And Yet Good Things, Too

Kermit doesn't care about corona virus. He cares about getting his food on time, sleeping close against my legs, and about those darned cats that keep using our fence as a path, which is what he's watching for in this picture.

I'm trying to let him be my teacher in this. Yesterday we went out to see if we could buy some potatoes (we were out) and there were simply none to be had. But there were still plenty of people piling shopping carts high with anything they could grab. It made me cry, right there in the store, that people -- in whom I have faith that they can be good -- would continue to be so selfish and amoral in the face of a crisis. My sadness discolored almost my whole day ... then we got a text from Alex that said that the transplant center was releasing John to come home to recuperate the rest of the way.

They were home safe and sound by the time we awoke this morning, and it was a joyous and festive kind of day. Yes, we're all prohibited from having guests in the house, or visiting other people's houses, but except for Joma, we're all heavily on the hermit side of social, so that's not a hardship. John looks great after his kidney transplant, and Alex, Lil, and I had fun planning a schedule that will keep us active and productive.

We made a monumental feast of Mexican rice and frijoles refritos; tacos with home-made tortillas. After the meal, Bernie and I went to Ripon's excellent bike and hike path and walked together, admiring the trees blossoming and the geese ambling about. We were surprised by how many people -- families -- were there, too, walking, biking, exercising their dogs. This is not a time to go to a movie theater, and with so many folks working (or not working) from home, what do you do? You get out in the open air and see the sun splashing through the fluffy clouds and hear the voices and laughter of people.

Maybe not such dire straits on all levels.

Bernie split some kindling for tomorrow's fire, and found a little sagebrush lizard torpid on top of a log. He picked it up in his work glove, and we all got a chance to admire the tiny creature close up.

Oh, yes, the girls' schools closed after classes on Friday, not due to reopen until mid-April (ha, ha, so they say officially) and so Joma and I began working on the Forbidden Basics: Reading, Writing, and Arithmetic. Our text for reading is a big book of Dr. Seuss books, and we're starting with classic "1 + 1 = 2" etc. Which she has never experienced, recitation and memorization not being in style with teaching methods these days. A couple hours ago, I heard her chanting the numbers to herself.

I think, if I live through it, I will see this as more of a time of promise than of curse.

I wanted something beautiful to accompany this post, because otherwise I might begin to despair over how awful people can be. This is my plum tree on the back patio, in the sweet light of morning.

We went to the grocery store two days ago. We needed a couple baguettes, some dog food, angel hair pasta, a white onion, a yellow onion, and strawberries, which were on sale. The first clue that something was off was that there were hardly any shopping carts available.

Now I have seen pictures of empty shelves in supermarkets, usually when there is a major weather event brewing, but until Friday, I had never seen panic-shopping in person. The store was crowded, and people's carts were all piled high. I mean HIGH. We stuck to the outskirts of the store, mostly, because people were rude, pushy, determined, with pinched faces that fiercely ignored the others around them, and gave the impression that if you looked in their carts too hard, you would get punched in the face.

There was no water on the shelves. No toilet paper at all, not even the cheap stuff. No paper towels. I had wondered, as we entered the store, why an older woman in heels and a suit was buying so many boxes of tissues and -- napkins! Signs on the shelves informed shoppers that they would be limited to six items of cleaning supplies, and two bags of ice only per shopper.

As I reached for a package of angel hair pasta, a fat hairy man reached past my ear and started grabbing bags of pasta and tossing them into his nearly full cart. On another aisle, Bernie pulled me out of the way of a woman who was trying to push past me and who would have almost certainly run over my flip-flop-clad feet. Feeling a bit overwhelmed, I saw the fat hairy man meet up with his wife, who also had a heaped-full cart of her own. What they were hauling would be enough to feed them for six months, I think.

The pheromonal stench of panic was horrible. I wanted to get out of the store as soon as I could, before I caught the mob mania and started grabbing things -- any things -- off the shelves.

Quick! Time for something else that is beautiful before I begin to cry.

 Almond blossoms! Yes, remember how lovely they were, and how their perfume filled the air, and how I could stand in the spaces between the branches and listen to the myriad of bees buzzing around the flowers.

