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 White rabbits!

I watered all the plants early this morning after one of those two-sleep nights. 

It's where you wake at 3am, ready to get up, have a snack, make coffee, read, listen to an audiobook, then go back to bed. 

Then get up again a few hours later, for a second breakfast and a shower.  Except for the shower, people used to sleep this way. The idea of staying in bed all night is fairly modern.

I'll probably water the plants again this evening, though the humidity is in the fifties, not drying them out.

Very quiet day of reading about the Tudors, bit of weaving 

I'm liking how this is working. Definitely getting a bit of experience in managing warp threads and keeping them uncrossed. 

The shuttle is a pleasure to work with, too, much better than the usual blunt ones I've had. And this weaving doesn't bother my hands at all, unlike knitting. 

I did a bit of painting but found, shock, horror, I have no pilot pens. I use them for writing as well as drawing and I think they're all used up. So I ordered a supply. It took a couple of tries to find a source that didn't charge more for shipping than for the item.

All the daylilies are in bloom everywhere just now so I have to mark that.  This is watercolor crayons and graphite pencil.

Happy day everyone, off to make a roast chicken sandwich with a green salad for supper. Tomorrow Misfits arrives with fruit and other things I'm out of now. I have great sympathy for the drivers this week, brutal heat.

Billie the Pup wonders if these are the dog days. To her every day is a dog day.

 

Repatriation has started.

Gary has started moving houseplants to the new place, yay. The bromeliad moved out this morning, the palm to follow. Meanwhile I brought down my snake plant to replace the bromeliad. 

The split leaf philodendron is to follow, also the charcoal drawing on the wall back there.

Every item that leaves is a relief. I'd like to have all the plants downstairs because I forget to water the ones in the guest room. And I don't get to see them anyway, when they're upstairs.

Outside the daylilies at my door are opening.

The kimono sash is completely finished now. I ended up with the knotted finish you see.

Note the use of the clipboard as an art tool. It's very useful as a third hand in various weaving stages. Also it works like a small drawing board when you don't need to wrangle a full size one. Mitchell probably knows this of old.

Along with the current braid on the lucet, and the linen jacket finishing, I fancy making another clasped weft weave, with half the warp threads one color, half the other. Like the eyeglass case, only a band, and the same two colors for the wefts. 

I'm also thinking about making a braid to finish the jacket fronts. Hm. After the current one on the lucet. 

I could remove the current one and come back later to it, but I think it might be wiser to finish the one I'm on. Or I might contract Second Braid Syndrome.

Or I might find fabric for the finishing and pockets of the jacket to match a skirt. I'm pretty sure I have some bits from when I made the skirts. Or maybe this is when I bust out that pink and white stripe cotton fabric, which is still waiting to be pressed.

I'm never short of ideas, as you see. There are only the ones I can be bothered to enter here, one finger typing, you remember. The brain is a busy old loom.

The hobnobs were well received by Gary and New Friend, who is now a new person in my circle too, lovely lady.  I thought they needed to keep up their strength, still packing cars and driving back and forth all weekend.

Happy day everyone, happy solstice, summer or winter, depending on where you are. 

This is as technical as I plan to get about it 

Blessed rain and other good things

 Where we are 

One of these days I'll be back in circulation, but not quite yet

The second is for those knowledgeable European friends who exclaim oh but you Americans have a dry heat. In Arizona maybe. In NJ not so much.  

Blessed rain, yesterday evening, cleaning the air and the pollen off my car.  I can feel the difference in breathing and my eyes are less irritated. 

The indoor scallions are done, and now there's a colony of fungi. I expect David or Chris or someone will tell us what they are.

New credit card arrived. And they make it very easy to acknowledge receipt, put it in use. Why don't medical people use decent IT on their sites? Yes, I know, they're cheap. Credit card companies spend more and get better work. 

Meanwhile I can now update the various online people who use my credit card for regular donations. One worthy organization has been nagging me since April to update. Many emails. I finally said it's impossible until I get the new card, not even due for months. 

I also said I was thinking of discontinuing membership if they didn't stop harassing me. Whereupon they thanked me for my message and said that in accordance with my query, here was the date of my membership expiration!  Bring on the clowns.

The people actually doing the work of the org.  are wonderful, and the IT people are making them look aggressive and not very bright. 

Remember the missing check to the food pantry! It finally came back. Addressed to the same address as always, now with a big sticker applied by some bright spark in Trenton to say undeliverable, inadequate address. Oh well, at least it wasn't cashed.

