Portrait of Pregnant Candace


I thought I'd keep the trend going and make a portrait of Candace while she's pregnant. The last time we had a painting done by Wilson Ong (google him y'all) and since Candace still had the same nightgown I figured what the hell. Although I'm not sure you can call it a trend because this is only the second and last time this will be done. Somehow we missed doing this with our first kid. We must have been too freaked out by the prospect of actually having a baby that it just didn't happen.


Candace was kind enough to come out to the arbor that leads to the woods in our backyard. I'm biased but I like it.

I took one roll with the medium format and 4 sheets with 8x10. I developed the roll and made a contact sheet. This is my favorite but there are also two or three others I like.

Impending Human Addition

For those of you just joining us (you know who you are) we are due to welcome a new addition to our little family any day now. Candace had an ultrasound today to check her fluid level (don't ask) and came home with this.

If you squint really hard you can see our fat little chubby-cheeked baby. Still not sure what we're going to name her...probably Dagmar.

Poison Ivy Can Kiss My Butt

If you ever wanted to see every single variety of poison ivy you could come and walk around our yard. We have the bush kind, the low ground cover kind and the vine kind. The stuff is literally everywhere. I've been spraying like crazy all summer and have knocked it back from the areas we use in most of the yard.

The vines are particularly maddening. My sprayer will only go so high up the trees so there's lots of dead leaves down low but up higher the evil stuff couldn't be happier.

When I started cutting down the trees that had to go (and happened to be covered in vines) I was always very careful that if it touched my hands/arms/face I would immediately come in and wash with hot soapy water. I've never been around this stuff until moving to New Jersey so I read all the horror stories online...

One time I was ripping down a vine of what I thought was virginia creeper then realized it was poison ivy. It was all over my hands and arms and I was right in the middle of trying to get trees cut down and limbs cut up so I waited to go and wash. Then I totally forgot all about it. I had no reaction. Another time working on the same tree I caught a bunch of it to my face. Again no reaction. Apparently about 25% of people are immune to poison ivy. Lucky me I'm one of them.

Dead leaves on the bottom-healthy leaves just out of reach of my sprayer. Now I just yank the damn vines right off the tree and up root as much as I can. Now that I have special powers poison ivy can kiss my butt. You're going down sucka!

Tire Swing!

The kids have been talking about a tire swing ever since we started talking about buying a house. Every yard we looked at was evaluated based on if we could hang a tire swing or not. Well, I finally got around to hanging it.

Old truck tire: $0

Chain and hardware: $40

Happy kids: Priceless

The Yard

The inside of the house has been getting a lot of attention so I thought I'd post some pics of what we're faced with outside...
This is the front and where I put the piles of yard stuff for the city to come collect. No one knows when they come and no one has seen them. Every few weeks or so the piles just disapear. Currently I have 11 piles in the front and 4 in the back. I've done this three times so far.

Looking from the front down the backyard is this side strip of open area next to our yard. It's a favorite spot for fireflies in the evening and butterflies during the day. I ride my bike down a good stretch of this until I get to the road with the nice bike lane.

This is the street behind our yard. It's called Jenny Jump lane, how cool is that?

Our yard is made up of half usable area and half "forest". The back half is the forest part.

From the strip of open grass next to our yard looking into the woods of our backyard.

I think at one point the woods were maintained but it's been a long-long time since anyone has put a hand to this stuff. Here's Alexander standing in the old arbor. He's probably getting several mosquito bites.

On the other side of our house is this area. There used to be six or so old pines and a sick crabapple tree here. Half of the crabapple was actually a very healthy collection of poison ivy vines. Now it's a great spot for a swing set.

For Father's day this year Candace gave me a chainsaw. We named it Pepe and it's awesome!

More of Pepe's handiwork. Crabapple stump.

In the back woods there are two sheds. This one was still in great shape except there was a huge willow leaning over it and several smaller trees blocking access to willow. What's that Pepe? But of course you can.

The kids actually talk to Pepe and I now have to do the "voice" all the time. I also have to do the voice of the sledghammer named DonCarlos.

Here's the other shed just as you go into the woods. I kinda want to put a moonshine still in there or something but it's falling apart.

I literally hit the back twice with DonCarlos...

Office/Studio/Nursery

One of the best things about this house is this large room upstaris. I have room to work and make my small paintings. Still need to hang the Velvis...

This room has a closet and storage access. See that little hobbit door beind that thing my easel is on. There's a kind of storage hall that runs the length of the house. The kids love it.

Thank you Ikea for cheap bookcases that look halfway decent. They even survived the move.

Oh yeah. Here's where the baby will sleep until she's old enough to room with her sister.

ManWorld

Before we really get into the plans for ManWorld I wanted to show what happens when you make more paintings than you sell. They start getting hung in odd places. Like the laundry room. Thanks Candace.

Manworld is going to be mainly the darkroom. The darkroom needs a sink so I'm building one. It's been fun designing my first darkoom sink and I decided to size it so I have lots of room to grow. It will be 12' long and will be able to handle 24" trays. I thought I'd like to do some larger prints like maybe 16"x20" and got kind of carried away.


This shows the 2x lumber I used to make the frame and legs.

Here are the sink parts (bottom and sides) plus Hadley and my commuter bike.

ManWorld is in the basement as it should be.

Once you get to the bottom of the stairs you could look to your right and see our food storage. This will eventually be where the tv ends up.

This is where you go if you turn left from the stairs. This area will be where the sink will go and will eventually be framed in and light tight.

The little ladder you see in the picture above this one goes to a crawl space/storage area. If anyone asks us to keep your crap (just temporarily of course) for you, it will end up here. I'll just toss it in and you can come get it out. Do you like spiders? Before this flash photo was taken this space had never been exposed to so much light.

Behind the wall of the "food storage" room is this area. The workbench came with the house. I think it will be great place for a bigger workbench and maybe a place to paint.

If you wanted to go directly to the backyard you could use the bilco doors.

There's a few spiders in here too I think.

Bugs

Living where we do there are always lots of bugs and creatures to look at and catch. Here's what we found today: On the trellis next to our front door we found this Monarch butterfly. We currently have about 5 caterpillars in various stages in the house as an "experiment".

I saw this on the tire swing tree. I think it's a Robber fly sexing up another Robber fly. Or maybe it's lunch. Or both.

We have a ton of Cicadas around here. We even caught one as it came out of the ground and Alexander got to watch it transform that evening in his room. I collected a bunch of these shells for a macro photo idea and had the poor judgment of putting them in a tupperwear and leaving them on the counter...sorry Candace.