Another Year in Yreka

I haven't posted in over a year.  It has been a very weird year.  I went crazy on Facebook for a while, then managed to pull myself away. So, to get away from the horror of politics, I've been staying creative.  I didn't take very many photos this year.  I did make a fair amount of art.  Below is a lake reflecting clouds at a local park.

Spent a couple of months working an hour a day, four days a week carving the Dawn Redwood tree (below) that had died from the drought in front of the Siskiyou County Historical Museum in Yreka.  It was very dry and cracked from the sun, but it was meant to be a rustic piece anyway.  All those limbs looked like people to me, so that's what I did.

Drove to Baker City, Oregon to meet Barry Carter, an expert on making ormus. The video, below, shows what he's about.

 The scenery was spectacular.

Watching David pan for gold.  He owns this piece of land along the Klamath River outside Happy Camp.

My garden goddess, below.  I'm hoping to get her started this spring and hook her up to a watering system.  I bought seeds for greens to be grown in her skirt, small tomatoes in her boobs (two stainless steel bowls not shown), etc.

My goddess is presently living in the community garden, below, but circumstances have made me decide to bring her back home and start a garden here. 

My back yard.  I write and work on my computer facing the back yard. I put up this bird feeder because I work better when I can look up and watch the birds.  Since I also feed all the neighborhood wild cats, I had to build this wire fence contraption to save the birds.  They play mind games with each other.  These photos are from my bedroom window.  

Can you see the bunny rabbit?  In back of the feeder?  He just hopped right in and I thought the cats would go after him but, no, not interested.  He spent the morning running around the back yard, then left.

Okay, I didn't see this before - is that a UFO?

About a mile up my road you can get past all the surrounding mountains and see Mt. Shasta, about 30 miles away.

Below, I made this wood stove for the play "Anne of Green Gables".  I was given a table, which I wrapped with cardboard, cut up cardboard to be the doors, glued them on, painted everything black, then went to the dollar store and bought two doorstops to be handles for the doors. Took me less than an hour to make. Someone else added the stove pipe on for maximum effect.  It turned out looking exactly like the wood burning stove I used when I lived in the Outback (Wagga 

Wagga, New South Wales) in Australia.  I have photos of it somewhere.

 I'm at the far left.

Below, my rendition of the design for the next play that J.J., the director, wants for the set.  Will start painting it in a week or so.  The play is called "Ravenscroft", a mystery comedy set in the library of an English country house in 1905.

Below, twenty, count them, twenty paintings that I finally finished after five years.  I did the series to help raise people's frequency.  I want people to laugh and feel good when they see these.  I found all the images from the internet then redid them my way.  I have worked professionally as a painter for the movies in Los Angeles and as a set painter for Summer Stock in Pennsylvania, but I never really had a painting lesson to learn how to do light and shadows.  I have to learn by doing, so this series was how I taught myself.  I want to start another series of paintings but I have to think about what to do now.  Something different.

A few months ago a friend, Mark, gave me a 3 foot tall black walnut log.  I'm the kind of woman men give logs to.  Haha.  I finally started carving it and I'm still stuck in the same series as the paintings because it turned out to be a child hugging a slobbery dog.  It will look good when I'm finished.

David kept asking me to put up on Youtube the documentary that I shot in Happy Camp in 2008.  I spent two months in Happy Camp interviewing interesting people, gold miners, jade hunters, well, you'll see.  I returned to Santa Cruz and joined the public access tv station and when I finished editing it all together, I gave them a copy.  They began playing it on their public access station and I went away for a year.  When I came back a year later I turned on the tv and there it was, playing.  Below, is my very first attempt at making a documentary, "A Town Called Happy Camp".

Some of my wild kitties.  Getting a new front porch soon.  David is widening it a bit so we can have stairs that go down to the back yard.