Anyone remember that place that was on South Lamar called "
Austin Found"? [
Here's a great little short video on it] It was a shop that reminded me of my Grandma's house - the one with the compulsion for hoarding everything... new stuff ordered from catalogs and squirreled away so so Grandpa wouldn't see it and have a fit... found objects... items obsessively purchased whether needed or not, and sentimental items... like string and lint. Anyway, (like Grandma's house) this shop was a wonderful mixture of a Goodwill store and a city dump, and of course it's gone now, since they had too many items that were sold for mere pennies, like these 2 crescent moon wooden cutouts that we picked up for about $2 for the pair. I decided (being the butterfly-lover that I am) that if turned back to back they sort of resembled a butterfly, and I decided to paint them and hang them in the garden. After sweeping cobwebs and spider eggs off of them for years, I finally got the job done and the suckers are - at last - hanging on the fence by the back gate. I sure miss that shop. I could practically live in there.
Maybe I do... (trying not to turn into my Grandma and Mother, but...)
I discovered in the process that painting skills really do get rusty when you don't use them for 30 years. It looks like a morning after, but I decided to just go with it and let it be considered done.
In other backyard news, we have a little bit of lettuce sprouting up. Enough for one small salad. The vegetable garden has left a lot to be desired this year but it's a new project and we are in a drought.
MrB has been the ultimate recycler and turned the old city recycling bins (that are now obsolete) into a composter. A little duct tape and it will be perfect.
A couple of backyard views taken yesterday, January 7. Click any of these to enlarge, as always. The yard is great for sitting in now with the mosquitoes gone:
4 comments:
WOW, your yard is gorgeous! What a retreat you all have created. I love the moon butterfly. I'm glad that you got back to painting. It's a physical thing, too, like playing an instrument, and must feel good to coax your arm into swishing the paint again.
I think many of us have the Depression-era grandma gene. My mother and aunt removed countless cans of Yuban coffee from Grandma's basement after she died. I'm afraid I've passed the gene on to my kids, too, based on the amount of "sentimental" string, rocks, paper clips....
The yard is pretty tame right now. Click the "garden" label to bring up some of the summer wildness.
I found I was more dangerous than anything else when it came to the paint - especially when there was paint leftover. That's how the planter on the stump in the yard got painted, and I was starting to paint everything in site.
Someday I need to scan some of the pictures from my grandmother's estate auction. I still have her collection of can openers, cookbooks, and a few other things. I am trying my best to fight off the genes. Never sure whether I'm winning or not.
"It looks like a morning after"
Don't be so harsh! I like it - and its got great movement all over!
Happy 2009!!
nava: thank you! but seriously, I am not a painter anymore. I had visions and imaginings for what I wanted those things to be, and just couldn't make it happen. I actually hated them for a good period of time during the painting process, and then reached a point where I didn't hate them but only liked them well enough to be through with them.
Now it's the job of the birds to finish... ahem... painting them.
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