Dig up all the yellow invasives, front and side. Pick up catalpa pods. Cut back ornaments grasses to make room for new growth.
Garden many iterations ago
Shop for plants to bring back structure to front bed: iris, peonies, and euphorbia (because there was no ligularia). Don’t bother with shrubs because dryer vent in foundation kills them all.
Rake front bed, half of south bed, dethatch parts of lawn. Pick up catalpa pods.
Pull out dead blades from spider plants. Remove desiccated leftovers from around the hostas. Fill two bird baths — one new one, a pretty copper bowl! Pick up catalpa pods.
Remove dried stalks from sedum — carefully! —remembering the time you got three nasty splinters in your thumb doing just that and that asswipe doctor didn’t believe you and kept asking you if you bite your cuticles.
Scoop up and remove some sunflower hulls. Pick up catalpa pods. Fill the porch planter with pansies, petunias, and allium. Brace yourself to begin removing echinacea from the front bed.
Talk to Scott about chipmunks. Shop for a second umbrella. Unwrap patio furniture.
And now, I’m pooped. Have stock on the stove for butternut ginger soup for dinner. Easy peasy.
I can hardly wait til tomorrow for the new Perry Mason. May go back and watch episodes four and five again. The plot is densely woven (in a good way).
In thinking about how my snapshot of days through haiku differs from my usual blog posts, I realized that the short form doesn’t allow room for complaint or self-denigration. I might do too much of both as a rule.
So here’s to a fresher, more immediate style of blog posting.
With K at the office today, I can watch Kimmel at lunch without restraint.
I made too many lentils for last night’s linguine/lentil dish, so I may be on the hunt for a good lentil burger recipe this afternoon.
Finn did not bark at Winnie today. Winnie did not bark at Finn.
I don’t know why but watching a squirrel cross the sidewalk with an apple core in her mouth this morning filled me with gladness.
Trout lily’s up. Solomon seal is not. Will I or won’t I see a jack-in-the-pulpit this year? The suspense. Virginia bluebells have spread — how nice!
Going to California for three weeks next month and early June. Given that it was 27 degrees here yesterday and that the weather in LA seems to have calmed down, I can’t wait.
Of course, it’s not about the weather.
Finished round 8 or 10 or who’s counting anymore of my novel. Cut around 5,000 words. But not enough. So later today I will copy the file, rename it “shorter Weight of Cloth” and delete five chapters. I have a pretty good idea which ones.
I’m sharing pictures Maggie sent of the sculpture she mentioned in recent comments. It’s 12 inches long. The artist: Beverly Thomas. Apparently Thomas doesn’t have a website but her gallery info is listed further down. Below is what Maggie, a sculptor in her own right by the way, had to say about the piece.
In other news. I looked out the window at 6:02 and couldn’t see the moon. A total eclipse of the Blood Moon seems portentous on Election Day, wouldn’t you say?
K has gone to the office, so Finn and I will make our loop alone. We did yesterday too because of a business call which gave me the opportunity to listen to the sixth episode of Rachel Maddow’s newest podcast, Ultra. Holy shit. Did you know that in the 40’s there was a Nazi plot to overthrow our government? Not just Nazi sympathizers, including in Congress (which would be shocking enough), but a Nazi spy here on our soil and actual Nazi propaganda from Hitler’s government being distributed through congressional offices to constituents.
My Tuesday morning Indivisible call is cancelled today. I call us The Seven Sisters now by the way. Two of us are out at the polls helping with ballot correction or oversight — one in Georgia and another in New Hampshire. A third has been working the phones for North Carolina. The rest of us have been writing Postcardstovoters. Whatever else happens today, I am proud of these women and honored to call them friends.
78 degrees when I snapped thisTexting with Deb when I shot this. It was warmer HERE than in Georgia!It just keeps getting more interesting!
Keep the faith! I’d say See you on the other side but results will be a while in coming (she said with a veneer of calm). I remain optimistic.
It’s the kind of day when you take your thin cardigan off halfway through your walk. Beautiful, in other words.
I swear dogs are so much smarter than we think. Case in point: passed a beagle who howled in just the right register and with just enough volume to penetrate Beyoncé on ear phones. Oh, hello over there!
I never wear earbuds the whole way because they create a barrier to the world. Before Beyoncé, I briefly sampled a recent Sisters-in-law podcast and whew, switched that off fast. I wouldn’t mind a day of not thinking about Judge Cannon and classified documents.
Do you see the chipmunk?I love all the directions here Another arrow in the form of a shadow
A friend who is also an intellectual property lawyer gave me a free and informative rundown on copyright law yesterday. It was excellent timing because of that notice I got on Instagram last week.
I had no idea, for instance, that posting too many words from a book could be problematic (and here I thought I was promoting the author!) I will be more judicious in future, maybe limiting quotes to a short paragraph.
Also “fair use” (a defense against a copyright violation allegation) is broader than I thought. For instance, an image doesn’t necessarily have to be transformed if the artist is using it to make a commentary that differs from the original.
Not making money is a factor, BTW, but not an exemption. I thought it was.
There are also privacy interests apart from copyright issues. Public figures have no privacy interests to protect. So that means, for example, that the recurring Jeremy Irons face in one of my collage series would not run afoul of the actor’s right to privacy. Only the photographer in that case might have a grievance.
Home. Garden having a final flourishPaper only — border is a photo of a quilt I made. Buildings from a magazine. Barn eave from PCC
The upshot of all this is I want to use more exclusively my own images. The interior magazine image above was originally whole. Yesterday while thinking about all of this, I ripped it in half and oriented one half upside down.
Paper collage discussed above is here doubled exposed and filtered with another quilt I made (below).
Or is it the one below? Sometimes it’s hard to tell. I don’t mind that.
Oh stop now! You’d never know I meant to be very brief here. I have an AWA workshop in a few.
But no discussion of copyright is complete without noting the value of proper attributions: please find some of Deb Lacativa’s extraordinary fabric in quilt above (if you hurry, she has a new batch of vintage, hand-dyed fabrics available). Also, both the nine-patch and woven cloth strips arise out of a long association and class-taking with Jude over at spiritcloth. A real mensch and a maven, she is.
