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Time to show you what I do every morning. The same boring thing, go walk, look at trees, meet friends, its just totally pathetic But it is a very important part of my life and makes me happy each start of the day to give the right base for things to come. You do meet some odd looking trees on the way, lets start out with the “bench”:

This large tree toppled over in one of the winter storms this year. Phoebe still likes it though!

Next up we’re walking along some pretty grooved trails (this one’s for you Hank!):

Some trees decide somewhere along the lines that one trunk is just plain boring and branch out in rather odd ways:

The best thing though is to meet friends along the way, here they come!

Macy isn’t too sure about Phoebe approaching like that, is she going to chase her?

But of course

Speaking of trees who trunk out in odd ways, meet the “cage”:

Awesome tree isn’t it?

Lets navigate some more grooves in the trail….

Get your foot in this one, or, better not!!

Macy is giving us her best impression of a bat:

Scary, isn’t she?

Or maybe she is trying to imitate the face of this tree?

I am surprised that this one hasn’t been pushed over by storms yet, the opposite side of the tree has the same face and the center trunk is rather thin at that spot.

This is how dogs walk on imaginary leashes:

(it does help to have a load of cookies in your pocket….)

Time to go home and rest on another funky tree:

and tomorrow we’ll do it all over again

Got bears? yeah, put your hummingbird feeders inside cause them furry ones really love to snack on those!
Hummingbirds will visit all those lovely wildflowers that you rip out around your house to keep stuff “clean”, sometimes they’ll even go for petunias in planters, but it is always a quick visit, on to better things. I found that there is one plant that is very easy to raise in your garden or a pot (not hardy) that is pretty much irresistible for hummingbirds, and those are Cannas! I prefer to plant them in a large pot so that I can rush out and pull it under the porch during hail….
It takes a day or two after the first blooms open but word gets around quickly, here is a little girl enjoying the bright red flower’s nectar:

Lets get a little closer and admire her from all sorts of directions, enjoy

We do have an unusual amount of rain this year, or so it seems. I have a green lawn ( = pathetic patch of grass) which is super cool at this time of the year. Since I have stopped using precious drinking water to dump on grass, it is usually brown in the summer.
This month’s MWS ATC mingle theme is crayon resist and/or abstract. My recipient likes dragonsflies, dragonflies like water, so there:

The beautiful stamp is from Clear Artistic Stamps (Belinda Landtroop) and sadly now retired. She will not reopen the clear stamp business and you can snatch up remaining stamps at incredible prices here . The horizontal dashes are my attempt at crayon resist, not very obvious but looks neat. The background over that was brayered and I added raindrops in versamark with clear embossing over the entire card. Raindrop background stamp can be found at DRS Designs .

ok not that old, but I knit this a while ago, just didn’t get to catch a picture
This is the Ishbel Beret by Ysolda , worked in Panda Silk by Crystal Palace Yarns (52% bamboo, 43% superwash merino, 5% combed silk). Perfect for summer wear!

I noticed that all these beret type or slouchy hats aren’t really that slouchy on Adrienne’s hair since she has all that awesome hair to fill them out

I added an elastic band in the rim which is folded over. This way it won’t loose the fit.

Here is another stash buster, the pattern is from Marie Grace Designs and called Classic Raglan Pullover. A very easy knit, a bit tight on the needles where you join the sleeves into the body. I used some cotton stash yarn and I hope it will get softer with washing (hence the name for this post). Ava certainly has some room to grow into this one which is ok

The yarn has these little irregular bubbles of shiny stuff which looks a lot like terrible knitting in this picture, ugh, a very neat effect closer up:

I extra brought the dogs home and got the camera to catch this pretty one….
He is lying at a high spot at the yearly fall deer meetup. In just a few weeks he’ll have a whole bunch of gals in all sizes lying with him and enjoying the evening sun:

Amazing how it can take 8 months to get a driveway permit in Park County CO!! ok, they needed us to rezone and all, but hey
And SOME driveway this is going to be. As we are counting pennies, 3 excavators are competing for the bid, kinda cool!

Here is a view from the road that isn’t a road because its private and nobody knows who it belongs to. But wait, it could be also from the small patch of county where there IS a road, well just barely… The arrows point towards a part of the future driveway, house building site would be to the left and an aspen grove which we want to drive through to the right (not the 3.5 aspen in the center of the picture…):

Why not use the path of those existing ATV tracks? ehhh, way too steep for regulation and any average vehicle.

Here is a closer view of some tentative scraping. You’d think this is the side of a mountain and you encounter rock and gravel stuff, but no, beautiful dark top soil LOL! I know what to do with that!

A little closer to the building site, you can see some humps of soil at test digging areas (arrow):

The entry from the road is still being heavily discussed as we may need to do two culverts, one at the “road” and one to lead a little stream under the driveway, so pretty! Exciting, isn’t it??!!