Finches on the Feeders

I do love my little finches.

If there's seed in the sacks, up to a dozen finches could be on it, chomping away, fighting over who gets the best position.

Today I stalked them with my camera, standing outside on the patio, waiting for them to get comfortable with my presence.

To be honest, it didn't take them long. The cold weather has made them very hungry. They've nearly emptied both seed sacks and it's not even 4 pm!

And then I realized, while I was watching the little creatures flit and flutter, that I could be making a MOVIE of them! And so, I did.

Limping Dog

On Tuesday, Howie began limping, holding his right hind foot off the ground.

There's the tootsie in question; we've examined it with a flashlight and full sunlight, and can find no injury. There's a crack in the pad, but he has one on the other foot, too. The center pad is a little swollen, but there's no sign of puncture or infection.

Yesterday I was so worried about him, pitying him as he followed me from room to room, holding his foot off the ground.

He hasn't seemed in any distress, however, and I've only seen him lick the foot twice over the past three days. He still wants to play ball and tussle with Sebastian. In fact the only thing that he's been unhappy about is us all trying to get him to stay off the foot and relax.

Today he insisted on coming outside with me and puttering about the patio while I swept up leaves and stuff in advance of rain.  While I scooped detritus up with a dustpan, he went walking past me ... walking nearly normally, with hardly a trace of a limp.

Maybe the cold cement made it feel better. He walked around for a while, and even was ready to trot after Sebastian when someone let the younger dog out. Maybe in another day he'll be ready to go for a gentle walk.

The day before he began limping, I let him out to run a neighbor's cat out of the yard. When he does that, he goes all out, toenails scrabbling, charging heedlessly over the retaining wall to stomp at the base of the fence. Where the cat went back over the fence is a pile of wood that the fence installers left for me; I suspect Howie didn't see the pieces in the weeds and went right over them, bruising his sweet striped foot in the process.

Watching him walk using all four feet is such a relief.

Lois

Lois Munger was an example of how to welcome strangers.

When we were escaping the hell of our existence in Houston, Texas, we went to stay with our dear friends John and Melissa for a while. We met their families, and I was particularly impressed with Lois and Virgil -- John's parents. Though we were strangers, they accepted us into their kitchen and at their table as though we were family, by virtue of our friendship with John and Melissa. 

I found out tonight that Lois had a stroke on Monday, and is not expected to last long. She was part of the best of people, and though I haven't seen her in twenty years, knowing that she's leaving the world has me in tears. When she gets to the other side, she'll know how much I loved her for being an icon of welcome and fortitude.

I've tried to be like her.

Foggy Day and Hard Work

This morning was so foggy I refused to take my camera out in that slop, so I had to do a picture in Photoshop.

Dink was my concern today; it's supposed to be rain-prone tonight, and the only thing worse than a dirty paddock is a soaked dirty paddock, so my friend and I opted to clean the horses' paddocks rather than ride.

 

Ugh, what a heavy mess. With all the fog, nothing dries out. Including dung. We turned the horses out into the arena to roll and stretch their legs, and while Dink occasionally thundered across the arena, and Peanut quietly stood, trying to ignore Dink's rudeness, my friend and I shoveled horse poop for almost two hours. 

She has a bum wrist from a horsey accident over a year ago; my back is pretty iffy. We've found, though, that if we help each other, the job of mucking out the paddocks isn't as bad, and we don't get ... quite ... so tired.

As in, just too tired to go find something to eat so I can take some ibuprofen, but not so tired I won't be able to stand up and stagger over to the bed before falling asleep.

The Biting Poltergeist

Back in 1972, I drew a cartoon episode called "The Biting Poltergeist."

It was drawn on a cheap newsprint pad, 24" x 30", and I've carried that pad along with me back and forth across the country. This past few years, I couldn't help but admit that the paper was crumbling, that the cartoon in blue Bic ink was in danger of disappearing into dust. I knew I had to figure out a way to preserve it, even though it's really not very funny. 

The process is being discussed in my other blog, Resolution Every Day, in which I goad myself to create something ... duh, every day. But here, I'd just like to talk about the thing.

