by Diane: Update # 18; How Covid 19, caregiving, and my art escape are changing me

 Monday, May 25, first thing in the morning, I painted for a few minutes. Finishing a painting takes the longest. For days  many times a day I kept glancing at the painting hanging in our dining area.  Often I looked outside at the swallows in flight. Questions came to mind.  Watching swallows, I saw the closest ones taking up more of my field of vision and their swift flight is more blurred than ones flying farther away. Same as a  picture's surface the closest swallows would be more blurred if I painted exactly what I see. But should I paint what is counter to  the identifiable detail that the viewer expects in the foreground?
          My idea for continued work on this painting  is to turn the front swallow back into the painting. I am concerned about the beginning and ending of their flight and would like to make their flight more circular and continuous like I observe.
           Questioning improves my enjoyment of observing and learning.  Makes me feel more alive. 
          The Covid 19 self quarantine reduces some of the distractions in life so focusing on  what is around our home is proving far more fascinating than I used to think it was.
         Tuesday I made the closest swallow more contrasty and it's path transparent to express speed. I do not worry about overworking the painting. With Covid-19 and my husband's health, I foresee a time when I will need to move. More than ever I want to tie my body of work into a meaningful whole. I am slow to use the new aquaboards that arrived from Blick's catalog on line.

          Fisherman Hubby's blurred vision and shakiness was found to be low sodium according to the ER on Wednesday, May 13. He received a hydrating IV. 
           It hurts to see Fisherman Hubby either too cold or too hot because his body doesn't regulate temperature. While watching television he allows his head to drop down every half minute. Also see his shoulders jerk. His hands are less steady and he talks me into typing for him.
         Gaiter Aid is helping but still he feels that his ALS is worsening. What gardening he could do in one session the first week of May now takes three sessions. Tuesday our 2020 high school graduate Grandson mowed the grass, sprayed poison on the weeds, and removed three upright stepping stones that served as the cement dragon's back because they were a  tripping hazard for me.
         I am, also, doing more gardening which has always been a parnership thing Hubby.  Now gardening has moved from a small part of our  togetherness to our major connection we share.
       On Friday Fisherman Hubby received his Tobindynavox Ipad that will serve as a speech generating devise. If necessry it can be eye activated. It has canned conversation in files like "Can we watch a movie?" "I am not intoxicated. I have a neuro motor disease."  "You do not have to talk to me like that. My ears are fine and I can comprehend like a normal adult." Maybe when he starts feeling better he will take an interest in it.
      We were so lucky that when it arrived Friday afternoon one daughter happened to be here to help with the set up. We are so thankful for the care our daughters have for us. Plus we appreciate all those friends who also do errands for us.

      The painting is first a landscape and then there are birds flying through. I want the painting to be swallows flying in a landscape atmosphere. On a warm day a rain shower is followed by hatches of flying insects.
      I am hesitant and not sure of my next step in painting so I wanted to do some pruning.

                 The first of three wheelbarrow loads of trimmingsoff the rhodadendron!

             The next job will be to prune back the Fall crocus leaves and the forget-me-not.
It is good to feel the Fisherman Hubby sharing the satisfaction of making beauty together in our garden.

by Diane, Happy surprises in on our garden

 

Some of my favorite surprises are volunteer sunflowers with their dark round seed pods punctuating the round sunburst dahlias.

 

 

The bucks with big racks peeled off the bark all but girdling our dogwood tree last year.
Amazingly the tree still blossomed and leafed out this year. Many branches died and now the tree has fruit, I have never noticed before.

 

A rock with a split crack cutting it all the way across the middle is a surprise planter. For several years snapdragon seeds grew in the crack. This year cosmos!

 

Love the way tiny snap dragon seeds find the most unlikely niche to sprout and flourish.
Love the way the holly tree is healing after last year the sap suckers pecked the trunk all around in long rows of holes. This year I allowed the sucker branches to protect the trunk while scar tissues closed the wounds. To my surprise the brave holly bush is making a come back.

Love the way life strives to survive even against the odds!

by Diane: a visit to Henri Rouseau's fanciful flight from Paris in Paris

My two adult granddaughters were graciously accommodating to an addition not on our list of the things we wished to see during our four days in Paris.  I wanted to see where Rousseau found what he needed to see to paint his jungle inspired painting.  One of my recent paintings is derived from Rousseau's  THE DREAM.
        Le Jardin des Serres d'Auteuils ( The garden of green houses ) is  a distance from the usual tourist attractions.

 On a Saturday the park attracts Parisians. We saw some families picnic on blankets and playing on the lawn, some were sitting on the benches reading. I was not surprised to see a few art students getting a semi-private art lessons.

