Tag: Houndstooth

Mood: Monday

Happy Earth Day 2024! I have few details to provide about the creator of this art. I paid for and downloaded it digitally from the Etsy account Unlimited Extra, where it’s listed as Earth Day 2024: Everyday, Protect Environment, Save The Planet.

Every day should be Earth Day for sure. I hope you find a way to honor and provide stewardship of our beautiful planet today. I’ll shoot and add photos to this post later to show a little of Nature’s beauty at Houndstooth Hall.


Growth returning after I pruned these a few months back.

Scenes from Debby’s work around Fairy Cottage.

Some of Tim’s plants in the Hall’s front beds.

Tom always prunes the lantana after it freezes, and this one is already flourishing.

And in the other bed, this one always blooms later and is starting that now.

A peek at the tops of the mimosa and magnolia trees from the back yard.

Every morning…

…I play games. It began with one game, Spelling Bee, in my news feed. I didn’t play it the way other people played it. I had a single goal (there can be several with this game), and I waited until the next day to learn if I’d accomplished my goal (you can get immediate online solutions from many sources, but for me, waiting was a deliberate exercise in patience). I thought of the game as my mental acuity test: How well is my brain working this morning?

Through my same newsfeed, I started checking out Connections, and I was surprisingly good at it and got even better over time. Occasionally, I only correctly guess all four groups because the fourth is made up of my leftover choices, but once I see the answer, it makes sense, and I realized I sometimes have to put my logic aside and try to guess the game creators’ logic.

When the online game Wordle took off in 2022, I briefly glanced at it, but it didn’t grab me at the time. I knew several people who played, including Tom, Jim, and Timmy. Then, for whatever reason, Jim, Timothy, and I began talking about Wordle since Jim played it, and the next thing that happened was that both Tim and I began playing, and he, Jim, and I began sharing our game results in our ongoing text thread.

Online games are a slippery slope. Among the three of us, we are now playing and sharing our scores for:

And those include daily and weekly Quordle, and daily and deluxe Waffle. Other than Framed, all of them are word games (none of us, as far as I know, has interest in Sudoku, which is Tom’s numbers game, and so far, we haven’t ventured into any online crosswords games). We each have our games we’re strongest at, and let me assure you, Framed, in which you get six chances to identify a film based on six still photos from that film, is NOT my strong game. To entertain myself despite my abysmal ignorance of so many movies, I make up titles or choose actual movie titles that are so far from the actual movie that I have a secret hope the game creators have some kind of algorithm that provides them with the worst/silliest guesses.


However, it’s possible Framed has had a different impact on me. I’ve become aware of a lot of movies I might enjoy, and as a result. I’ve decided the summer months, when Houston’s heat is so daunting, will officially be  Ethan Hawke Summer. When I need a mid-afternoon writing break, and I want some passive entertainment, I’ve started a list of Ethan Hawke movies the dogs and I can watch together.

As long as Ethan doesn’t interfere with my morning games (they take about fifteen minutes total to play) and my daily writing/research or cause me to burn things in the kitchen, this should work out (and possibly save me from some of the trauma of election season).

Respect

Respect, 2007

One day, back at The Compound, I picked up a fresh 4×6-inch canvas and chose my paint colors, only realizing sometime into my painting that I was being influenced by the painting on the wall behind me.


It was a painting my father gave me, which I suppose one might call an unpaid commission, since I said, “Please paint me a city.” I gave him no other parameters, and this is the large canvas he painted and gifted to me. I’m SO, SO glad I gave no input, because nothing I could have said would have been as beautiful and perfect for me as this abstract is. It has traveled and lived with me since, and now it hangs over the fireplace in the library at Houndstooth Hall, where I get to enjoy it every single day.

 

Recently, when we celebrated my birthday, Rhonda and Lindsey gave me this great coloring book, The Reverse Coloring Book, from Kendra Norton. The colors are there, and the person coloring the page gets to decide how to use the shapes and colors to create their own work of art.

This page made me think of The City, so it’s the one I chose to work on in honor of today’s date. April 18 is when my father died in 1985. I know I’m one of the most fortunate people in the world not only to have endless memories of a good father (and trust me, having endured my teenage years, my father might be surprised at how I always praise him), but also so many tangible memories of his creativity. I never went inside a museum until I was in my thirties, but I’d long been prepared to fall in love with art.

I’ve seen some great versions of that coloring page online with people using pen and inks, adding architectural features to the buildings, and even including some foliage at the ground level. I chose to keep mine simple and make it another homage to my father’s.

