Another Week In Review

I spent 2 1/2 glorious days last week up at Peninsula State Park, catching up with old friends and soaking in the scenery. It was just glorious weather and the lilacs were rioting. The puppy adapted quickly to tent living, and with several other dogs in the group she had lots of positive role models and lots of play time. It really was a situation that just couldn't be beat. And though I hated to leave when I did, I had the consolation of knowing that the weather turned beastly cold and rainy as soon as I was out the park gate.

But I had to get home for the first day of Farmer's Market on Saturday, and it was just brutal. Cold, with threatening rain that turned out to not to be a bluff, and accompanied by the chaos that one would expect for the first attempt of the season. I was late, and my set-up didn't go smoothly, and although there was a surprising volume of customers (given the weather and the lack of actual produce this early in the season) I barely made enough to justify my efforts. When it started raining at 11:00, I packed it in despite the disapproving looks from my fellow vendors.

Luckily, Sunday's graduation events were all indoors and my baby made it across the stage without a hitch. There were a lot of misty eyes when she and the other graduates were recognized in church that morning, but the graduation itself was strangely anticlimactic; perhaps because college is looming so large in her future, and we have the strong sense that this is just another milestone towards a still distant goal.

Along with the big events, we've had a few smaller incidents this week. Somehow a (presumably mother) squirrel and her compatriots got into the roof overhanging our front porch, and from there worked their way into the kitchen soffit and the kitchen/master bath wall. We could tell that one squirrel had fallen down into a gap between a pair of studs and was trying to climb out over the weekend. Rick got into the bathroom ceiling and fished a rope down between the studs, hoping the squirrel would climb up and then get out - which may or may not have worked, since the sounds in that part of the wall were gone by Monday or so. And meanwhile, he applied some tinfoil to the trim piece they'd been climbing up to access the overhang, hoping they'd slide down and be unable to get back up. But by Tuesday or so there was more scratching and carrying on in another section of the wall, and we eventually gave up on the rope concept in favor a low, discrete hole through the sheet rock.

This little guy seemed almost too young to be away from his mother, and despite Rick's best efforts with a warming lamp and eyedroppers of preemie puppy milk, he didn't make it. The whole thing is a shame, but I'm secretly relieved we didn't end up adding a pet squirrel to the menagerie. Instead, I acquired 8 Auracanus chicks from a friend and am incubating them in the same glass cage recently occupied by the squirrel.

Most of them will go to Cousin Kate in a few weeks - but there's a dark chocolate chick with a certain air about him who reminds me a bit of our recently deceased Rudy. I'm not sure what the little guy's name is just yet, but he's probably male and he's definitely staying.

Ladies' Night

The chiropractor from my networking group is hosting a "Ladies' Night" tonight, with demonstrations and vendors and such. I've been invited to attend and hawk my portrait work, which meant putting a trade-show type booth together for the first time. Luckily, I have an assortment of tables from my farmer's market set-up, so I just needed to figure out a tri-fold display. What do you think?

Also, I put together a jewelery set for my friend Sara at Sheboygan Monument, similar to the ones I made for Dan's wedding last Fall. In exchange she gave me this lovely garden stone. I'm going to use it as a door prize tonight; I like the continuation of the "stone" theme.


I considered also bringing my bin of matted 8" x 10" art prints, but I'm not sure this will be quite the right venue. I think tonight will be more about making contacts than making sales. Still, I think I'll have it handy in the car, just in case.

And finally, a gratuitous rooster picture. Chester still misses Rudy.

Paging the Magic Elves

Oh, my . . . where do I start?
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Well, you know how they say bad things come in 3's? Well, Sunday of Memorial Day weekend my elderly next door neighbor hired someone to work on her yard. That someone foolishly and irresponsibly brought with her a springer/beagle bitch in heat, who immediately took off for my property line and killed Rudy, my longtime companion and all-around favorite rooster.

He was such a handsome boy, full of personality and as social as can be. I was VERY upset, especially since the dog's owner seemed absolutely thoughtless about the whole thing and had been so casual about letting her dog run wild like that. In the end I gave the sheriff a tour of Rudy's last moments and then sent him over to have a talk with her about personal responsibility for one's animals and destruction of "property." Then I dug a grave, which was NOT what I had hoped to be doing on Memorial Day.

The next day (Monday) I had planned to do some weed-whacking, and since our machine is crotchety at best we decided to get a fresh batch of gas/oil to feed it. I wanted to dispose of the bit left over from last fall in as safe and conscientious a way as I could, so I thought I'd burn it with some brush in the fire pit. WHOOSH! crackle crackle crackle . . . . It's a good thing I had my hair back in a knot and my sunglasses on, because the fumes lit in one big ball of flame that caught a bit of my hair on fire!! I'm okay, but it could have been much worse. Suffice to say I won't be burning anything else for a while.

Tuesday I bit into a Mentos candy and broke a tooth. A friend of mine commented that "my planets must be crashing into each other." Wednesday my dentist said that I'd need a crown, but I'd already used up my dental insurance benefits for the year - so I either needed to wait until January or cough up an extra grand. Thursday I played it safe, mostly staying home with a therapeutic pint of Haagen Dasz Green Tea Ice Cream. (Notice how the nutritional information is artfully covered by the cap.) And Friday, I had my previously scheduled root canal on another tooth, which will need its own cap in a few weeks. It still hurts.

