Category: Personal

Paint, Yarden, and Paint More

For awhile I had a link in these emails of my daily blog post to take you to the site on the internet so you could see the photos. Now there is some tomfoolery happening with my blog, so I am not putting the link in until it gets sorted out. If you would like to see the pictures, go to jana botkin dot net (written this way to confound the evil robots who are messing things up.)

The commissioned oil painting of mountains is challenging. I paint a little, get stuck, try to figure out which photo is my guide for whatever section I am working on, paint a little more, and then take a break. Here’s how that looked a week or so ago.

Yeah, no problem, I got this figured out.

Wait, where am I? These rocks aren’t lining up with the right peaks. Where’s a pencil??

Yeah, I got this figured out.

Hunh? Time for a break. I’ll just survey things in the yard, pull a few weeds, decide the next priorities.

Does that mean yard priorities or does it mean oil painting priorities?

These weeds are sure pretty. But remember, one year’s weeds equals seven years seeds. . .

(Oh yeah? Then why do I have prolific weeds in the areas that I have been weeding for 24 years?)

The iris around the pillars are supposed to be prettier than the weeds, but they haven’t bloomed yet.

STOP IT! YOU ARE SUPPOSED TO BE PAINTING.

I walked back to the painting workshop but kept seeing beautiful things and weeds on the way.

Finally got back to work.

Oh no. Now I have to figure out the foothills, again working from forty-eleven photos.

In case you were wondering, I LOVE to work at home, both in the yard and in the painting workshop.

commission oil painting oil paintings

Fifteen “Why” Questions

Today’s post is question after question, interspersed with photos of flowers to take the edge off of all the unsolved mysteries of life.

Why do website hackers use evil robots to mess with my little bitty nothing-burger site??
Why do young people drive fast when (in theory) they have lots of time left?
Why do old people drive slow, when for them the clock is running down quickly?
Why is Microsoft Word so hard to use, with very unhelpful “help”, and the people in the forums to help don’t read the questions but just slam out a non-answer?
Maybe the real question is this: why is Microsoft Word so popular when it is so difficult*?
Why is the food truck for Quesedilla Gorilla in Three Rivers gone?
Why is “gorilla” such a popular word in marketing: Quesedilla Gorilla, gorilla tape, gorilla glue…?
Why is it that the more ways there are to communicate, the harder it is to get answers to questions?
Why do charities waste so much money on printing and mailing solicitations for money to the people who already support them?
Why do people spend so much money on bottled water when we have the cleanest tap water in the world?
Why were we pushed to use plastic bags in grocery stores when paper comes from a renewable resource?
Why do companies discontinue products without having a replacement ready to go or to recommend?
Why am I not doing the Redbud Festival this year?
Why didn’t CACHE get the grant?? No one could possibly have worked harder, done more research, been more careful about how it was worded than our most excellent board president.
Why do I have to restart my computer in order for Airdrop to work? Every day, day after day, restart, restart, restart.

Today I have questions. Tomorrow, I hope to have a few answers, but most likely not for any of these questions.

*I want endnotes to start renumbering with each chapter, not run consecutively throughout the entire book I am working on. . . some Know-it-all on the Microsoft Forum answered my query with this: “The thing is that for many people Roman numerals become a challenge once they get above iii. This does include highly-educated academics.” Excuse me??

Eight Non-Art Things Learned in April (plus one art-ish item)

If you receive these posts in email and the pictures in the post don’t show for you, tap here janabotkin.net. It will take you to the blog on the internet.

Dragon Arum is the name of a beautiful black and maroon calla lily in my yard.
I asked my trusty mechanic if he would allow his wife to drive my car to Oregon and back (I wasn’t offering my car; I was looking for advice). The answer was immediate: NO WAY. Phooey.
Rocky Hill is 5 miles in circumference; the seeds of wild cucumber make a good binder if you plan to mix it with pigment to paint on rocks (but don’t do this on public property, okay?)
Grant applications are crazy hard, and don’t appeal to straight talking commonsense folks like me. However, I had the privilege of helping CACHE do an application, and learned several things, the main one being not wanting to ever apply for a grant on my own. Or possibly at all.*
A friend taught me how to grow sweet potatoes, something I’ve been wanting to learn for awhile. She starts them using a potato from the grocery store, similar to growing an avocado from a seed, EXCEPT you don’t plant the potato—you root the individual shoots, and then plant those. She hasn’t had any great crops, but like me, she never gives up trying to be successful at gardening.(Bonus: the leaves are edible, good added raw to salads and taste like spinach, according to my friend.)
Barbara Kingsolver’s latest book, Demon Copperhead, might be the best one yet. I found her in the 1980s with The Bean Trees, and her work just gets better and better. The story was hard hard hard, the main character fabulous, too much cussing, tons of sad difficult things, but a decent ending. It is patterned after David Copperfield, something I haven’t read and don’t want to.
The one art-related item: There is a new style of drawing, called Zentangle. (The one a friend showed me reminded me of Spirograph designs.) Look it up—very interesting, very different from my style.
I learned how to make a QR code; just put it into the search bar and you will find methods. It was shockingly easy.
There is a new type of laundry detergent; it comes in thin squares in a small box. There are several brands, mostly called “earth something-or-other”; I bought a brand called Ecos. Instead of a giant heavy box of powder or a giant heavy jug of liquid (prolly mostly water), it weighs nothing. You can get it without scent, and it seems to work just fine. I think it is brilliant: lightweight, small, uses few materials, utter simplicity.

