For all the mom’s out there, I hope you have a nice warm sqwishy hug day today. 🙂

Yesterday was a busy day. I helped our neighbor with her yard for a while. She’s had a lot of construction going on over there for the last few months, the warm weather and huge mess made her pretty ambitious so I offered to help! We cut down one of her small trees (the dogs were working on digging it up for her), and she wanted to get rid of another one of her trees so she had someone dig it up and we moved it over into our yard. It’s a Red Bud tree, we think. Mark has wanted one since our trip home from Florida when we saw them blooming all the way back.

Today I am stiff and sore. I’d like to run down to the home improvement store for a water feature for all of this landscaping we’ve been doing, as well as some more mature plants so we don’t have to wait for everything to grow! We even built up an area for the girls to have their own garden to maintain. Jay planted carrots. I planted snow peas (eat ’em right out of the pod, yummmy!), and Cait planted big ol watermelons. We split the bed in half so there are veggies on one side and they picked out flowers for the other. Now they can water it and check them and watch them grow! Fun stuff.

I’ve got some painting to do, too! Dang I only have a couple of weeks left to finish everything I’ve got going. Then June is clear so far so I’m starting to think of other things I’d like to paint, non-commissioned. Hey, it’s been a while since I painted something non-commissioned huh? My last piece was the Viola, Antoinette. I finished that one back in Februrary.

So much to do, such warm weather to try to ignore….

I hope you’re having awesome summery weather and playing outside in it, too!!

Ok so Sheila gets an A+ on the last assignment, thank you Sheila! Here’s the bird on eNature, an Eastern Towhee. He’s beautiful! He came back, and I have more pics. Wow what a neat bird!

Now we’ve had another one here that is beautiful, and chocolatey colored. Anyone wanna figure out what he is?

UPDATE: He’s a Brown-Headed Cowbird. Man, their profile on eNature doesn’t paint a very pretty picture of this species. Still, a pretty bird.

Here he is:

And here are a couple more GOOD pics of the stunning Eastern Towhee!

I’m out painting and this bird catches my eye. WOAH! I’ve never even seen a picture of anything that looks like this guy!

Your assignment: Find out what kinda bird this is for me! Please someone post me a linky to his profile and tweeter noise?! I’m sorry the pics are not as great as usual, I was running for the camera, jittering to correct the settings and then the birdie wouldn’t keep still! Doesn’t he make you hungry for s’mores? Okay, maybe it’s just me.

I have been trying to get good pics of a few of our birdie visitors without much luck until lastnight! I decided to remove the screen from one of the studio windows (that are super clear ’cause I just washed them), and I sat there at sunset, waiting patiently, and voila! A gadgillion pics later, I had two decent ones I’m not too shy to share. Our cardinal is so camera shy. I could go outside without my camera and he wouldn’t flee. He sees that big black thing pointing at him though and he bolts pretty quickly! I was pretty giddy that I got a pic of him. Even if it is grainy and not nearly as crisp as I’d like it to be. (Shoulda got the 8MP. bah.)

Gotta add one, I just took this one this morning! I’ve been trying to get a pic of this bird for 2 years! I think it’s a finch? It is so pretty, and he sings like he’s been cross bred with a canary!

Ooh-ooh! One more! Boy I have a prime spot to capture & share our backyard buddies now, don’t I? Here’s a chicka-dee-dee-dee:

I updated my gallery today. I added my Lion painting the other day, so if you would like to go leave a comment on him, he’s in there now. I also streamlined my “ordering information” area. I have all steps available and linked through the top menu now. I added my calendar schedule link to my “Artist Info” menu links, and I think that’s it. Still need to add a page for my Catfish project, that will happen when I have another opportunity to pull my hair out without interruptions.
😆

Just for fun, I wanted to show you the progress of cropping my image to view at 100%. Here’s how the zoom progresses on this squirelly who is still out there munchin’ up all the corn. “Read More” for the rest of the zoom!

Did I ever tell you guys about our peony saga?

3 or 4 years ago, I decided I wanted to have our own peonies so went and picked up a 3 pack of baby roots. Mark followed the instructions and started digging, to this day we are sure that the instructions read to plant them 21-inches down. Yes, 21 inches. We were confused, but that’s what it said, so that’s what we did!

Needless to say, we didn’t get peonies the following year. Or the year after that. We kept hoping they’d make their way to the top, and his dad still teases us that we probably have large beautiful peonies growing a foot under the soil. hehe!

Well I decided to pick up more, so I planted 3 more while Mark was gone. About 6 inches down. Now we have 4, because one of our 21-inchers actually made it up to the top! You can imagine after waiting several years for my own daggone peonies how excited I was this morning to see this:

YAHOO!!!

We stopped over at our zoo for a little while today. It’s cold and uber windy so we didn’t stay too long, we’ll go back when it warms up a bit!

This morning I’ll share two-lips with you. :kiss:

There are two ways that I view things around me, one is “oh how beautiful” and the other is picking it apart to see it for its components, what makes it what it is. These tulip shots represent each way that I see things. First, the composition, the beauty, singling out one tulip and looking at it as a whole. Appreciating how when everything is brought together it is just really daggone pretty.

Then we have the way that I see things when I get closer to them. I notice the gradiating colors, and the contrast against the background. Even when it’s dying out there are beautiful things to see in a gracefully drooping plant. The shape made me thing of a wine glass, cropping it the way I did is abstract, which is unusual for me, but I liked how my eyes moved around this area.