Trail Guy and our friend K went to White Chief, and came back raving about the flowers. Two days later I went to White Chief and came back raving about the flowers. Our photos are intermingled on my laptop, so I’ll just post some many in today’s post and many more in tomorrow’s, keeping the chitchat minimal.
Super clear day, heading up the right (west) side of the valley.
The ferns along the trail are tall despite only being the end of June.
Spring Creek is running strong—thankful for that footbridge!
thimbleberrycollomiapenstemon
Entering White Chief, like a painting that sold earlier this summer, except the stream is dry now.
Pride of the Mountains was stunning!
The color clash was amusing to me. . . color combinations acceptable in nature would be weird in someone’s wardrobe.
Whorled penstemmon was profuse.
morning glorysulphur flowerunknown
Come back tomorrow for more. The whole thing was stunning, and neither the camera nor the iPhone 14 do it justice.
A city guy on his podcast went on and on about how much he loves animals. Too bad I couldn’t invite him over, because he could experience animals here in Three Rivers, in my yard and in my house.
A giant black beetle in the kitchen sink (they’ve been in almost every room in the house lately).
A lizard ran under the fridge.
A little frog was in the shower and then hopped under the clothes hamper.
A raccoon got into the garage, made his way into the workshop, and pulled the bag of catfood off the shelf, dragging it into the RV garage (yes, we have a three-in-one building where the cats are supposed to be safe at night.)
Coyotes were howling at a siren passing by on the highway while I was walking in the morning.
There are at least 3 new fawns in our yard, learning how to destroy our plants.
Squirrels are now getting into the fenced off tomatoes.
Turkeys are EVERYWHERE, in great numbers.
A bunny was at the bottom of the driveway. Good thing they reproduce so abundantly, because everything wants to kill them.
Another bunny succumbed to the vicious nature of our 3 cats; I had the privilege of scraping up and burying the remains after they had their way with it.
At least we don’t have any snakes right now. HOWEVER, some guests at a vacation rental accidentally transported a RATTLESNAKE home to Iowa in their luggage!!
The cats can’t keep up with the gophers and squirrels, but they are trying.
I got to know someone from New Jersey when I attended college in San Diego. Most of us said “beach”, but our New Jersey suite mate said “shore”. Actually I think she said “sho-ah”.
The owners of my pier drawing asked me to draw some “shore birds”, but I think they are both native Californians. That’s okay, I knew what they meant.
I got ahead of myself, and stopped drawing to ask this question: “Do you want me to make them exactly the same as in the one you saw on my blog, or may I have freedom to move the birds around and add some more?”
The answer came back thus: “I didn’t save the picture from the blog, so I can’t answer you precisely- however I think the artist’s choice would be most satisfactory. Just not too busy – the wave action in the pier drawing is kind of serene, so the shore birds might reflect the same.”
So, I changed my drawing a bit by erasing a few birds from this first version:
Then I darkened a few things, added some rocks, and finished the wet sand.
This will look excellent with the pier. Let me demonstrate here for you to admire.
I sure have a hankering to go to the beach. Or the shore. Even the sho-ah would be amazing.
I don’t remember what pier this is. It is somewhere on the Central California coast.
I might be at jury duty today. After I got the summons, I sent in the excuse form which said that I am unavailable most months of the year except July, August, and December, when I am not teaching drawing lessons.
The county immediately sent me a summons for July 1. Oh boy.
There is a creepy thing that has entered our lives via our cell phones. Here is my experience: I bought a charging device at Best Buy. Immediately, that same day, I began receiving spam emails faking to be from Best Buy. Best Buy did NOT have my email address, nor did they have my phone number. When I returned the following week to buy a new phone, I checked. I am being stalked! This is with Location Services turned off.
2. Learning to use an iPhone 14 is more difficult than I expected. It doesn’t have a push-button, and the whole swipe-thing just doesn’t work very well for my fat clumsy ever-so-slightly numb fingers. There is also a charging problem—the portable charger? the cord? Elevation? Sigh. And although the camera is far superior to what I am accustomed to, I can’t figure out how to make it focus on what I am trying to capture. And what good is it if it won’t recharge?
3. That phone charger went back to BestBuy, along with my phone, the cord, the plug-in unit, and a bunch of questions. The same guy was there, there was no waiting line, and he showed me how to do some sort of a reset procedure on the phone, which is supposed to “clean up glitches”. Then he looked up some stuff about that charger, called a Ugreen Magnetic Power Bank and showed me that it can magnetically attach itself to the phone. When I got home, I tried it, and it worked. Then I found the “instructions” that came with it: many languages, a few tiny illustrations, and lots of information gaps, all of it requiring both cheater glasses AND a magnifying glass. Okay, I admit it: I AM OLD.
4. Thinking through all the potential questions to ask a customer before starting a commission is something that I still don’t always get right. Slow down, JB. Think carefully before picking up your pencils (and this after accepting commissioned pencil drawings since 1985… I seem to be a slow learner.) Because I like to protect people’s identities, I will just leave this learned thing here without showing you the hoops I had to jump through.
