Smokey Mountain Breakdown

Well. It's been almost a year since I posted. I'm a slacker. I've been neglecting Buzznet and Flikr so it's not just the blog.

You know, I'm still pissed off about Katrina.

But I'm much more at ease now that the balance of power has been restored in Washington. I stayed up all night waiting for the mid-term election results to come in. Woo-Boy-Howdy...I was doing the happy hillbilly dance of joy!

I feel much safer now. So, I can start writing again. Hopefully more about this strange place I live which just seems to never get boring.

I've been paring down on the livestock. I just have one chicken left. He is named "Mr. Chicken". I only have three geese left. Some of them flew off the 300 foot cliff just outside my back door and landed in the cow pasture. They are still down there but have now become community geese. I wish the three I have left would join them. It's damn near impossible to navigate the yard without landing in goose poop. I've decided to focus on the goats and the dogs.

I have two gorgeous new Nubian bucks. The herd is up to 10 head now and my new boys have bred all the does. I'm expecting kids in January. Not the greatest time for babies since it is pretty chilly here in late January and early February. I'm probably going to have to pull the doe kids and bring them in the house to bottle raise. So I'll have babies running about in diydies and onesies. I was planning to put Lucky in the freezer, but I just haven't been able to bring myself to do the deed. My freezer is also completely full of veggies from this past summer's garden so there is no room for cabritto. The garden was almost too successful and I was really busy with it all summer. My brandywine tomatoes did especially well and I put up about two dozen quarts of marinara sauce. I've got my eye on some unusual French winter squash for next year. I always bite off more than I can chew with that damn garden. It's a gang of work for one person weeding and tending a quarter acre plot. My watermelons were amazing this year! And the pumpkins were great too! I made some outstanding pies with the pumpkins. They were heirloom stock from a local garden. I got some amazing sunflowers and got some really good photos of bees on them. I think they are up on both Flikr and Buzznet.

When things are so beautiful...you just want to stay alive and enjoy it all.

The start of bear season kicked off. Big Creek Market and Deli has a hand-written sign on the front door proclaiming that they will be open at 5 a.m. for bear hunters. Heard a guy from Knoxville got a really big one on the first day out. I have my request in to a bear hunter to get me a big tub of bear fat. I'm going to render it down and make some soap with it. That's the other thing I've gotten really caught up in over the past year. Making soap. I sell it on my petfinder site to support the cocker spaniel rescue. One of my more successful batches involved getting local raw honey and wax from the beekeeper down the road.

I finished the Angel Dogs Calendar and it's up on Cafe Press. I'm sort of embarrassed by the Angel Dogs thing. I mean, I spend boucoup de years getting my MFA and all those years as a wigmaster for film and television, costume designer...blah, blah, blah... and I actually do know what good art looks like. I'm actually capable of doing good art. And I end up sticking wings on dogs in heaven. An artist friend described them as being frighteningly rococco. And it's true. They are. But people really like them and pay me money to do them. And I don't have to mess up the studio getting my watercolors and prismacolors out. I do have some standards. I draw the line at "sofa-sized" paintings.

Though I do feel I need a break from photoshop and illustrator. I wish there was a life studies class closer than Asheville. I really need a tune-up on my human figure work. It's just not the same working from books and photos. Even the losest, sketchiest life drawings look better than working from photos. I had one that I did during the class at Rythymfest one year that I really loved. Which is unusual for me since I don't usually get attached to my studies. I liked that one though.

Anyway...that's what's been going on...at least part of it for me. I'm going to start working more on the stories.

So...my apologies to all of you who have written saying you've read the stories over and over and want more. I'm going to start afresh tomorrow. I think it may be an introspective piece. Who I am, where I am, and how that's workin' out for me.