Meanwhile, Rick took all of last week off in an effort to get our 1978 VW van in fit condition for a camping trip this week. He was truly heroic with his efforts, but we made the command decision last night that with an untried engine, a suspicious (if small) oil leak, and a battery that may have an internal short, it just wasn't wise for me to take the beast on a solo trip to the very northeastern tip of Wisconsin. Pity - it would have been SUCH a cool thing to do. But instead, I'll be packing up a tent and a cot for the big Peninsula State Park 100th anniversary gathering starting on Wednesday.
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Before then, I need to put the house in order for the guests arriving this weekend. (This would be where the magic elves come in. If you see any, please send them over.) I also need to finish post-processing on the family portrait session I did on Saturday at the lake, and teach on Tuesday, and practice violin before my Wednesday lesson, and get a fresh blog ready for one of my clients, and put together a "trade booth" set-up for an event I've been invited to attend on Tuesday evening. Blogging purely for my own pleasure seems a little decadent just now, but I'll try to post van photos and some other updates before I leave town Wednesday afternoon.

Wet Cuffs on My Pajamas

It's cooler and rainy this morning, but before getting ready for school I just had to check out the lilacs blooming outside my bathroom window. These are bushes that I picked out a few years ago from the lilac thicket on the other end of our land, and painfully lugged over to plant next to the house. They are an unending source of pleasure when they are in bloom.




And so long as I was out there, I did a quick inspection of some other early blossoms.



Oh, and that second scarf blank is hung up for the last stages of drying. I mixed a fair amount of metallic gold in with the greens and browns and bronzes, but so far the scarf still reminds me a bit of something an Ewok would wear. We'll see.

Just A Little Experiment With Color

I was wandering around Michaels a few weeks ago in an inexcusable manner when I came across a couple of lightweight cotton shawl/scarf blanks on clearance for almost nothing. The suggested use was to add iron-on items and buttons and such, but I thought the scarves would probably lend themselves well to the farmer's market (after a little jazzing up with some of my silk dyes).

I was using the memory of a recent sunset for inspiration - golden ambers fading to deep blue. I noticed, however, that the cotton didn't seem especially absorbent. I twisted the scarf before painting it and figured I'd end up with diagonal light patches, but wasn't sure how the fabric would take up the dye that was being applied directly and enthusiastically on top. This is what I got, after everything dried:

I think I like it. It's almost an aurora borealis effect, with streaks of color on an otherwise fairly bland background. But I think I'll go for more "woodland-type" colors on the other blank.

A Mother's Day Portrait

Why is it that my own kids are the hardest onest to photograph? I did my very best to insist that they sit for me in honor of Mother's Day, so I could send a portrait to each of their grandmothers. It was like herding cats to get the schedules of two working teenagers to coordinate with each other, my own availability, and the good graces of Mother Nature. A week late, I finally got them in front of my lens.

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Unfortunately, Tasha needed a very long lag time to get ready, and refused to take my first several suggestions for poses. Then Lucas got the giggles, and made a bunch of faces at the camera while I was trying to get the dog to smile. Then he kept trying to go deadpan to compensate.

And wasn't looking at the camera . . . And then the dog blinked . . .

By the time we finally got something I liked, I was ready to throw the camera!

But I keep reminding myself that we won't have too many more times when both kids are home and we're all together. We need to savor them, even if I felt like screaming once or twice.

New Neighbors and Carl's Award

I picked up this birdhouse a while back at Goodwill because it was cute, and because I wanted to hang something on that porch hook that would not shrivel if it didn't receive daily watering and attention all summer long. It didn't occur to me that it would actually go into use - I figured it was strictly decorative. Apparently the little brown bird twittering happily from inside didn't get the memo. And from the look of it, he also forgot to measure the door frame before trying to move in the "furniture."

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It must be the season for such things, because I've also got two hens (the white one I bought last spring and one of her daughters) industriously incubating eggs. It seems I'm going to have a pile of chicks on my hands in about 5 weeks, most of which will probably have to be given away. Actually, one of my older brown hens went missing about the same time, probably to incubate her own batch of eggs in some little corner of the field or woods. The chances are not great that she will survive 6 weeks without nightly predator protection, but I've had independent-thinking hens beat those odds before. We'll see if we get any Father's Day surprises.

Meanwhile, I took a trip over the weekend up to Green Bay to see Carl receive his award for driving 100,000 miles without incident. The event included a tasty buffet (even by vegetarian standards), and the chance to get to know a really nice group of people. I have always been convinced that truckers are some of the nicest, friendliest people around. This crowd certainly proved the point; our dining companions were a husband and wife pair who drove truck for the pleasure of being paid to explore the continent in what might have been their retirement years, after careers as an engineer (her) and businessman (him). I never did get my hands on the adorable baby two tables over, but had the pleasure of sitting down to chat with one of the trainers and the driver manager after the event itself was over. (In true Carl fashion, we were the last ones out the door, and there were still plenty of stories being saved for next time.)

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I have to say that I was also impressed with the company itself. Gordon

Trucking seems to hold its drivers and its safety record in equally high regard, and the younger Mr. Gordon himself had flown in from the West Coast to personally congratulate Carl and the others on their performance.

Carl walked away with a gold tie tack and a clipboard inscribed with his accomplishment. Others in the crowd were being celebrated for higher accident-free mileage milestones - you got an embroidered jacket for 250,000 miles, and I saw a very snazzy watch which the owner had earned for his impressive safety record. The guy with the 4,000,000 accident free miles wasn't there, so I don't know what he got; but Carl was looking carefully at that list of milestones and calculating what it would take to get him to the top of the list someday.