The corona virus is bad, no doubt about that. But only a few weeks ago, fully a THIRD of the students at Joma's school were out sick with some kind of cough and fever that knocked Joma off her little rocker for well over a week. No one rushed out and bought up all the cough syrup and Clorox over it. NO ONE in this town has COVID19, and what will buying and hoarding toilet paper help them with if they pick it up somewhere else?

I guess what makes me really sad is that this little town is one of the most affluent in the Central Valley. There's no need for anyone to hoard anything. But there you have it, they are. Today Bernie and Joma went to the store for parmesan cheese (Lillian is cooking stuffed shells for dinner tomorrow) and Bern reported that there has now been a run on meat and cheese, almost none to be had. (The shaved parmesan that Lil wanted was in good supply -- must be too weird for people to know what to do with it.) I sort of understand about buying meat in bulk, but cheese? It doesn't freeze well ... and I know maybe four or five folks who actually DO know how to cook, but for the most part, the general populace here doesn't.

After the bout in the grocery store, I was not at all surprised to hear that both the girls' schools were closing for three to four weeks. Or that our diocesan bishop dispensed with the requirement of going to Mass on Sundays until this virus blows over.

And until the panic does, too.

Four Tasks at Once

The nice woodstove does a few things well.

First of all, it heats the whole house. Secondly, it dries the kitchen dish towels in a matter of minutes. Third, it keeps a dog warm -- or a person, if the person is quick enough to get to the chair before the dog does. And fourth, it saves electricity by cooking my onions and celery for my Chicken Stuff dressing. (If you could peek into that pot, you'd see the celery and onion simmering away.)

Let's add a fifth: it's beautiful and comforting to look at.

The Tale of Woe

August: Joma brings home the flu to Bernie and me, possibly from some germy little hog on the soccer team. My dog Kermit starts rubbing his eyes and muzzle -- lots of wildfire smoke in the air, so probably a reaction to that.

September: Recovering, lots of coughing for us, more rubbing by Kermit, still so much smoke.

October: Alex's health is getting bad enough she has to quit working.  Kermit is losing weight and his coat feels dry and dirty.

November: Kermit takes an extreme turn for the worse, stops eating, loses 20 pounds and looks like a fur-covered skeleton. Alex has surgery to correct her health problems. By November 10th, I quit NaNoWriMo because I fear my dog is dying.

December: Kermit appears to be on the mend after we nearly had him put down -- he couldn't walk without crying with pain, wouldn't eat. Bernie has surgery scheduled to correct a scar tissue problem from an operation 44 years ago, but halfway through the surgery, the doctors see something in his monitors that makes them fear a heart attack, and he is admitted to the hospital (it was supposed to be a 3-hour in-and-out thing) for three days for test upon test on his heart.

Christmas: Bernie has a clean bill of health for his heart, his surgery was quite successful, and I know from the medical tests that he doesn't have the same heart condition that killed his two brothers in the last three years. Kermit looks good again, putting on weight, his coat soft and glossy.

Goodbye, 2019.

National Novel Writing Month 2019

I'm not really sure why, really, I'm doing NaNoWriMo this year. I don't have the time to do it, practically speaking, but here I am, on Day 5, with a respectable word count of 9214. I was hoping for 10k, but was easily distracted today by laundry, and an absurd desire to maintain some kind of timeline consistency.

I doubt that any of what I'm writing will be usable in a new novel; maybe some, maybe not any of it. What I do know is that since I started writing again, nightmares have stopped completely. A month of no bad dreams is worth the time eaten up by writing. It's like having a vacation.

The lizard above is one of the MANY we have on the property now. I'm thrilled that the sagebrush lizard population has boomed. They eat ants, says the Internet. Indeed, I am not seeing the swarms of megacolonies of ants that I did a few years ago.

With the time passing into November coolness, the lizards have to sleep most of the time. I get to see them if I head outside around noon, but before that, and after two-thirty or so, it's just too cold for them. Kind of like me, and writing out in the studio.

Liz is saying, "Hey, why does it get so cold when you write?"

