with two women pulled up on the road and yelled at me was I shooting those dogs? That pissed me off. What was it to her? No, I hollered back, I'm trying to scare them away with firecrackers, you want them, you get them. She turned and spoke to the driver who said something I could hear but not understand. I just shrugged and eventually they drove on down the road and out of sight. A few minutes later I saw them coming back in the direction they had come.

So I called SPOT and was describing the dogs and their location and she told me that they had picked up 6 puppies yesterday on Walter Rd. that sounded like the dogs I was talking about. Sure enough, they are those puppies so I told her they missed one. She said they would see what they could do to get the last puppy and the adults and might be calling me today about it. But not so far. I haven't seen the puppy today but I did see both adults out in my absentee neighbor's yard.

Anyway, the 6 puppies are at the local vet that works with SPOT getting evaluated and their shots and will be available for adoption. They do look healthy.

For those of you who may have thought that my attitude and response to the dogs was less than compassionate, let me just say that I have seen what a feral dog pack can do. When we first moved out here there were a couple of feral dogs in this same area. The female had two litters one after the other and she tried to move them into my absent neighbor's backyard and under the house which I went to great lengths to prevent them getting in there. Eventually the pack consisted of about 6 adults and another litter of puppies. They became bolder and more aggressive and I eventually had to rescue another neighbor's terrified and screaming goat from being killed that they had cornered and had already bitten several times. You can read that story here.

I'm glad that the puppies were caught and hope they get the last one and the adults as well. A much better solution to someone finally having enough and shooting them.

home alone

Saturday morning we were up at 4 AM so that the husband could make his 7:30 AM flight to Vail, Colorado. It's an hour and a half drive to the airport in Houston so we left the house at 4:30. Marc is spending a week with my brother at his timeshare. My brother skis. My husband does not so he plans to hang out or go visit his brother in Denver while my brother is swishing down snowy mountainsides. I had no interest in going and after 40 some years of being together 24/7 as working partners, having the house to myself for a week sounded much better than freezing my ass off in the snow. So I dropped him off and headed back home where I needed to get ready for my day at the antique store.

Saturday evening, my grandson called. He would be out either late that night or early Sunday to spend a couple of days and work on his car. I had already gone to bed when I heard him come in with my youngest grandgirl, Robin, in tow. And yesterday, my daughter and son-in-law came out to work on their property and brought out twin Jade.

Sunday, I had planned to plant my newly acquired peach tree and tomatoes from the trip to the nursery last Thursday so after fixing eggs and pancakes for breakfast I headed outside. I didn't actually get anything planted as I got sidetracked by having Mikey move the arbor to it's new location for me so I set about to secure it in place with stakes and getting it leveled and plumb and then cleaning out some of the dead canes and dead branches that have fallen in the climbing roses.

Next, I set about constructing a crude fence around my two tubs of water plants because the black dog, foiled from getting into the small pond or filter, thrashed around in the two tubs tearing up those plants. And I think there are 6 puppies, not four. 

I tossed a couple of firecrackers (courtesy of my neighbor) their way yesterday afternoon when they were on the edge of the Wild Space. The problem with that is that Minnie freaks out too and she was nervous all the rest of the day.

Late afternoon, The Girl and SIL came by to pick up Jade and Robin (Mikey stayed overnight again to work on his car today which is his day off work and to help me unload another yard of dirt if I went and fetched it, none of which is going to happen as we woke up to a slow gentle rain). She was telling me that Mikey told her he was coming out this weekend because 'Granny's going to be alone with Grandpa gone and she'll get lonely'. Nice that the grandkids are looking out for me.

I am a lucky girl.