My friend Bill and I played role-playing games before we knew there was such a thing. Or maybe we imagined mini-series. Or maybe it was story-volleyball. We didn't worry about it, we just constructed a castle on the Rhine River, and peopled it with Helmuth de Witt (the Elder -- that was me) and Cousin Siegfried (that was Bill), and a myriad of characters. He has a pasteboard Christmas tableau of a veritable forest of characters that he still keeps (he's a better archiver than I), and I have a couple of cartoons.

Nearly forty years later, I can't honestly remember what made us cackle about a biting poltergeist; it might have been a headline from a tabloid, or a book of ghost stories. Nevertheless, the cartoon was drawn, and eventually I hope to put it in the Piker Press so that it gets that little copyright symbol on it.

Helmuth de Witt the Elder and Cousin Siegfried were both "old fogeys" back in 1972; although I'm not as fat as I drew Helmuth, and Bill is not at all as bald as Cousin Siegfried, I can almost recognize us NOW from the old cartoon. This is a pic of Bill and me in 2007.

We've been friends since we were both in first grade together, and admired each other's artwork since then, too. He says he can't wait to see "The Biting Poltergeist" again.

Colored Pencils

The other week when I spent a day in bed trying to keep from getting sicker than I was, I perused a book on art with colored pencils. 

One of the first things the book mentioned was to find a way to stage one's colored pencils so that one knew just what colors one had, and what one needed to purchase.

My colored pencils are cheapies; it's not a medium that entralls me. I think they're Crayolas, for heaven's sake. They have lived in a small cardboard box that at one time was packaging for some computer gewgaw, in a disordered pile, blues with purples and grays and oranges and what not.

Yesterday I made an effort to sort them into basic color groups: the reds, the oranges, the yellows, the greens, the blues ... and the plethoras of blue-greens and of pinks. (Lillian observed the end result of the process and remarked, "Wow, you have pinks!")

The colored pencil book was absolutely correct: I had no idea what all values and hues I had in that box. One of the projects Bernie and I want to tackle is a pencil holder for the colored pencils so that I can use them effectively when I decide to use them at all.

And since one of my Christmas gifts to Lillian is a set of colored pencils, I think I ought to start learning how to use them effectively. 

Oh, Boy, Raccoons

So a man returns home from a long night at work and sees the cute little lighted deer in the front yard by the fish pond has been knocked over.

On the other side of the fish pond, that is, his front porch, he finds a wet spot, and tracks leading away, to a spray of wetness where some creature has shaken the water out of its fur. And more tracks ... tracks that look like a small hand ...

Obviously we've been discovered by a raccoon, if not a passle of them. 

Just great.

Separation of Christmas and State

Bernie was telling me over lunch today of a town (somewhere, he could not remember) in which the city council decided to stop calling their town decoration a 'holiday tree' and just call it a 'Christmas Tree.'

Promptly after that, Jewish residents complained that if a Christian holiday was going to be symbolized during the Christmas season, then a menorah ought to be accepted for Hannukah.

The city council was all right with that.

But then, some local atheists got bent and said that if those 'religious' symbols were allowed, then they should also have the right to put up a display that said all religions are bunk.

Such a tizzy, oh, what do we do?!

After running around the kitchen table several times, frothing at the mouth at people's contentiousness and utter stupidity, I told Bernie what I thought would be a fair solution.

Local/State/National governments need to drop the word "Christmas" from their vocabularies.

The CHRISTMAS season is from December 25 thru January 6. 

Let the secular governments admit that what they are decorating for is the HOLIDAY SHOPPING SEASON.

And if there are to be Christmas decorations put up, let that be done, where it belongs, at every Christian church. Baptist, Catholic, Orthodox, Methodist, Presbyterian, and all of the little community Christian churches everywhere. If there are Hannukah decorations to be put up, let the synagogues do it. Let each household decorate as they please, and let the atheists put up all the little signs in their living room windows that denigrate all believers in God.

I was aggravated to see a news article (which may have contributed to my rant at Bernie) about the ceremonial lighting of the White House Christmas tree. 

That was all about the ceremony, and had nothing whatsoever to do with the anticipation of celebrating the birth of The Christ, God Coming to Earth to Become One with Mankind. (The only G-word that accursed administration worships is Gasoline.) And this empty ceremony only commemorates a season that is no longer observed: a holiday shopping season beginning the day after Thanksgiving. 

Sorry, White House, the Christmas stuff is up in stores in SEPTEMBER, not the day after Thanksgiving!!!! Get with the program!!!!