Finished Paintings

You know, I can't remember when I started these pictures. It was so long ago that I found them under a pile of papers, having forgotten about them. As I set them out on a work table, I thought "Geeze, why was I so timid about this?"

The limited palette I'd chosen (good thing I wrote it down in a project notebook I found with the preliminary paintings) was Titanium White, Cadmium Orange Medium, Naples Yellow, Alizarin Crimson, and Burnt Sienna.

The inspiration for them was a piece of seashell that I carried with me for a while, calling it a "worry-stone" -- I could find it in a pocket or on my desk and fiddle with it. Turning the shell-shard, I found the lines making strange scenes.

In the third one (on the right) imagine the lines to be stars. I'm pleased with the resulting images, and we're already trying to figure out where to hang them once they are dry.

LG LRE3083SW Range -- Goodbye and Good Riddance

It had a pretty blue enamel interior.
It had a convection oven function.
Mmm, it had a smooth ceramic top.
Self-cleaning.
Warming center on the top.
It was on sale.

Yes, I bought it, and thought it would be the last range I'd ever have to buy, so lovely to look at and play with that it was a trophy stove for my kitchen, even though I do tend to sneer when people make trophy alliances or buy trophy homes or cars.

Serves me right, I guess. The first time I used the self-cleaning function, it did a really crappy job. I mean REALLY. So much so that I went to the store to buy oven cleaner, only to find that you may not use oven cleaner on convection ovens. I was not pleased to discover I'd have to live with a dirty-looking oven. But surely, the industry of oven cleaners would evolve to come up with a solution, sooner or later.

Last spring, we began hearing groaning noises coming from the stove when we used the oven. Intrepidly, Bernie researched and found it it was because the convection fan in the oven was giving out. Repair would be fairly inexpensive, and relatively easy ... so we'd deal with that when we had to.

Labor Day Weekend; a family meal, a big batch of delicious breaded pork chops with mashed potatoes and gravy, and vine-ripened tomatoes and corn on the cob ... WTF, the front burner stopped working and now my chops were sitting in oil instead of frying in oil! Switch to another burner, salvage the rest of the meal, dangit. Well, those burners can be replaced, a bit of a tricky job, true, but not impossible.

The next morning, I turned on the back burner to heat water for my tea. It came on, but so did the big front burner, without me touching its controls. What if I had been using that front burner area like an extra bit of countertop? After all, that's the main reason I like flat ceramic tops, because they can function as additional serving space or work area.

After researching, Bernie found that the likely source of the problem was the control panel. Seriously? For a barely three year old stove?

About $250 for the part alone, not counting the cost of service call and labor if it turned out to be a repair he couldn't do himself.


My turn to do some Googling of stoves. I found a plain old damn electric range at Lowe's for $350, although it wasn't in stock and would take some weeks to get here.

Next best option: get the model that simply upgrades to a self-cleaning oven. $450. In stock. And when we went to look at it, and subsequently buy it, we got $100 off by opening a Lowe's account, which costs us nothing. And there it is, tucked into its spot, looking like it belongs to the kitchen and the dark granite countertops.

It's pretty.
The burners heat up really, really fast.
The controls are simple.
The oven is WAY more even for baking (Bernie made some outstanding zucchini bread)
The oven pre-heats a lot faster.
The burners' temperatures don't fluctuate.

The LG ceramic top stove was probably never meant to be used by people who cook as much as we do. I needed a workhorse, not My Pretty Pony.

I think I've got it.

Gulf Fritillary in Our Garden

Bernie called me out to the front garden to look at a butterfly he'd never seen before. I hadn't, either, so off to Google Search we went. This is a Gulf Fritillary, usually not seen this far north. But apparently they have been in the Bay Area in ages past, and recently have founded a colony in Sacramento County. Simply beautiful.

Bean Therapy in the 2019 Summer Garden

This has been a year of exploration of peppers, which I never bothered to grow since back in the day when my mother and I would plant tomatoes and peppers to make our own salsa casera. After I moved to California in 1988, I had no need to plant peppers and make the cooking sauce; out here EVERY supermarket has it, unlike rural Pennsylvania.

