Crazypants for the Carving Thing

Okay, so maybe I went a little crazypants, but I'm jumping into this woodcarving thing with both feet.  I bought the books and I bought the tools. I've ordered the stuff* I'll need for designing what I will eventually carve - charcoal pencils, tracing paper, carbon paper.  All in all, I've spent about $135 on this so far.  Thank goodness I don't need to buy wood.

I already have several pieces of fine wood set aside.  I have the dogwood and the lilac pieces, loads of cedar, and some smaller black cherry set aside.  There's a persimmon tree that needs to be dug out of one of our wood piles, which I'll do today.  Years ago**, I also set aside a few pieces of unidentified wood that I hope will make excellent walking sticks.  Oh, and there's the beaver wood I've collected.  I kinda know what I'm going to do with the beaver wood, even if I don't know exactly what kind of wood each of the pieces are.  

If all of this works out, I will start selling pieces.  That is obviously down the road.  I don't expect to start cranking out saleable goods immediately.  Hell, I'm half-afraid I won't turn out anything that doesn't look like crap... ever.  

There's also the distinct possibility that I will be limited by my already crappy hands.  Man, they're hurting this morning and I didn't even do anything to irritate them.  (Other than typing this post.  Blerg.)  How I'll handle using them to push sharp metal through wood remains to be seen.  

But I'm gonna try.  

All I know right now is that I'm excited about doing this and that's a good feeling.  It's been a while since I was this excited about any endeavor.  (Probably like 11 years... which is how long it's been since I started my self-publishing journey.)  

I guess the big hope is that I'll bleed some of my visual creativity onto the wood.  I used to be really into creating art.  Hell, I took 4 years of art classes in HS and one in college.  I ought to be able to do something, even after all these years.

Not sure if I'll continue to detail my carving journey here, or create another blog.  :shrug:  Time will tell.  Wish me luck.

*All ordered stuff is due to be here by Saturday, so I have plenty of time to start practicing carving before I get into design.

** which tells you how long I've been thinking about doing this.

Tree Seeds Update

 Okay, so back in late October, I gathered a bunch of seeds to try my hand at germinating and growing native trees and shrubs.  Here's where we are right now...

The dogwood seeds that have been in the fridge after being soaked in boiling water are germinating.  Yesterday, I started putting them in pots.  I didn't count how many I planted, but I ran out of small pots and gumption, so there are at least 3 more in the bag, which I put back in the fridge.

The redbud seeds that I put directly into pots after soaking have spent the winter in the garage.  I may have forgotten to water them regularly and of course, Woodstock the Garage Wren may have been playing in their dirt.  I watered them all yesterday and left them outside on the deck.  Fingers crossed some of them live.

The spicebush seeds spent the winter in pots on the deck.  Those also didn't see much watering. We'll see.

The buckthorn seeds are still in the fridge in a bag.  I didn't notice any germination yet.  As soon as I acquire more little pots, I'll try planting them and see what happens.

Like the spicebush seeds, the acorns I planted spent the winter outside in a pot.  If they don't germinate, I'll give that up and find some volunteer seedlings.  We're always getting at least one or two acorns growing in our flower beds.  I wanted to grow them from acorns so I knew what variety I was planting.  Getting a seedlings out of the garden is a crap shoot.

Speaking of volunteers, I dug up and potted another cedar tree.  I named this one Clyde.  He's kinda funky and didn't start his life out straight, but he's about 6" tall.  We'll see if I got enough of his root base to keep him alive.  He couldn't stay where he was, growing under the deck, so he would've died anyway.  This way at least he gets a chance.  We have several other volunteer cedars I may try to grow.  The problem with cedars is they are slow growing.  Cecil is about 4 years old, I think, and he's only about 2' tall.  Of course, he's been growing in a pot.  Maybe he'd be taller if I put him in the ground.  

Anyway, the idea here is put all of these in the ground at some point.  Hubs will build cages around them to keep the deer from doing what they did to poor Elmer (i.e. munching them to the ground).  That's a long way off, though.  Fingers crossed we get at least a few of each of the varieties to grow large enough to have to worry about it.  If we get more than a few, I may need to find homes for them.  We'll see.

Next fall, I may try germinating persimmons.  We have a big persimmon tree that drops loads of fruit.  I just have to snag some fruits before the critters get to them.  

What about you?  Have you ever tried growing trees?  

Non-Writing Projects

 I'm embarking on a couple new projects.  No, not writing projects.  Yes, I'm still editing and I still have tons of stuff to do in the writing vein.  These are for me. 