Another concern, because of not driving for a few days, was whether my car would start. I tested it after the rain cooled the air a bit. It started, yay. With this car, not being driven much, it's been an issue.

And here's this morning, before the heat comes rushing back again 

Lovely Stella d'oro day lilies. Whoever developed this variety was no businessman. I bought one, thirty plus years ago, whose divisions have brightened two developments, numerous private gardens and a median strip in Trenton. Not much return to the horticulturist, huge ROI to the buyer.

I'm glad you enjoyed the animal tales, more some other  time. Yes, there were moments of excitement, usually from the humans, rarely the animals.  Client management is a big part of a petcare enterprise. Sometimes people would ask about how to start this kind of business because they got along better with animals than people. I had to explain that without people skills,  there's no business! Eighty per cent of the agita comes from the humans.

Happy day, everyone, here's hoping for minimal agita for you today.

Summer solstice, waiting for fridgot, Textiles and Tea, wild finds

 

Yesterday's walk yielded early fungi

The first jewelweed of this year

And beds of wild daylilies, always a few days earlier than the cultivated ones.

Speaking of which, you can either buy spiderwort at the nursery or let it crop up as it will. This is cultivated 

Textiles and Tea yesterday was mainly talking, very sparse on slides, but here's what I gleaned

And the new fridge arrived, very good installation team, old fridge  gone, and here's the lovely new one in place and working fine. 

Left is Handsome Son making me a welcome cup of tea.

Happy day everyone, hoping for no drama..

Birthday drawing and other small things

Yesterday was a lovely day for sitting outside and drawing, cool, cloudy. And the daylilies are coming into bloom. They're a symbol of human and animal life -- each blossom lasts only a day, but there's a succession of them, and the parent plant goes on flourishing indefinitely.

So it seemed right to celebrate Handsome Partner's birthday with a drawing of a daylily he used to know, in my favorite drawing tool, the fine point black Pilot pen.

And while I was out there, to see this visitor on the marigolds

And a bee scoping out the daylily, huge area for him to work

While the self seeded Thai basil seedlings get to work

There's a lot of life in this little space

And while I'm still pursuing the eye doctor to get the Rx called in, hasn't happened yet, a week later,  stress levels high over this, I'm reading this

The cover image, Picasso's Demoiselles d'Avignon, is appropriate, since it's described early in the narrative though not by name, but unmistakably.  One of her deliberately naive passages.

I saw this painting many years ago at a joint Picasso/Braque exhibit at the old MOMA, and was stunned by its size and power. The color alone is enough to knock you down. 

In fact I had to go sit down to recover, and wasn't able to take in much of the rest of the huge, significant,  show.  

This is why I like to go to art exhibits alone, so I can leave when I can't take in any more, quite often after seeing only a couple of works, even if it was a long trip to get there. 

I can't wait for the new Princeton art museum building to be finished and opened, short trip to see small and wonderful exhibits, on a campus filled with great outdoor sculptures.

Still reading the Winterson art essays, and with a Maisie Dobbs audiobook to accompany Sock Ministry knitting.

Hoping for Rx success today..

Happy day everyone, press on, push voter registration and help the good guys, applaud the G7's clamping down on Russia's economy to help starve  terrorist Putin's armament funding.

Plum cake, daylilies and grubby sneakers

Yesterday was hot and humid, and I baked. I'd started before I realized this wasn't a great move. In fact I got wobbly partway through and had to sit in front of the fan, push the cooling down a bit and drink water till I recovered. Which I did, and here's the plum snacking cake that resulted.

It's from Melissa Clark, whose recipe used figs but I had all those Misfits plums. When I ordered them, I had originally thought I'd make that Marian Burrows plum torte I've made joyfully every year when the plums come in, but decided this one was more my mood yesterday.

It's crisp on top, crunchy with raw sugar, cake-like inside and the plums are tart and just very good. Plenty for Handsome Son, neighbors and the baker.

The daylilies are starting to blaze, with the lavender now just ebbing a bit, and the  daisies blooming away, though, against the stucco, they're hard to see in a picture.

Gary hauled me out last evening to trudge about in his yard for a place to plant his new bit of groundcover. He tends to fall in love with plants then, once home, to wonder where they can go in his increasingly jammed little area.

You know how to the writer everything is copy? To the artist everything's a subject.I never understand people saying they can't think what to draw. 

Anyway here's a Sharpie and black Crayola pencil of the grubby old sneakers I wear for working the back forty.

As always I present this humbly, not assuming it's great, just that it's the best I can do right now, and I'm sharing.

Happy summer Sunday, everyone!