Jaci Dawn

I have some old friends back. Don makes fun of them and calls them some not-so-nice names, but to me they are old friends.

They are two of my first creations from the summer before last.

He was a masterpiece (in my own mind). The first and the best (so far: he is free-standing and he has so much character in his funny little face. I use him for my profile photo on Google and sometimes on Facebook. He just has a face you have to love.

He reminds me of the first sculpture I ever made, back in 5th Grade. It was of a parrot and ended up being so very strange and different from everyone else’s nicely crafted birds that I felt ashamed of him. I think I threw him away after the project was over. I know I wondered how I could have created such a hideous object when I was supposed to be the one with talent.

In recent years, I have come to terms with the “ugly” creations. It isn’t that they are ugly, really, but different. It’s a matter of perception, I guess.

Don calls my creations little demons or something like that. He’s just being funny, but I can see a bit of truth in what he says. Not that the creations are demonic, but that some people might see them as being demonic because they are, well, different. Not your usual pretty faerie or elf, but something that might blend in with the dark. But the perception isn’t mine: it is the viewer’s perception.

I have to go back to the drawing board on this one. She isn’t free-standing and one arm keeps breaking. I just hope I can salvage the material I used for her clothes. Bummer if I have to scrap that. She’s a Harlequin elf (note the painted face). I’ve had just over a year to think about how to fix her. She’s at the top of my list when things settle down a bit here.

It just feels good to have both of these elves back out, staring at me while I type. They make me think about new creations and better ways to approach problems.

I just love his thoughtful expression. “So. When are you going to start working on art again?”

Soon, I promise.

I carry my camera every where, but that doesn’t mean I come up with a lot of fascinating subjects for photos. Today was the same old: geese, ducks, some faerie rings (toadstools). <Yawn>

My walking partner wanted me to take a photo of the cherry blossoms, but I pointed out to her that there wasn’t really much chance of a good composition. The trees are surrounded by businesses and parked cars. But she insisted. I then pointed out the tree would be back-lit (not a good thing).

But I took the photo.

I had to play with the saturation to get it this clear (I should have kept the original, but I didn’t: it was really dark & back-lit).

Then I had this inspiration: why not totally photo-shop it? I hop between Paint and the Arcsoft Photoimpressions program I downloaded last January (hmmm I see there’s a newer version available!). Photoimpressions is not as easy to navigate as Adobe photoshop, but it isn’t difficult and it has enough tools that I can have fun with it.

Anyway, the end result:

Amateur, but not bad. And it only took me about an hour.

If I had planned better, I could have spent this weekend out working in the garden. The big storm that was supposed to keep us drenched and cold all weekend never came in off the Pacific. The sun stayed out, the weather was warm, and I had other plans that kept me inside the house.

Oh well, there will be plenty of other weekends.

The only giant hyacinth I have is open and brilliant. It makes me almost like hyacinths.

I have so many of these in my yard, they’re like weeds. They are, however, my favorite type of hyacinth. They haven’t quite opened. If a flower could wear a sweater, then these have their sweaters on.

The unruly Oregon grape is blooming. When I was a little girl (and addicted to Dark Shadows) my dad told me this was “wolf’s bane and that by having it growing outside our home we kept werewolves at bay.

My dad told me a lot of strange things and I never knew when he was being funny or serious. Oregon shouldn’t have any werewolves, not even the Twilight kind: Oregon grape is the state flower.

Chickweed! And some tiny purple-flowered mint that grows as a weed in my yard with the chickweed. I like to pick chickweed and add it to early spring bouquets. It’s such a pretty flower (and such a noxious seeder! I need to get it pulled and disposed of before those flower heads turn to seed-throwing pods. When the pods dry, all you have to do is touch them and they pop open, spraying tiny seeds everywhere and into your eyes).

Another favorite weed: baby blue eyes. the spider on the rock adds perspective: this is a tiny blue flower that grows close to the ground.

I didn’t notice the spider when I took the photo of the baby blue eyes. Bonus pic! These little black spiders love to sun in my northern flower bed. They’re fast. I let them be as I figure they are keeping the non-beneficial insects down.

Just had to share the bonus.

That was as much time as I spent in the yard. I spent more time working upstairs. Looking around, it doesn’t look like I’ve accomplished much but… I got my computer moved up here.

Weekends afford me the pleasure of taking photos of things I love. A faerie’s eye view of the wild violas that grow on the edges of my yard.

Sunflowers starting! The chickadees and juncos will be pleased when the plants grow tall and the seed heads ripen.  The past few years, I have not harvested the sunflower heads: the wild birds have gleaned them clean by the time the rains come. I am rewarded when the few seeds the birds missed sproutin the spring.

I love my birds.

