Four cool, crafting chicks, and other animals.

Here are three of the four chicks (the fourth being me) who had an impromptu gathering at Mindy's home this weekend, to have time to do art with no interruptions. Shanna is a painter. Mindy is a belly dancer and visual artist. Claudia is a scrapbooker, what Allie Edwards would call a life-artist. I was planning on writing. We did spend time doing art, some of it collaborative, and I have a better idea of what I am going to write when I start my own private nanowrimo next week. But mostly, it was about the eating, the home-made margaritas, the laughing, the uninterrupted thoughts, and the talking. It's good to get a women-only fix every so often. I felt recharged to run home and hug my boys and give thanks to Nicolas.
Laughter is good.
Of course, whenever an animal is part of the cast, it tends to steal the show. Here is Christy, the neighbor's cow who needed milking twice a day (the neighbor being on vacation). Mindy and Claudia took on this large chore. I commemorated their hard work with Christy portraits.

The volunteers doing their synchronized milk dance.
The neighbor's rooster was the angriest, meanest damn rooster that any of us had ever met. He attacked Mindy earlier that week. She still has the bruises.Mindy, shovel in hand, checking under the milking barn for A.R.'s covert war trench.
Today, back home, many beautiful winged visitors came a'callin' through out the day.



The only local farm pictures of this past week come from Gillen and Jesse's backyard farm, where they have been proudly harvesting their first radishes.


Hope you all, well, you who may still be reading here after my long blog break, had a wonderful weekend. May everyone have had a good weekend, those who read here and those who don't. May Diana have had a fabulous fortieth birthday (again I am late with a card). May I learn how to make mix-CDs that can be played on non-mp3 players. May itunes let us record songs that we have just bought from them, or may they never get my money again. May I have something to say when I sit down to write next week. May exercise (having been on on hiatus here for a few years) happily re-enter my life tomorrow, since it lost it's chance to return today. May I now go get the sleep I missed for much of May. And may this mosquito die a quick and painless death when I finally stop typing and kill it.