Drizzly Days

The Dachshund Channel

There are only so many ways I can entertain myself on cloudy/cold, rainy/drizzly days, and we had a bunch of them last week.  In fact, last Friday it SNOWED.  I ask you!  The temps have struggled mightily to climb above 40-45 degrees.  Did the great Pacific Northwest miss the Spring memo?

So I watch a lot of The Dachshund Channel, a private entertainment source.   Truman and Pippin have different energy levels but once or twice a day they are on the same page and want to romp around.

As you can see from the short video below, Pip is big enough now to hold his own and even dominate his older pal.  Tru is not too sure what to make of it all.

Dachshunds, however, sleep a lot, too, and then they are not quite so entertaining.  One needs more than dogs to fill 16 drizzly hours a day.

Non-Drizzly Birds and Where To Find Them

Luckily, we did get a few brief breaks here and there, during which I dashed out to run errands, or race around the block with the Hounds in an effort to beat the next shower.  One day we even managed to get to Magnuson Park, where we found the Last of the Winter Birds lolling about the ponds.

Look at that sky--blue holes! (But it was chilly, of course.)

Ring-necked Ducks are one of the Winter visitors and we found several who had not gotten the Spring memo yet.  With snow and 40 degrees, who can blame them for delaying the northward flight?

The Green-winged Teal also found Seattle more to their liking then the frozen tundra. 

Pippin is fascinated by birds of all sorts.  Truman, who has been on many, many birdwatching outings, has learned that birds are BORING.

The U.S. Reading Project

My current reading project (I have others, trust me) is to read one nonfiction book about each of the fifty U.S. states.  Subject can be anything--history, travel, memoir, nature--as long it is about each specific state.  Researching and choosing each title provided hours of fun (well, I thought it was fun, other people mostly scratch their heads when I explain it). 

I started a month ago and have now finished the "A" states.  I read:

Alabama: One Big Front Porch (Kathryn Windham)
Quaint, enjoyable tales of local history and culture

Coming Into the Country (John McPhee) [Alaska]
Outdated and overlong; best part was a wilderness canoe trip

Going Back to Bisbee  (Richard Shelton)
Part memoir, part history as the author takes a meandering southwestern Arizona road trip

Arkansas/Arkansaw: How Bear Hunters, Hillbillies, and Good Ol' Boys Defined a State (Brooks Blevins)
Fascinating study of how the image of Arkansas developed over the centuries

I'm now reading California's Frontier Naturalists (Richard Beidleman).  I just finished a section that gave me pause.  Why, do you ask?  Well, I will tell you!

In a description of an early 1800s exploration voyage, the author tells us about one of the ship's naturalists, a fellow named Adelbert von Chamisso.  The brief bio includes the information that Chamisso served as page to the Prussian queen Louise, fought with the Prussian army, studied philosophy and literature, moved to France to hang with Madame de Stael's famous social circle where he somehow fell in love with botany and got good enough to go on a Russian expedition to the American west coast.  Afterwards he became a famous author of stories and poems while superintending the Royal Botanic Gardens in Berlin and in his spare time became an authority of Australasian languages, penned the first poems in German on American Indians, and compiled a book on Hawaiian grammar.

The reason this gave me pause is because it's not uncommon--I often encounter similar biographies of 17th-19th century people with inquisitive natures who manage to become experts in multiple fields, fluent in three or more languages, and authors of impressive tomes while whiling away their spare hours performing concert-level tunes on obscure instruments previously mastered only by Tibetan yak herders.

This sort of information tends to make me feel a tad indolent.  Of course, those people didn't have the Home & Gardening TV Network or YouTube.  Which I imagine is the point.  While I don't have cable TV, I obviously have the Internet, and some days I feel I ought to be doing something more useful with my oodles'o'free time than watching cute dachshund vids and playing trivia games and flicking through Facebook wondering when something interesting will show up there. 

So I am in search of Projects.  Rainy day/Drizzly day, Cloudy/Cold day, Wintry Can't Go Outside day Projects that don't involve sitting on my duff in front of a screen.  Please help!  Send ideas!  Is there an App for that??

When In Doubt, Shut Up and Paint

Because it was Not Nice Enough to go outside this past week for more than short dog walks, I came up with a new Indoor Sketching subject:  Lighthouses! 

I don't like drawing from photos (especially other people's photos).  But after the Drawing People exercise a while back, I realized what I needed was subject matter I actually cared about.  DUH.

And I adore lighthouses!  I have drawn and painted lots of them from my own photos.  So this week I went looking for new ones, and found a terrific site:  lighthousefriends.com, for all your lighthouse sketching needs.

The site has state-by-state lists of all the lighthouses you could ever want to draw, with multiple photos for each one, some of them historical.  It's fab.

I did these all directly with pen, because it was more challenging that way, and I figured it was good practice for when I'm out and about in the real world trying to draw buildings without wriggly off-kilter lines.  Drawing in pencil first just wastes time, and the only time I do it is if I'm not going to use pen at all, but only watercolor.

Look at all those non-wriggly lines!  Whoo hoo!  (Though if you look closely, you can find off-kilter lines...I just covered them up with paint.)

The forecast for this entire coming week is DRIZZLY RAINY CLOUDY COOL IT'S NOT REALLY SPRING YET HA HA FOOLED YOU.  So there will be lots more lighthouses.  Possibly from the next states or provinces (the site includes Canada) in alphabetical order.

The rest of the time I will be thinking thinky thoughts about learning a foreign language or three, taking harpsichord lessons, and studying the linguistic intricacies of hieroglyphics.  And then I will go bake some chocolate chip cookies instead. 

Have a full and formative week!