Colors

swell day. sun, blue sky, warm, breezy.

watered all plants. no groundhog casualties for two days now. sprinkled coyote urine that we regretfully bought last year to see if it will help deter it.

peas are growing quickly now that they've found the fence. lettuce is generous these days. love to water the garden, see how everyone is doing each day. boy alternates between watching the water flow from the hose and hanging himself over in the sling, looking at the ground as i walk, always quiet.

found this eastern black swallowtail when i went to get the mail today, lying on the side of the road. reminds me of one i found on my first day working at a children's home in north carolina.

(i just today discovered how to put text below my pictures. this is very exciting.)
the males are always yellow, but the females can be yellow or black/brown, in which case they're referred to as "dark phase females." the one in NC was in its dark phase, and it was the beginning of my sharing my love of nature with the kids at the home. all but one of them didn't even feign interest, but one little guy could have played outdoors all day with me. we'd build little rock dams in the stream behind the home, he'd catch crayfish, salamanders. once he caught a baby salamander, and went in to show it off to the other kids, whom he was eternally trying to impress. one the of girls who normally couldn't be bothered with nature discovered, upon looking closely, that the creature's tiny, beating heart was visible through the translucent skin of its belly (it was up on the side of the transparent carrier).

also:
in his insatiable love of board games, my husband happened upon instructions for making a "Piecepack." this is the board game equivalent of a deck of cards, in that one can fashion a limitless number of games out of one set of pieces. it consists of 20 tiles, 24 discs, and four dice, all divided into four suits.

while it is possible to purchase sets, we both loved the idea of making our own; we play a lot of wonderful european board games (don't think 'monopoly' - it doesn't compare), and it was exciting to have something simple enough to be able to make our own. the link above gave him directions, and he promptly found a site to order wooden pieces from and set about designing suits for us. we chose the four elements: earth, air, fire, and water, and he combined ideas from the web with our own aesthetic. below is what he came up with. he printed the images onto adhesive transparent paper, cut them out, and affixed them to each piece. it's marvelous!

here he is working at a game. the games we've explored so far are as complex and challenging as the board games we regularly play. we're even working on creating a game of our own.





setting up for "fujisan," a fun solitaire game: