Garden Update and a bit of the usual other stuff

 Most of the two dozen+ perennials I added to my little backyard garden strip are surviving, and some are even blooming, along with the roses I planted last year.  Yay!  And the roses out front, which came with the house, are also doing quite splendidly:

Pippin likes to check out the plants in the back yard from time to time:

Here is one of the roses I planted last year:

I'm afraid I've forgotten what this perennial is...I tossed all the labels....

Another rose that I planted is a floribunda called "Carefree Wonder":

One morning while inspecting the garden, I ran across this delightful little critter -- it's a jumping spider, and I do mean little, because this is way zoomed in.  I don't think it was even half an inch long.

Here is the clematis:

And here is Pippin relaxing in the garden:

More flowers are slowing starting to bloom so there will be another update soon.

And now for the Usual Other Stuff:  here is a drawing of an alleyway on the island of Santorini:

And here is an ink-and-watercolor sketch of some badlands area of unknown location:

And now for not-so-usual stuff:  on Thursday I drove to Yakima (about an hour away) to check out a used bookstore.  It was fabulous:

They also had a lot of antiques mixed in:

Parts of it reminded me of Aziraphale's bookshop in Good Omens.  I liked it very much, and bought a few books (though I didn't get any of the antiques).

Back to the more usual stuff:  wiener group walks!  On Saturday the dachshund club walked at Chiawana Park in Pasco, while one of the riverboats sailed past:

Pippin's girlfriend was out of town, but we met a new dog:  a longhaired blond named Winston!  

Truman's best buddy up in Seattle is also a longhaired blond dachshund named Winston.  How cool is that?  Pippin liked him, too:

So that was fun.  

And that's my report.

May you all have as usual or unusual a week as you want to have!

Into the Wild...Well, Okay, Into Wenatchee....

Day trip!  Last Tuesday I actually ventured forth from my beloved bubble (AKA "home") for a day-long road trip that took me and a Friend Who Shall Not Be Named all of 119 miles northwards, more or less, to the 35,000-population city of Wenatchee.

The main target was Ohme Gardens, which I'd vaguely heard of as a lovely spot and a star attraction of the area.  This was a private home decades ago, which the owners donated to the county, and which turned out not to be what I consider a "garden" at all.

Instead, it was nine acres and a mile's worth of stone paths and steps on a steep hillside with evergreens and wildflowers.  No flower beds, no flowering shrubs, nothing but trees and rocks.  Lots and lots of rocks.

There were several manmade pools scattered up and down the STEEP hillside:

I will admit that the viewpoints were grand, but it was not my idea of a garden, and with an $8 entry fee, it was rather on the disappointing side of things overall.

And there were an awful lot of stone steps.  So many steps that we were offered the use of hiking poles at the entrance.  Naturally, I have my own walking staff, which I made good use of, but the Friend Who Shall Not Be Named borrowed one of the poles and even then refused to go down some of the VERY STEEP paths (not shown...this is a mild one).

That's her up at the top of those rocks, refusing to go farther:

The pools had stone benches to rest on, which was a really good idea.

After an hour of playing mountain goats, we scrambled on out of there and returned to the city proper, more or less.  The reason the Friend is not named is because she turned out to be the world's worst navigator, and despite having both the GPS directions on her phone AND a physical map, she got me turned round on wrong streets going the wrong way so often that eventually I just started doing the opposite and managed to get where I wanted to be.

My long held belief is that the person driving (ME) focuses on the road while the passenger's duty is to navigate.  The Friend admitted, halfway through this little adventure during which I spent around six hours behind the wheel, that she had "a very bad sense of direction."  Ah.  Good to know.  Even better to know it BEFORE heading off into the hinterlands where you've never been before and where the city planners decided logical street signs were optional.

Ahem.  Okay, so we survived, obviously.  And after I took over navigational duties, we even got to our next destination -- downtown Wenatchee.

There we encountered my next mild disappointment -- the public market.  I'd been told by other friends who shall not be named that it was a fabulous place full of fun stuff.  What I found was a few restaurants, wine (which I don't drink), beer (which I don't drink), a tiny amount of fresh produce, a handful of gift shops of no distinction whatsoever, and a cheese shop where I couldn't buy cheese because I hadn't brought a cooler.

Sigh. 

One of the restaurants had outdoor seating, so at least we got lunch, which I'm happy to say was excellent, and which The Friend duly paid for.  On the way out, I had a hankering for a small something in the way of chocolate for dessert, and spied some handmade truffles at one of the gift shops but naturally, just as I approached, a customer standing in the narrow aisle right in front of the truffles started coughing.

