Back in March which seems like such a LONG time ago, we took a fun trip to San Antonio for our friend Steve’s birthday. It was fun to hang out with Steve & Jennifer’s family and also I had a chance to wander around the town as I had never been there before. I loved the whole riverwalk situation even though of course it is all touristy. Still super cool.
It seems like there was a fair amount of art league volunteering, because I was helping with the Art Across the Ages. Mostly I just showed up and helped out other instructors. But one time I taught the embroidery on photography workshop myself. I also pressed some flowers and brought them to one of the workshops involving making bookmarks with pressed flowers. It’s easy and quick with the tool I have for the microwave.
Instead of going to Austin for a No Kings Protest, we went into Dripping Springs and were super impressed with the incredibly large turnout!
During this period I saw someone make cordage into jewelry in social media which got me interested so I learned how to make cordage from yucca and even prepared a some strands from a century plant for cordage! And then I took a short on-line class about how to make cordage from old clothes, and finally I started to make homemade beads from various things including local seeds. I’m still wanting to do more with this but somehow can never get around to it. There’s a few pics below but I actually have a small box full of cordage experiments :)
While I’ve been cordaging, Rob started his own set of projects which seemed to start with his purchase of a reel to reel (pic below). I get the impression that one purchase like this can cause a cascade of other purchases all in order to make a great listening experience! It seems like a fun hobby to me.
Not nerdy at all ;)
And my Mom came and visited for a few days which was nice and pretty chill. We did go to the Blanton Museum which we had never been to before. Oh and we went to the Natural Gardener because it’s always cool to look at the plants they have!
And of course we GOT MORE CHICKENS! Once again we headed over to Callahan’s and decided to get two “Production Reds” and then a black one and a mottled one. I forget what breeds they are, but anyway then we had to quarantine them for a while and right away we saw the reds were pecking on the others so then we had to perform a quarantine within the quarantine and separate the reds from the others! Fortunately, just as we had read, when we reintroduced the reds the pecking order had reset and things got better.
So after that we started the transition process of combining all the chickens. This wasn’t so easy either. Especially at night when they all went to the roost there was tons of aggressive behavior and anyway long story short things are finally pretty smooth. In fact, they all kind of hang around each other during the day which wasn’t true for a long time as they basically had their two clicks for weeks. Oh and there was an issue for awhile where I wasn’t sure the new chickens could find the water so I was freaking out and in thinking about lack of water during the period we hadn’t yet named the new chickens, the idea of deserts came to mind so we decided to name the chickens Sahara, Sonora, Mojave, and Yuma. The reds are Sahara and Sonora, the black on is Yuma and the mottled one is Mojave.
I had the opportunity through the art league to visit Madrone Springs Ranch because the owner is an art league member and hosts plein airs on her property. Some of us tagged along as she made the rounds feeding the exotic animals :)
It was time to get the exterior of the house painted and we had a bit of scramble figuring out our color palette, but we ended up super pleased with the result!! The trim is a nice subtle green and our front door is ORANGE!!
This is random but we now have some amazing Pride of Barbados plants in the backyard and I pressed a couple of them and they came out so cool (below)!
We had a few things in the garden but as usual, things get kind of haphazard and overgrown (which is actually just fine). We actually got some very nice strawberries. And we had a borage plant which provided edible flowers, and we also had calendula flowers from my Mom, as well as bachelor buttons again and all of them are edible. And we can eat the native turk’s cap flowers too! We let the leeks grow forever and so now we have these incredible spherical bulbs of flowers on them and the greens we planted were so bitter that we never harvested them so they kept growing (not even the bugs would eat them) and now they have millions of amazing blue flowers! We did do just fine growing basil though. And our lemon plant is actually growing one real lemon right now! (There were small ones earlier in the season that are gone now).
We started to occasionally take walks with the dogs over on the Belterra trails which was fun for change. But we don’t go if there’s been rain because trails get muddy. Below you can see when it finally pays off when you go looking inside something thinking what a perfect place for a cute little frog… and then THERE IS ONE THERE!
below is just a quick video of a hummingbird moth. they are cool because they are so big!
Hummingbird moth
Tom and Leah came down to visit and we had a great time hanging out by the pool, making cordage, and relaxing.
And more recently, Rachel and Zach came down for a visit where we got to do even more pool hanging, sports watching, and eating!
And just yesterday it was Rob’s birthday! I got him (really it’s for us) a giant android tablet that I’m hoping we can use as our “command center”. In particular, I envision that as we cook dinner, the recipe will be up on the giant screen where we can both see it, and there will be one or more timers up on the screen as well. Haha well anyway then we went on to a very fancy dinner at a French Restaurant in Austin! YUM!
