Feature Works

It has only been three days but here goes…

I go to bed early and rarely go anywhere in the evening but the night of the third I awoke to a neighbor’s fireworks. It was quite the sight from my porch. But so was the sunset just before heading off to bed.

Wasn’t that fun!

The new house now has drywall all up in every room.

That last image is the dining area looking out to what will be a small screened porch. So more drawing in the house book….

and yesterday while checking out the drywall, I found this hanging tool still in the garage.

With this tool the tall (6ft 8in) installer can and did work alone. I just love the look of the thing…so drew it in the book.

Because I am bored stiff with packing boxes, I dug out my watercolors again to work on the Meadow Book.

These are some of the plants I either bring home or photograph so I can draw them at home. I don’t think I am quite ready to drag a chair out there and sit while balancing my paints, pencils, water and brushes.

This morning I went to the dam before checking in with the builder.

He seems to be waffling on my plan to move in mid August. And, of course he can. It was only my idea, not his. The problem now is not supplies for my house, all those are here. It is shortage of labor. The good thing is he has no problems putting extra topsoil in the back of the house for my landscaper to fit in a Japanese-type garden. There will be a small pond with trickling water, Japanese shrubbery/trees and all my round stones collected here in the yard with my outdoor stone sculptures. Thank heaven he (the landscaper) is moving all of that so I don’t have to ask the movers.

Speaking of movers, I need to stop stalling by painting in books and get the rest of what goes north packed up. Family will be here in less than a week to load it all up. I defrosted the chest freezer in the garage for them to take. Now I need to eat some of what I found in there before movers take my refrigerator along with everything else. The cleaning lady will not be back until near the end of the month and will help me scour cupboards.

I am running short of boxes so will stop by the grocery store again tomorrow for those nice strong egg loading ones. They used to be half the size and great for filling with books and still be able to lift. Now they are twice the size and perfect for anything but books. I need to ask the movers if they move dressers with clothes in them or prefer them empty.

I will ask Patrick and Marla if they can get on a ladder to pull nails I can’t reach and touch up the walls. I want to leave this house ready to move into. I want the new owners to get on with enjoying this house right away and not sigh at having to do much before they can.

Okay, that is all from here in a sea of boxes…filled with the things I somehow justified worthy of coming along.

Til later…..

 

I went to the dump this morning…just like I do every Sunday. This time loaded with soggy bags from defrosting the chest freezer in the garage. It is such a great feeling when I drive away from there. No changing my mind now!! And before I leave the house, I take the half full bag from under the sink and walk around to bathroom drawers, open them up and if I don’t see a need for the assorted things in there, in the garbage it goes.

The lady at the bank who keeps me in twenty dollar bills told me that the free shredder won’t be coming til October. Too late for my needs. Now I am in the downstairs office trying to get a grip on three cartons of papers needing a shred. After about ten times, stacking three sheets together, it wants a break. A few minutes later it will start up again. This could take forever! I can haul the papers upstairs, load them into the car and drive about a half hour to the nearest professional shredder. There I can pay sixty-nine cents a pound and get it over with. It seems a tempting alternative when I think of how many bags of shredded paper need to be taken to the dump each week til I leave here.

I was going to watch a movie on prime while shredding but there is no audio…lousy picture that continually pauses and no audio. This particular computer is on its last legs and is waiting for the daughter with tech know-how to take it all apart, clearing information from the drives.

So like Dilly here, I am packing things up.

The new house should be completely drywalled by the time I go there on Tuesday morning. Thursday morning it was about half done.

My bedroom and walk in closet.

The following morning I walked the dam.

Then because I miss drawing and get bored with filling boxes, I started the sketchbook about the meadow near my new house….

I put a baby killdeer in because there are so many flitting about. Now because my shredder bucket is packed and it is taking a break, and I don’t have more garbage bags down here to fill with these endless strips of paper, I might just finish this and go back upstairs and draw some more,

It is the fourth of July holiday here. A celebration of our country’s beginnings. With the giant leaps backward made by the Christian-biased Supreme Court, there is not a lot to celebrate. We have begun the journey to abject failure as a free and open democracy. This is not a country I am proud of anymore. We are exactly what the rest of the world sees, a country that has lost its way, through ignorance and an insatiable greed that has found a way to feed the ignorance to maintain power for such a small minority.  Hopefully by this time next year we may be on a corrective course. There is always hope.

For now I am going to ask myself again, “Do I really need this?” And keep on packing.

Til later….

