Out of the Frying Pan

Fun Denver Botanic Gardens toy

Those thinking of a visit to Denver's botanical garden might get a kick out of playing with this: gardens navigator. Search for plants or features and it'll show you just where to find them. Slick.

Oregon Siding Specialist

My nephew, Jeffrey Ludwick, has put together an excellent overview of his business, Oregon Siding Specialist.

If you're in Oregon looking for someone to do a great job on your siding, Jeff is your man. The Web site's photos offer a nice view of his eye for detail and his commitment to overall excellence.

And if you're not in the market, you might take a look at the site, anyway, just because it's a refreshingly simple Web site for a small business. The information is straight-forward and well presented. No, I didn't do it. I just think it's really nicely done.

Catching up

Yes, it's been a while.

First, happy 27th birthday, Uncle Elmer. I remember your charming presence and the fact that you could wiggle your ears. I can still see you backlit in the kitchen window. And I still remember the fact that your step-daughter credited you with being a loving father. You didn't do "step"; you just did "father". May God be very good to you.

It has been a hobbled couple of months. I fell and sprained my right foot. Then, about two weeks later, I decided to try to bear my considerable weight on my left leg -- which was completely asleep. I fell and sprained my left ankle. A cane seemed like a reasonable idea, but it wasn't clear to me which side to use it on. So there has been a bit of a hitch in my git-a-long.

Physical therapy, a new experience for me, has been the order of the day. First off I was referred to a place called SOMA in Boulder. After an evaluation visit, I left without instructions -- they don't do paper instructions -- and feeling like I had a big dollar sign on my forehead. The range of therapists and treatment modalities recommended was amazing. Logging on to the site they'd promised would deliver the exercise instructions, I discovered that it's a fee-only portal. After politely inquiring about this and receiving the brusque response that they can't get the instructions for me, eventually the therapist emailed instructions. By that time, though, it seemed reasonable to look for another service provider.

So that's how I ended up at Alta in south Boulder. The facility is, first off, clean and there is plenty of parking. Their forms are available online, another way they beat out SOMA. And the therapist practiced the exercises with me until I understood how to do them. And he also gave me a sheet of paper that shows exactly what to do. And he didn't see a need to call in a battalion of other therapists. If you are in Longmont or Boulder and need physical therapy, I recommend Alta.

This week I'm celebrating the one year anniversary of Picturing Plants. Starting from zero, the traffic has built to more than 10,000 page impressions per month. The site is generating almost no income: less than $15.00 in google ads income for the year. I'd like to figure out how to make the site more worthwhile from an income standpoint, but feel stymied.

Some sites I'm enjoying:

web designer depot

Technically Incorrect

Community Connections of Colorado - a dandy little non-profit in Longmont that aspires to help build networks with Colorado charities. I believe in this thing to the extent that, for the first time in 15 years or so, I'm putting my skin into the board of directors, something I'd sworn off for non-profits when we came to Colorado. (Yeah, mention the dangerous women's group sidetrack to me if you're feeling the need to upset me!) Anyway, one of their "arms" is Ceci's, a nifty upscale resale shop.

And finally, the Master of Space and Time still takes my breath away:

A poem and more for the New Year

"You think I am dead,"
The apple tree said,
"Because I have never a leaf to show-
Because I stoop,
And my branches droop,
And the dull gray mosses over me grow!
But I'm still alive in trunk and shoot;
The buds of next May
I fold away-
But I pity the withered grass at my root."

"You think I am dead,"
The quick grass said,
"Because I have parted with stem and blade!
But under the ground,
I am safe and sound
With the snow's thick blanket over me laid.

I'm all alive, and ready to shoot,
Should the spring of the year
Come dancing here-
But I pity the flower without branch or root."

"You think I am dead,"
A soft voice said,
"Because not a branch or root I own.
I never have died, but close I hide
In a plumy seed that the wind has sown.

Patient I wait through the long winter hours;
You will see me again-
I shall laugh at you then, 

Out of the eyes of a hundred flowers."

--Edith M. Williams

This poem appeared today at one of the gardening blogs I follow, greentapestry - a gardening and allotment notebook. It seems fitting for the New Year, a year for which I have decided my word will be "hope". 