 The art instructor provided a variety of materials. In the morning they used colored pencil. When we left at about 1:00 PM the instructor was demonstrating colored felt pens. He agreed to me taking a quick look but I didn't feel he was open to conversation as he was intense and highly engaged with his two student.  The instructor also had raw canvas and paints presumably for the afternoon.

 

 

 Inside one of the glass enclosed arboretums I saw two women with their children having a jungle themed lunch imagining that they were in the tropics.

The garden lends itself to surreal day dreaming now as it was for Rousseau who imagined into his painting a nude women on a couch in Paris pretending she is a mermaid in the jungle.

 

photo copied from the NewYork City MOMA web site

Different plants but same dreamy atmosphere was a delightfully relaxing change for all three of us.  

 

What's up now

by Rain Trueax

It's been cool in the desert with more rain than last year but that promises a beautiful year for wildflowers. We've also enjoyed some amazing sunsets and once in a while sunrises.

Rather than going off and doing fun stuff or even looking for a fifth wheel trailer, to upgrade ours to something a little larger, we've had more time here at the house than we initially expected because of repair work that was needed-- most outside but some inside. I am starting to think in terms of storage here if this becomes our full-time home along with time in the trailer. 

ups and downs

by Rain Trueax

I am in a group blog, Sweethearts of the West, where I posted the blog below. It got seen by less than usual there as at the same time I learned that a writer friend, Celia Yeary, had died. I wanted to post on her loss, what she had meant to me and it kind of buried my blog where I wrote about the history of the Chinese in Oregon. I thought I'd share it here as I feel it is an important part of Oregon's history.

popular or not

by Rain Trueax

Sometimes I dream something and wake with an associated idea-- sometimes only roughly associated. It happened this week. My dream had taken me back to high school relationships and one particular one where the dream mixed real life experience with fiction. 

In high school, I'd had a friend, the kind we did things together, had sleepovers-- and then one day I went to school and she was no longer talking to me. She never told me why. I never asked. To this day I don't know although I could hazard a guess. More interesting to me would be-- why didn't I ask then? I didn't and won't ever now. Her loss was painful for me as I didn't have a lot of school friends. The dream encompassed this real life experience but gave it a different ending-- think Hallmark ending ;)

When I woke, it was with this thought-- I am not a popular person. Is that why my books are not popular? Do they even relate?

It's their season

 by Rain Trueax

July is when the wildflowers do their thing in the high country of Yellowstone. Sometimes I try to figure out their names, have books to help me do that. I had none with me this trip. The thing for me though is to enjoy beauty. These are nature's gardens and none could be prettier with their gorgeous mix of colors.

In driving and looking for flowers, it's interesting how a tiny elevational difference determines what will be where. Wildflowers might look to be scattered randomly, but they have strong requirements as to where they will grow including amount of water, temperatures, nearby plants, and soil types. It makes finding, something like Indian Paintbrush, challenging. 

When on gravel roads, with less traffic, it was easier to stop where the flowers were. On the major roads, stopping for a wildflower is not safe. These were taken in parks or not far off roads.

I think, when I get my current manuscript to the rough draft phase (a long way off), I might try to put some of the Yellowstone photos into a video with music. Something classical would suit the images best.

Western Oregon in May

It's May-- It's May, the lusty month of May. 

And it does feel that way with flowers in bloom, birds on their nests, bird calls in the air, and beauty everywhere I look.

ups and downs

Sitting here at the keyboard, I am enjoying the sight of the columbines out my window, allergy season not so much, and re-edited an Oregon historical manuscript that is due out June 21st. 

 this is not the cover, but I played with it as a possibility

Where Dreams Go has been edited, time and time again. This edit is the one ahead of when I hand it over to a beta reader. He has read a lot of my books, maybe all of them, been a friend, knows a lot about Oregon history, and has proven to be good at finding errors I missed. I think the first time I experienced his skill was in Desert Inferno, where I had a heroine, who didn't care much for coffee. She was sitting on her patio, enjoying a desert morning-- sipping coffee. Okay, I might have gotten by with that if she hadn't been sipping tea only a few lines down. He caught that one, and he's been good at it ever since. 

Finally it dawned on me to ask if he'd consider being a beta reader. There is no money in it, but beta readers do get many thanks, the book free, now and again a paperback or bookmarks, and the satisfaction of telling the author-- you goofed. Mostly they are looking for inconsistencies in the author's logic, but anything else they find is a plus.