Can’t Find Scratch, pencil and colored pencil, 11×14”, $275, unframed, AVAILABLE HERE
5. Biscoff is a combo of “biscuit” and “coffee”, a cookie (because “biscuit” means “cookie” if you are in the UK) to be eaten with coffee. The Duck defines it thus: “a type of spiced cookie, also known as speculoos, originating from Belgium and the Netherlands. It is known for its caramelized, cinnamon-flavored taste”. I learned about this from my friend Elisabeth who has spent the last 2-1/2 months traveling and living all over Europe with her husband and 2 offspring. Optimistic Musings of a Pessimist is her blog. (P.S. I saw some at Winco, read the ingredients and put them back on the shelf.)
Saw this on a recent morning walk.
6. You know how the health industry keeps changing what will help us and what will harm us? The latest evil in processed foods is seed oils; apparently they have overtaken high fructose corn syrup in the category of TERRIBLE FOR YOU. While at Winco, I looked at every type of cracker, and every single one contains seed oils. What happened to butter? olive oil? avocado oil? coconut oil? (because these are now the “good” ones.) Those seed oils are what we used to love, called “vegetable oils”, because they were going to save our lives. Now we learn that they are all RBD: refined, bleached, and deodorized. That just ain’t natural-like; it also ain’t vegetables. Weird.
7. My inner lazy self is beginning to assert herself more than I think is healthy. After listening to Mike Rowe interview Michael Easter (author of The Comfort Crisis) a second time (episode 489 The Hard Way), I put 10 lbs. in a daypack, and have begun wearing it on my morning walks rucks. My walking partner put 2 lbs. in her daypack, and we are just huffing and puffing along together, doing our best to squelch those inner lazy people.
8. A friend in Texas sent me this screenshot from FaceBook (I guess that’s where she saw it) which made me laugh. All those towns except Salinas are in the Central Valley, right here in California’s fly-over country. I’d say this is why Trader Joe’s refuses to come to Tulare County, but Bakersfield has a TJ’s. Who knows where this stuff comes from, or why it says “Advertisement” on the bottom. Here is the link to the actual article: Visalia is the best at being the worst (that’s my paraphrase)
Screenshot
9. One more thing about that new-to-me iPhone: the sales kid offered me a choice of blue or black. Silly me, thinking this mattered—the case covers the phone and the color is invisible. The sales kid should have told me about the % of battery remaining and perhaps I should have known to ask. Turns out that my phone battery is at 79%, and Apple recommends replacing batteries when they drop to 80%. I wonder what percentage of battery was remaining in the black phone? When my phone decides to recharge (see #3 above), if it reaches 100% charged, it is only 79% full. Now I have to figure out how to get the battery replaced. In case you were wondering, I hate all this. I want a landline and a camera. Period.
Now I think I’ll just go read an old fashioned paper book from the library. While sitting. In air conditioning. So there.
OH NO! LOOKS AS IF THE INNER LAZY CHICK HAS ESCAPED AGAIN!
Never again will I wear anything remotely resembling these shoes. Thank you, Lord, for Crocs.
Behind and around our cabin is what firefighters call a “jackpot”. This is a conglomerate, a tangle, a giant mess of downed trees and limbs. Let’s not think too hard about their nomenclature.
I’ve been raking, dragging, cutting and organizing this in incremental sessions throughout the past 2 years. It is gradually decreasing, gradually getting cleaned up. Of course Trail Guy also works on this, approaching it a bit differently than me.
A handsaw rather than a chainsaw gives me a lot of upper-body exercise and makes some firewood to share with neighbors. My pace is laughable to Trail Guy, but I consider myself to be a rather productive tortoise.
Then I thought about swinging an axe to bust through a pretty stout limb, something I have only done once before in my life (a Three Rivers neighbor’s tree blew down in a storm, blocking her driveway, and no one with a chainsaw was available so I bravely marched down to her house in the rain with my trusty axe and got it into pieces that we could drag away.)
This piece required a lot of whaling, slamming, swinging, and wondering if I would be able to git-‘er-dun. When I got it this far, I asked Trail Guy for some input, guessing he’d bust through in 10 swings. He swung 15 times (yes, I counted), handed the axe back and told me to use a sharper one instead.
So I swapped axes, and went after it again, this time busting through with a shout of victory. The sharper axe was more effective.
I’ve asked Trail Guy to teach me how to sharpen an axe this summer, (mis)quoting Abraham Lincoln about spending an hour sharpening an axe and an hour chopping wood instead of spending 2 hours chopping wood.
Thus we conclude another look at my quirky cabin life. Perhaps next time I will be able to persuade Trail Guy to fire up his chainsaw, but most likely he will be working on neighbors’ stoves/water heaters/toilets/faucets/refrigerators. There has been way too much of that so far this summer. I helped with a water heater, and took photos and measured for a stove and another water heater to be replaced… I’m good for more than just some axe-swingin’.