First off, Hubs and I decided to try our hands at growing trees from seeds.  Yesterday, I went out onto the property and gathered seeds pods from the redbud, then I gathered fruit from the dogwoods, the spicebushes, and the carolina buckthorns.  I've already done a ton of research to see if this is even possible and then to see what exactly needs to be done to get the seeds to germinate and thrive.  I've already planted an elm (poor Elmer, may he rest in piece... he was quite lovely before the deer ate him) and two cedars (Cecil and Cedric.  Cecil is doing fine in a pot right now.  Cedric never recovered from a late night critter attack.)  This won't be a short process and we won't even know if this works until Spring.  Fingers crossed.

The other project... err, hobby?... I'm gotten the urge to embark on is woodcarving.  We have all this wood and some of it is quite lovely (cedar, lilac, black cherry), so I'm going to try my hand at using it to make something beautiful.  I spent some time yesterday reading up on it and looking at tools on Amazon.  Sadly, the majority of inexpensive wood carving tools are made in China.  I may have to spend more to get domestic tools.  We'll see.  

Yes, I am quite aware that these are distractions and time sucks away from what I should be doing.  I also think I need this to keep myself sane.  :shrug:  Who knows how long I'll stick to this stuff?  It's worth a shot.  I mean, sure, I still have a big plastic tub full of yarn from my crocheting days - along with a blanket I started back in Colorado that I have yet to finish.  This may all come to nothing.  Either way, I'll learn something and that's never bad.

If the trees and shrubs work out, they'll make nice additions to our landscaping.  If the carving works out, I'll sell the stuff I make - or use it for gifts for friends and family.  I really want to carve up some really nice walking sticks and canes.  I have a thing for those.  :points to sporadically gimpy leg:  

Your turn... Tell me about something you do as a hobby.  Or tell me about a hobby you would like to have.  

Thursday This n That

I was at the dollar store the other day, checking out, when the cashier asked me if I wanted any two-dollar bills.  I'm all like 'sure, why not'.  She then proceeded to tell me the story of the man who had come in earlier and paid in all two-dollar bills.  And when she tried to give him his change, he wouldn't accept it.  Didn't want any of that 'dirty money'.  According to him, two-dollar bills are the cleanest money.  We should, in fact, be doing it like the Germans who have some kind of thingy in their cash registers that cleans all the money while its in there.  Ummm... okay.  Anyway, I now have a two-dollar bill.  I tucked it away.  Who knows... someday it might be worth something.  :shrug:

I also have a plethora of coins.  I'm pretty sure they're not worth anything.  (I've looked some of them up, and no, not worth any more than face value.)  But they're interesting to me.  Whenever I happen across foreign coins, I keep them.  I used to have an arrangement with a store in CO.  If they got foreign coins by mistake, I'd buy them for whatever American coin they got gipped out of.  You know, if it looked like a quarter, I'd give them a quarter.  Pennies, nickels, etc.  I have stuff from China, Australia, Mexico (natch), the Dominican Republic.  When I was in Michigan, Canadian coins were everywhere and they spent the same.  Down here, no one wants a Canadian, so it's worthless.  To everyone but me, of course.  I got a lot of Asian coinage when I was  in Utah.  Go figger.

The other day, a friend posed a question on FB about hobbies.  I mentioned fishing and gardening.  She pointed out that baking was probably one of my hobbies, too.  I joked back about baking being a compulsion, not a hobby.  And we laughed.  I also collect old books.  And I guess the coinage thing could be a hobby, but I don't devote that much time to it.  Same with collecting rocks.  

The covers for UatB and CU came in last night.  Now I just have to upload everything.  Also, the proofs for Blink and UEQ shipped yesterday.  Woohoo.

I have so many carrot sprouts coming up it looks like the pots are growing hair.  I'm going to have to thin them soon.  I hate the thought of thinning.  I mean, each of those carrots I thin will have to die.  I wonder if I can eat them.  Carrot microgreens?  Could be a thing.

Okay, I'm running late, so I'm gonna just leave it at that.  How are the this-n-thats in your world?

The Tree Project

So here I am in a new environment.  Six months now.  And we're still kind of settling in.  The things we could do, we did - like the landscaping project.  Other things - like new flooring - will have to wait until next year.  It all depends on time and fundage.  One project that didn't have to wait for fundage is something I'm calling The Tree Project.

When we first got to this heavily treed acre and a quarter, we had a good idea what some of these trees are.  Black walnut trees are pretty hard to mistake for anything else - especially when they start dropping smaller tennis ball looking fruits all over the place.  And an oak is an oak is an oak.

Except when it isn't.