St Paul writes about hope in his letter to the Romans (ch 5):

Therefore, since we have been justified through faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have gained access by faith into this grace in which we now stand.

And we rejoice in the hope of the glory of God. 

Not only so, but we also rejoice in our sufferings, because we know that suffering produces perseverance; perseverance, character; and character, hope.

And hope does not disappoint us, because God has poured out his love into our hearts by the Holy Spirit, whom he has given us.

And again, in chapter 15 he writes:

May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace as you trust in him, so that you may overflow with hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

Today would have been my mother's 88th birthday. She would not fault me for saying that hope was a virtue she was able to invoke more faithfully on behalf of others, than on behalf of herself. Maybe this is the way things go for us. I don't know.

The Dalai Lama speaks to the knife edge of hope and despair that sometimes cuts right through:

When we meet real tragedy in life, we can react in two ways--either by losing hope and falling into self-destructive habits, or by using the challenge to find our inner strength.

Colorado is brown right now. Shoots of green are months away. The challenge is to find shoots of green in my heart, to believe that an endless Spring can be present in one's spirit.

Happy New Year to you. May you, too, be able to cultivate the blessing of hope.

Looking ahead

Today, my friend Fr victor Hoagland, C.P. blogged A new year is coming. Highly recommended reading.

Also, today a blogger I follow blogged at length about a tropical garden in Zone 5. Buffalo's Zone 5 is different from Denver's in many respects, but the achievement is inspiring: something a gardener in Denver's Zone 5 might want to consider before returning to her usual kvetching about the place ;-)

On Christmas Eve

We stayed in town to go to church. The roads are slick and the sidewalks are icy, not the best recipe for traveling to our downtown parish at the Cathedral.

A few week into the Missal changes, people are adapting well. "And with your spirit" begins to confuse itself into something near silence by the end of Mass, but people are getting the hang of it.

Tonight was, of course, the first outing for the "new" Gloria. The words themselves posed no problems at all, but the setting -- Dan Schutte, I'm calling you out on this -- is atrocious. People are expected to cover fully an octave and a half. That's not possible. Look around at an ordinary assembly. Do you see Roy Orbison? Didn't think so, so enough already with the operatic leaps.

Could we please, please just do the Latin chant? Could we please, please simply be a catholic church?

That time of year

It's getting to be the time of year that the Front Range is all about shades of brown.

Monday Mix

DollarSeed has organic seeds, a small but nice collection and the price is certainly right. HT, Redneck Rosarian, whose blog is a treasure for rose lovers.

What's wrong with this picture?

Wow. A sweater that can be worn twelve ways.

Over at Picturing Plants, I'm beginning to amass a little collection of carnivorous plants.

 

 

Monday Mix

Monday Mix has been on hiatus. Today it seems to be back.

How to get a job at a small company - I love Seth Godin's blog entry. He points out that jobs at Fortune 500 companies have latterly shown a net loss, so the place to think big is to apply small.

12 steps for gardeners in the fall - This is the way to prepare for beauty next year. Yeah, it's a lot of work, i.e. I probably won't be doing it. But she nails the program, if you're interested.

Melissa at A Contemplative Joy links to this article about Joan Didion. If ever you've suffered bereavement, Didion just might speak to you.

Today over at Picturing Plants, I feature an engrossing drawing by Ferdinand Bauer, a towering figure in the field of botanical illustration. I think you'll like it.

The glorious unlikely

My first swing at the title was "The glorious impossible" but that's not really true. Other gardeners have plenty of success with roses in Colorado, our municipal gardens being just one case in point.

But I don't. Of more than thirty roses I've planted, a handful remain, mostly miniatures which are tougher than you might think, given their diminutive size.

Not that this stops me from window shopping. The latest window at which I've found to slaver is Rogue Valley Roses. What a selection!

It's just as well that I'm not in a buying mood. My tastes continue to run toward the pale colors that are lovely under the grey skies of northwest Oregon, but that wash out completely in high altitude sunshine. Maybe you can take the gardener out of Oregon, but you can't take the Oregon out of the gardener.

I don't think this means I want to be repatriated. It's just that I sometimes long for the cucumbers of Egypt, in the form of lovely whites and palest pinks. So you'll find me browsing Rogue Valley Roses, soberly aware that for me rose growing has become "the glorious unlikely".