Walking in Mineral King (Not a hike because we didn’t take packs)
Instead of the now normal down-the-road-and-up-the-Nature-Trail walk, or the wussy turning around at Crystal Creek, we went past Crystal to Franklin Creek.
It was a little bit farther this year. Don’t you just hate that?
Looking backLooking ahead
The flowers were most totally excellent.
This was interesting to your wildflower obsessed Central Calif. artist: a purple bush lupine adjacent* to a seldom-seen pink bush lupine.
This is angelica, not to be confused with cow parsnip. Angelica has lacy leaves, sort of visible at the bottom of this photo.
Here is Franklin Creek/Franklin Falls. This is the stream that rose too high for my hiking pal K and I to cross last year in August. You can read about it here: An Exciting Mineral King Hike
Crossing Crystal Creek is way more my speed than dealing with the deeper, steeper, and faster Franklin Creek.
Oh man! I forgot again to put that dime in my pocket for understanding sizes of little flowers!
The Indian paintbrush were spectacular, particularly interspersed with the grayish green sage.
An Advertisement Because This is Supposed to be a Business Blog
This painting is sold, but I can paint it again for you.
*”Adjacent” is “everyone’s” new favorite word. Podcasters and bloggers love to attach it to other words, like this: “This blog about art is Mineral King adjacent”.
Last year some fine folks of impeccable taste bought this pencil drawing. A few months later, they saw this drawing on my blog and decided it would be a nice companion to the pier.
It would, but whoever owns it would likely disagree. Fortunately for these fine folks of impeccable taste, I accept commissions; fortunately for me, they would like a new drawing, this time in the same shape and size as the pier.
They sent the dimensions, said “no rush”, and I started immediately. I love the beach and by drawing this, it feels somewhat as if I am spending time there. Besides, another two commissions are stuck in Waiting Customer Approval or Waiting for a Deposit mode.
I laid out the size, and determined where the horizon belongs. I think that the 2 photos on the left were what I worked from last time. Those were taken with a film camera, so it’s been awhile…
I now have many more and better quality beach bird photos, so i started experimenting with placement and sizes. This time I carried it outside into the hot bright sun to photograph.
Unsure of bird placement other than that one Jonathan Livingston, I jumped to the sky and water. S’posed to be working top to bottom, left to right so I don’t smear, so shading the birds would have been premature.
It was too hot outside, so now the photos will be a little crummier for you.
Quite an assortment of birds.
That drawing is a lousy print of a lousy photograph of the earlier drawing. You can see I’ve got quite a stack of photos to refer to
Suddenly I got nervous. I forgot to ask my customers a very important question before beginning: Do you want the same birds as in the previous drawing, or can I do a new assortment?
Hmmm, I might end up with a beach bird drawing to store in my flat files and then need to start over.
Every single custom job I do has all sorts of ways I can mess up. You’d think that after this many years, I’d know of all the possible ways to avoid this sort of hazardous situation. You might need to have another think.
I really like the assortment, the big crashing waves, the flock in the sky. If it doesn’t suit my customers, maybe I’ll frame it and keep it anyway. I miss the pier drawing, because it hung by my drawing table for several years before I finally took it to the gallery where it sold.
On a recent hot day, as I was preparing to go down the hill to teach drawing lessons, the gallery curator texted me to say the A/C wasn’t working. So, I immediately texted (almost) all my students* and cancelled.
We had some chitchat, and one of my most motivated students said she had started a new drawing on her own of a golf ball on a tee. (I tell all my students to pick a subject they love because they’ll be looking at it for a long time.) She sent me the photo she planned to work from, and before I had a chance to stop and think, I found myself texting some instructions to her.
Drawing # 1
I told her to not make the drawing too small, because it would be hard to make all the dimples, that all the dimples would have soft edges, and to draw a grid on the sphere of the golf ball so the dimples can be lined up. Then I drew an example and texted it to her, because a picture is worth a thousand words.
Drawing #2
I’ve had a pencil drawing commission in the conversation stage for a couple of months. The customer is in the midst of selling her home and moving away, so she’d like a pencil drawing of it. She has sent me multiple photos, and we’ve had several conversations so I am getting an understand of what is important to her.
On my unexpected day off from teaching drawing lessons, I finally had a chance to compile and peruse all her photos. Instead of giving her a bunch of options, I sent her this sketch, which I think is the best possible way to gather all her important things into one piece of art.
Drawing #3
Finally, I pulled out a drawing that I started a few weeks ago and had a wonderful (almost) quiet afternoon with my pencils. The little wall unit A/C roars, but it is preferable to being in the gallery without any A/C.
*Getting a new phone meant that some texting groups didn’t land on my phone and I am SO EMBARRASSED that I forgot a longtime student and good friend.
P.S. I FINISHED THE DRAWING THE NEXT DAY.
P.P.S. I had the opportunity to take a couple more photos for clarifying. It was a waste of film (JUST KIDDING—What’s film??) because the drawing is finished, and no one cares about whether or not things are exactamundo. Here are the photos anyway, and now that a little time has passed, I see the unfortunate alignment of the stove prop and the teakettle spout. Phooey.
