Tag Archives: summer

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Wee timorous cowering beastie

No, not a mouse. But the lizards are timid too. They do not want to engage and they leave very quickly. These one is fairly large, a foot long, so she posed for a photograph. Let’s crop it.

The next one is going for camouflage and is really quite brilliant at it. I like the tiny blue dots.

I also catch sight of small things scurrying out of my path hiking. Also lizards, 3 or 4 cm long, and very fast.

Today I go back to the first clinic I worked at here. I am feeling mildly timid myself. Stage fright? I can’t sing a song that I know, because I don’t choose the patients. They show up.

I took these photographs on the Palisade loop trial, in July. The lizards like it.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: timid.

I left out sleeket.

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Summer sunset

Last night my daughter and I went up on dinosaur hill for the sunset. What a summer thing to do!

Afterwards we walked on around the hill. We saw a very beautiful fox! This is zoomed all the way in on my phone, so the colors are not good. She watched us for a while and went on.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: summer.

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Cool

I am still wearing sweaters to work.

It is high desert here. One morning it was really pretty cold when I walked Sol Duc in her harness. Really she walks me. Cats are like that. But I wished for mittens. The temperature was 38. The last few days the low is in the high 40s or low 50s. Two days ago it was 90 driving home from work.

The consequence is air conditioning. I do not have air conditioning on the Olympic Peninsula. My house is from 1930 and well designed to stay cool in the summer and we rarely hit 90 anyhow. Two summers ago my heat pump switched to cooling when we had one hot week, startling me. We did hit 100 one day in Port Townsend, but it still dropped thirty degrees at night because of the cool Salish Sea surrounding us. My patients would complain of the awful heat when we got to 80 degrees. It’s all relative, right?

Here in Grand Junction, we are just starting to heat up. The hottest time appears to be around 4 or 5 pm.

I was cold at work all day two days ago. I wore a linen shirt over another shirt and it was not enough. I went outside at lunch and heated up nicely in the sun. Yesterday I took a wool jacket with me. Air conditioning is very strange.

This morning it is 51 now and projected to reach 85. The high desert temperature change of 30 to 40 degrees is not that different from home, but the air conditioning is different.

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: ambivalent.

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Summer fools

Some fools are summer fools
other fools are sommerfugls
fugls are birds, yes, summer birds
but summer birds are butterflies
I don’t think butterflies can hum
but hummingbirds can hum and fly
flies and birds and soon it’s fall
the summer fools fool us all

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: hum.

Sommerfugl is Danish and is pronounced summer fool. The literal translation is summer bird, but it means butterfly.

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Rock rasp

There is a raspy sound when the beach is pebbles and the waves wash in and they rasp together. It is a singing clicking rasp. Beautiful!

I walk Marrowstone Island early yesterday, since there is a very low tide in the morning and it was sunny and gorgeous. The clear agates light up.

This one is clear in the center. I have to dig it out of the mud flat with another rock.

Turn again.

There, isn’t it beautiful with the light shining through?

For the Ragtag Daily Prompt: raspy.

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Four seasons

These are etchings by my mother, Helen Burling Ottaway, who died in 2000.

All four are done with the same etching plate.

Winter is done first. The zinc plate is covered with a protective layer and then she draws with tools, including dental tools. The plate is placed in an acid bath. The acid etches where the drawings are, different depths. The protective layer is removed. The plate is inked. Most of the ink is gently wiped off and the plate is placed on the press. Wet paper is laid on the plate and the heavy wool covers are folded down over that. The press is run. The wool is folded back on the other side and the paper is lifted and laid to dry.

The plate is re inked for each one.

She puts the protective cover back on the plate and adds the buds for spring. These are etched. Winter is now gone, the plate has changed. She prints all of the spring series.

Next is summer. Leaves are added. She prints those.

Last is autumn. Now there are leaves on the ground as well. She does some the plates with more than one ink color. This was one of her largest etchings. She did a small series first, where the etchings were about 4 by 6 inches. This was 18 by 24. She had a really big etching press. I don’t know who has it, my sister took it to California and it disappeared.

I have the etchings and I have all the plates. I can’t run this series, I could only run autumn. I grew up surrounded by my mother doing art, etchings, watercolors, oils, lithography, a constant sketchbook and crafts. I took a painting class a few years ago. The instructor says, “Acrylics are NOT watercolors.” I reply, “I know how to DO watercolors.” I was being quite creative with the acrylics only I automatically used the watercolor techniques that I grew up with.

The photograph doesn’t really do them justice. I will have to take some more. Plus I have her slides in some of the boxes left from when my father died. More cataloging.

Blessings and good memories of my mother.