stinkin' hot

I would be perfectly happy if we could go straight from spring to fall. Like, let's have spring through July and fall starting in August, and just skip all this silly hot weather. And yet somehow all the fruit could magically get ripe anyway even if it never went over 80 degrees?

Sigh. I HATE the heat. It was 107 today. Even the cats melted.

As everyone likes to say here, "at least it's a dry heat" and having recently been to the part of the country where I stepped out of the gloriously air-conditioned 75 degree car long enough to gasp the moist 90-something degrees air and say "eww" I agree, thank goodness it's not humid here. I don't ever in a million years want to live in a hot and humid climate.

I finished the first lion knife tonight (the one I showed in progress last time). I will attempt to shoot some good pics when both are done, so I think I'll just leave you in suspense until then. I'll start the second one tomorrow. It'll be in color.

pictures today

I needed to stop and smell the roses today, so to speak. So I wandered around after the rain with my munchkin camera and took a few photos.













And then there's this one from tonight. I'm totally insanely oogly googly over frogs and toads. Seriously. I adore them, they make me giddy, I'm instantly back to six years old when I see them. I don't remember seeing frogs and toads much (ever?) as a little kid in San Diego or Redmond (WA) but when we moved back to California and were looking at houses in 1985, I kept seeing these tree frogs as well as baby toads at the places we looked. And that became my criteria. (Hey, I was six!) So when we went to the big ranch where I grew up, and I discovered the entire front yard was full of hundreds of baby toads, it was love at first sight, I didn't even go with my family to see the rest of the property as far as I remember, just stayed in the yard. So imagine my extreme glee at finding baby tree frogs hopping all over the back sidewalk this evening. Glee! So teeny and adorable! I randomly selected this one and brought it into the kitchen and took its photo, then put it back outside with its siblings. Sadly, I rarely see toads anymore, but the tree frog population seems to be doing well around here.

my beautiful horses

I started a new scrim project today. I just have the image transferred and a little bit done, it's not much to look at right now. So I didn't scan it.

My horses looked soooo bored today. Nice sunny day and they've been cooped up in the corral for months (I want the pasture to go to seed so I'm keeping the horses off it). Anyway, I felt sorry for them so I let them out for a gallop and a little grazing. They were so eager to graze it was hard to get them to MOVE for photos, which is why they have grass hanging out of their mouths in these pics! Classy, I know. Gwen is a 22 year old Morgan X Shire. She's the black one with white socks. Shylah is an almost 6 year old Canadian Horse (yes, that's a real breed). She came down here from Canada from the PMU industry when she was just a little stringbean of a weanling.

I took way over 100 photos. I narrowed them down to these. There are more of Shylah because she moves around more! :-)











Olin, meanwhile, maintained his usual level of enthusiasm.

poultry show and other things

It's hard to believe I was in Fresno yesterday (~160 miles away), but I was. I got up at 4am and was down there at 7:30am. I'd been considering just driving down there for the heck of it to see friends but figured if I was going to do that I ought to go ahead and show something so I entered three birds. I never even managed to see all the birds at the show, I sort of forgot to make a point to do that, which actually makes some sense because I really was there to see people. And with the exception of a badly-need 2.5 hour nap in the back of the minivan that morning I spent the entire time talking to people, it was great. I missed a few though, there are people I saw in passing once or twice but never got a chance to chat with. That's a bummer. Time flew, my Black cockerel that I like so much won best RCCL, and that made me happy. The show let out around 5:30 or so, I had dinner with a few friends, hit the road, and was back home at 9:30pm. Talk about a whirlwind. I'm glad I went though. I'm not sure when the next one will be or what all it will entail, and I REALLY need to figure out what the heck I am doing with these birds.

Blurry, but a sunrise nonetheless, just for proof I was awake early:

You know how some people always manage to blink when they are photographed? Well so does this bird. I took 4 photos and this slightly blurry and not well posed one is the only one where he isn't blinking!