Double sigh.  I left without chocolate.  HOWEVER, lest you think this was the Day Trip of Doom All Round, wait!  It wasn't!  Things began to turn towards the better when we went in search of an antique mall that I had reconnoitered online beforehand.  It turned out to be just as advertised, unlike the garden that was not a garden.  It was, in fact, stuffed full of fun and fabulous objects from days of yore.

I was fascinated by this cookie jar set from The Wizard of Oz, which had ten in all, for a mere $2500 total:

I did not buy them.  I'm not that fond of the movie.  But there were also books!

I did buy these two books:

And I bought these two marvelous pelican salt and pepper shakers, seen here on display on my kitchen windowsill.  Wahoo!

Serendipity struck as I was searching for a parking spot on the crowded downtown main drag of Wenatchee where the antique mall stood -- I couldn't find one, so I drove around the block to park farther away, and right by that parking spot was a used bookstore that I didn't know about.  Whee!  So I dragged the Friend in there, too, and I bought three more books, AND the place was selling HANDMADE CHOCOLATES.  Score!

They were absolutely scrumptious.

Then we drove home.  Wenatchee is not reachable by normal, simple routes.  You have to navigate a series of odd turns and backroads and at one point you have to drive east for several miles in order to go west and that sort of nonsense, and you have to do things like that for a good hour before you manage to get to a sensible highway that goes where you actually want to be.  So, having experienced The Friend's map-reading skills on the way TO Wenatchee, I decided that on the drive FROM Wenatchee that I would ignore the bulk of her instructions and just wing it on my own sense of direction.

Most likely, if I had not done so, we'd be in Seattle by now.

Next time I get a weird urge to go on a road trip, I will be taking the Hounds instead.  They have wonderful senses of direction  (HOME IS THIS WAY).   Yup.

Okay, so that was the big adventure for the week.  Nothing else happened other than the usual dog walks, the usual Looking at the Egret on the Riverbank, and sketching.  

This first sketch is a view from the French village of Ternand.  I have an acquaintance who is an ex-pat living in Lyons, and she likes to wander around exploring places when she's not working, and she likes to post photos to her Instagram, and the sketch group enjoys checking out those pics for possible drawing material.  She has a good eye for fun details like this downspout:

She also likes to venture farther afield and is currently visiting the Greek island of Santorini, so expect to see some of those views here soon.

For the other drawing session, I wanted to use the gray toned paper again, and found this lovely gargoyle image.  This turned out quite nicely -- I used black ink pens and some water-soluble brush pens in various gray shades, along with a bit of white gouache:

This coming week I have no plans to go anywhere, and hope to enjoy hanging out in my little bubble away from the World and away from Mildly Disappointing Places.

May you all have a lovely week ahead, and may you not make any wrong turns!

Back to the Refuge

 It's been a while since I visited the McNary National Wildlife Refuge (which is about 11 miles away in Burbank).  I tend to avoid it in Spring because it gets quite buggy, but one day last week I felt like venturing farther afield, and there was a light breeze, which can keep down the bugginess, so I tootled off.

It turned out to be quite a lovely day, with nearly no bugs to speak of, and more birds than I anticipated seeing.  One of my faves was out on the water -- the Ruddy Duck, with its fabulous blue bill and perky tail:

Nearby was this Cinnamon Teal:

There were plenty of Yellow-headed Blackbirds in the reeds:

The highlight, though, was an avocet that flew in and landed on the path, and strolled about for several minutes.  I had never seen one of these splendid birds completely out of the water before.  Check out those legs!

Normally I only see them wading or swimming.

I had stopped at a park nearby to look for Ospreys on a nesting platform there, without any luck, but got to see one flying overhead instead:

And the Barn Swallows were busy swooping about -- I was happy to have one land briefly:

I had brought lunch along, and Truman and Pippin and I enjoyed a rest on the refuge  headquarters balcony, where I ate and they watched attentively.

On a different outing, closer to home, I spied this lovely female Common Merganser on the Columbia River:

And the Great Egret that's been frequenting that riverside park was back fishing several days last week.  The fish it catches are rather on the small side.  Here's a pic of one:

Last but hardly least, on yet another outing to a different park on the Yakima River, I got to see this delightful Lark Sparrow -- it was eating a dandelion.

It seems appropriate that after such a birdy week, one of our art session pictures should be a heron:

The second session pic was not a bird.  My fellow Zoom artists chose a picture of a fungus to draw, which I did not find inspiring.  I decided to do a google image search for lighthouses, one of my favorite subjects, and found an unusual one to try.  It's a still from a 2019 film called, simply enough, The Lighthouse.  The picture was dark and gloomy and menacing, with no details in the figures.  I had a good time drawing this, using ink and watercolor on gray toned paper:

Quite different from my typical drawings!

That's it for the roundup.  Have a great week out there!