catching up

Whew, lots going on!

It's not even three weeks now til Draft Horse Classic, I will not be accomplishing all I'd hoped to do by then. Yikes.

I spent Friday at State Fair. I got there around 7am for check-in, and got my one chicken all squared away. I debated napping in the car til opening time but it was already too hot so I wandered around and saw some of the livestock and horses before the fair opened. One of the horses that played Seabiscuit was there, he was a cutie! And the horse that played Shadowfax in LOTR was there too but I have to say he's not nearly as pretty in person. Then again I didn't get a very good view, there were ropes around the stall so I pretty much just saw his head and neck and the top of his backline.

I spent the day with a few poultry friends and wandered the fairgrounds. I may edit in some pics here later. I hardly took any but WL took some pics of me with my drawing on his camera and I think they are better than the ones on my camera (I took the coolpix, yeah the flash still doesn't work, I haven't done a darn thing about it). I had a great time catching up with friends. I had wanted to stay all day and see a lot of the shows but it was over 100 degrees so we all wimped out around 3:30 or so. I did get to see one horse race before I left (a quarter horse race, and had I gone with my initial impression my favorite would have been the winner, but I over-analyzed and picked the 3rd place horse instead. Darn, trust the initial impression! Oh well, I didn't bet anything anyway). And I got the trifecta of fair food: cinnamon roll, corn dog, frosty.

I did not go back in to see judging on Saturday. I heard I got best of class but beyond that I don't know who won what. I just wasn't up for spending more time there.

I hate painting. I don't mean art painting, I mean wall painting. We're painting the kitchen this weekend. Ugh! I think taping is the worst part.

Shylah was all cross canter tonight. Aaaarrrg! This is driving me up the wall. She's been very consistent (at times) under saddle as well as bareback, so I just can't figure out if there's any correlation to anything. Maybe I'll try bareback again tomorrow.

I still want to get the landscape drawing done by DHC. IF I am almost done by the end of the week I'll go ahead and order a frame. Probably the new graphite drawing is something I'll work on while I'm there. The Serama illustrations have been pushed back til after DHC (long story there). Lots of scrim ideas I could work on.

Speaking of scrim... about eight months ago or so, after deciding that if I wanted to be taken seriously I needed to scrim a knife, I bought one on ebay (yeah, jumping the gun a bit!). It was several hundred dollars, which I don't part with too easily, but I realized shortly after buying it that I shouldn't have done that. It's not made by someone who collectors are seeking (in fact it doesn't even have a maker's stamp) so basically it has no resale value. The value of my scrim would FAR exceed that of the knife, and it would be impossible to sell for what my work is worth. It's not a bad looking knife, but it's also not really all that elegant either. I'm in a pickle as to what to do with it:

1) I could resell it as-is (having nothing done to it). I probably would not get what I paid for it. But knowing that if I scrim it I could never sell it anyway, maybe I ought to just unload it.

2) I could go ahead and scrim it. A GREAT idea came to me today. I could either keep it as a sample of what I can do (then again it may not be a good "canvas" for my work as far as showing it to high-end collectors) or I could give it to someone. It would give me the chance to work on mammoth ivory, which I have not yet tried. And then at least I could say I scrimmed a knife. I'd just have to go into it knowing I get NOTHING but personal satisfaction out of it. But do I want to use my great idea on this knife? Would this knife even work for it, hmmm, mammoth ivory is very dark, it might be hard to see the image. My great idea involves a tiny amount of metal engraving, something I have not done. I'd need to learn how to do that to pull this off.

It's going to be a busy week, again.

pics from the Starbucks ride

Here's a bunch of pics from last Sunday. Thank you Alora and Suzie for taking pictures. :-)



"Hmm, do they have anything without coffee in it?"

Why yes, my horse is rather cute isn't she!

The red ribbon is used on a horse that kicks. Shylah unfortunately has a rather large personal space when it comes to other horses (thank you Gwen, ugh). She does NOT kick people. The red ribbon is a symbol that all riders know means to mind their distance. That's something everyone ought to do every horse anyway. I try to be REALLY careful with Shylah on a group ride and usually put her last (she's always the slowest anyway). On many rides there is a non-ribboned horse that kicks someone.


Shylah and Trog. They have met before.



The big red horse is Sampson, he lived here several years ago. He's a tank!


Uh oh, we're holding up the line! I got some chocolate minty iced thing, it was quite yummy.

the bear cubs

"The Lookouts" (black bear cubs)
scrimshaw on paper micarta
1.5 x 4.75 inches

*whew done finally!*

I love it. :-)

I have been doing scrimshaw for one year now. Happy anniversary to me! May there be many more to come.

