Curses! Foiled Again!!

Felled by a few grains of pollen! Or was it a few mold spores?

I have severe allergies, and despite allergy medications and shots, periodically I get sick. It's like having the flu; aching all over, lack of energy, sinus headache, scratchy eyes and throat. Oddly enough, I rarely get all stuffed up like most allergy sufferers which might explain why it took 12 years and 5 doctors to correctly diagnose my problems. Some thought I was just depressed and needed to go on anti-depressants, but fortunately I refused.

But, I digress. Last week while madly digging away in the dirt getting my perennials planted, I noticed my energy waning away each day to the point that by Thursday I had none. The consequences of this are that I missed going to Horse Shows By The Bay on Friday and missed the first-ever polo game in NW Michigan! Needless to say, I was disappointed and moped around all evening while the match was going on. But, the news reported that there are plans to make the polo match an annual event, and HSBB will be back again next year. By then, the yard landscaping should be complete, and I will have more time and energy to visit the show. So, all is not lost.

In the meantime, I'll select an image from a previous HSBB to begin a new work of art which will violate my only-three-works-in progress-at-one-time rule, but rules are made to be broken, right? Besides, Bard is close to being finished.

Since I still had a few photos left to shoot on my compact flash card, I decided to take some photos of the cats this weekend to use them up. Annie, our long-haired cat, needs to be clipped again, and her coat is at just the right length to be very photogenic right now. Normally, she grows a large mane, like a lion, and the hair on her sides grows so long that it hangs down making her look like a yak. Since she has digestive problems as it is, a long coat which makes more hairballs is very bad for her. So, I clip her a couple of times a year. Then she looks like a skinned rat for a while, and our other cat hisses at her.

Above is a photo of Annie who is camera shy and gets very self-conscious when photographed, so you have to shoot quick! Below is an interesting shot of Molly. A good title for that one is "Kitty In The Window".

At any rate, the last of the plants and shrubs are now in the ground, and I can get back into the studio while the weather does whatever it wants outside. With only a little bit more mulch to put on a few more beds, the gardens will be in shape to handle the heat and dryness that usually comes with August weather.

Gardening Season Arrives

Try as I might, I haven't been able to make much progress with Bard this week so far.

Over the weekend, I spent some time in the yard raking leaves and debris out of the flower beds and generally checking things over. The perennials are coming up rapidly now, so time was of the essence to prevent damaging tender young shoots. My husband also got out the gardening wagons for hauling things around and also some old fence that we didn't get down last fall. I'll use it to fence off the rest of the shrubs before the deer can munch off the new shoots and "prune" them in very undesirable ways.

My neighbor told me that the big doe which has been hanging around the area the past few years was hit by a car last winter. I confess that I secretly celebrated this fact since it meant that she would not be back to ravage my yard and steal our apples this year. I'm sorry that she had to suffer, but that's as far as it goes. Just call me heartless. She and her two yearling fawns did a lot of damage last year. So far, the two fawns have not shown up, but I'm taking no chances.

Then on Sunday I was hit by a spammer who used my email address to send out what must have been hundreds of thousands of spam emails. Over two thousand delivery failure notices were in my inbox Sunday morning, and close to another two thousand arrived during the day! It took a lot of time to go through all of them and delete them, call my web host to see if anything could be done about it (it can't) and generally obsess over how long this would go on. But, thankfully, by Monday morning the onslaught had waned and things are now back to normal. In my opinion, an exception should be made for the use of waterboarding for spammers who are caught.

And, yesterday I put the apple blossom painting back on the easel for one last time and painted the grass a lighter shade. I'm not quite sure that it's an improvement, but instinct tells me that I'd better not fuss with this painting again or it will go south in a hurry. There is definitely such a thing as too many tweaks when it comes to art as we artists are all aware.

I did manage to paint Bard's ears last night but didn't get any further.

Today was chopped up by this and that, but tomorrow I'm dedicating the whole day to studio time. Then I'll have art to show again.

The image above is of one of our forsythia shrubs which is now in bloom. Believe it or not, it's the best of the three and shows the results of deer pruning by its uneven shape. Ugly or not, the fences are staying around the shrubs until they get big enough that the deer can't damage them too badly. From a distance, you can't see them at all!