Thank you, Daddy.

Button Sunday

April 6 was National Tartan Day. Though I’ve s-l-o-w-l-y come to embrace my sister’s research that showed our lineage is Scottish, not Irish, which I was told all my life, information given to me by my college running buddy Kathy about Thomas Cochrane, tenth earl of Dundonald, whose burial place she saw at Westminster Abbey, helped pique my interest. You can see a little of the Cochrane tartan on that button.

And you can see how that interest in our Scottish side led me to this. I still keep these dolls in their kilts on display in the writing sanctuary every day. Muses.

I misdated this post so it published on Saturday instead of Sunday. I went back and put my actual Saturday post where it was supposed to be, corrected this one to April 7, and noted that National Tartan Day was April 6. Computers and me sometimes…

Saturday’s Belated Birthday Brunch


Rhonda, Lindsey, and Pepper joined Tom, Debby, Timothy, me, and the hounds for a brunch celebrating my March birthday. There was food, conversation, cake, present-opening (The Brides brought gifts for all the birthdays missed in December, February, and the upcoming May birthday because they won’t be here), and then there were games and more conversations.

Timothy, Lindsey wearing her houndstooth Chucks, Rhonda, Tom, and Debby enduring me taking another photo when they just wanted to eat.

A really fun and much needed day with friends that I appreciated so much!

Whirly Pigs


A very sweet friend sent a strand of wooden Whirly Pigs for my birthday. She knew and loved Aaron, making this a perfect addition to Aaron’s Garden.

I forgot to take pictures during the daylight after Tom hung it, so the lighting isn’t great. When the wind blows, the feathers become spinners. I can’t wait to see it in action when we get a good breeze. I’ve collected pigs most of my life, and feathers are a reminder of Aaron that his mother once shared with me.

Thank you so much! ❤️

Song Challenge: Day 27

Today’s song challenge is “a song that breaks your heart.” For me, that song is the Carole King composition “You’ve Got a Friend.” I own it by at least three artists, and I no longer listen to it. There’s nothing at all wrong with the song; it’s as beautiful to me as it ever was. But a moment came in my life when hearing “You’ve Got a Friend” evoked a lyric from a different song, the Jackson Browne composition “These Days”: Please don’t confront me with my failures/I had not forgotten them.

I’m not linking to either song. I had a great birthday yesterday, and today I’d like to pick up where I was in my manuscript. I don’t want to be derailed by melancholy.

On a lighter note, in February, I received “The Beatles Coloring Book” from Nurse Lisa in Iowa. Below are a series of photos showing the evolution of the first picture I colored from it and finally finished this week (working on it sporadically for the last five-plus weeks).


The cover of the Beatles’ Abbey Road album.


The cover of the coloring book Lisa sent.


My first coloring included the title and the Volkswagen.


Finished page!


Framed and hanging on the wall in the writing sanctuary, a little birthday gift to myself yesterday.

When I wrote A Coventry Wedding, I scattered Easter eggs (an “Easter egg” is defined as “a little extra something that authors hide in their books for readers to find”) throughout the book. In A Coventry Wedding, the Easter eggs were allusions to Beatles’ lyrics meant as gifts for Riley to find when he read the novel. Sadly, Riley died before the book’s release, five months before my mother died in 2008. The novel came out later than scheduled because the editor gave me an extension so I could focus on Mother during her final months while I was also grieving Riley’s loss. It doesn’t require a therapist to recognize that I haven’t tried to get another full-length work of fiction published since 2009 or that it took me ten years to even begin writing novels again.

Some of the Easter eggs in A Coventry Wedding alluded to songs on Abbey Road. Off the top of my head, those include “She Came In Through The Bathroom Window” and “Mean Mr. Mustard.” From that album, here’s my deliberately-chosen song “Carry That Weight” (in which the Beatles sample another song from Abbey Road, “You Never Give Me Your Money”). All kinds of writers have a little fun with their work sometimes. In fact, I’ve just written a scene with a character analyzing Easter eggs in a screenwriter’s music video.

Song Challenge: Day 15

Today’s challenge is “a song you like that’s a cover by another artist.” This just serves as a reminder to myself that I haven’t replaced one of my favorite drowned albums, as pictured here after the Harvey flood of 2017.

The song is “Blue Bayou,” written by Roy Orbison and Joe Melson and covered by Linda Ronstadt. Here’s a live version.