Mixed Bag

 I really didn't know what to title this post.   The three portraits are from my book club meeting this evening,  but then so were the mish-mash of drawings on the next page.  I didn't count these as individual drawings because they were all sort of one stream of consciousness doodle done while I was really thinking about the discussion.

 On the left is a tangerine that someone was getting ready to eat, someone's lovely necklace, an apple core, and the tangerine's skin after it was peeled.  At the bottom right was the beginning of a shoe drawing, but the shoe was moved completely and never returned to its original position.

 After the meeting I felt like I needed some more drawing, this time a bit more focused.  So I scooped three lemons out of the fridge and did contour drawings of them twice.

I'm not really happy with the paper in this little journal.  I used up some paper left over from a project when I made the journal, and it was a poor choice.  Insufficiently sized, it bleeds through sometimes, and the surface is never predictable.  Even my super fine point V-ball catches and blots from time to time.  I'm also finding the size a little too small!  I used to love this tiny size, but maybe it's the combination of unpredictable paper surface and tiny size that make me race through this book so that I can get back to the size I'm more comfortable with these days and a paper that lets me control my lines more.  Of course this is a good opportunity to let go of some control, so I'm trying to practice being slightly uncomfortable with drawing, very interesting!

First Day of Spring-- Really

Today felt like the first real day of spring, the day when socks feel so heavy and muffling and dreary and all the clothes I've been wearing day after day suddenly look ridiculously dark and heavy.  Of course I needed to venture out to the new trail because I know that in a matter of weeks this not-exactly-trail will be so overgrown and buggy and snakey that I will need a machete to hack my way through.  I want to map the places where I still get unsure, one of them right at the beginning when the trail leaves the flat clay deposit place and takes off into the dry grasses.  I missed the cutoff three times, and each time I thought I had gone too far.  Finally I went far enough and found it.  Here are two maps/sketches to help in identifying where the new trail starts:  On the left is the view down the cut off, two identical baby pine trees across from one another and a group of four young not-pine trees over to the right.  And on the right is a map of steps between landmarks so I will remember to go far enough -- around 350 steps from the clay place-- even though all the landmarks are overgrown.

 We didn't go any further than the beginning of the trail today, but went home our usual way on Charlie's Spring Trail.  But today I noticed that the chimney is just barely visible through the trees at one point.  At the top it's peeking through trees off in the distance.

At home, Jesse was enjoying the first really springy day, too.  He started out sitting on the picnis table bench watching the backyard and grooming his paws.

Then he slouched over on one elbow in his favorite leisure cat posture, still watching the backyard for territorial infringements such as Ghengis or wild turkeys.

Then we both went outside and I sat on the back steps while he sat on a paving stone.  Then he wandered over to the small deck and sauntered off down the stairs.

Jacob, Lambies, Another Ramble

Late morning at Over Easy, Jacob at the table waiting for our order and taking closeups of things such as reflections of objects in the tea shot through a glass of water.  Beautiful pictures!

Later at a meeting, one of the cups on the table, the bird feeder outside the window.

Driving home from the meeting I discovered that the sheep have had lambies!--  about half a dozen tiny lambs, many hunkered down in the newly-green grass, their ears blowing in the wind.  Happily the mothers' wool has grown in and they look a lot more comfortable out in the windy cold.

Salaman, the watch donkey, came up to the fence to watch me watch the sheep.  She turned away after a few minutes and I drew her departure.  A big wooly sheep and two lambs are on the other page

And of course I can't let a sunny, if cold and windy, afternoon slip by without a foray into the woods.  I've never yet found the shelter from the chimney, and the chimney is very close to my house.  Since we came down from the shelter via the slope down to the trail that the chimney is on, it seems that I should be able to get up there from the chimney, right?  Not so.  I did mark on my map the exact location where I left the trail, in between the cut log and the rhododendron slick.  Keeping the chimney to my left, I skirted the brambles by going around the chimney to my right.  Then I knew I should veer back toward the chimney as I got up the slope and out of the brambles, but when I did that I think I veered too far left because the ridge that I finally got to looked nothing like the ridge that the shelter sits on.  Plus when I turned a bit more to the left, I ran into the Charlie's Spring trail.  I was happy to meet up with the trail, curious about how I went wrong yet again.  But then again, M has never walked to the shelter from the chimney either, so we didn't retrace our path the other day.

Next plan-- walk from the overlook and along the river as M and I did the other day.  Blaze a trail after leaving the gully.  Take really good and detailed notes.  Use a compass to stay southeast, as the map says I should go to reach the chimney.  Take photographs when I get the chimney in view.  Be very attentive of the path that I hack through the brambles as I descend the slope.

Eating with Phones

At Greenlife Cafe this evening while waiting with P for D and H to arrive, I did these fast fast drawings of cafe customers who were eating while doing things with their phones.

