Just This Morning – And Just This Week

This was the sunset a couple of days ago. It happens about the time I go to bed….7:30 pm. If I don’t go to bed  that early I won’t make it up to head to the gym by 5 am. And I won’t get the steps in that I require of myself every day. This week in a five day period I almost made it to 75,000. That’s a lot.

On Saturdays I can sleep in. So last night from 8 pm to 6 am. Ten hours of pure luxury!

Now it is 10 am and this is what I have finished this morning.

Filled the fish pond with water, moved the sprinkler three times, trimmed some dreaded forsythia bushes back so Lee can see out a shop window, finished three loads of wash, vacuumed the porch, cleaned up the kitchen, helped Lee wash the porch chair cushions, changed the sheets on the bed, fed the fish and the cats, checked my emails and just now took a look at facebook and was reminded again just how much I despise the present administration.

On the bright side I am hoping that our neighbor gets back to working on this.

Originally they thought they would turn this downed pine into a pencil….but everyone is doing that! I suggested since we see it as we drive up our driveway that it be a monster-type snake attacking something that just poked its head out of the ground. It is very long and now has good stable legs propped underneath….plus his other thin ones. The snakes eyes will be bigger and likely he will attach the diamond shaped thick boards I had handy to give him some fins. He will also have banded stripes along his body. The stump’s bark looked like flowing hair and with some judicial chainsaw cutting he now has an open mouth in full scream.

He just needs to get some googly eyes and a nose. I am sure that the neighbor wishes this pine fell on our property and not just over the line on his. But he is taking my suggestions well, being a good sport about it. But he goes to bed a lot later than me and gets up a lot later.

If he kept to my schedule he would have at least two of these monsters chainsawed by now.

In the studio this week I have returned to the specimen journal and completed the framing on the Driveway Messages. I think I am going to now work on a larger piece using the etchings on cloth and more of my contact prints of leaves. Since I went to using the sewing machine it has increased the possibilities of what I want to say about correspondence.

Earlier in the week I made a trip over to my under graduate school, Western Carolina University. I talked to the book arts students about my work, showed some of my books and left a couple of cartons of books from my studio library to add to theirs, and donated almost all of my personal artist books that were either collected, purchased or made and exhibited by me. It will be a good home for them. After Christmas they will receive my collection of over ninety pop up books.

Also this week the trip to Australia has been finalized with a travel agent. I now know what I am doing and where I am going to do it, not to mention when! Now just keep the dialogue of ideas going with the students….my favorite part is the planning with them way before we meet over tables and tools.

More next week after an overnight in Asheville and having a bit of scotch at the Grove Park Inn. And Trader Joe’s on the way home with a bucket of sunflowers and a box of wine.

Til then.