Last summer I began using peppers in my minestrone recipe, and found that they had become indispensable in my cooking. Box 7 became my pepper nursery, with Anaheim chilis and Italian White Wax peppers. And what the heck, why not plant a pepperoncini and a bell pepper as well?

Having no room set aside for the last two, I just jammed them in with my first planting of wax beans, which I'd started too early and looked like lame weeds. To my surprise, two weeks later, the wax beans had begun to leaf out like crazy, and the bell pepper and the pepperoncini were enormous and covered with blooms, while the Anaheims and Italian White Waxes were less than half the size.

Whaaat? Beans and peppers like each other?

Now back to tomatoes -- which I love like a crazy old cat lady loves kittens. This has been a crummy tomato year in the Pilarski Farmland. Seemed like every time the plants had a wave of flowers, the temperature went over a hundred, which shriveled the buds. And the first nine Shady Lady plants I put in ... they were not thriving. Since peppers and tomatoes are both from the same family, I began planting bean seeds in with the sad tomatoes.

And seeing how pathetic this year's tomatoes were, Bernie told me to go buy more plants, three more Shady Ladies, which I planted into the new bed with beans, not waiting around to see if they needed beanie buddies. This is Box 10, tomatoes planted with beans:

With Beans

You can't even see the beans in there, except on the edges. But boy oh boy, those tomatoes know the nitrogen-fixing beans are partying right along with them.

And then, this poor trio, which were the first plants this spring:

No beans

Admittedly, they're all husky plants, that's why Shady Lady is my go-to producer. But wow, what a difference. Same light, same watering system, same potting soil, same number of plants, same size box. Beans made a huge difference.

Next year, with bean buddies from the beginning, we'll be planting Anaheims again, as they are delicious in a number of dishes, and of course, jalapenos and a bell or two, but the Italian White Wax -- turned out to be so hot that when Bernie nibbled one, I thought he was going to pick up a frying pan and smite himself with it to put himself out of his misery.

They are now compost.

Look at What I Can Do!

I was cleaning up my various email inboxes and came across some Photoshop tutorials that I'd signed up to receive, and of course never looked at because I have no time (sarcasm) to learn anything new. One caught my eye, about being able to use text to reveal an image. I clicked on it, fully expecting jargon I would not understand about functions of Photoshop that don't exist on my ancient version of the program, Photoshop 7. (I have a couple books on how to use Photoshop 7 and can't seem to get through a single chapter without becoming annoyingly confused.)

"HAH!" is what I said when I pressed Ctrl + Alt + G -- and the image you see appeared, with the text revealing the image. I felt like I had just reached into my top hat pulled out a rabbit smoking a cigar. And it was so easy. I made a new file image and filled it with black, put text on a new layer, made another new layer, and pasted the image on it. Then the Ctrl + Alt + G thing ... presto!

The image revealed by the text is of the tomatoes sitting on the counter waiting for someone to eat them. We've had sliced tomatoes, tomato and cucumber sandwiches, salsa, tomato-onion-garlic-basil on pasta, salads with tomato, and we love them all. In fact, I'm going to go pick some more tomatoes right now. Day before yesterday, the total was 21 pounds 5 ounces.

I love tomato season.

Update: After picking the tomatoes, the season harvest so far weighs in at 29 pounds 4 ounces.

Computer User

There he naps, in his sunbeam.

I got a surprise the other evening when I was fiddling with my computer, and Kermit came by to see what I was doing. Suddenly a new window opened, with an advertisement for cat food.

Kermit had seen the image of the cat in the ad on the sidebar of the site I was perusing, and poked it with his nose.

Touchscreen computer = dog friendly. Good thing I wasn't on Amazon.

Yet Another Amenity

A redwood deck in the front yard, nestled among the young podocarpus trees and Swiss chard, seats four comfortably, free wi-fi, pets okay.

Had To Experience It For Myself To Believe It

I'm not a bad housekeeper.

Too true that I'm not good at washing windows, and I don't stress out over dog hair (as long as it isn't in my food or my sheets), but no visitor is going to wind up with food poisoning from a dirty kitchen, or sustain major injuries tripping over stuff left on the floor. But ...