Besides not having beta readers, I also haven't had editors. A major no-no to the ePublishing world. The experts, and pretty much everybody else, are adamant that you must have editors as no writer can edit their own work. I believe they can, but it takes hours and hours, doing it many times with distance between the reads, and is a pain in the neck job as it's a word for word job. It has none of the excitement of writing the first draft or reading a book for the first time.

This week, our ranch lost a calf. Fortunately Ranch Boss saw the problem and was able, with a lot of muscle, to pull the dead calf and save the mother. It was too big for her. These things are tough; but on the same day, another heifer had hers without problem, but that was due to its being smaller. 

Currently we are trying to get our shearer out here, but this is his busy season which means we work around his schedule. They are doing okay although we did have one lamb break its leg, something that is generally fixable. The question in such cases is always-- how on earth did it do that?

Weather in my part of Oregon has been a mix of gray to beautiful blue skies. We are now though in a warm streak with temps up to 80ºF this week-end. The garden is tilled and ready for planting, even if it is 33ºF in the morning. Normally, I buy bedding plants about now, but this year I can't buy from any source that will not promise me that the plant was not grown using neonicotinoids or their ilk.If you are not familiar with the concern, here is but one link: 

beyond pesticides.  

When you think about it, it's not hard to figure out that if a product becomes part of the plant and kills insects, why not bees. With the great concern over hive collapses, it seems to me that we home gardeners must do our part to see this product and those like it are no longer used. Petitions are nice but kind of do nothing. When you vote with your dollars, growers and manufacturers hear you. In my case, if I can't get guarantees of the plants being safe, it's the year I'll grow them all from seed. 

I have also read that these products are not healthy for pets. We would like to think we can trust our nurseries or stores. The truth is-- we need to ask questions. If they say they don't know, then bye-bye. I am grateful for the researchers who reveal such problems to us and give us a choice. Science is wonderful for what it can do-- Of course, the science that told me of the dangers of neonicotinoids was used by a corporation to develop the product to begin with... 

What most of us want as consumers is full disclosure, and that for all those working to come up with new products, there are others assessing them for their safety. I know not all people value science. Some even want to cut budgets for any research. That's where consumers again need to be educated and vote their personal ethics and concerns.

gardens

My life has been entwined with images and words as I consider the right cover for the last of the Diablo Canyon Trilogy which will be out in mid-June. Yesterday I figured out what energy I wanted in the eBook trailer which ended up better than I had imagined when I began. When I finish something like that, it feels good. 

When doing covers/trailers, I spend a lot of time looking at photos of the sky, landscapes, and of course, the right people to fit the characters. As an indie writer, there is a lot of pressure to buy your book covers from graphic artists (which ranged from the truly gifted to the prosaic). Prices vary a lot depending on whether the cover was already made or whether you are working with the artist to get something close to your own book. 

I choose to do my own because I like doing them but am always told my books would sell better if I laid out a thousand dollars for a good designer-- not to mention the same people would have me paying another thousand to a professional editor. Maybe they would sell better but there is sure no guarantee of that. There is a guarantee that I'd be a lot more depressed if they didn't sell...

For this book cover, I wanted red rock background, interesting sky, and then a man and woman who best depicted my characters. It's unfortunate that hot men and women are de rigueur for at least indie romance covers. Famous writers can get by with a single rose but not so a lesser known. 

Nothing wrong with good looking men. I myself chose one of them critters and enjoy the benefits. It's fun to look at something attractive for sure. As a writer, however, it's frustrating that the most common options in royalty free image sites (royalty free just means you don't pay each time you use the image-- not that they are free) are models. 

Happily at the site I have had for a month (5 images a day for 30 days), I did find a guy who fits Dirk in the last of the three books. But whether he will suit those who buy books based on covers... not so sure.

Outside, it has been a beautiful spring. We are making adjustments to our gardens. Removing the deck was a big improvement for the creek garden which you see first in the photos below. The veggies, herbs and flowers are planted-- slugs got most of the marigolds even with slug bait. Why do they want the newest thing with plenty of other greenerie to eat? 

The freeze last winter cost us one shrub which led to moving the Buddha to be balanced on that fence. I liked that shrub, felt bad when we lost it, but the new arrangement is actually better.

 look closely and you will see a rose thief through the fence.

And finally a small bee hive for the swarm, giving them a place to live for awhile. They seem to approve. I have sure learned a lot about honey bees and their interactions. There were many natural pollinating type bees in the wilds of North America, but the honey bee was brought in specifically by our first European arrivals. They are considered essential to certain big crops and hence a lot of concern over problems regarding hive destruction. I suspect the way the honey bee is used, ignoring their instincts, treating them as slaves with no more meaning than an inorganic tool, is contributing to the problem.