We Got Cut Off for a Few Days

 We've had no contact with the outside world for a couple of days, as a cable was crushed somewhere and interrupted the telephone, internet and television connections to our house. Combined with cold winter weather and now, strong winds, I wish once again that people could just hibernate like the animals do! The temperature is going to -30C tonight.

I did some work, however, slowly and carefully as my new eye gets used to its lens; I had my first cataract surgery nearly two weeks ago, and am now driving without glasses for the first time in well over half a century....

Two glue pots, a right angle, and two glue brushes awaiting their bristles are ready for the bookbinder's shop. The front facade has been cut, as well as the two side walls, but I have to be patient (sigh!) for the other walls needed. As I do not have a miniature lathe, I cheated and cut apart a wooded goblet for the pot holding the brush, with a base of a small wood circle added. The other glue pot had much of its tapered base cut away, and because it was solid wood it didn't affect the pot shape. That uses up some of my far too large stash.... The right angle is painted cardboard.

Book production has also gone ahead. Some of the spines didn't bend nicely and tore a bit, but that's fine as those will become the books waiting to be re-bound! The nicer books will be the finished product for the shop.

And I recently stumbled over a series of YouTube videos by Cathy Brickner, in which she makes more than a dozen southern prairie wild flowers. Today I found a stash of a material very like Flower Soft at a local second-hand store, and I can use that to make some of the other flowers in her series. The videos are short, which means you have to pause while you work on the flowers, but that gets me up out of my chair and makes me walk over to the computer on a regular basis. (Well, I have to look for the silver lining, don't I?) The white flowers are rain lilies, awaiting their grey-green leaves, while the pink ones are evening primroses. The stems have their leaves, but I won't plant them until I've made a whole garden of near-desert flower varieties, as they are all different heights..

I'm thinking of a small flower-bed that has been allowed to go wild, with perhaps a cactus or two in it now, and a tumble-down fence - which will likely mean back to barbed wire manufacture - and if I can find one, a scale Texas longhorn skull. We'll see! And yes, we do have cactus in Canada; in Alberta you will find prickly pear growing quite happily!