*Wipes froth from corners of mouth. *

This is the season of Advent, during which we await, symbolically, the coming of Light into the world. It's a dark time, a time to light fires and peer with an anticipation or worry into the darkness, to look into the sky and wonder if we will see the Universe peel back to reveal the face of Reality. 

The darkness deepens... when will the Light return?

Piggie Finches, and News

Eight little finches, gobbling nyger seed. 

They look so cute -- such tiny little birds. And they sound adorable, little chibi voices, conversational and varied. I love hearing them argue with one another through the window over my desk, and looking up from my computer to see them hanging on the seed sock and feeding.

A couple days ago, I was watching them and saw a sudden shadowy shape come zooming from the sky -- a little merlin hawk, hoping for a quick snack!

The finches scattered, and the feeder was unattended for several hours. 

I hope that I don't have to cut back on feeding the finches; I enjoy them so much. But the economic slump has made its way to our door, and we may have to curtail extraneous spending.

Well, not "may" -- "will" is a more accurate word. How extraneous is yet to be seen.

Bernie's plant is shutting down as it always does for Christmas week ... but this time they're adding four "planned non-production" days to the break. And then, after the Christmas vacation, they're adding another week of "planned non-production" ... and then adding to that, a few rounds (at least) of four-day weeks.

Some people, I know, would see that as a financial constraint, if not a hardship, but I hate seeing Bernie go off to work every single day. For him to have nearly a month off, time for us to go for walks together, to have writing sessions together, to play at yard work -- this is the very best Christmas gift I could receive.

The Weekend Willies

Let's see, Friday I was weary and had a bit of a sore throat. 

It was the day after Thanksgiving, so none of us did much, but by nightfall I was feeling rather more tired than I should, and the raw throat that started the morning was downright sore. Saturday dawned and my throat hurt so much and my glands were so swollen I thought about the mumps, a disease I have not thought about since childhood. (and one which I never have had, thank God.)

Bernie, in a fit of wisdom, had a look at me and sent me back to bed. I didn't argue with him, even though I have only rarely spent a day in bed. I gathered my sketch books and a pile of magazines I could look through and then throw away (finally) and my laptop and a book to read, remembering Robert Louis Stevenson's poem that went, "When I was sick and lay abed/I had three pillows at my head,/and all my toys around me lay/ to keep me happy all the day."

I stayed in bed, warm under layers of blankets, and just was quiet.

Sunday morning dawned, and I was able to swallow without pain; and though I still felt rather tired, and went back to bed in the afternoon, I was suspiciously admitting I was feeling better.

Today I got up and felt like a normal woman, which was good because Alex and John were having a church blessing of their civil wedding, and we were having another day of guests and food preparation. We had no idea how many people would be there, but John asked for six pumpkin pies, and as a wedding present, I made them. (with Alex and Bernie's help!) 

I have never caught a cold virus that came and went so quickly; however, I have no complaints about that. Maybe it was that Bernie ordered me to bed and made me stay warm and quiet that enabled my body to recover; maybe it was the pneumonia vaccine that kept this cold, unlike all others,  from immediately invading my lungs. Maybe it was the kickass turkey soup recipe I made Friday when I started to feel poorly, a recipe based on an Aser story... If it was the latter, then as a fictitious character, I rock as a healer.

The last permutation that I can come up with is that today was a fluke and tomorrow I'll be back to being sick again. I hope not.

Tomorrow I'm making more of that soup, just in case.

So, About the Gravy

A long time ago, in a rundown Victorian house in a small town in Pennsylvania, a young mother was worrying about the gravy for her Thanksgiving dinner, especially because the family had a notable guest, Fr. John Schmalhofer, the assistant pastor at the church.

It was probably only the fifth or sixth Thanksgiving dinner the young woman had ever prepared by herself, and though she was a pretty good cook, gravy does not necessarily have a dependable result. Sometimes it can be lumpy, sometimes too thin, sometimes tasteless. Greasy? Scorched-tasting? Yes, it could turn out all those things.

Turkey gravy was made on top of the stove, in the roaster that the turkey would have just vacated, from the drippings of the roast turkey. Dry bird? Few drippings. Roasted too long? Burnt drippings. Over-basting? Oily drippings. 

