More dogs!

My second favorite painting subject (after birds) would be dogs. My next foray at the Painted Cork studio was to paint my dog in what Kim calls “classic style”. The stakes were higher, but I had a lot of fun and was quite pleased with the finished product.

Lani in bean-mode

This all went so well that I was inspired to paint a friend’s dog. This was much harder because imperfections with my own dog are ok, but I was attempting to represent another person’s baby! I ended up trying this twice, but the recipient was pleased with both of them.

Boids!

Birds have long been a subject of my paintings. I used to spend a lot of time running around with my camera looking for interesting pictures of common birds, or common shots of interesting birds. Some of my best pics I ended up painting.

Now it was time to give it a try with acrylics.

As much as I love working with acrylics, I miss the simplicity of dropping in a bokeh style background to suggest muted vegetation or blurry ocean scenes with watercolors.

The Furst Supper

I recently started fostering with Doggie Protective Services in the Bay Area. My most recent foster was found stray after the 4th of July, a holiday famous for putting immense pressure on shelters from terrified pets that run away from home to escape the random fireworks. My new foster was also found to be quite pregnant.

The rescue organization picked her up at the Solano County shelter and I picked her up. Everyone was expecting her to whelp (birthing for dogs) immediately. We were fortunate to spend the next 10 days waiting for puppies and getting used to each other.

Once the big day (actually middle of the night) happened, we were witnesses to the miracle of new life. At one point I was particularly in awe of the voraciousness of the babies and the magic of lactation. When they nursed they would get into crazy positions just to reach a nipple, then adjust all over again to reach another nipple. I was particularly involved in this at the start because one puppy wasn’t gaining weight like the others. My job was to put him on a nipple when he wasn’t already there. This intervention was best all around because it kept the natural process and eventually just stopped. If I gave formula via a syringe, I would have to continue to do that for the duration.

At one point I imagined these babies like the cherubic angels in a renaissance painting and said as much to several friends. Can’t you see the resemblance between these chubby butts?

View of the frescoed ceiling of the Grand staircase of the Palais Kinsky in Vienna, at the Freyung. The palace was owned by the noble Kinsky von Wichnitz und Tettau comital family. It was constructed during the baroque age as a Stadtpalais (city-palace).
Photo By Gryffindor – Own work, CC BY 2.5, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=1008198

Then I got the idea to actually paint it. So I started researching the renaissance style. This summary at Master Class provides a great list of features like use linear perspective and atmospheric perspective. So I looked through examples to find something I’d like to replicate. The room that “The Last Supper” is set in is weird, but not too detailed. So I went with that.

I didn’t want to get stuck in a bunch of architectural detail like “The School of Athens”. I also wanted to feature something akin to a “maiden in repose” but I couldn’t find anything exactly like that from the Renaissance era. I chose “A Young Lady Reclining on a Chaise Longue” by Lemaire-Colle Madeleine because the blue and white fabric draped over the chair looked like the Madonna’s robes.

Then I sort of munged up most of the rest of my Art History class from 30 years ago regarding representations of the Madonna and hagiography and ladies in repose on a chaise lounge and came up with a basic composition.

Then I started mocking that up in photoshop. I put the chair in front of the last supper, then assembled 4 different puppy shots.

As I painted, I freestyled a pillow for Mama’s head to fill the space and also show the saintly aspects of motherhood. Then of course I needed to pun the name, and now we have “The Furst Supper”.

Wand Follow Up

I finished that other wand and gave it to an even bigger Harry Potter fan. Knowing I needed to make another one before Halloween, I still managed to put it off and spent the weekend before soldering it together.

Both of them were based on a stick from the yard–first was apricot, second pittosporum. I originally hoped to maintain some part of the natural wood, but I couldn’t find a way to hide the wires, batteries, and reed switch.

I used Magic Sculpt to hide the wire, but rather than blend it in, I just covered the whole stick. The batteries are embedded and not accessible. If it matters, I will bust it open and patch it up again.

I used acryl gouache to paint the “bark”. I mixed some opposing colors to get a couple of different browns. I’m impressed with how realistic the combination of gloved thumbprints and brown paint turned out to be.

I wore a rubbery ring and slipped a neo-dymium magnet underneath.  The wand was actually really handy while walking down dark, crowded streets while the kid collected candy.  I never got a chance to “trick” anyone with the magnet activation though.

