After Igor

Its been a wild 24 hours or more with the arrival and departure of Hurricane Igor.   Being surrounded by trees in the woods is generally not the best place to be in a storm, but luckily, despite debris of tree parts flying and trees being uprooted, we survived with minimal damage.

The power went off for 18 hours and that left a sump pump in the basement not working and a bunch of young chicks in the barn that needed heat lights on, so generators were called into action.  An all nighter was done to keep checking the waterline at the pump in the basement to make sure it didn't overflow and flood the basement.

The storm is past, all things are still in one piece and life gets back to normal slowly.  Unfortunately some favourite trees in the back garden were blown down - a maple and a birch, both about 40 feet tall.  Willows at the rear have a distinct lean to them too.   I so hate to see trees damaged, especially 'my' maple, it was so stately and lovely.  But it had the grace to fall on the hydrangea and flatten the fence instead of the house, so that's good!

I sketched a few views of a mussel shell while the storm raged outside.  I just adore the Lunar Black watercolour from Daniel Smith.  Its granulates so perfectly when painting shells or fish.  Its likely o ne of my 'can't do without' colours.  Chris Beck has told me that when wet, if you draw a magnet under your painting, you can drag the lunar black particles around!  Isn't that amazing?  I haven't tried that yet, but I must!

Drawing or painting by candlelight sounds romantic, but in reality my eyesight won't cooperate with that light level to do finer tasks, so art was abandoned once darkness fell.  Hopefully now I'll have some time to play catch up on some projects.  Of course now I'm catching a cold.  I blame it all on Igor.