 

I walked through the meadow a couple days ago to check on the house and deliberately get close to this pile of red soil near the gym. I pause there to appreciate how much it reminds me of being in Australia.

And you can see where it was dug from the rise behind under the trees. So there is more where that came from. I love it. And when I got to the new house, the drywall had been delivered to every room.

Naturally the following day I walked back over expecting it to be hung, at least in one room….not so. But one of the men I stop to have coffee with told me that if the drywall hanger is still the tall worker (6’8″) then it will be hung quickly. So tomorrow morning I will go back over to see if it is underway.

Last week I also had a chance to walk along the river. I took the down stream side and endured hundreds of mosquitos just to see how the high river was affecting the shoreline.

Geese swimming close to the path,

With so much soaked soil, a tree toppled taking some of the trail with it.

The mimosa trees are in full bloom. Pink powder puff blooms that don’t last long before covering the ground beneath.

Today I packed a couple more boxes and told the cleaning lady to not come back for four weeks instead of her usual two. By then the big moving truck that my son is going to pack full will be gone with much of the furniture and artwork.

I had some time to draw in my building book.

These two by fours are getting tedious. The book is close to the halfway mark and things should get more interesting once the drywall is in. Next will be shelves, shower tiles and doors, texturing walls and painting before flooring and cupboards arrive. The appliances are waiting in storage.

Packing so many of my books to take with me. I have had the grocery store bagger bring out sixteen boxes that held four gallons of milk each. Any larger than that and it is hard for even movers to pick up when loaded with books. Those sixteen should hold just the ones in the living room. Those big coffee table books that were in the den took three boxes. They are so heavy! I even found an old hardcover Australian cookbook. I might make myself a Pavlova with my new oven once I get settled. Too bad we don’t have passion fruit here….

Til later…..

I did get up at five a.m. to photograph this rose-toned moon the other morning. It hung so heavy in the sky before it gave up any more ideas of floating and sank into the trees.

Walking over to the house paid off two days ago with the discovery of insulation being almost completely installed.

But while there was nothing new happening I did find things on the site to draw in my building book.

This morning I headed over to the river. It was so high with not much movement, that there was a smell of rotting plant life. But still beautiful to see early in the morning. I won’t even bother to walk on the downstream path because that is bound to be covered with overflow.

And the garden at the foot of the bridge.

On the walk this morning a couple passed me from behind. From under his t shirt flowed the perfect pattern of diagonally plaited basket weaving….down both arms to the wrist. I couldn’t help but wonder if the pattern curved around and down his chest to finish in a large potato basket on his stomach. But enduring the pain of all that to end up with potatoes just did not seem logical, and I was happy not to have asked him. Tattooing is beyond me. The pain and that creepy blue of impending doom…..

I have called the moving company wondering if I should get on a list for an undetermined date in August. They said not to do that yet and to wait til mid July to see if I have something affirmative from the builder. So far no one is scheduled in August. They have worked with my builder before and know he is pretty accurate in his estimates.

Then I asked my electric company how I change accounts from here to there and what could they recommend about their internet service. Simple, just call when I am ready and they have a plan that is sure to give good internet at a much lower rate than I now pay for an outside company. This moving just gets simpler and simpler. All I need to do is tape together more boxes and fill them.

And before I could stop myself I bought two more books this week. I read about Suzanne’s on a FB feed from an Asheville, NC gallery where she will be giving a talk. I had seen her work and admired her dedication to documentation. In fact while I was doing a two week artist residence she came down for one week to record the Nature of the area. So, while I was on the internet ordering her book, I added my one and only Beatrix Potter. One artist draws the brutal reality of road kill and the other dresses her little animals in perfect attire for wandering about in their homeland.

Both of them make me want to draw, draw, draw. I think the last thing in a box to be moved will be my pencils and watercolors. I am missing Burke and Wills while they are safely tucked into that old field portfolio. But I need uninterrupted time to get back to their story.

I started to read Suzanne’s book this morning. Only meaning to read the preface…but found it hard to put down. I can appreciate how she says the art is not enough and needs her words to complete the story. And I so admire those Nature artists who spend so much time with research and live (or dead) specimens. It is a good book and more than worth the twenty dollars it costs.

It makes me wonder if I should take one of my blank journals, made before I packed up the studio, and dedicate it to documenting all I see in the meadow between my new house and the gym. In just the few months I have been walking through there it has changed so much. And it would be perfect timing to start in late summer to see the landscape and all it supports die off only to re emerge next spring and peak into full bloom like it was earlier this month.

It is going to be another hot humid day…..pack boxes or read?

Til later….