Total Eclipse

We went to Oregon for the 2017 total eclipse.  We took two weeks and three states to get there.  We spent a week in the Sierras and a couple of days in Northern Nevada.  Then there were a couple of days in the Antelope and Wildlife Refuges of Eastern Oregon.

By the Friday before the eclipse it was time to enter the band of totality and stake a claim to some part of the landscape to watch it. After a few tries we found a road without dozens of cars already on it.

I set up a tripod and managed to mount three cameras on it and placed another below. One was an old iPhone 4 just to get our reactions.  I mostly followed the advice of many to just experience the eclipse and save the photography to the experts.  Not to say we weren’t temped, but we didn’t waste too much time on it.

In the moments of totality, birds stopped singing and insects stopped flying.  We had noted these leaving a stump nearby while waiting.

Here’s my video of totality with some bits slowed down to show the shadow.  It moves over us to the horizon.  I’d rather it move across the frame, but we didn’t have a great choice of landscape that morning.

This is a time lapse of the whole thing.

We planned to spend another week in Oregon, but when we received word that our cat was on death’s door, we headed South.  Closer to Madras the image below was reversed and we were in the traffic.  It took another night on a random Forest Service road before  we made it home where we had a few more days with our dear kitty.

Using a Roof Top Tent on a Ridiculously Tall Truck

I managed to capture a time lapse of one of our camping setups on our recent trip.  I’ll keep trying this shot because I’ve thought of improvements already, but in the meantime we have this.

While in Bridgeport for ice and wi-fi earlier that day, we learned that the next day was going to be Friends of Bodie Day when the park was hosting many special events.  We decided to camp along the Aurora Canyon road. We drove up to a spot just under Potato Peak for our second night East of the Sierras.

YAIC – Yet another insect colony

A couple of years ago I established a dermestid beetle colony. I bought the starter bugs from a guy on the internet. This seemed cleaner than collecting from carrion in the wild, but on second thought it’s all dead stuff.
I fed them canned dog food to start, but soon I found a dead garter snake on the road. It was not damaged except for a puncture or two which led me to deduce that it was dropped by a raptor. Silly as it sounds I had my son pick it up for me.
I put the snake on an open cereal box inside the colony container. After a day, I noticed that the bugs seemed to only enter through the punctures. I got my gloves on and tied my hair back, it was time to gut this snake. The scalpel was sufficient, but slicing across the belly scales was harder than I expected.
Once open the snake’s anatomy was mostly recognizable after I adjusted to seeing paired organs offset. Lungs and kidneys were not side by side, but rather one after the other. I put the offal next to the flayed snake. The pile was gone in three days.
It took many more days, but I was surprised with the thoroughness of the dermestids. They ate almost every scale and truly left only the bones. There were a few scales left on the head and I didn’t want to wait for them to flake off on their own.

This is a fragile specimen and half of the jaw came loose as I moved it. I first sprayed peroxide to clean and whiten, but then I noticed that the bones were softening while wet and a couple of ribs were dislodged. I moved the skeleton to some parchment paper and let that dry in the sun. Before it was too dry I arranged the snake to a more manageable configuration with a slight coil.
My riskiest move paid off when I used aerosol spray fixative as a final step. This seems to have done the trick with holding the tiny pieces together without discoloration.

Other Specimens

I have added other creatures found dead in our yard, but I haven’t had as an amazing success as I did with the snake. Everything else has been mammal and I haven’t taken the time to gut or flense the bodies. Where they ate the snake scales, they don’t eat fur and it leave a mess in the colony box. They also smell a lot more. My family is wonderfully patient with me.

Naked Eggs

We’ve done a lot with eggs since getting chickens: making breakfast, making custard, boiling, frying, making ice cream. We also took each chicken’s first egg and blew it out. Some were so tiny that it was fun to preserve them.
Then one day we put a couple in vinegar to eat away the shell. It’s a very slow variation on the baking soda volcano. As soon as the eggs meet the vinegar, small bubbles form. After two days, you have shell-less eggs. They are held together with only the membrane.

I cooked them when we were done playing, but it seemed as if the proteins were denatured. Not good eats! And they reeked of vinegar, so to the compost they went.