We have at least 4 different varieties of oak in the yard.  And a couple different kinds of hickory.  So the first thing I did was pick up a copy of The Audobon Society's Field Guide to North American Trees: Eastern Region.  Which helped us determine that the big oak in front is a white oak and the hickory tree just outside the sunroom is a mockernut hickory. 

Using the internet helped, too.  Without online resources, I wouldn't have known that was a redbud tree in the front yard or that those were dogwoods just off the property line.  (Never seen either of those up close before.)

But a few trees still eluded me.

The other day, I went around the yard with my camera - snapping pictures of each tree's bark, the leaves, and any fruit they might offer.  (Stupid oaks weren't being cooperative and wouldn't show me their acorns - at least not on the tree and with all the squirrels, I can't just guess which acorn goes to which tree.)

Now I'm trying to catalog which trees are what.  Yeah, I'm totally geeking out.  But I have a burning desire to know.  And it's not easy. (Of course, it doesn't help that some oak trees are known to hybridize... those hussies... which would explain why the oak in back has traits of both the Scarlet Oak and the Shumard Oak.)

I even made a map of the yard and numbered the trees in red, so I'd know which pictures were of which trees.  (Yeah, I'm thinking way too hard about this, but that's kind of what 'geeking out' means.)  In the end, I'll have a good idea of who's who and what to expect from them over the years.  Who'll be dropping nuts, who'll be flowering, and who to watch out for in times of drought.  In the great scheme of things, it's not that important, but it's important to me.

What kinds of things do you geek out about? 

Repainting the House... the 21st Century Way

Hey, remember in Total Recall (the original awesome one - not that thing they did to remake it) when the secretary was painting her nails?  She just used a wandy-thingie, touched the tips of her nail, and it changed to a different color. 

Well, I'm not quite using that level of technology, but I am using Microsoft Image Composer to look at different colors on my house so we can get an idea of what color would look the best.  (Yeah, Image Composer - which I've had and used since 2000.  They don't even make it anymore and it's not 100% compatible with Windows7.  But I'm used to it and it is awesomely easy.)

Anyway, I used one of the photos I took of the house:

After several false starts, including one where I turned the whole picture B&W, I got into the 'tools' in the program and chose the 'colorization' function to make the orange part white (for a better canvas):

And since then, I've been trying various shades of wood tones.  Anything to get rid of the orange.  I even tried to match the wood - using the 'color picker' tool (it sucks the color off any other image and puts it into the 'paint') I tried to match our sunroom paneling:

And ended up with:

Way too yellow...

I tried to pull colors off one of the does:

But everything looked flesh toned...

I tried using a fawn's coat:

But the background was making every attempt pull too much green.

Anyway, I'll probably play with it some more today.  I may even go out and take a full frontal pic of the house to get a better canvas to play with.  :shrug: 

Yeah, I probably should be writing...

What are you up to today?  And once you get done answering that question here, please go over to the Killer Chicks and answer it over there. 

kthnxbai

The Timesuck That is Yardwork

Okay, so all y'all know that we bought a house and moved back in April.  The house isn't perfect - what house is? - but we knew all it would take was some sweat equity to make our home the way we want it.  The first thing we did was get gutters installed on the north side - where there were no gutters.  (Really helped with that 5.5 inches of rain we got.)

The next big project was digging up the foundation and sealing it - with it's ancillary project of sloping the ground away from the house (thereby creating flower beds) and creating a drainage system to direct the rainwater coming down the hill away from the house, too (thereby creating walking paths).

First order of business - move the azaleas lining the front of the house so they'd be out of the way and wouldn't get crushed by all the activity.  Those went into new beds on the other side of the driveway.  And they're looking pretty okay, considering it's not the right time to transplant shrubbery.

I moved 5 of them here and the other 4 are on the opposite side of that tree.

So, we got the bushes moved.  Then came the digging of trenches - both to clear the foundation and to create a drain so the rain wouldn't drown our foundation.

Next, we ordered retaining wall blocks...

and began putting those in place.

But we couldn't do much more to the front because we were waiting for the foundation to dry out there.  (The 5.5 inches of rain did not help with that.  LOL)

So we worked on the iris bed alongside the driveway...

It's ready for planting.  And since the dirt arrived yesterday, I'll be working on that today while the Hubs puts another coat of sealant on the front and digs out the back foundation so it can dry. There'll be more pics as we get certain aspects of this done.  (If I waited and posted them all at once, we'd be here all day. LOL)

Yes, all of this is a tremendous timesuck.  And I'm getting squat done for writing.  But hey, it'll look awesome when we're done.  Plus, our foundation will be nice and dry from here on out.

What timesucks have you encountered lately? 

