Number One Hundred!

This is my 100th post to my blog! How exciting. The only suggestion I got on how to celebrate the occasion was pretty weird... so BM, this one's for you:


I got back into chicken drawing mode by working on a couple things to sell at PPBA. Standard work will recommence tomorrow. As I said I'd had pretty good success with the hand-colored tiles, but they just take so darn long I wanted to investigate other alternatives. I was thinking perhaps doing small sketchy graphite drawings, but if I did them on paper I'd really have to frame them, and I hate to invest in a bunch of frames. Even the cheap ones add up, plus I'm sort of insistent on having things nicely framed anyway. So I think I'll go with tiles, but I needed to really decrease the time investment. I did a graphite sketch on one, and it looked okay but just didn't stand out much. I washed it off (I know at least one of you is horrified by that), and redid it in ink. MUCH better. I had four tiles left from last year so I drew all those, and will buy more tiles soon. It took 1/4 the time of doing the colored pencil tiles, and looks pretty cool. I'm not sure if I will post pics before the show, or wait til afterwards. Hmmmm.

We got over an inch of rain today. The yard was just full of standing water, so it dawned me as I was squishing around out there in the rain today that perhaps the dry well drains weren't doing their jobs. Sure enough, they were totally clogged with leaves on the drain covers. I cleaned the leaves off, and it was so weird... the circle of grass over where the dry well itself is started to bubble. (The dry well is a 40' deep (I think) hole filled with rocks, and grass over the top so it blends in with the rest of the yard). It was just so strange, this ~3' circle of grass with oodles of little bubble streams coming up. I guess the water was displacing the air from the drains! Then I slogged out through the corrals to the creek and shoveled out the drainage ditches, they were all filled in with grass, fallen branches, etc. That made a huge difference, so hopefully the water will recede out of the corrals quicker now. I feel sorry for the horses, but there's not much I can do about it.