Good grief! I thought I was an artist, a Central California artist, a regionalist from Quaintsville**. Instead, I’m going on about all sorts of things. I hope it scratches your itch to learn new things.

*Cache didn’t get the grant. This reinforces my distaste for the process.

**I use pencils, oil paints, and murals to make art that people can understand of places and things they love for prices that won’t scare them (while I am learning all sorts of random life information and skills).

Washing the Mud Out of Our Eyes With Wildflowers

If you receive these posts in email and the pictures in the post don’t show for you, tap here janabotkin.net. It will take you to the blog on the internet.

Yesterday was fascinating and ugly, so today we need to recover from the visual assault of all the gray, brown, silt, mud, and sand. These are photos that I took on April 22, so by now I think most of the wildflowers are about finished in Three Rivers, at least on the bank behind our house. They last quite awhile if you drive further up, not that you can go on the Mineral King Road. But maybe you can explore the North or South Forks. (Just keep looking south so that you only see north-facing slopes.)

First, Tucker wanted to say hello. (I’d rather have my cats visit me in the studio than keep the rug vacuumed, and yes, I have done some work in my studio lately but it isn’t interesting enough to show you any photos or to talk about it.)

I’m done talking now.

Hope you are feeling better now that we washed the mud out of our eyes.

Three Rivers wildflowers

Oops

I just wrote a blog post that was supposed to be scheduled for a week or so from now. Then I accidentally hit Publish instead of Preview. So I rescheduled it, which means if you got the email, and then tapped to to to the website to view the photos, they didn’t exist.

Oops. I’m sorry.

Fascinating and Ugly

If you receive these posts in email and the pictures in the post don’t show for you, tap here janabotkin.net. It will take you to the blog on the internet.

You may recall that there was some serious rain this winter in Three Rivers. I was fascinated by all the rushing water and posted a few times about it in March. March 11, March 12, and March 13. (Probably posted in January and February too, but who wants to chase down all those links?)

One result of that enormous amount of water is that Kaweah Lake filled up very quickly. Now, the Army Corps of Engineers is letting water out as fast as possible to make room for the large amount of anticipated snowmelt. This means we can now walk down at the lake bottom again, and wow, is it ever fascinating and ugly.

Looking upstream from the Slick Rock parking area; Alta Peak is visible with snow on it and Blossom Peak has three points on the far right.

Normally when the lake is this low, this gate is open and we drive farther down. Not this time.

There’s a culvert beneath our feet here. It had to be roaring through to create this canyon.

The water is still flowing through the culvert; that is Highway 198 above.

Somebody was here when the mud was still squishy.

Driftwood galore.

So many layers of different types of dirt: silt, fine sand, coarse sand, all so thick.

It started getting a little squishy.

Look how deep this stuff is!

Too bad backhoes and trucks can’t come get this for fill on all the washed out roads, for future sandbags, and just to allow the lake to hold more water. But this is owned by the government, which isn’t exactly known for practical thinking or helpful practices.

Weirdly fascinating, definitely ugly. Life in Three Rivers can be so varied and interesting; if one must live in Tulare County, I vote for Three Rivers (although Exeter is an awfully nice town if you like town living, I dearly loved living in Lemon Cove, and Springville is quite beautiful in springtime.)

Tomorrow we will wash our eyes out with some wildflowers.

A post about walking on the lake bottom in March of 2020 is here. . . scroll down for the lake pictures.

Kaweah Lake Lake Kaweah

More Yardening Photos

If you receive these posts in email and the pictures in the post don’t show for you, tap here janabotkin.net. It will take you to the blog on the internet.

This post about yardening is not about procrastination; it is about pure enjoyment of one of the most beautiful springs in recent memory. Is it just Three Rivers?

Our cats have always loved feather grass. They try to kick the stuffing out of it when they are kittens, and then lie on top of it or try to hide in it when they grow up.

Basil was the only item that the fantastic plant nursery did not have; I found it at our local hardware store the next day.

Here is the studio to make this post a little bit about my art business.