Red light

Loveland street corner.

"...the gala is actually corrupting"

Gala economics: Seth Godin nails it again.

Downtown Longmont

Yes, just this afternoon. That's our town. Other municipalities in Colorado seem to have succeeded at getting the new "pharmacies" to tone down their architectural embellishments. Call it Longmont's local colors.

Some blossoms remain

We've had some cool weather in the mountains, but not yet so cold that the last of the wildflowers are gone. Many birds have gone, which makes me wonder if winter will arrive early.

Keeping the talk going

Seth Godin's blog is one I follow pretty religiously. Today he has a great entry, Open conversations (or close them). It has many applications beyond the sales world.

Up top

A ways back in the Moraine this morning. No elk in sight; turns out they were hanging out at the RMNP sign: very convenient for park visitors in search of wildlife.

How many faces do you see?

There's a Facebook group to which I belong which is pretty much light-hearted. Pretty much, but occasionally things run off the rails into political territory.

This is a photo of one of the shelves that I see from my desk. Despite the bombast that sometimes occurs, it didn't seem quite in the spirit of things to post the photo to the group page. So I'm putting it here.

Grace

Yesterday I learned, unexpectedly quickly, that the biopsy taken from my right breast showed only benign cells. This was, for me, pure grace: an unmerited blessing for which I am deeply grateful. There are other graces, too, in this experience. One was the gentility and kindness of the medical staff I was blessed to have. Another was you, my friend, who carried me along with prayer and kind thoughts.

Today I am keenly aware that many women received different news yesterday, news that has upended their lives and will cause them to evaluate the friends who will be with them, no matter what. For them, for myself, and for you I pray these words of Lady Julian's:

“But all shall be well, and all shall be well, and all manner of thing shall be well.”

May we experience and appreciate this "shewing" of divine love in our lives.

Up at the park yesterday

Yesterday it was almost as busy in the park as it is on the weekends. And, yes, the bulls were in full throat.

Monday makeup

This little guy tickles me because it looks like he managed to get into some waterproof mascara.

Camera: 596; Patricia: 1

But who's counting?

A bad day of fishing is better than a good day of work

...or so I have heard it said.

Turning fear into fuel

Jonathan Fields blogged this topic today. It has some relevance to me this week, because a week from tomorrow I'll be having a breast biopsy. When this came up five years ago, I was almost too frightened to breathe. This time, I'm not best pleased at having to go through this, but I've been using some of the strategies Jonathan mentions to help me cope, especially mindfulness.

And I'm relying a lot on my friends. And do you know what? I saw one of my physicians today and he said he'd be praying for me. Extraordinary. Regardless of how this turns out (the mammogram was classed Bi-RADS 4 by the radiologist, but I'm not sure what kind of 4 it is), I'm a lucky woman. Blessed, you could say.

It's Fall

Color is coming to the high country and down on the plains creatures are on the move.

CR46

Plenty of trucks are rumbling along the road on the south side of the pond today. It's the last of the corn. You can tell it has been dry for a while because the dust kicks up in a beige fog. The creatures on the pond seem unperturbed, even when a tractor lets loose a long blast of its horn.

A pair

These are beginning to smell distinctly pear-like, which probably means that their days as "talent" are over ;-)

Sign

When these lovely creatures pass through, it's a sign that Autumn is near.

Outside and inside

This time of year, our days start out sunny, but in the afternoon it is not unusual for weather to blow down from the mountains. It can look dramatic. This wasn't bad; not more than a few raindrops, really. Just enough to be an inside day, instead of an outside one.

Roadside collection

Will winter come early this year? Already the roadside sunflowers are beginning to sign off for the summer, which makes me wonder.

Doubles

It was one of those days when I found nothing I was looking for, but everything one could possibly want.

Ide & Starbird No. 2

I've never before been close enough to see the color of the eyes.

Out on 95th

My friend Anne gave me a tip about a sunflower field. They used to be everywhere when we came to Colorado, but then came ethanol and cornfields. I hit the field a day or so past its prime, as you can see.

Downtown tonight

Tonight I met a couple of other photographers in town at the little garden there. They are both far more advanced than I and it was fun to watch their methods. Out of more than 250 shutter clicks, this is the one that catches my eye.

