Green!

This morning I leaned out the front door when I was putting out a birthday card for the postman to pick up, looked down and saw... GREEN! Despite the bitter cold we've had and the snow, sleet, and freezing rain that has arrived this last week, look at these hyacinths. They're sprouting. Woohoo!

Not three feet away is a daylily plant and it's sprouting too. Go, lily, go! I hope that we don't have an arctic blast or a polar vortex come screaming in out of the north and freeze these two signs of life. Fingers crossed.

 

The diggers were back behind the neighbor's house this morning. I know that they had a lot of snow to move before they got to the hole they made with the wires running through it. I think that they put some sort of door in the ground so that they could access it more easily. I didn't stick around to watch because I had a snowblower emergency.

 

I went out to clear the driveway and the plow drift and realized that the auger, the blades that feed the snow to the chute that spits it out, only half of it was turning, the other half was freewheeling. Something was broken. So I texted my small engine fixit guy neighbor and he told me that a shear bolt had broken but that was easily fixed. So I chugged up to his house with the snowblower, he took out the remains of the broken bolt, then took out the unbroken one so I had one to show the parts people, and sent me off to the hardware store to get some shear bolts. They had them! And they weren't a zillion dollars! I brought them home, he installed them, and the snowblower works. Whew. And I have two more bolts in the cabinet for when it happens again. He assures me that it will happen again.

 

It was sunny this morning and the House Finches and Sparrows enjoyed breakfast at the feeders. The Cardinals came too but didn't stick around for a photo op.

The Daily Art prompt said to use your fingers as a viewfinder to frame something in your house, something that you wouldn't normally draw and put the focus off center and just draw it. I looked across the table at the sappy sign on the wall and then at the chair in front of it with a bag hanging from it. My eye was drawn to my watercolor sketchbook in front of the chair so I decided to try drawing the chair, bag, and sketchbook. I did it. It turned out way better than I anticipated. Maybe I am improving after all.

Today was the last day of the Daily Practice class I've been taking on Creativebug. We were to take the tiny still life studies that we did yesterday and paint a bigger picture using them as inspiration. This didn't turn out too badly. I'd like to do it again with something bigger as the center focus but all in all I'm happy with it. (Although I think that the leaf at the bottom looks like a pickle.)

Then I paged back in the month's lessons to the first flower painting day. I have eight pages of sketchbook left blank so I thought that I'd just go back and do the things that I really enjoyed the first time around. Here's the ranunculus, a tulip, and a sunflower. I like 'em.

I spent more time this afternoon reading through The Seaview2 and I have to say that it's pretty dull. Maybe it'll perk up in a few pages when the hurricane arrives. I sure hope so. I got an email this afternoon telling me that the roundtable I signed up for is a go so I copied and pasted the first seven pages of that manuscript and sent it "reply all" to the group for Thursday's meeting. I'm nervous and excited. It's been a while since I was in a critique group and I feel like my listening skills have deteriorated. I hope I don't disgrace myself.

--Barbara