The Blackburn Digest

Mystery:  We only have two large-leaved (leafed?) trees in our yard. They are Redbuds, and the leaves dropped at virtually the first sign of winter’s chill.  They were removed/mulched weeks ago. The remaining trees in our yard and neighboring yards are either small-leaf varieties (Crepe Myrtle, Oak, etc.) or evergreens. Well, Casa Blackburn must be situated at the nexus of some mysterious wind vortex, because the entire lawn has disappeared under a thick carpet of large leaves within a remarkably short time span! (Nearly eight 33 gallon trash bags full of them!) I have no idea where our small, tractable, cooperative leaves were transported to by the shifting (and shifty) winds - perhaps there is someone a quarter of a mile away, puzzling over the mysterious appearance of a multitude of small leaves in his/her treeless yard! Since our *windfall* arrived, it has proved to be remarkably stubborn about relocating (thus becoming somebody else’s problem) on subsequent gusty days. DH went forth today, armed with his trusty rake, and spent several hours moving the collection from the lawn to the trash bags. 

This evening, in a desperate attempt to begin catching up on one of many activities which have been largely ignored during the run-up to the miniatures convention my local club planned for over a year and finally hosted on Saturday, Feb. 17th, I logged onto my Flickr account. Or rather, I tried to! This is what greeted me:

Flickr is having a massage.

For updates, please check the Flickr Blog.(It sounds like fun, but a look at their blog shows that an ever-growing group of Flickr employees are beginning to pull their hair out in frustration!) Guess I won’t be removing out-of-date images and uploading new ones tonight.

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How did it get to be November already? I haven’t even blogged October! “I’ll write as soon as I….” seems to be my motto, and my downfall.

I’ll write as soon as I:

1) Finish counting beads and cutting wire, packing 24 kits and making four prototypes for next Tuesday’s senior-center craft class.

2) Finish packing 100 kits for miniature (1/12th scale) bluebonnets. . .due date has already passed, but use date hasn’t. LOL!  This only entails counting the right number of each component into each bag and adding my illustrated instruction sheet. To be exact, 22,500 deep blue petals, 3500 light blue petals, 700 bud bases, 2800 bud petals, 700 accent petals A, 700 accent petals B, 700 pre-cut stem wires, 400 leaf bracts and 100 “soil” bases!

3) Finish packing 100 kits for miniature (1/12th scale) yellow rose bouquets. Ditto the due & use dates:-)  This one’s easier - only 8400 rose petals, 400 rose bases, 600 leaves and 900 pre-cut stem wires.

Look up Procrastination in Webster’s Unabridged Dictionary, and you will see a photograph of . . . . . . . well, ME!

Two of my Inching Along club members have completed their Totally Texas prototypes!! Innovative exterior finishes and trims, flooring installed (or scribed and inked on the base of the box inself), porch area finished in weathered planking or egg carton “field stone”, inside walls “plastered” or wallpapered and shelving/racks/tables brimming with Texas themed miniatures. They’re wonderful to behold - - - and irritating in their completion!

*My* Totally Texas languishes upstairs with a coat of exterior stucco (applied too thickly, so its convincingly (?) and unintentionally covered in a spider web of cracks! The interior plaster work is a plan-in-waiting, as is the porch roof, support posts, porch & interior flooring. . . . you get the picture?

As further proof of my finely-honed ability to procrastinate:

Saturday, 9am - Jan. 21st Since it was *The third Saturday of the month*, I was repeating something I have done for the past 2 years+ . . . . . Hearding Cats! (aka: conducting a business meeting of my miniatures club, Inching Along of San Antonio.)

My main goal of each business meeting is to get through the old & new business quickly enough to end the meeting before I totally lose control! Seriously! There is no group more capable of flying of on a fresh tangent in a millisecond than a group of miniaturists. Seventeen cats in one room could not move any faster in independent directions with individual goals than this group can!

Gave myself a pep-talk on the drive across town. “This should be an easy meeting; my fellow officers will be there, we have an agenda.” (The latter usually helps limit the number of tangents.) “Get through the list of items pertaining to our SAM’s Birthday Party in 2007, close the meeting and play with minis.” HAH!

Actually, I captured an entire month (or rather, my photo of my Petal Pushers florist’s shop did! The month of April, 2006, to be exact, in a calendar produced by the moderator of TheCamp@yahoo.com!!

When the call went out for photos of member’s projects several weeks ago, I did not jump to post any. Many of the members of The Camp are featured writers and guest artisans of the finest miniature magazines in the US, Canada and Europe. Many of them also do their own photography to illustrate their articles, web sites and catalogues. Granted, the original plan called for 4 photos (of dollhouses, vignettes, scenes or special pieces) per month. Even with 48 photos to be chosen, I wasn’t eager to compete on this level;-)