To bring the short story to its long history, the young mother was me, getting concerned about screwing up a guest's Thanksgiving dinner by making a lousy batch of gravy. Fr. Schmalhofer was hovering around the stove watching me fiddle with the food when I told him that making gravy was the most stressful part of Thanksgiving preparation.

"Here," he said, "I'll help." And he extended his hands over the heated roasting pan with its pre-gravy substance, and said a prayer over it! 

I was surprised; I didn't really think priests had time or inclination to pray over such mundane things. And I don't remember what the prayer was that he said, just something along the lines of "Heavenly Father, please bless Sand's gravy and make it turn out well. Amen." 

Yesterday we celebrated our 33rd Thanksgiving together. The bird was delicious, the pie was exquisite ... and that gravy was so perfectly rich and delicious that guests asked for more of it to crown the meat and potatoes. Bernie and I both thanked Fr. Schmalhofer (wherever he may be these decades later)  for the continued efficacy of his blessing, just as we have every Thanksgiving since the one at which he was our guest.

This is a fact: I have never made a bad batch of gravy, be it beef or pork or chicken or turkey since Fr. Schmalhofer said his prayer. Bernie and I joke that maybe one day Fr. Schmalhofer will be known as the Patron Saint of Gravies. 

Silly story? Maybe. But it gives me the opportunity, every time I make a gravy, to reflect on the efficacy of prayer, and to be comforted that God cares about us so much -- even in the little stuff.

Thanksgiving

What with finishing up NaNoWriMo, I was left with one day to focus on preparing for Thanksgiving.

We don't get VERY elaborate with the day. We have a turkey, stuffing, a veggie, cranberry sauce (which Bernie makes from fresh berries), and pumpkin pie if I have the time and energy to make one. Close friends and we alternate where we'll eat a Thanksgiving meal; this time it was at our house.

THE question on everyone's lips was, "Are you going to make pumpkin pie?"

I honestly believe that I have the secret to the best pumpkin pie in the entire world, and I can also honestly say that everyone who has eaten it agrees. Thank God my mother made me learn how to make it, and thank God I figured out how to do it in the microwave for even more spectacular results than the original recipe.

Anyway, I managed to find a "banana squash" of substantial proportions, and yesterday, cut that sucker up and cooked it, drained it, pureed it and put it up for future use. (And baked four turkey thighs so that the family would not be fighting over dark meat.) Cutting up and peeling pumpkin is a pain in the ... back. By the time I was done, I was exhausted, and stressed, too, not knowing how the new microwave would do with the old recipe.

At this time, the grand dinner is done, the guests gone home; from first bites there was superlative praise for the turkey, and for the gravy, which was truly phenomenal (maybe that will be tomorrow's post) ... and then, the pumpkin pies absolutely knocked everyone off their feet. They were so perfect, so delicate, so flavorful that I could get a big head over the experience if I didn't know how much recipes like that leave to chance.

I'm tired, to be sure, but the feast was grand, and all of us -- all of us at the table knew how lucky and blessed we are, and were glad to give thanks to God for all that we have received.

Wealth!

There is something about brown eggs that I love.

Yesterday, when I went to buy eggs, Bernie 'egged' me on to spend the extra dollar to get brown eggs, and so I did, a lovely five dozen of them.

They're so pretty, with their subtle gradations of color, and these eggs are of a very good quality, from a local poultry farm -- the shells are clean and healthy, the taste excellent.

I note here that we shifted to buying locally produced eggs after we got two dozen from the supermarket whose shells were so fragile your fingers could go right through them if you weren't careful, and the cooked smell of which almost was fishy, quite unpalatable.

Bernie commented on the ride home that I, with my two flats of eggs in my lap, looked like a woman who counted brown eggs as "wealth."

I have to separate eggs tomorrow when I make my pumpkin pies ... I think Friday is a good morning to invest some of this wealth making taters and eggs with the egg whites. Mmmmm. Holiday!

The Climate Change

I don't have any image to go with this post, and I don't think I want one.

Everyone knows the country is struggling economically. The housing market has tanked, foreclosures are all around, people can't get credit, CEO's have stopped bragging about how much money they're able to steal from companies that they mismanage. Retail sales are 'way down for the start of the frenzied Christmas shopping season.

Since Bernie works for an auto manufacturing firm, we're watching the crash and burn with concern. His plant is a joint venture between GM and Toyota, sort of an entity unto itself. GM is dying, Toyota is just slowing down a little. A flip of the coin how we might land as this mess escalates.

