Relief from the Heat

The kids have two new members of their farm community. I've read that pigs are smart, these two have figured out how to beat the heat here. Enticing as it is I'm passing on joining these babies, their pool is too small and I'm still leaving for the ocean today.


This is the newest Large Black Hog, a heritage breed that my son is raising. This little guy will help father assorted lines of breeding stock for sale when he grows up.



This is one of my grandgirls with the mixed breed cutie that the hog farmer couldn't pass up and brought home with the Large Black. Its a red head with charming spots on its back. Bon Voyage piggies and grandgirls. See you later.

Blue Skies and Water

Photo by Wheeler on the Bay

Shangrila for me this coming weekend. My sister and I have a room with this view, a deck over the water, kayaks to use, and a lovely restaurant across the street. The weather looks most promising for the girls' weekend out. Our husbands have taken the watch on the home front, feeding kids, and watering the posies, or acting as ballast so the couch doesn't float up to the ceiling. There wasn't a Christmas morning as a child that filled me with anticipation as this does. My little city it is hot and dusty. True, the skies are also blue if you look straight up yet on the horizon the summer dust hangs in the air laden as well with the output of many wheat harvests. It does render the sunsets red and glorious. Still the weather on the ocean coast promises to be clear and around 70, ahhhhh!

We both are taking our art materials, I'm taking my camera, and a book. I've packed the requisite clean undies in case of a mishap, and I'm set. The best thing we are packing is our relationship. This is above all an opportunity to be with a sister who in spite of our 20 year difference in age knows me better than anyone on earth and loves me anyway. We have a complicated almost mother/daughter relationship, are sisters who feel close in spite of distances and life changes, and we are friends. I am one of her biggest fans. I can just barely wait to get there.

O' to be an Artist again - a loooong story.

Once upon a time, in a land faraway, I used to be an artist. I have an art degree but I was not able to actually support myself at it. This a sad truth for many artists of all kinds but I worked instead as an illustrator of airplane parts, a graphic designer of technical manuals and so on. Those were distantly related venues which had the advantage of not being the kind of work you had to think about at home and so did not interfere with my "real" life. I made stained glass windows for residences, I painted acrylics and sold them, took a turn at designing and making quilts; for a time had a freelance business doing design and graphics for other businesses. With two children and a husband and I was pretty well employed 18 hours a day for a long time. I still painted less and less, did photography but the art part was slipping away. I changed occupations by returning to school and becoming a computer programmer and "unthinkingly" changed brain realms from left to right. She who had been math avoidant discovered numbers could be our friends.

Then one of those life events happened to me after what should have been a low impact surgery for a kidney stone. I was overdosed with morphine (I am physically quite drug intolerant) and had what they referred to as a possible cerebral event. That means they thought I had a little stroke. I still cannot remember anything from the six months before that happened. I found I could not read and comprehend the computer programs I had myself written at work in the last year. I was scared. And I could not draw at all. Peculiarly, I did however recover memories from my childhood which were new to me the result of some kind of neural scramble. Eventually the programming skills returned but I no longer liked it. I changed jobs to software testing which was less taxing and took up walking and exercising more. I began a sketch book. I tacked a huge cardboard carton to the wall of my kitchen and began painting a self portrait. It was great, but so personal that I eventually destroyed it. I'm sorry I did that. I haven't painted for the last ten years, I have taken some pottery classes and a watercolor class in the interim but nothing permanent has emerged. Then last year I bought myself a nice camera. Turns out my photography skills have suffered as well. But I am making myself a photographic sketch book and giving it another shot. I hope to use these for source material for painting.

These are some of the pictures I've got. Actually now there are hundreds. There's no theme. I trying to conquer the craft of good photos first. I find myself wondering if I could make notecards to sell at the Farmers' Market here. And how much would a decent printer cost, can I make my collapsing garage into a studio. Who would buy my stuff?

I have many photos of empty, abandoned buildings which fascinate me but that's for another time. These are just some that I liked.I don't know what these flowers blowing in the wind are but they grow all over the Oregon coast in the summer between Canon Beach and Tillamook and probably other places. All a delicious orange.
This one of my grandgirls four farm cats, farm cats, ha, they all live in the house. He has a formal name but they all call him Market Cat!? He just wandered in out of the fields and shoved the other three out of the way and never left.

This one I love and have taken many pictures of, a little church in the dunes in a small beach town. I did'nt get one that framed it the way I wanted and will return soon to try again but I'm sketching composites to capture what it looks like to me.

And what to do with this, ha, ha, my nephew the swamp thing. Actually those are glasses that function as straws, imagine trying to clean those out, ewh! When my children were young I drew them often and their school mates as well. Sold some of those too to parents and grandparents.

I no longer, God willing, have to make money from this but I hope make enough to pay for supplies and to involve my grandkids who have less and less access to art of any kind in school. In a bad economy art suffers. I hope that concentration and practice will restore some of what I lost or misplaced over the years and that would make me very, very happy.