I wish I could show you all the birds that came to my feeder today. The song sparrow, Townsend’s warbler, house finches, red-breasted nuthatches, white-breasted nuthatches, chestnut-sided chickadees, black-capped chickadees, bushtits, juncos, a pair of young European starlings (boo), the chipping sparrow and a Downy woodpecker. They were all in the tree pretty much at the same time, but then the eight-toed grey tabby crossed our lawn on his way back home and they flitted off to safety.

The yard is unkempt right now: too wet to mow, too cold to work in: a faerie-land for birds, bugs and wee people. In some ways, I like it this way: wild and overgrown. Mysterious.

The ugly mound of tough weed grass (I’m sure it has a name, but I don’t know what it is: it just is not lawn grass and it has taken over spots in our yard) looks unsightly and wild.

But from the faerie point of view, it’s a jungle to hide in. There could be homes and villages hidden inside there!

The fallen camellia flowers look… Well, OK. they just look ugly. There isn’t much help for camellias. Pink today, then purpley-bruised looking brown tomorrow. Somethings just aren’t very magic for very long. Look now or forever miss their fragile beauty!

A cushion of moss becomes a walkway in the yard: fern like leaves weaving in and out of each other. I like the mossy pathways.

The rhododendron branches create a webwork of crisses and crosses, twists and turns, and wild entanglements. Here is where the small birds like to hide. Hidden behind the canopy of evergreen leaves, hopping in and out of the maze of branches, seeking the tiny ants, spiders, and other insects that make this their home.

I wish sometimes I was small enough to climb around in these branches, exploring upward and outward. The rhododendron has stories to tell.

I’m inspired to start working on some art work again. As soon as I have all of my things back in my room: my materials all in one place, at an easy reach! I’m getting excited.

Photo of the day #1: the on/off switch for headlights. This switch engages the taillights as well.

And photo #2: Not the windshield wiper part (although that was engaged a lot both days) or the ability to change from brights to dim, but the fact that this lever (usually located on the steering column) is the lever that tells people what your intentions are before you make a sudden turn.

It’s the turn signal lever.

And that’s all I have to say on the matter.

Drive safe, please.

I just do not have enough subjects to match up with photos. Or is it that I can’t take photos of the subjects that are on my mind? One or the other or both.

For instance: I keep thinking I should do a blog about traffic, headlight use  and turn signals. But how do I take a photo of traffic without violating some safety law myself?

Today was one of those days when I had a good blog going in my head as I drove to work.

It was also one of those dark, dreary, wet days when photographic opportunities just don’t jump out there and engage me. I didn’t take a photo until I got home and then it’s a rather mundane one of a pill box. What can I write about pill boxes (except that I like them and if I can pick them up for $0.50 or less at a yard sale, they’re mine).

I have resolved to not to the 365 Photo thing next year. It’s too difficult: the photos end up being random and the subjects stray from when is really at the heart of my life (no, not traffic: that’s just a daily occurring headache). But since I have made the commitment to do the photos and I am 2/3’s of the way through my year of photos, I am going to complete what I started.

That means you have been spared a twenty-minute rant on people who use their turn signal after they’ve changed lanes and nearly clipped your bumper in the process: “Oh, by the way: I meant to do that. I was changing lanes and you were in the way. See my turn signal?”

Instead, you get the pill box:

The top of this pill box is plaster or porcelain. The chips are because of me: I’ve carried it around in my purse and its banged against keys and pens and other pill boxes. I finally quit carrying it around because of airport security (funny how little metal pill boxes will set off the alarms).

I carry safety pins in it. A woman never knows when she might need a safety pin.

There is something soothing in that little red rose painted atop chipped porcelain. I can almost let go of the traffic now.

This pale brown moth found its way into my home this past week. I’ve seen them before: one or two, lost in the house. The outer wings are almost gossamer, the scales so pale and dusty.

I can identify a butterfly or at least classify which family it falls under, but moths are entirely different creatures. I suspect this one is not a beneficial moth, but a wool-eating caterpillar moth.

Still, its beauty is fragile and it brought me a little joy to find it resting on the porcelain of the bathtub. Clearly, insects are not everyone’s cup of tea (why does that sound like a mixed metaphor? Would you drink a cup of tea with a moth in it?)

It has been moved to the great out doors where it can camouflage itself against the bark of a tree, emit pheromones and, with luck, find a suitable mate.

And, yes, I photo-shopped the pictures so you could not see the dog hairs clinging to the porcelain. Really. It was hard enough for me to take when I looked at the photos and you want me to share the dog hair with you? I do not think so.

I hope this post made you smile, brightened someone’s day, and – if you know what kind of moth it is, let me know!