Thank you BK for the title (and the original idea). :-)

bear with me

I know you just can't bear to wait. The bear scrim is done. I finished tonight, it's pretty much all I've been doing the last couple days. But I'm still waffling on the title, so I'm not going to post it til I figure that out. :-) Hopefully that will be tomorrow.

I have no other WIP pics, sorry.

I should have pics from the Starbucks ride tomorrow or Friday.

Jessie the dog is doing okay. Not great, not awful, just okay. Leaning toward good. Better.

that's a no

Well, at least I have a definite answer now. I will not be showing at the engraving show in Reno in January. I am not eligible to exhibit as a member (since I am not a firearms engraver) and I am not able to apply as a commercial exhibitor for the 2009 show. However, I had to scoop up my jaw and eyeballs off the floor after seeing the commercial exhibitor booth fee, so needless to say I would not be interested in applying to that category anyway. Hmpf. This is most disappointing. I will still attend as a visitor for a day or two, as there are people there I need to meet. Heck, with all the money I'll save on booth fees and lodging maybe I ought to go see the Safari Club show while I'm in town....

August 24 work in progress, etc.

Tonight I went on a very strange trail ride. :-) There is a "horse trail" (a multi-use trail, walkers, cyclists, dogs...horses I think are a rarity on this trail) that goes through part of Elk Grove. My friend WM (whee, she has new initials!) and some of her family and friends have this tradition of riding to Starbucks on Sundays. I was invited to go along, and so I did. It's maybe a 3 mile round trip. Shylah was pretty good, kinda grumpy today with a few spooky moments. It's way different than riding on the road where I live! It's pretty silly riding a horse through a drive-thru. :-) Several of my friends showed up with cameras, so I will have pics to post by the end of the week.

I definitely need to desensitize Shylah to "throwing things away" as she nearly unseated me when I tossed my empty cup into a trash can as we rode past. So I'll be taking trash cans and buckets out to the round pen and an armload of clanky things like empty pop cans to throw away. I have a few non-horse-owning friends who would actually like to go riding with me. There are two issues here. One is that I have only one rideable horse. I have access to an extra horse (Dusty!) but would not in a hundred million years put a newbie on Dusty, which means Shylah would need to be the sensible horse. She generally is, but I know some things that need work. The other problem is lack of a truck and trailer so I pretty much need to get a little group of totally sane dependable trail horses together so I can mooch rides anyway. :-)

So, in the world of art this weekend... did not work on the bear scrim, I wanted a few days off from that. Weekends tend to be kinda scattered and I want uninterrupted hours for that. I did sand down a Corian tile for an upcoming horse scrim. I still need to sketch the image though. It's a really extremely complicated image (two horses in harness).

I started Nude #4, which I think will be titled Beach Babe or something cheesy like that. Right now it looks like absolutely nothing, yeah!

I am disgruntled with the landscape drawing again. I'm tired of working on the sky, though sometimes I'm totally thrilled with it. It's just taking a lot more layers than I anticipated and kind of dragging on and on. The pink/orange parts are almost done, the reds and purples and blues still need a lot of work. I'm eager to get to the foreground! I need to get this at least pretty close to done early this week so I can order a frame.

Uncompleted sketch for upcoming 12x18" graphite drawing. I'd like to have this done by DHC but I'm not sure I can pull that off.

Ummm, I think that's about it. Oh! I took some hummingbird photos. These are both female Black Chinned Hummingbirds. Could be the same bird, who knows.

chickening

I got rid of 40 birds last weekend. That's always sort of nice. There are some promising youngsters out there, and there were some *really* bad ones too. One thing about hatching only a third as many birds as normal is I don't have much to pick from. Last year I was overrun with really nice BBRed cockerels. This year I kept only three (took a bunch to auction) and none of them impress me yet. There are only four black cockerels. Lots of pullets still, they need to mature more before I can really judge them. I likely will have very very very few showable birds for the fall shows. However I'm pretty certain I'm only going to Ventura in the fall, so it's not like I have much scheduled.

I am taking one bird to State Fair. How pathetic is that! :-) I entered three, but this is the season where they molt (lose and regrow feathers) so only one of them looks decent enough to show. Oh well.

I took a few pics this evening. And some video.

Video: "OMG Olin's walking past the pen, everyone crowd around!"