I wish I'd remembered to take a spray bottle with me and used my reflector, even though I embarrass myself when I try to fold that unwieldy thing up again. There are very few lighting situations when I shoot roses, imho, that it would not be better to trot out the reflector.

These are September's roses, kind of overblown and nibbled on, but still lovely. There's a metaphor there that I think I won't unpack :-)

On Golden Pond this morning

Seemed like it at the time

So apparently Colorado just passed its hottest August on record.

Fooling around

Art history online

It could be that I'll need to make up some art history courses. Smarthistory won't help with that, but it's a pretty interesting site.

Google+

Are you doing Google+? I am and would like to get some different circles going over there, including one for botanical art. If you're interested, please drop me a note or leave a comment.

Work in progress

...but at least it's working, sort of.

Today I finally gave up the idea of selling these things matted. The shipping expenses, not to mention matting materials, are simply too much. And shipping the 16x20s is a real PITA. So, for now, no mats.

Cutting back the oregano

The wisdom jar

My favorite summertime snack

Something about Rainier cherries just shouts "SUMMER!" to me. Most of the cherry trees of my growing up years were Bings, which is a perfectly nice variety. But I always favored Rainiers and still do.

This is from the sage plant that envelopes grows near the miniature roses.

Summer garden

The summer garden is beginning to come in: lots of salvia, rudbeckia, and a few Shasta daisies. The Johnson's geraniums are on the run because of the heat, but they'll be back in a month or so when the evenings get a little cooler again.

Making some changes

Late in February I decided to launch three "Picturing" blogs. Based on how these have been received (i.e., their traffic and income) I've decided to change from daily publication of Picturing Plants to three times a week. Picturing Angels and Picturing Birds will both move to month publication.

This seems like an admission of defeat and maybe it is. But much as I love historical illustration and much as I think it isn't seen enough on the Web, I need to clear more time for my own work. Job one there is getting prices revised and installing a shopping cart.

Making changes is something that's hard for me, so we'll see how this goes.

Butterflies don't read...

See this: Gardening with Binoculars: Royal Catchfly catches a Butterfly

Classes and critiques

The two-Saturday course I've just finished was with Colorado photographer Eli Vega. Check out his site for some really beautiful photos. These are the images that I submitted for critique:

 

 

Eli's main comment to me was that I "have a good eye", which was encouraging. I've been taking some workshops through Boulder Digital Arts and hope to do more.

I feel bad about needing to deface this photos in order to show them here. Google image searches have resulted in enough problems that I'm afraid this is the way forward. But I feel bad about it.

If you're interested in how some Christians are faring in China...

...read this.

Go, Rockies Todd

As I slide ever closer to the seventh decade of life, Todd Helton's durability impresses me more and more. What talent! What attitude!

Speaking of attitude, I'm in a brief workshop that suggests attendees show up with three or so photos for critique. My attitude, which ought to be an open mindset, is worried and insecure. If you have a thought, please drop me an email. Although I've had very good experiences with collegiate critiques, a workshop is a different animal and I feel intimidated.

Making peace with gardening in Colorado

There ought to be a group, seriously, for those of us who move here from other places and try to come to terms with the pure, un-rehabilitable clay. I'm not really gardening, to be truthful, but lately I've taken aim and thrown (literally: it isn't more than that) some things at the garden. You know, old standards like echinops for height and texture.

Anyway. At this time of year in my Oregon gardens, it was my habit to get up early and do a blossom count: ticking one for each variety of something blooming. I was greedy in my habits of collection and young and strong for things like double digging. It wasn't unusual for us to have more than a hundred different plants in bloom.

In the backyard of our Colorado house, I've tossed out a few things here and there, hoping for little and generally being rewarded in kind. Recently I've paid a bit more attention and found seventeen different plants in bloom. I'm mildly bothered that I no longer know the names of most of them, by which I mean their species. But I set out on a little count today and found 18 different things in bloom.

One big mistake I made when moving here was to try to continue my love affair with single roses -- you know, the ones that have only a row of petals. Colorado sun just cooks them, while their centifolia (100-petaled) relatives shine merrily on.

I don't love gardening here and maybe I never will. This is a great loss to me, a real sorrow. But it is good to look at what remains and now and again to do a blossom count.

This morning