If you check in here every single day (and I seriously doubt anyone is that bored, but just saying), you’ll have noticed I was gone yesterday. No post, no photo, no reply to comments.

So what happened?

Well, it snowed.

OK, all of you who live in snow country and still have snow piled up meters high, quit guffawing. That really is snow falling between the house and the camellia (by the way, the only time a camellia is pretty is when it just starts to bloom and before the flowers fall off and turn into muddy brown slush under the bush). I never said the snow accumulated, only that it fell from the clouds.

But that is not what kept me from posting.

Yes, that’s a box of tissue and one of my favorite coffee mugs with Airborne™ in it. No, my nose isn’t stuffy, but my head is. My throat is itchy and I have a heck of a headache. That started Sunday night with a lot of sneezes and a dose of some sleep-through-the-night drug.

I called in sick on Monday. To my horror, my husband was already up (he goes to work earlier than I do) and he had also called in sick.

What is worse that having to spend the day sick in bed? Having a spouse home and sick at the same time. And having the modem to the computer die at the same time.

Yes, here it was6AM and I’m trying to find my boss’ phone number and Don is telling me that the modem isn’t working.

“I paid the bill,” is all I could think to say. I’m not really into modems at 6AM. He went on about it and I added, “All you have to do is call Qwest.” Notice that *I* did not volunteer to do this for him. I dropped it all on his plate. Then I called my boss, left a voice mail and crawled back into bed.

Sometime in the day, I woke up to hear him on the phone with Qwest. Or wait? Was it that he came into the bedroom, modem in hand, looking for a different phone plug in to test it on? And the dog followed him and jumped into the middle of the bed (and me)? Oy.

I went to work this morning and left Don home in bed, sick. I’m not certain going to work was a good thing, but it kept me sane.

Qwest moved mountains to get us a modem, too: they had one here early this afternoon, just about 24 hours after Don called them. Don told me that it took two hours of tech support time to get the thing installed, but he’s a patient guy and everything works now. I am so glad I let him call Qwest this time.

Oh, and by the way, more of this is predicted for tonight:

(Not the pink flowers: the little white dots between the lens and the pink flowers. That stuff. Snow.)

The was a bit more of an ordeal than I bargained for. The gallon of paint I have been saving for this day was not enough to paint the room. I managed one full coat, but I could see I needed a second coat. The dilemma was getting a new can of paint to match the existing color and getting to the store to get the paint.

You see, I loaned my truck to my son in law on Saturday before I started painting. I told him he could return it on Sunday after church. By the time I realized I’d painted myself into a corner, it was late and I didn’t want to call Sam up and ask for my truck back. (They would have to load babies into the car & disrupt their routine.) Don was gone all day Saturday and by the time he got home, I didn’t want to go to the store: I only wanted a hot shower and to rest.

It’s hard work climbing up and down off of a stool to paint angled ceilings & then crawling on hands & knees to do the walls! Besides, I became so obsessed with the project that I forgot to eat and I was not really in any shape to go to the store. I needed to eat and drink plenty of water.

I know: no one else does that. Forget to eat? Get obsessed? That would be me.

What I did do was a little research. I figured I would not get a perfect match in color, but I could make up for it by sponge painting. And sponge painting would add an accent to the molding that I hadn’t considered earlier.

Enter another problem: Don was going to go back up into the woods today and I would not have a car until this afternoon.

I guessed that all I would get done would be the trim & molding.

But Don is a little obsessed with his projects, too, and he had a stamp auction on eBay this morning. Yes, you read that right: he’s a philatelist. I suppose a philatelist is obsessed by definition: you’d have to be obsessed to sit and wait for an auction to end to see if you won a group of South American stamps from a dealer in New Zealand.

While Don waited for his auction to end, I borrowed his rig and went to the paint store where I had them mix up a gallon of something that came really close to the original paint. The woman who mixed the paint gave me an odd look when I said I wasn’t worried if it matched exactly as I was going to sponge paint. I bought a nice sea sponge, too.

I also made my self eat breakfast and break for lunch.

While I worked, I worried that this was not going to work. It’s hard to tell where you’ve been and whether the paint is drying a different color while you’re working. Up and down on the stool again, and onto my hands & knees. It wasn’t as hard as working with the roller and by the time I was two-thirds of the way into it, I was feeling pretty good about it.

I let it dry for an hour before I decided if I liked it or not.

The photo doesn’t quite do it justice and I can see some flaws in my work.

This is a little closer to the true color combination, but still doesn’t quite capture it.

The last photo is the truest.

I’m happy with it.

Next step: cleaning the softwood floors. I saw a product at BiMart that I want to try. There are some stains on the fir flooring that I want to try to remove. But that’s for another weekend.