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.

Gap in the Skyline

This weather is...wow. The water has receded off the roads in the immediate area. We lost our biggest tree in the front yard. "Big" is relative term, and other people might call it a not-so-big tree, but it was the tallest in the yard... I did not see it fall. I was in the front room putting chairs away after today's annual shindig. All was well. The wind was ferocious... I took an armload of chairs back to the guest room closet, walked back to the front room, happened to look out the window, and something seemed amiss. Part of the front fence had fallen down earlier, but I saw another part fallen over, with something sticking through onto our side, and I thought "whoa, that's weird, some sort of big log sticking through from the neighbor's side." And then it dawned on me that the "big log" was actually the uprooted (well, more like snapped off just below ground level) trunk of our tree, which had fallen on top of the (now broken) fence, and into the neighbor's front yard. So that's going to change the view out the front window...

We've had some impressive weather here, but this is absolutely NOTHING compared to conditions elsewhere in the state...flooding, power outages, etc. I got some pretty impressive flood pics from a friend in Antioch, and read another friend's blog about massive power outages and falling trees up in Humboldt county. I know there are many many areas having major problems. :-(

Wild weather.

Flooding

Wilton has a tendency to flood, at least parts of it. I grew up on a ranch along the river, and I remember the levee breaks and the flooding that resulted. It was scary, especially the first time, since I was just a little kid. The water didn't reach the house, since the house was up on a bit of a hill (it would have been darn near impossible for the house to flood), but watching the water creep up across the pastures was fascinating and terrifying at the same time. I remember walking down to the river after the water subsided, boot-deep in sticky mud in some places, and being so saddened by the things that had died--cows from somewhere upstream, rabbits, squirrels, and surely lots of smaller critters too. It's really quite scary. The rivers often win the battle of containment.

I think we are safe in the place I live now too. The roads around here flood, but the house and barn are up quite a bit higher than the roads. We got 2 inches of rain just overnight (add that onto the many inches in the last week and it makes for a very soggy place!). I've never seen quite this much water across the road. I was able to walk down there with rubber boots, and could have driven out, but I didn't have anywhere I needed to go today, so I didn't drive through it. I am not worried about it.

The pastures are totally saturated.

Normally you would not see any water here... Those are fields, not lakes.

And that's a road..