PS.  Yes, my house is the color of pumpkin puree.  That will be rectified next year maybe.  Depends on time and finances and how long my husband can bear to look at that color.

Living in the Projects

No.  I'm not talking about government assisted housing.  Even though I don't work (at least not for cashola), we're not even close to the financial straights it would take for us to move into one of those places.

I'm talking about the myriad of little things I'm smack in the middle of.  I do one for a while, move to the next for a while, jump into the next...  So, yeah, I'm living in the projects I've created. 

It's April, so it's Ancestry season.  I'm tracing my tree.  I'm tracing the Hubs' tree.  I even traced my daughter's tree from her sperm donor up (which wasn't easy since there's no one I can ask).

Last month, or maybe the month before, I offered to do some tweaking of my nephew's senior pictures for my mother.  He didn't opt for the retouching.  Hmpfh, boys.  And since I took and retouched Daughter's senior pics, I was the obvious choice for the project.  I got the pics Thursday.  There are only three, and it's not hard, it's just time consuming.

Reseeding the lawn.  It's a yearly thing.  Living out here in the high desert makes keeping even the semblance of a lawn alive a pain - unless you have underground sprinklers, which we don't.  So every year, I pick up a bag of seed and hope for the best.  This year I'm trying a new product from Scott's.  It's the one with the dirt and fertilizer included along with the seeds, so it should be easier.  So far, no baby grasses, but I have hope.

I've also been making short excursions into the countryside.  I've got two goals for this.  Right now the birds are migrating, so I've been trying to see what new birds I can add to my birding lifelist.  And I'm trying to get some quality photographs while I'm out.  Ever since the guy at Cornell argued with me about my sighting of a Western Screech Owl in the area, I'm determined to get photos of the unusual birds that pass through here.  Plus, if any of them turn out really good, I'll print them and frame them. 

Oh yeah, and there's this other thing I'm supposed to be doing.  It's called WRITING.  Remember that stuff?  Yeah.  It keeps trying to make it's way to the top but it just gets shuffled back down again.

We're not even going to talk about the blanket I was supposed to be crocheting for my sister.  The strips are all crocheted.  It just needs to be sewn together and shipped to Michigan.  But it's sitting over there in my crocheting bag.

Of course, there are all the typical day to day things I should be doing as well, but since this is about 'projects', we're just going to forget about those for now.  (Why not, I've been forgetting about them so far. LOL)

And for all that, I still don't feel particularly busy or productive.  Maybe that's because I'm not making writing a priority in all that mess.  :shrug:

What projects are keeping you busy these days?  Anything fun? 

Back on Track. Kinda.

Hi all.  First off, thanks for stopping by and continuing to hang in there when I haven't been the most consistent blogger.  Also, welcome to the new stalkers... errr, followers.  I hope you enjoy stopping by.


Well, I might not be consistent in my blogging, but I'm pretty consistent in my yearly mid-winter slacking.  For those of you who haven't been here over the years, I get my very own case of S.A.D. (seasonal affective disorder) after the start of the new year.  I try to write.  I do write.  Unfortunately, most of what I write sucks hard.

But this is April.  Spring is in the air (even if it did snow/slush last night) and I'm finally pulling my head out of whatever orifice it's been residing.  I started back to work.  I even feel good about the words I've put down so far.  Life is good and all that jazz.

As for the 'kinda', I have been working, but I've also caught the genealogy bug again this year.  For the next month, I'll be climbing the old family tree to see what I can find swinging from the branches.  Last year I discovered cousins who married each other, and a tenuous link to Mary, Queen of Scots.  Wonder what I'll find this time around.  I'm still looking for the rumored link to President Zachary Taylor, so maybe that'll be it.  I just wish I read German so I could figure out my father's paternal branch.  Great Grandpa Auguste was in the Franco-Prussian war (on the Prussian side), but he's also the first one here, so the records in English stop with him.

How are things going in your work?  Got anything fun distracting you?  Ever caught the genealogy bug?

Shutterbug

As I said yesterday, I have this photography hobby.  I don't much care what I'm taking pictures of.  Anything that catches my eye, really.

When I was a kid with that first old 110 camera, I took pictures of clouds.  I'd lay on the grass, snapping pictures upward of any cloud I thought was interesting.  I still have some of those shots.  They're pretty boring.  (Clouds, btw, make poor subject matter unless you have something in the foreground.)

When the old 110 died, I went for years not taking pics of anything.  Of course, I was also in college and didn't really have the time for hobbies.  Looking through the old albums, I really wish I'd saved up enough money to buy a new camera.  There are memories I wish I'd saved.

