Wisconsin Chainsaw Afternoon

Here I sat at the laptop, minding my own business, when the chainsaws fired up and big pieces of tree started falling. The neighbors had their trees trimmed so now I won't have to duck branches when I mow and maybe the leaf carpet will be less solid in the fall. To give you an idea of how much they trimmed away, I used to not be able to see their window through the leaves. Now I can. I was so impressed because the tree trimmers didn't have a big ladder to get into the tree, the guy just climbed up using spikes and a rope, and he had a chainsaw dangling from his belt. The guy had to be 30' up in the tree. Amazing.

Today's Daily Practice was mushrooms and brooms. Brooms is another goofy thing to draw. I spread the mushrooms out a bit too much so I had to squeeze the brooms in at the bottom of the page but, like I said, I'm not wasting paper.

Then I started a second pass through Things With Wings (20 Ways to Draw a Butterfly) and had fun drawing a butterfly, an angel, a ladybug, a paper airplane (which didn't turn out so well), and a winged foot. I find the winged feet very odd.

After lunch I went out to fill the feeders and decided to put in fresh suet cakes. When I lifted the roof of the feeder a dozen hornets came boiling out. Yikes! I didn't get stung and I managed to use a stick to knock out the big and little nests that they'd built under the roof and in the middle of the feeder. I'm sure they went right back to work building another nest but I felt good that I'd managed to fill the feeder without getting stung. I left the nest on the ground and noticed about an hour later that something had carried it off. I wonder what did that. I also bought a different flavor of suet pellets yesterday that I filled the feeder with. I'm trying to figure out if it's the orange flavored ones that attracts all the birds or if it's any and all flavors.

I was lucky enough to catch a young House Finch pecking away at the orange half. It also had a dip in the grape jelly in the dish below the orange but I didn't get a shot of that.

 

Today's painting was not as successful as the sunflowers of a couple days ago. I'm not saying that I don't like how it turned out, I think it's a little too loose, but I like the colors.

I tried on the Hayden Hawthorne Sock and decided that I had enough foot to start the toe decreases. I want to finish this sock so I can cast on another one before I go away for a knitting weekend with friends. A sock is good "knit and talk" knitting, especially a plain old stockinette sock.

Writing went okay this afternoon. I got a couple pages hammered out, killed off one character, and brought another one back. All in all, a pretty good day.

Happy Birthday to DD! My best baby girl turned 42 today. How did she get that old?

--Barbara