Video: a golden duckwing cockerel crowing

These GDW's have a few years to go, but you have to admit these are darn handsome!:

And I took a few pics of "It." It has a name, but I'm afraid I'll offend someone so I'm not going to say it. I'm pretty sure It's a girl, but that's sure not normal female coloration with those wing bows! It behaves like a female, but has the most comb and wattle development of any female out there (and is not the oldest). And It's tail seems to be coming in with some very curved and glossy green feathers. Hmmm. It is my favorite chicken out there, I have to admit! ;-)





Oh, if anyone wants to see something silly, be at the Starbucks on the corner of Bond and EG Florin around 7pm Sunday. ;-) You can meet Shylah... ;-) ;-) I hope to get pics.

August 22 work in progress

Gah! I totally love this piece! :-D I should finish in the next couple days.

August 21 work in progress

stuff

I'm taking a little eyeball break from the microscope so I guess I'll sit down and try to write something. Things have been hectic.

I'm starting to plan out what will be going to Draft Horse Classic for my booth. I wish I had more new stuff to show. I will have several scrim pieces, the landscape drawing will be done, I may get another horse drawing done (ha ha?) and there are a few other items that crowd has not yet seen. I need to allow about two weeks for framing, and have everything ready to go a week beforehand, so that doesn't leave me much time.

Jessie the dog has taken a turn for the worse, again. This has happened many times over the last year. She's off feed (other than fried eggs, she gladly eats fried eggs) and not well. But she's still happy and perky and may come around again like before. I won't see an animal suffer though, and I'll know when the time is right.... Honestly both dogs are sort of in "hospice" now. Nellie has Cushing's disease, so her timeframe is also uncertain. It's tough when animals get old. :-(

JJ came over on Tuesday night and watched me ride Shylah. She cantered normally the entire time, other than occasionally picking up the wrong lead if I was working outside the round pen. No cross cantering though, so I guess she has that all figured out. The difference is astounding. I was riding in a bareback pad, and it wasn't long ago there would have been no way I could have stuck on there through that bouncy cross canter. Some observations though:

She barely lifts her feet off the ground at all (this may explain her whacking herself repeatedly on the poles the other night, and also some of her issue with rocky terrain, she's not paying attention to where her feet go, but having lived in land-of-flatness for 5 years that's understandable, the biggest protrusions off the ground out in the pasture are horse turds.) So when I was trotting, I was really surprised when JJ said "she's not trotting!" Huh? Yes she is, same as she always has! Well, in Shylah's world it's a trot but her front feet barely come up so it's more like she's walking in front and trotting behind. So we'll call this the Shylah Shuffle now, and it doesn't change whether she's trotting fast or slow (oh wait, she doesn't go fast). Whatever, it's quite comfy and she seems like she could do that all day.

She's a small horse, obviously (14.2ish). She has thick legs and big feet. She's not delicate by any means and would have no trouble packing me around all day, she's just... compact, and I'm rather tall so we're an odd combination. She doesn't have much front end. When you sit on her, you think "where's her shoulder?" There isn't much, and her strides are short and without extension. She wings out a little with her front feet. My saddle may put me a bit too forward on her, though I feel no difference in her movement whether she's bareback or saddled. She is without a doubt completely adorable though. She does not seem sore at all in any part, and JJ said she looked very relaxed at all gaits. (Half-asleep, probably). JJ said I should try her cutback English saddle. Hee hee, me in an English saddle, it's been 16 years!

Conformationally she ain't perfect. She'd never make it as an endurance horse, and she's sure no race horse! She's probably be best suited for having roses braided in her hair and pulling a cute cart down the road. Second best might be a short-legged rider. But instead she has me, and for the type of riding that I do (pretty mellow! I DO want to get out and hit the trail more, hint hint to anyone reading this) she'll be just fine, and despite her shortcomings don't think for a second that anything would change. I love that horse to pieces. I'm just becoming more aware that she'll have her limitations, and it seems more doubtful that I would ever have her bred. If I had the means, it would be nice to have more than one rideable horse, but right now that's out of the question, and even though Gwen is sound at the walk and usually trots around just fine, I just don't trust her enough on the trail not to do something completely idiotic like kill me. I really can only deal with owning two horses at once....soo...oh well.

It was fun going to the Fair last night. I'll be spending more time there when I take my bird(s?) in for show next week. It's a real trip down memory lane being there. I mean, I've been showing at State Fair since 1988 but it was definitely most fun as a kid. I didn't have much time to look at the art show but I walked quickly through just to see where my work is hanging. There is some amazing stuff there, and also some totally weird stuff. Sometimes I just don't understand art. It's a great place to people-watch. If you ever want to see some really good examples of what NOT to wear, look around a state fair. *shudder*

Well, I'd better get back to it.