It rained all day today. This afternoon I went down to the Woodbridge Ecological Preserve with GM to see the sandhill cranes. They are starting to migrate out, and today was the last day of the guided tours and I've been meaning to do that all season so I figured let's just go anyway. The weather kinda sucked and was not conducive to good photography, but it was neat to see all the cranes fly in at sunset. Next year I need to make a point to do that earlier in the season and on a day when there's more light. The pics are way gritty, but these are the best of them:

Two sandhill cranes:

Three snow geese and two greater white-fronted geese:


And last but not least, a little cuteness! All together now, awwww!

May 19 work in progress

19x27 inches
graphite and charcoal on velour paper

And now for some random photos:

In my next life I think I'd like to be a cat my cat. :-)




This was yesterday, looking out my bedroom window. They left the nest today. I meant to get more pictures of them. Oh well.

And here's what came out of the hatcher yesterday. They can be together about two days before the ducks get too messy and have to be moved to their own brooder.

This is not normal hatching progress. The chick ended up just fine though.

Eighteen down...

I have washed 18 chickens in the last two days. Actually, technically not, because 4 of them were still clean from last time around. But still, they count toward the final tally. At this rate I may actually finish on Monday, that would be nice! Of course there will be a lot of touchup work to do on Friday...

I've been looking at the BBRed cockerels and trying to figure out which ones to keep for breeding pens this (will be hopefully selling the rest next weekend.) It's so tough, none of them is perfect. Some have better type but poor color, some have better color but poor type. I'm sort of feeling like I need to keep the ones with the best type, since "type makes the breed and color makes the variety, and type always must come first." I do get pretty hung up on color though, since it's darn near impossible to get it right. So when I have a bird with proper neck color, it's almost easy to overlook that his tail feathers aren't long enough, or he has red spots on his chest (should be solid black). Maybe I should just eeny meeny miney moe them...

I finished up drawing for the night last night at 12:15 and then headed off to bed. Olin was asleep on my bed, and I was feeling generous so I decided I'd let him sleep inside (knowing it meant I'd have to get up around 5 to let him out... but I always have faith in my ability to go back to sleep. If I've never mentioned that I'm not a morning person, I am NOT a morning person). Anyway, around 12:45 he left my room, and about 5 minutes later I heard it--the Sound of Impending Doom. When you hear it, it's too late. I launched out of bed in movie-like slow motion, the voice in my head shouting "noooooooooooo!!!!!!" But it was too late. Four, count em four piles of cat barf in the hallway. Do cats ever barf on linoleum? He could have walked just a foot and a half down the hallway and had a vast expanse of easily cleanable floor in the laundry room, but no... I had to be out there in my pj's scrubbing cat puke out of the carpet at 12:45am. I love my cats, but I hate cat puke.

So then this morning I stumbled out to the kitchen (was it early? Nooo, just takes me a while to wake up!) and what did I encounter? No, thankfully not more cat puke, but a very substantial trail of ants traipsing across the kitchen floor from the grate under to oven, to the cat food dishes. Gross. I was pretty sure I could hear them all gleefully singing the "hi ho hi ho" song as they went off to work, but those were not the words going through my head. I blasted some ant poison around the room and wiped up all the little carcasses. There are always strays though, running around the floor in a "oh crap oh crap!" panic. I'm not a big fan of ants.

In other news, those drawings I said I was going to finish the other night are more or less done, I just need to sign them and make sure I don't need to tweak anything. I've noticed that my drawing style has actually changed a fair amount between now and the start of the Standard project. Evolution, I guess. I think it's improved, but I'm noticing that just the way I handle the materials is different, things like more frequent use of graphite to "outline" things. This pair of illustrations are white birds. I think white is the most difficult color to draw, trying to get the shadows believable. With other colors, the drawing it much more saturated and the lines are pretty sharp, but white tends to look soft and blurry, so without even really thinking about it I've been putting a bit of a line around certain edges. I think it looks good. Dang I can't wait to show all those drawings on my website!