My next camera wasn't purchased until I was pregnant.  It was a cheap-ass 25mm, but it worked for all the shots I wanted of my bundle of joy.  (Okay, bundle of squalling, pooping, vomiting - most days.)  I took tons of pics.  K.D. laying in her bouncy chair.  K.D. screaming.  Plenty of shots of her sleeping.  During those days, it wasn't so much about the art of a shot, but capturing memories.  Her first steps.  Her first birthday.  Those important first holidays.

It was probably long about 2000 when I snagged a sweet job working as a web designer / trainer / consultant.  Along with that came the need for a digital camera.  Can't design a good company site without a few pics of the offices, the facilities and the employees.  That damn HP cost me almost $500.  And some of my best work came off that old thing.  (Unfortunately, my best work is also low res and when I try to blow it up to frame, the quality blows.  With that thing, it was either low res or be satisfied with like 10 pics before I had to download.)

I had that camera for a good long time.  It went with me through Arches, Yellowstone and Dinosaur National Park.  It catalogued the journey from Florida to Utah.  It still works as far as I know.  I just can't get the cable to plug into the port anymore so I can't download anything.

Enter HP #2.  The little camera that could.  I bought it and I hated it (but since I got it half-off on clearance, I couldn't return it.)  It didn't have the little view window.  Everything I took I had to look at on the little screen.  Have you ever tried to take a pic using that damn screen when it's a bright, sunny day?  Holy crap.  Still, I got used to it and eventually took some killer shots.  But it wasn't enough.

Last year, my darling husband got me a Nikon for my 40th b-day.  He da man.  The zoom alone on this thing is worth every penny.  All those years I spent trying to get that critter way the hell over in those trees?  Now I can get right up on the damn thing without having to worry about scaring the bugger away.  Hell, I even used it to do my daughter's senior pictures.  Pay a professional?  Oh hell no.  Not when I got this baby.  Woohoo.

So now, it's a year and then some later.  I have the camera.  I've mostly learned how to use it.  (Manual?  We don't need no stinkin' manual.)  Now I can finally go back to taking the artsy shots again.  The clouds, if you will, but with the knowledge to make those shots turn out right.  And with the present my husband gave me this x-mas of new memory chips, I can actually take more than 19 pics before I have to download.  (You don't want to know the acrobatics we had to do when we went to Estes Park.  All I can say is thank the gods for Daughter's laptop.)

Now, I can stand outside with the flock of robins who arrived yesterday and get stuff like this:

Someday I'd like to be good enough with this thing that people will actually pay me for my pics.  Who knows?  Stranger things have happened.  Until then, though, this is a lovely way to take a break from writing.

And yeah, that first pic up there is me at the ripe old age of 14 when we spent a week in the Les Cheneaux Islands.  The fish?  Mostly my dad's handiwork, but my sister and I caught a couple.

Hobbies

I've never really been what I would consider a hobbyist.  Sure, when I was younger, I painted die-cast figures of D&D characters.  (I still have a couple around here somewhere.)  I also did the whole hook rug thing for a while and paint by numbers sets.  Those were hobbies.  I did them for a while because they were interesting, and once they weren't interesting anymore, I let them go.

I'd also consider my brief frenetic dance with genealogy this past spring as a hobby.  I got all the way back to the 1500s and it only took me a month of constant digging.  It was a wild ride, but it's pretty much done.

If you've been here a while, you probably already know about my crocheting.  I attack that in fits and spurts.  In the five or so years I've been at this, I've made 6 blankets, with the 7th about 80% done.  It's not hard and the monotony of back and forth, back and forth suits me.  (Umm, if you know anything about crocheting, I only know how to do single chain, so back and forth is about as exciting as it gets.)

I've also gotten more serious about my longtime love affair with photography.  I got my first camera when I was like 12 and over the years I've taken some awesome shots with whatever device I had available.  Last year, the Hubs got me an awesome Nikon for my birthday.  This Christmas, he got me memory chips so I can take pics to my heart's content, as well as frames so I can showcase my work.

Those are my hobbies.  The writing?  Well, I've heard people compare writing to a hobby.  Let me go on record as saying anything that takes this much time, effort, heart-wrenching and hair pulling without anything solid to show for it ain't no hobby.  Cuz if it was a hobby, I'd stop.

Thinking about it now, that's probably why I've never follow through with my former art classes.  If I'm going to do that, I'm going to do it all the way.  Just like writing.

What about you?  Do you have any hobbies you do now or that you did in the past?  Do we have any hobbies in common?

And just in case you were wondering how the photography is going, here's an artsy shot I took a couple days ago and then tweaked with Microsoft Office Picture Manager...

I call it Teens in Winter.  Something about using black and white in this case just turned me on.