Fort Clux

Yes, the title is an incredibly silly pun based on Fort Knox for chickens, but here we go anyway.

A few years back we got chickens which is not something that anyone should do lightly. We picked up chicks at our local feed store when the first batch arrived in February. As we kept them warm and safe in the garage, we had our ultimate impetus to figure out the coop we wanted to build. We had birds, and these birds would need a home.

My then seven-year old was delighted with his dozen new pets and we played with them every morning and night. I would have already been inclined toward bird safety, but his attachment drove me to the utmost in coop security.

We planned where to put it by squeezing it into an otherwise unused corner of our yard. Some design considerations flowed from our unique location, but others are applicable to all builds. Most of these techniques were adapted from other folks solutions to known problems of predation.

Materials

Hardware cloth

We used hardware cloth everywhere and skipped chicken wire altogether. The openings in chicken wire are big enough for predators to reach a bird near the wall. Think of a grubby raccoon paw and what sized opening it would fit through.
I included windows in the coop, but they too are covered in hardware cloth. Where we attached hardware cloth near its edge, we secured it by sandwiching it with another board screwed on top. Staples have been reported to be pulled out by said raccoon types in order to access a coop.

Kreg slot screws

It’s completely non-standard, but we did all of our construction with the studs turned flat to parallel the wall. This afforded us extra inches inside the coop allowing us to maximize usable space. The Kreg made “toe-nailing” super easy and stable and doesn’t necessarily require their special screws.

Footers

After reading advice in online forums, we used a substantial 2 x 8 footer in the coop. This is also our only use of pressure treated wood. The footer does not directly contact the ground though. One edge rests on our retaining wall. The other three rest on a foundation of frustration. My darling husband dug a trench and set 9×9 paving stones on edge to create a wall to be buried. The idea being that any predator inclined to dig under the footer would find cement and be turned away.

Let there be light

We used SunTough roofing to keep the area as well lit as possible.

Technology

Water

The Little Giant Automatic Game Bird Fount Waterer is a genius design. It uses a Schrader bike valve and the weight of the water to trigger filling.  It’s adjustable too.  I change bike valves more often than I might like, but I haven’t had to replace the whole thing.

The Upside to Big Brother

When we first brought the chicks home, I worked a few miles away in an office. I wasn’t comfortable leaving such helpless little creatures completely unmonitored. I bought a weather station with remote reporting and a wi-fi camera. Both were inordinate amounts of trouble to set up to access through my home firewall, but once it was done I could watch the chicks from my desk and see that the heat lamp reached an area that was adequately heated for their age. This setup was priceless for my piece of mind while 12 helpless bodies roamed in a pile of sawdust with a fire hazard suspended above.

Later when the girls moved to the coop I was able to move the camera along with them. I mounted one inside the coop and I could see which bird laid which egg and at what time. I got another camera on sale and mounted it outside which allowed me to record the nighttime comings and goings of our backyard. I learned that we have mice, rats, raccoons, opossums, foxes, and skunks. I also noticed that no one creature spent any time near the coop. My plan was to be able to see where a vulnerability was before it became a full-on blood bath.

Ador door

This works. The interface is maddening, but it has been mostly reliable for three years. We had the drive give out, but bought their replacement. I had a regular lantern battery last for over a year and then I added a rechargeable with a small solar panel. This setup didn’t last any longer. My husband recently hardwired it.

Tower of Jewels

It’s that time of year again. It’s when neighbors and dog walkers stop for selfies in our front yard. It’s when our “Tower of Jewels” aka Echium wildpretii is in bloom. We’ve heard it referred to as “penis tree”, “red schlong”, and other variations on genetalia.

The plant it great to have around even without strangers stopping to stroke the six foot stalk as they walk by. It is dense with flowers and manages to keep the bees fed all Spring.

We tend to do very little to maintain them. We don’t even water them. At some point, darling husband usually has to tie up especially large specimens to keep them from drooping over the sidewalk.

Being biennial it does take some mindfulness on our part to recognize small rosette this year will be a towering beacon for phallic worshipers next year.

We also have the “Pride of Madeira” aka Echium candicans in our yard, but so does everyone else. Being perennial it took a few years to get to bloom. It’s handy to have it to point to when explaining what the giant red thing is related to.