The Grew-Up-Better-Off-Than-The-Great-Depression part of me says, "We'll be fine, things will be back to normal in no time." Once again people will start throwing money away like maniacs on things they neither need nor can effectively use; vacations will be planned for exotic Disneylands and gambling resorts. Birthday parties and kindergarten graduations will be lavishly bedecked with Jumpy-Rentals and goodie bags and storebought cakes with icing an inch thick.

The other part of me says, "Ouch."

I was at the grocery store today, and was drawn into a conversation, the first sentence of which that I heard was "You know, my wife was totally against it a couple months ago, but now she's done a complete turn, and thinks it might be the only way to go." The man looked at me and said, "Hey, we have to fight back with this. We can't just go under and lose everything."

Having no idea what he was talking about, I was sort of relieved to hear his companion say, "My sister had to do it. She lost her job when they just suddenly closed the gym she managed. She had an extra room, so they rented it out -- they had no choice. What are you going to do?"

Sort of relieved.

Here we are, in broad daylight, buying sustenance for the family, and the discussion turns to renting out a room in one's house to a stranger in order to make ends meet. In order to stay in one's house. You can be relieved that they weren't turning to prostitution or drug dealing to stay in their house, but it's hard to be completely at ease with the idea of people having to rent out part of their own house in order to stay in it.

The book that I've been writing this National Novel Writing Month puts a family directly in harm's way, set in these economic times. I thought it would be easy, and thought I could even work in some dark humor about bad cooking. But as I've written sentence after sentence, the real possibility of people ending up in such a situation has very few funny angles at all. It's a matter of survival, of doing whatever you have to do to keep afloat.

Talking to a lady the other day who just bought a house nearby, she mentioned that they had been looking for the "right" house for two years. "You can't believe what some of these places looked like," she said. "Appliances gone, fixtures just ripped out of the walls, the places trashed ... because when you get a foreclosure, well, they just take every thing they can possibly take."

Guess they take a form of revenge, too, destroying the place so that the bank takes a loss, as well.

I had a number of places I had to shop today, and one of them was Target. Business was so slow that employees were actually approaching customers to help them find stuff, which is just about stepping into some weird fantasy world. And there was a lot -- a lot of clothing that was marked down. Cutting prices to get any kind of profit ... wow.

Just wow.

First Fog of the Season

The deck around the pool was wetter than it had been for the last "rain."

The sky to the East was white.

The grass was wet, the trees dripping.

It was the first fog of the season, not a thick one, but reminding us of the solid white days ahead.

Dia de los Muertos

Whoa, it rained last night!

These are some of the drops that hung on my fern pine this morning, the dim light making me use a low-light exposure.

***

Today was Dia de los Muertos, and at Mass, our pastor talked about purgation and the afterlife. It's not popular nowadays to talk about death, or -- heaven help us -- purgation. No one believes they are going to die, and no one believes they will be held accountable for all the little shit (or big shit) they did in their lives. Popular media spouts that people become angels when they die, and all of them go to heaven.

If you study the religions of the world, you find that not one of them says that is the case. Instead, most of them talk about a period or journey that requires souls to leave behind them that which they think was important in life: beauty, wealth, associations; or to embark on a journey that strives to attain something that is beyond beauty, wealth, or associations. Only after leaving behind the earthly stuff, or striving for the non-earthly stuff, is completion, or Heaven, attained. 

The interim time between death and "heaven" is about purgation, if the soul hasn't bothered to deal with it before.

 (Yes, I believe there is a "Hell" -- a place without God for those who have no desire or interest to be with God. That's also what my church teaches. God is not a machine-gun pointed at every soul's head. God does not demand, "Love Me or I will kill you." But God will allow anyone the choice of existing outside of Heaven.)

What makes me fixate on Purgation today? Why, my mother's condition, wasting slowly away with Alzheimer's Syndrome. 

My mother was always a very proud (arrogant) person, always always always ragging and bragging about how she had raised the family up from poverty to prosperity. (We're talking small town prosperity here, not riches, BTW) Now, though she is declining in health with Alzheimers, she is well-kept with 24-hr care in her own home. Her financial acumen of her mid-years has borne fruit: she can live in her own home, amidst all her (meager) possessions, and need not go to a nursing home.

