Photo 1:  The water has gone down and I was able to put a camera down into the hole that was emitting the sound of water dropping into a pool.  I showed the photo to Mike and he immediately identified what is going on.  It’s a broken tile.  The hay-field had tile for drainage installed sometime in the seventies.  Then about twenty dump truck loads of soil were unloaded on the field and spread.  As you can see from the photo, this particular tile has failed.  It’s about two feet below the surface.

Photo 2:  Critter chew marks.  We’re thinking beaver? 

Photo 3:  Catawba tree.  I love the shape of this tree.  Unfortunately its pollen is highly allergenic, so I won’t be planting any.

Photo 4:  Thistle, marked for destruction.  Mike has been diligently removing these whenever he finds them, so the population has been slowly decreasing.

This is pretty interesting.  Photo 1 is of the wet weather spring in the distance.  Today was the first time I could actually see where the water is bubbling up. 

Photo 2 is of the spring I noticed first, because it is big and you can see the sand fountaining up from the source.  At first I thought it was a crawdad digging.

Photo 3 is a close up.

Photo 4 is an unsuccessful attempt to photograph the sand bubbling up in the spring.

Photo 5 is a view of the spring water flow pattern.  And yes, that is a concern.

Photo 6 is what probably started out as critter holes, but when you get up close to it, you can hear that just underground, water is flowing/trickling quickly into an underground pool!  Mike was worried I might sink into the ground when I was standing here.

Photo 7 shows some idea of where it’s located.

As long as the house doesn’t sink into the ground, I’m pretty thrilled about this.

P.S.  The volunteer fire department just came for their yearly donation.  I had been holding some money aside for them since December, when they usually come, and was just about to give up on them and spend the money.  So…last year it was “Fields of Fire.”  This year it appears it will be “Fields of Water.” 

…chases the doubt away. 

I am ambidextrous.

This drawing and the drawing of the girl were sitting forgotten in the basement.  Unfortunately for me, if it’s out of sight, it’s out of mind.  Very frustrating. 

I had a party just before Christmas.  As part of the pre-party clean-up, I had put a stack of about a thousand very old business cards by the paper shredder.  (I still have not had time to shred them.) 

At the party, an unknown guest, who had come with one of the invited guests, picked up one of the business cards, walked up to me and said, “Show me your artwork.”  I was taken aback, but since it was such an unexpected request, I started pulling out everything I could remember to show the unknown guest.  Then I remembered the drawings in the basement.  They were still wrapped in packing material from two moves before.  I ripped off the material and showed them to the unknown guest.  The unknown guest asked me if I knew what she did.  I said no.  It turns out she is an art teacher.

From age fourteen to fifteen, I was apprenticed to a Mayan art restorer.  My job was to take badly-repaired Mayan pottery apart, clean the glue off, and reglue the pottery properly.   Then I would fill the cracks with plaster and match the color of the plaster to the original pottery color of the piece.  That was it.  I never did any of the glyph repainting, but the glyphs on the pottery had an effect on my drawing. 

The guy hunkered down in this part of the drawing is Manuel Noriega, the “evil pineapple” of Operation Just Cause.

These glyphs are part of a larger, unfinished drawing.

I had actually packed up all of my drawing stuff after unsuccessfully trying to draw this live model and was walking angrily out of the classroom when the teacher called me back and asked me to try again.  This was the result.  The teacher and I were both stunned.

For a friend who will probably not be repairing the roof in this world.