Thanks for all of your comments. I am still taking pictures. And I still take too many pictures but there are some animals passing through on their way south to warmer climes and I don't want to miss them.
I am still writing.
I write every day. I no longer write with a fountain pen but I do jot things down on my high school spiral bound notebook every day. Who is here. Who came. Where we went. The temperature outside when I get up. I write all that stuff down. I can go back in years to the same date in any year and compare the temperatures or how cold it was or whatever. I write that stuff all down.
It seems like we have way more white oak leaves on the ground this year than last. I never have written down how many leaves we got but this seems like an amazing amount this year. I try to use them as the fertilizer they were intended to be. The trees drop them straight down in hopes of getting paid back for all the work the tree did to keep them as pretty as any other leaves on the block.
Instead, most people rake them up, burn them where they are still allowed to burn leaves, or put them out by the curb for the $80,000.00 sucking machine the city uses to suck them up and blow them into the back of a modified truck. From there they are taken to people who own lots of land and they are dumped in monumental piles to become fertilizer for the man who takes them. And the people who rake them up, around here, pay another man to fertilizer their lawns four times each year. Duh!
I like to blow them up against the flowers or the areas where the hawk looks for birds or around flowers or grass clumps. None are thrown away. And Patty mows those in the grass into tiny pieces that speeds up the fertilizer processing.
None of us are looking forward to winter. Though the kids are looking for days off from school and hope the snow makes it possible.
I saw a Wheel Bug yesterday on the patio in a pile of leaves that had blown up there. That pile was raked into the garden area and I guess the Wheel Bug went with it. And the other one walked up and down the brick wall near the back door and ended up on one of the outside brooms. I suppose it is looking for a place to hibernate. See a Wheel Bug here.
Winter is coming. I am still on a break from blogging and I am getting caught up with my mind. Happy holidays. I will be back now and then and may drop in on you from time to time. Stay warm.
さようなら - Tot ziens - Au revoir - auf Wiedersehen – näkemiin – adiós – adeus
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I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t drawing, painting, or doing something to make extra money. I was lucky and made an impression on Ideals Magazine editors and she sent me some of my first illustration jobs. Usually it was a poem or story about almost anything and my job was to read it and create a piece of line art for the story. Then I broke into pulp magazines like True West and they worked the same way. I got a Xerox copy of a story and was told to produce a drawing that fit one of the verbal descriptions in the story. This one was done in 1971 and shows a rider shooting an Army pistol into a running buffalo. I tried to imagine the chase and the bullet impact sending the buffalo head over heels. It is a drawing done in ink wash. India ink and water and a small pointed red sable brush was my favorite drawing tool.