We got the interior of the house painted this past year, and had scrumptious carpeting put down in the bedrooms and hallway, and as a result, I had to delve into closets and corners and clean up enough for work to proceed. More than once I had to say to myself, Good grief, how long has that been in there?

Also in the past year, Bernie found an article on the web that talked about this Japanese woman, Marie Kondo, who specialized in teaching people how to "tidy up." There was a book by her:


 ... and so we ordered it from the library and read it. Most of it, anyway.

The result was that Bernie and I cut the amount of clothing in our closets by more than half. The process was easy -- take every article of clothing out of the closet and pile it on the bed. Then pick up each piece and ask yourself,  Do I love it? Really love it? If yes, then it goes back in the closet. If not, it goes, to trash or donation bag.

A couple days ago, Bernie and I found a Netflix series on the same subject, and since, having cleaned our closets, we felt like experts, we condescendingly decided to watch it.

The 40 minute show took us nearly two hours to watch, as it sparked so much conversation about how we do things and think about our household. Yow.

One of the bits that I hadn't read in the book was about arranging drawers in baths, bedrooms, and kitchens. "Stay out of my drawers" was a statement my mother taught me from childhood. However, watching the TV series, I realized that I had not only underestimated the importance of drawers and organization, I had missed out most of my life a truly lovely and uplifting -- prayer-like -- experience of bringing order and finding joy in it.

I'm not going to show a picture of my lingerie drawer, but it turned out great;  the kitchen drawer that houses dishcloths, dish towels, potholders, and a couple miscellaneous things, and that USED TO BE a veritable rats-nest of tangled fabric and buried kitchen linens now looks like this:

This thing was overflowing when I unloaded it onto the counter. I threw nothing out, but now, orderly, there is room to spare and I can see at a glance what all is in there.

The handling and folding of the individual pieces was the most surprising part of it. In taking time to do so in a certain pattern allowed me to appreciate each towel, respecting its nature and its purpose.

 And oddly enough, I think that the process has made me a better woman.

The Wild Tree

My little almond tree on the north side of the house has clusters of beautiful blossoms. Last year it had only two, and they were pretty ratty-looking. This spring, the tree had a better idea of what to do.

Perfectly placed, the tree is not too close to the fence, and Joma can see it from her bedroom window. The scrub jay who planted it did a great job.

Leftovers: Golumpki Meatballs

So you open the fridge and there is a pound package of hamburger that's a couple days old. Oxidation has begun to make it look less appealing ...

Hmm. There's the leftover rice from two days ago when you made chicken piccata. Half a yellow onion lingers in a storage bag. Out in the garden, the stumps of three harvested cabbages still have big blue leaves living and waiting for someone to love them.

A couple months ago, I watched a food show in which some man threw his meatloaf ingredients into a stand mixer. Why not let the Red Lady Kitchen Aid stand mixer do all the dirty work? Throwing the meat, an egg, and the rice into the mixing bowl, I flipped the switch, and off she went, effortlessly and evenly mixing the ingredients. Why did I never think of this before?

Salt, pepper, onion powder, garlic powder.

The big blue leaves of the cabbage -- and a few outer leaves from a Napa cabbage in the back yard planting -- got wilted in a frying pan filled with boiling water. Into the Cuisinart food processor those leaves went, with the leftover yellow onion and a couple cloves of garlic left over from a salsa construction the day before. (Shh, I stole about three heaping tablespoons of Bernie's salsa and threw that in with the meat, egg, and rice mixture, too.) Having chopped to hell and back the cabbage leaves, onion, and garlic, I mixed those in with the rest. Go Red Lady, go.

I could have cooked the meatballs in the oven for three hours, but instead I placed them into a pressure cooker, with a can of tomato sauce dumped over them: 8 minutes at 15 pounds pressure. Cool off the burner for five more minutes, then cool the pressure cooker until the lid is safe to open under cool running water.

Then I walked away until later in the evening, when I carefully scooped the meatballs out and put them in storage containers for today's meal. Not only do they taste better the second day, but they're a lot easier to handle when they're cool. When they're hot, they fall apart. All the liquid from the pressure cooker went into a separate container.

