Driving Lessons and a touch of art

Hello Readers! 

Not a whole lot to show in the art department today. I've been busy with driving lessons instead of doing art. That and the old body doens't want to do art these days. I'm trying to enjoy going out everyday to do the lessons but making art has suffered because of it. Nine more days of driving lessons and I'll be back on my own again. 

I like my solitude. I've liked having my 18 yr old niece Allison here since around the 28th of May. We've had some adventures! 

Lets get busy with this and let me ramble through the pictures which blogger put up any ol' way they wanted. It will seem somewhat disconnected, but go with the flow! I find 'going with the flow' is sometimes the sanest option.

I was digging through a box the other day and came across this unfinished little blank book. What you see there is the caterpillar stitch done very badly. It still looks really cool tho! I need to finish sewing the caterpillar on the cover, through the page block and on the back cover. This actually appears to be the back cover so just reverse everything and you get the idea. This book is about 4 inches square. The cover backgrounds are painted newspaper on game board. It has copy paper pages. I'll show it to you all again when I get it finished. Whenever that is.

It has been awhile since you all saw the wheat field. It's the yellowish patch in the far distance. I have no clue what  kind of trees those are, except for the one in the foreground that you see a tiny bit of its trunk. That one is an elm three. I think the others are hackberries but don't hold me to that. 

The big clump of grass is pampas grass. The clump of unmown 'grass' left of the pampas grass is a stand of wild garlic being taken over by bind weed. You can't see it too well, but dead center, about a fourth of the way from the bottom is a baby evergreen tree with a wire fence around it. My brother, who does the yard work around here, has been babying that little tree for going on three years now. It has a cage so he doesn't run it over with the mower is what he says. I'd think knowing it was there for as long as he has known it is there, he wouldn't need to cage it. I could be mistaken though!

This picture was taken a few days ago. I'll get a picture off the front porch in the next couple days and show you how it's slowly changing from my favorite green color to a lovely shade of golden yellow. They'll harvest this wheat late June/early July. I hope the wind is blowing north when that happens! 

This is Dennis, the Bulldozer! He's a huge boy, sweet as treacle, quite entertaining and a mess of a cat! You see him here on the tote I use as a table when I'm sitting in my recliner. He's cleared the top of all the big things in his way and snoozing quite comfortably.

He's rearranged atop the tote and is working on knocking everything off the tote to the floor.

I found him laying on the keyboard the other day, stretched out like he is in the picture. I pulled the keyboard out from under him and he barely budged. Look at the monitor. He's managed to turn everything on the monitor upside down. I gave him a good talking too....not that it helped in other areas, but he's not been back to sleep atop the keyboard again. 

He plays the lava game. You all know the lava game, yes? The floor is made of lava and if you touch it, you're dead-out of the game. Dennis wins the lava game! One cannot be mad at Dennis for long though. He loves cuddles, headbutts and talking. He has a lot to say! Anytime he hears someone talk, whether you're talking to him or not, he will have something to say. 

He learned headbutts from my youngest son, RW. It is rather sweet when Dennis wants a headbutt. He'll get up in the your face and stick his forehead on yours and bonk you gently. He's a funny boy.

Mo and Lola have mostly come to terms that Dennis isn't going anywhere so they might as well stop fighting it and just embrace the new addition. Dennis acts like he doesn't even hear Lola's low growl as he walks by nonchalantly. Mo has decided he doesn't mind another friend even if he is a little indifferent to it all. So long as Mo gets his fair share of pets, he's happy. 

Toby dog hasn't arrived as of this writing. Soon though I do believe.

This granny square bag is the only artful thing I've done since the last post. It is the smaller of the two granny square bags I've made thus far. I ain't overly crazy about it myself.  It was an easy project and I already have another one this size in the works. I have 7 granny squares out of 13 in various stages of completeness. The new one is red white and blue. I ain't crazy about it either. It will get finished in the next few days or so.

Driving lessons are a chore. I volunteered to be the instructor and I have given it all I have to give most days Allison has been here. We had to take a week off when the hose in the engine blew and grounded us. The longest lesson lasted almost 4 hours. We average about an hour and a half each session. Her driving doesn't scare me usually. She takes direction pretty good and gets away from the edge of the road when I tell her to. We've not driven in town at all yet. Not Stockton anyway. She's driven Woodston a couple times. They have wide dirt streets. She didn't do so great on her first drive in Woodston, but we made it out alive and no new dents on the old blue beast.  She drove #9 highway from Woodston to Kirwin yesterday and did a darn good job. She needs to work on her parking skills,stopping and starting, keeping her speed steady and perception. She needs lots of practice with making corners. She does better with left had turns than with right hand turns.

We go driving out in the middle of nowhere on the chalk roads. We don't generally get much more than 30 miles from home. We've been north a few times, east a few times, south a time or two and west, but only a few miles to the west. I don't know that country very well. The picture was taken just south of the Ellis county line (if my reckoning is correct). We were lost. I had no clue where the heck we were. I knew 183 highway was somewhere in front of us, but I had (and still don't) no clue how far south we had traveled. It was beautiful country!

That big hill, not the one in the picture, about done me in. There were huge ruts on the downhill side and the girl hit every stinking one of them! I thought the car was going to fall apart! She bonked her head on the roof, I held on for dear life while hollering, Hit the brake! Hit the brake! She did a good job getting us out of that mess. She refused to drive much farther after the fact though. She knew I didn't know exactly where we were and we'd had a nail biting experience with a tanker semi on one of those roads 15 minutes earlier. So I drove until we found Plainville. Then she drove us home on a road we'd visited several times.

She's making progress. We've done some parking lot driving at the ball field and the fair grounds also. I guess her mama is just gonna have to suck it up and teach the girl city driving or send her to driving school. 

We didn't go out at all today. My old body said, "NO NO NO NO NO!" I hurt from the top of the my head to the tips of my toes today. Tomorrow we will get back at it again.

I started some paper mache birds a week or so ago.

Newspaper wrapped in masking tape

Here they are with their first second coat of newspaper and glue, waiting for their wings and tails to be attached. The wings and tails are cut from dog biscuits box chipboard. 

All but three of them have wings. They all have their tales. The painting muse hasn't shown up to proceed with these. As soon as she arrives, the last three will get wings and the others will get some paint. And everybody will get legs.

The little wires at the bottom of the picture are all their legs. 

Things I should do:

Start taking pictures of all the scenery on the driving lessons!

Finish the paper mache birds in a timely fashion.

Do some laundry.

Have more fun!

Write every day! Not necessarily here at the blog, but somewhere!~ Be it my journal or 750words. 

Thanks for hanging in there for this one. That's all I got today.

Remember....

be kind to one another!

it matters.

Peace

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