It is a mystery as to why hollyhock keep volunteering when the deer bite them down to nothing.

In the past several years, I have weeded all around the baby poppies and ended up with a nice showing. This year I decided to skip that task, maybe because it rained almost every weekend. The result is tall weeds and almost no poppy plants.

Chances are there will be very few blossoms.

Had to end with a studio photo (and a bit of the painting workshop) to remind myself to get back to work.

Procrastinating in Order to Think

If you receive these posts in email and the pictures in the post don’t show for you, tap here janabotkin.net. It will take you to the blog on the internet.

Sometimes life piles up a stack of difficult tasks, unpleasant chores, awkward situations, design problems that don’t seem to have an answer, missing information, incorrect instructions, circumstances that require negotiating skills, tricky decisions, impossible priorities. (Does this make you want to stab yourself with your pencils or knitting needles? Slam some chocolate? Curl up under your dining table with your thumb in your mouth?)

Recently I had a few of those types of challenging paths to navigate. Nothing serious, just no clear path ahead in several areas, all business-related.
So, I spent an entire day digging in the yard after a trip to a plant nursery so extensive that it required a more substantial vehicle than Fernando. I had been saving some gift certificates, and those were spent, along with some green paper with pictures of dead men’s faces, and I even plasticized some of the plants to put in the studio garden. (That means I used a debit card because it was a business expense.)

My yard is immense. It has about 10 separate sections, none of which look very polished, but all of which are a pleasure to putter around in (until the mozzies show up.)

I didn’t listen to music or podcasts. I just pulled weeds, pruned plants, dug holes, and planted new things, all while thinking only about gardening, not about problems needing a solution. Some of the “experts” on thinking say that relaxing your mind, ending the obsession, “changing channels” gives your brain a chance to come up with answers.

After living here for 24 years, I am finally learning which plants work and where they might be happiest. The difficulty of buying plants cannot be overstated. You can comb through the Sunset Western Garden Book and make a list. None will be at the nursery. You can make a list of plants that have succeeded in the past, and maybe you will find some, and maybe you won’t. You can try to remember the names of the ones that are currently looking good, fail to remember, take a photo using an app called “Picture This”, find a name that doesn’t match, show the photo to a nursery employee, and get steered toward something else. If the thought occurs to you, “I’ve never killed one of those before”, then maybe you will choose that. Of course, you could also think, “The deer in my yard might like that one”, and then you have another decision to make.

At the end of the day, I had no answers, one mosquito bite, 2 dirty hands, and many new plants to remember to water and guard from deer, gopher, bird, and bug attacks.

All in all, it was a very good day. Maybe in time I will figure out a few new paths through my tricky situations.

thinking while gardening

Lunch on Rocky Hill

If you receive these posts in email and the pictures in the post don’t show for you, tap here janabotkin.net. It will take you to the blog on the internet.

Rocky Hill is private land, in the hands of several people. One of those people is a friend, and she arranged for us to go to the very top. I had asked her if we could have permission to climb it with The Farmer and Hiking Buddy, and she said she has access to the top and can take people, and yes, she would love to take us up. Then Tulare County had a flood.

After things settled down from the flood, we learned of a tour to see the pictographs on Rocky Hill. Our friend was part of the tour, and she suggested that we go to the top for lunch after the tour. You betcha!

Get this: there is a paved road to the very top of this big rocky hill, and by “big” I mean 5 miles in circumference and 3 miles in diameter (not sure where that got measured). Friend has a key, of course, and we loaded up chairs, a table, lunch, and ourselves, and headed up. And up. And up some more. 2.4 miles, specifically.

Friend had laughed to herself when I asked if we could climb it. She later told me she wasn’t having any part of climbing but was happy to drive up with us.

It was so very very perfect. Very very very perfect. A perfect way to spend the afternoon. Perfection.

Shut up, Central California Artist and show some photographs!

At the base—the hill sloping into the frame on the right is Rocky Hill.

That blue line is the Friant-Kern Canal. The wildflowers are mustard.

This is looking west.

And this is the unparalleled view of the Sierra. (Lots of people say “the sierras”, but it is the Sierra Nevada Mountains; thus “the Sierra” is the correct shortened term. You’re welcome. P.S. My dad taught me that.)

The tiny blue piece of water is actually called “Hamilton Lake”, and only appears in wet years.

The creek in the distance is Yokohl Creek, which did some real damage during the flood. People used to be able to remove sand from beneath the bridge, but some other people made them stop (for very petty reasons). Since then, the sand has piled deeper beneath the bridge and as a result, the creek flows very close to the underside of the bridge, which means debris builds up quickly during high water and then the water finds its way around the bridge, washing out the approach. Water always finds its way. (Ever heard of “unintended consequences”?)