But all her pride is being taken away; this is her time of Purgation. Her ready wit, her savvy about money, her care for her property -- all gone. Her control over her estate, the doorways of her home, her ability to light a wood fire in the furnace and heat her home -- all gone. Her family -- God help us, all of us were her possessions -- is all beyond her reach to control and manipulate. 

Her care-givers make sure she dresses or is dressed appropriately; they take her where she might want to go; they take care of her property and her bills are all paid by a trust fund. She could smile and accept that she is in comfort, but she does not.

Instead, she pretends that there is nothing wrong with her, and fights every offer of help, and hates that she's been taken care off.

I watch her, in her purgation, and wonder what she'll let go before the end.

And I pray for her. 

Halloween, 2008

Hartley's Potato Chips.

Oooh, yeah. They arrived today, a couple days earlier than I expected them. I order them from a little town called Lewistown, Pennsylvania, at a ridiculous cost ... because they taste so yummy to me and they do not use sunflower oil, to which I have a hideously reactive allergy.

My Halloween treat was to open a bag and snag a couple mouthfuls. The Hartley's is to be my NaNoWriMo reward for when I get daily word count, but I couldn't wait. It's been so long since I had last snarfed the salty snacks...

I painted two extra eyeballs on my face tonight, by way of a costume, and I managed to freak my grand-daughter out when she saw me. That's a successful makeup job, I think. We took pics; if I can find one that doesn't make me look too aged or worn, I'll add it to this post tomorrow.

And rain is drizzling again.

P.S. There I am with my extra eyeballs.

Thunder!

Weather reports here have been changing hour to hour.

When I got up this morning, the weather report said it would rain tonight sometime. I went out to the ranch to ride mid-morning, and after riding, my friend and I cleaned the paddocks because rain looked to be close on our heels.

I wasn't home an hour before rain began to fall, and with the rain, lightning and thunder, which NONE of the weather services had predicted.

One of the few things I miss from Back East is thunderstorms. Bernie and I sat out on the front porch and watched the lightning and listened to the thunder for several hours. Glorious! And duh, so much for the weather services.

As I write, the rain continues to drizzle, though the thunder has moved away. Nevertheless, I feel pleasantly drowsy; I tend to sleep like the dead when a thunderstorm moves through. Maybe it is because I was born during a thunderstorm; maybe it's because while it thunders, I know I have nothing more that I have to accomplish.

Posers

After I'd taken a photo of my latest artwork, I took a break and tried to snap some pictures of the dogs. (Click on "latest artwork" for the link.)

It wasn't too hard to get them to lie down beside each other, but they would not look at me with my scary camera until I said, "Where is ball?"

Ears came up and I had their undivided attention.

Such good boys, Sebastian and Howie. They spent much of the morning with me in the garage studio, just peacefully lying on the carpet, watching people and cars pass by. (The garage door was open to warm it up in there a bit.) Even when a neighbor passed by with her dog, they didn't move.

My husband frequently asks me if I'm happy; I'm not sure why -- I hope I don't have a sad-looking face. Frankly, I think I am one of the most fortunate people in the world, and hugging these two big beasties reminds me of that in an instant.

Yuck, That's How Much Crud There Is in the Air

Oh, the hazy airs of autumn...

This tree is catty-corner across the street. I looked out the front window tonight and did a double take at the light. Grabbing the camera, I snapped a shot to record some very filthy air.

We're very nearly at the end of almond harvesting season here in the Valley; you can't see the mountains on either side of the Valley for the dust hazing the view, and everywhere you go, people are hacking.

Lillian is coughing at night; in the mornings I wake up and can't speak clearly until I get some hot tea down my throat. The cars, the sidewalks, the windows, the leaves on the trees -- everything is coated with dust kicked up by the shaking, sweeping, and vacuuming machines.

We had a trifling bit of rain the other week, and it dropped a lot of mud out of the sky. Everything looked splattered by mud. Amazing. We're hoping for a good hard cleansing rain in November, but the weather forecasters are changing their predictions from "rain" to "no rain" on an hourly basis.

I begged off going out to ride the horse this afternoon because it was too hot for this time of year. There wasn't a smidge of a breeze, the flies are insanely active before colder weather, and no amount of bug spray helps keep the biting flies off this old girl when she sweats. It was a grand afternoon to sit in the new studio and ply pigments instead.