That was yesterday. Today, I gently reheated the meatballs in the microwave on a low setting while I made fresh potatoes for mashed potatoes, and heated the reserved juice after adding a tablespoon of corn starch to thicken it just a little. (Flour works, too.)

Oh, yeah. Who'd have thought leftovers and discards could taste so good?

P.S. Don't forget the ketchup drizzled across the meatballs. You just would not believe how good that is.

Not Making This Up

Lillian and her mother came back from the store in gales of laughter. They couldn't even tell me what they were shrieking about -- Lil just called up a photo on her phone and showed me. I looked at it and gasped, "Where is THAT from?" (I figured it was some trash from Tumblr.)

"SaveMart!" Lillian cried, and then dissolved into another fit of giggles.

What on earth could they possibly have been thinking? Wait, don't tell me. I don't want to know.

The Diploma

I snapped this picture about 12 years ago, and I was ecstatic to have captured this species of bird -- the rufous-sided towhee is a very secretive bird -- on camera.

I've seen them down in the woods by the river; when I hear their call, I search for a glimpse of them. Not often successfully, either.

This year, I saw a bird scuffling around in my euonymus bush, saw a flash of orange-ish feathers about the color of a robin's breast. A robin? In a densely leaved shrub? That made no sense.

This past week, the mystery bird made his appearance right by our pool, scratching around among the river rocks and fallen leaves. It was a towhee!

You saw a bird, what's the big deal?

The big deal is that when we moved here, twenty years ago, our back yard was dying grass. A feeble fig tree and a twig-like little persimmon starved in the far corner. The patio off the kitchen was unusable because of the summer sun that baked the cement as soon as it was dawn. All along the east fence, there was a rock-hard hill of clay soil so inhospitable it wouldn't even grow weeds.

Earlier that year, I'd read Kim Stanley Robinson's Mars Trilogy, and was full of ideas for terraforming barren ground. Our back yard was going to change.

We put the pool in, and then I began planting. Over the next twenty years, we had a myriad of shrubs and plants that came and went; the pampas grass, a perennial morning glory, and beautiful breath-of-heaven went nuts and tried to take over the world. But the real foundation came when we planted podocarpus gracilior (Fern Pine) on the south side off the kitchen patio, and a hopseed, a eucalyptus, and a lemon tree on the eastern side of the patio. Then a nandina (Heavenly Bamboo), the euonymus, and a few years later, another podocarpus.

What was a desert is now a woodland, and the summer sun comes through the 'forest' canopy only in little sparkles. Under that canopy, a monstera deliciosa thrives beside a large-leafed philodendron. White-crowned sparrows return each year at fall equinox to scratch and feed in the undergrowth; goldfinches pack the feeders; scrub jays patrol the branches to scream if they see a cat.

But this year, a towhee.

For me, that's a lifetime achievement award.

NaNoWriMo 2018

How many times have I said I'm not going to do this to myself again?

Oh, well, here I am, Day 2, with 2515 words in my count already. Not done for the day, either. I can't say how many words I will type tonight, but my goodness, NaNoWriMo is already doing what I wanted it to do.

I got a late start yesterday, what with it being a holy day of obligation, and then having some outdoors work to do, as well as a landslide of laundry that miraculously appeared in the laundry room, and roasting two chickens and prepping another two for the freezer (I buy cheap whole chickens and then cut them into wings, breasts, and leg quarters). By the time dinner was done, I was ready to write.

Until the football game came on, which I was sure would be a lame-ass ridiculous display of ineptitude that I could ignore. Wait, what? The Lame 49'ers quarterback, CJ Beathard was out with an injury? Garappolo is out for the season, so that left ... whaaat? The former practice squad kid, Nick Mullens to take over as QB? Preposterous!

Then the kid marched his team down the field for a touchdown.

Okay, put the computer away, got to watch the new kid on the block. So much for 2000 words the first day.

When I sat down with my computer this morning, all set to write, I had a strange reaction: my hands began to shake like I was hyper-caffeinated. I couldn't type fast enough. Sure they were rough, un-thought-out words, but they were WORDS, and they were MINE, and no one can ever take them away from me, except me, if I decide to delete them.