Every person in the cafe who was alone at a table was eating while looking at a phone, except for one guy who was reading a book and at the same time running his finger around on his plate and then licking it.  What conclusions can possibly be drawn?

Ta Dah!

 In spite of a looming sky and predicted rain, my friend-who-found-the-hut and I set out early this afternoon ready for whatever fell out of the sky and determined to persist until we found the hut.  We had talked beforehand when we had decided to put this walk off as it looked so dark and threatening, and I had asked her a few more questions to try and figure out why the hut kept eluding me and I kept landing on Tony's driveway.  Drawing 2017 is the map I sketched while we talked.  A few minutes later she called me back and said nothing was coming down, and we decided to just GO.

 We walked the by-now familiar trail leading to the river and along the south bak.  We passed some early toothwort leaves and the treacherous pile of logs that must be scrambled over in order to continue along the trail as it leaves the river.

 Since I want to be able to walk this trail by myself and not get so wretchedly lost I made copious maps and notes as we walked.  I realize these are as inscrutable as the glyphs on yesterday's little woodworm-eaten stick.

 As we came to the crucial ending of the trail, M. picked her way along, remembering clues from the only time she had ever walked this way.  She has a great memory, because in spite of seeing this trail only once before, she could tell from the kind of ground cover (crowfoot/ground cedar) when to start bearing east.   We found the spot and headed left up the bank of the gully.  After a few yards we crested a ridge, and there in front of us was:

The Shelter!  This drawing does not do it justice.  It's a primitive lean-to kind of thing, very sturdy with walls of branches packed with about 12 inches of dry leaves.  Its ridgepole is touching a tall, straight tree, and the pole slopes toward the ground in the back.  Large patches of bark (we could see a nearby dead tree that had a stripped trunk) covered sections of the hut.  Inside it smelled wonderful, like leaves and grass, not at all mouldy or sinister.  It was just big enough inside for a single person to stretch out in a sleeping bag.  The floor was made of compacted dry leaves.  The openings on either side of the tree trunk were barely big enough for a person to squeeze in, too small for a bear to enter.

Nearby were a fire pit with some charred wood and a sort of wood-drying rack shown here.  Sticks were leaning against each other along a post slanted against a tree.  It looked like a small hut, but we think from its location that it was a firewood supply.  There were absolutely no signs of anyone having been there recently except the charred wood.

We were convinced we had seen another hut through the woods a short distance away, so we walked over there after a while.  It turned out to be the branches of an enormous felled tree that were shaped like a teepee when viewed head on from the gully we had walked in.  On the right and bottom I sketched the walk that we made to get home, down the ridge, through some brambles, and alongside the chimney to the trail.

When I got home there was a letter from my penpal grandson Nate with a big yellow circle made of fun foam used as a sticker on the back, and Jesse lay in a tangle of legs and paws on his bed.  A fine afternoon!

Subject Matter Doesn't Really Matter When It Comes to Drawing

I didn't get home tonight until a little after nine, and I had left home this morning at a little before 8.  It was a very long day, packed with interesting things, but drawing wasn't one of them.  This was a night when I would NOT have drawn if I had not been posting!  I had no ideas about what to draw.  So I started sketching an apple I was eating, at different stages.  That felt really quite good.  And then I spied a homely raw carrot left over from lunch.  I got so involved in drawing it, trying to use the fewest possible marks to render it.  I felt like I was enobling it or something, paying so much focused attention to this little scrubby thing.  I loved paring away everything except what felt essential.

Another Attempt to FInd the Elusive Hut, and Motorcycle Mannequins are Back!

Driving down Tunnel Road/ Hwy 70 this afternoon I spied the motorcycle mannequins for the first time this season, and they were  wearing pants this year!  Last year they were always just dressed super casually in long tee shirts with no pants that I could see.  I like to imagine the little old man who runs the shop dressing the mannequins before he puts them outside to browse among the motorcycles in his front lot.  It's still pretty cold for these girls, but they were standing in the chilly breeze looking stoic. 

Later a friend and I made another attempt to find the hut.  This time I chose to retrace the original directions, and we did great until the wretched path ended.  I've decided that's where I go wrong.  I think the path actually goes on a bit more, but since I'm expecting it to end, I see a trail end when it's really just a dense spot in a trail that continues a bit more.  My friend thought the path kept going but by them I was fixated on Going Due East and that's what we did.  We ended up in another wrong place, but we did find some very pretty scenery and an intriguing stick that has glyph -like marks etched on it by woodworms.  It looks like a primitive language.  At one point on the non-trail we looked across a very deep gully and through the woods on the other side I spied my CAR, so I know where we were relative to the lower down trail.  We came out of the woods on an old ivy-covered road bed that dumped us right behind Tony's tadpole ponds.  At the far side of the pond sits a cast concrete bench with lovely Etruscan-looking rams supporting the bench part.

Stay tuned.  I know I'm circling closer to the hut!  And thanks for all the encouraging comments last night and today!