Encaustic Painting

I started a new group today for Encaustic Painting. Encaustic Painting is painting with beeswax, or you can use soywax now days. Anyway, I wanted a place for those who are just beginning as well as the advanced to meet and discuss their wax adventures. A friendly place, especially friendly towards new Encaustic painters.

Click on the title above to get to the group.

Hayfever


It's really hard to create when your allergies make your head feel as if half your brain has been sucked out, through your left eye. I woke up this morning hubby asked me how I felt and I replied with I feel as if part of my brain is actually missing. Of course the sloshy feeling in my head only amplifies these thoughts. He informed me that he didn't see the mother ship land last night so my brain should still be in there somewhere.

Anyway... my digital camera is crippled but I'm still able to take pics, I just can't zoom in and out, hopefully next month I'll be able to spring for a new camera???

Sales of the new DVD have been brisk, it's due for release on May 1st, I'm excited and still shocked that I even have the capacity to do something like this. I guess that's ok it'll keep me humble. Now to get the book to a printer and get it on the shelves as well.

Here's a pic of my crab apple tree, just one of many plants and trees that are blooming, making my head scream. I woke up yesterday morning at 4 am with a headache so bad I thought I'd be sick. A couple of allergy pills later and I was fine. Tis the season for everything that is beautiful that causes an allergic reaction.

Altering Books

I have this old book here I was going to alter, simply because I love the name "The Rum Seller's Daughter or Woman in the Temperance Reform" It is really old, and like I said I was going to alter it, until I looked at the copyright date, 1874, and trust me it looks old enough to be from 1874. The book has prints in it, which once upon a time were probably black and white, they are quite beautiful. The pages are now brown, as is the cover which I'm sure th cover was orignally brown. So I'm keeping it for my own collection, I may photocopy some of it's pages for altering.

Spring Cleaning

One thing about not having the housekeeper here bugging me on Fridays I actually got a very large section of junk cleared out. No this wasn't her responsibility, but since I'm stuck cleaning I took it the extra mile.

Oh the reason I had a housekeeper is I have degenerative joint disease adn really bad, I'm not supposed to pick anything up over 5 pounds. I'm going to have to get a smaller dog I guess, she weighs about 15 pounds.

Anyway... I have plans to clean out our bedroom later this week, the excess furniture is going to go to the attic. We have 5 dressers in our bedroom, three of which can go bye-bye. I'll put my dresser in the east bedroom, for the sake of not having clutter everywhere. I want a peaceful serene bedroom, and since my clothes are not in our bedroom closet anyway it doesn't really matter if my dresser is in their either.

Personally, speaking of our bedroom, I'd love nothing more than to rip out hte door and the wall going to our closet, it's huge actually, long and narrow huge, with the door at one end. This makes it impossible to get to anything that's any further back than the door jam. If I thought hubby wouldn't have a seizure I'd start tearing it out this week! Then we'd actually have some useful storage space in this house.

The house is a 1905 Queen Anne wanna be, it's goregous actually, but the closets in this house, well they are non-existant! And we have major major storage issues because of the lack of closets. And the ones we do have are most inaccessible, making my life miserable. I'd ask how a person could build a house with no closets but I do know why, they used to be taxed as rooms.

Housekeepers

Mine quit, she said that I was talking down to her. Yep I'm guilty! 100% pure de guilty. I guess she never quite got the message that I wasn't paying her $15.00 an hour to stand around and gab all of the time. And one would think that after a year she would know to come in clean the bathrooms, the floor, vacuum and dust and not have to ask every single time.

I thought the rules were simple enough but apparently not. Wash the kitchen and bathroom floors every week, and the wood floors throughout the house every two weeks. the week you don't wash the wood floors you dust everything!

Too hard??? Apparently.

So now I'm looking for a new housekeeper, preferably a crew that can come in and get it done in two hours, instead of four like the last gal. Hubby told me to start interviewing businesses that advertise cleaning services.

Kitchen Floors

Both dog kennels are in the kitchen, the part that is just bare plywood. I'm tired of it being bare plywood, and since I am the one who has to wash it now, the housekeeper quit last week, I'm thinking of sanding and painting it, to get rid of the ickies. The mop and the broom both get caught on the bare plywood shards, I'm not sure how the pets deal with this issue, I always seem to get splinters when I walk on it barefoot. No I wish I could say that this is a temporary thing but it's been like this for about 10 years now. Husband can't seem to make up his mind on what he wants to do. We have the flooring, 300 square feet of maple. Why he doesn't plane it down so we can install it is beyond me. He has his reasons, I just don't agree with them. So, in the spirit of having a floor that is easy to clean I'm going to paint the floor, probably in May sometime, cause I'll be using an oil based paint, I'm going for durability here, and I'm thinking some catty cornered stripes might be in store!!! :-)

Warning never leave a wife with 65 gallons of mistints and a roller brush alone, it could cause vertigo!

Wet Dog



Well today I spent part of the afternoon bathing dogs. I didn't photograph silky, well because a wet weirmeraner and a dry weimeraner look pretty much the same, she's blue either way. I did get a snap of Angel, before and after. She's wet in the after shot. She doesn't know it yet but she's about a half hour away from a good combing/brushing. I'm waiting for her to dry off a bit more first. I also clipped her nails, she's very shy about this part of grooming, and washed her bedding and her dog kennel tray. John pulled the trays out of both kennels for me. Silky's tray is too big for me to handle by myself.

Tree branch?


Oh yeah that's half of our redbud, behind the daffodils I drew. It fell down yesterday, I noticed it as I was pulling out of the driveway, it was blocking my view, hanging over the sidewalk. Brenda helped me move the branch, or tree half however you want to view this. Anyway, it would appear that the tree is rotting, there are some sort of bugs in the wound on the tree. I was wondering why the tree seemed to be missing so many blossoms when everyone elses redbuds were beautiful.

Here's a picture of our neighbors redbud, it's how our tree looked once a upon a time. I'll have to call the city on Monday and have them come remove the tree, since it's technically on their property, otherwise known as the car park strip.