I stopped trying to make up shit to write, and just listened to what the characters were saying and doing, and transcribed as fast as I could.

My, that sure does feel fine.

At least today.

And the kid did good.

A Completed Oil Painting!

This sucker is finally done, after ... whaaaat? Nearly 20 years? Oh, surely it couldn't be that long.

But wait, the reference photo for it was on 35mm film. Well, maybe it was only 17 years ago.

I did a couple faint-hearted attempts at it; I knew the basic structure was the road and the palmettos. But every time I started working on it, I began to hate it. Recently I had an urge to smell solvents and linseed oil, so I pulled it down off the wall (dust-covered) and cleaned it up, and decided to mess with it as an abstract.

I kept the palmetto silhouettes, and began with a sky of ultramarine blue. Loved it. When I got to the road and the cadmium red light and cadmium red medium, I felt like I had hit one out of the park, or flung a perfect spiral football pass for a touchdown.

Yeah, that was ME shining through, maybe finding my oil painting 'voice' at last.

Labor Day Effort

For quite a few years, the Filthy Pikers have toyed with the idea of "10K for Labor Day" -- that is, writing 10,000 words over the four day Labor Day weekend. I've never managed to achieve that, but this year, I thought I'd give it another try.

In my voyage of creative discovery, I realized anew this past weekend just how much I hate deadlines and quotas. I could not find a single drop of desire to write, even though I have two interesting stories started.

However, I followed my sudden rabid urge to create. I needed to make an image to go with Charles Cicirella's poem "Modern Day Job" in the Piker Press, so I tackled a work of pastels. No, I wasn't thinking of the Hulk when I made green the focal point of the picture. (In fact, when I was done I wished I hadn't used green.) It was a lot of fun having ALL my pastels spread out on the side of my work desk, so much so that I'm going to do that again today.

Then it was time to move on. My Sony camera has more features to it than I was ever able to use (DSC-H400), but with the creative urge on, I perched on the back patio in the morning light and just played with the thing. Photo after photo, setting after setting -- it was glorious!

This is the breadfruit plant that thrives in the southeast corner of the yard, under a canopy of fern pine and hopseed. I loved the way the light was shining through this newly-unfurled leaf.

My neighbor's queen palm was blooming, and I had a good view of the fascinating golden cascade. Using the fence as a tripod, I was able to get a nice zoom-in of the blossoms.

Back to the shade and morning light! Bernie has a coleus on the shady bank, the variety is called "Camp Fire." The stems are dark red, nearly black, and the leaves catch the light beautifully. Sadly, the camera didn't want to catch the light except as a glare.

All that warm, pinky lit-from-within color was lost. How can a camera see things so much differently than my eyes? Exploring a light-blocking setting on the camera (for the first time ever) gave a somewhat better result:

From the darkness of the shadows, I moved to full sun on my potted corn plants. After giving me a few delicious ears this summer (it has been a lousy corn year everywhere in the Central Valley because of the high heat), the corn has dried. Beautiful when it's green, beautiful dried, too. When it turns white, I think of it as "ghost corn."

Back to the studio, and Photoshop. I needed a cover image to accompany Ken Dubuque's humorous essay, "Armed and Dangerous." Using some public domain clip-arty images, I was able to cut and paste together a contraption that put me in mind of the mommies who barrel along the sidewalks, shoving huge buggies before them, all the while staring at their smart phones:

The stripes were simply for graphic effect visually, but what was stupendous to me was that in fiddling with settings and tools in Photoshop, I was able to get onto the screen just what I could see in my head.

Between Photoshop and my camera, I was able to capture this antique-colored portrait of Bernie's zinnias. I've always loved how zinnias hold their shape even while their summer color begins to fade.

And finally, since our cell phone joined the ranks of Electronics That Refuse To Do What They Were Meant To Do, Bernie got me a Motorola g6 that has a pretty spiffy camera feature of its own. This is the first photo I took with it, on Monday evening:

My glass of wine! What better subject could there be, at the end of the holiday weekend? And with that tenth picture, if a picture is worth a thousand words, I did achieve 10K for Labor Day. Cheers!