Touching the Fence

 A new garden is born! I have been meaning to begin developing a serious shade area, as opposed to a small cluster of shade plants at the end of one bed. And for my birthday, I received a new hosta (Sum and Substance) and that was that! I began digging... (Doesn't look like much yet, but you'd be surprised at how many weeds and junk I pulled out. And rocks! Here's just a partial sampling:

The area that I selected for positioning the shade garden is majorly infested with poison ivy. While I have been careful (whatever that means) I invariably develop at least one case of what can only be deemed "heroic" poison ivy every year. Here's this year's offering! And of course, it's during the hottest, stickiest time of the summer, when I'm already crabby and battling evil weather. Like last Thursday. Bob and I were supposed to go to New York for a show that I am in. "Supposed to" being the operative words. Sanity prevailed as half way to the train station, I asked Bob if he thought it was totally stupid to be going into New York with storms threatening and it being just generally polluted and nasty out. We decided to not go and the skies did open and we missed nothing, except my being in an opening with 110 other artists. I'm delighted to be in the show, but feel like a minute carbuncle on the ass of the art world. Or should I capitalize that? ART WORLD. Carbuncles? You want to talk carbuncles? Just look at my arm...

 

So today I was in a foul humor, despite having several great art ideas on my morning ramble with Jules. I spent several productive hours in my studio, and still I feel sort of at odd ends. It might have been the tremendous thunder storm that we had last night. It woke both Bob and I with one of the loudest claps of thunder I have ever heard. So my present joke is about "touching the fence". You may remember that several months back, I was having a terrible day. Nothing seemed to be going well, I was out of sorts and just not my usual chipper Little Miss Sunshine self. And then I accidentally touched Maggie the Horses' electric fence. Hey Presto! It was as if a jolt from the sky re-routed my personal misaligned electrical field because everything was fine after that. (Perhaps it was a mild form of electro shock therapy?) Anyway, my standing joke now is that if the day sucks... go ahead: touch that fence!