Staff finds information for another guest while E.g. opens a card.

Last night we hosted a party.

E.g. turned 50 this week, so we held a women-only potluck, what I call a hen party. Eight guests came. One was our next-door neighbour, Staff. One was Gilda, who has been E.g.’s friend for nearly 30 years. One was a woman we met at the Shrove Tuesday pancake supper two weeks ago.  I had met four of the guests less than twice.

As an introvert, I wasn’t sure how I felt about this whole thing. Turns out that most of the guests, too, self-identify as introverts. And the party was an incredible success, with connections happening all evening:

“Really? What years did you attend Acadia?”

“Oh, I know your boyfriend! He used to play with my husband’s band.”

I’m unaware of what exchange was made concerning the fact that two women brought exactly the same broccoli salad. Talk about a group of people who were destined to come together!

A daughter of the Muses.

Such beautiful women in our living room last night. Such interesting, interested, thinkers and makers and doers. Crafters, writers, teachers, musicians, gardeners, animal lovers, techies. Courageous. Authentic. Helpful. Underemployed. Still alive despite whatever personal troubles each might have endured in the course of her life.

The party began with a “tasting”. I brought from the cellar two bottles of homemade hooch — peach-banana wine and hard apple cider — and E.g. handed round some disposable shot glasses and a permanent marker so that each guest could initial her glass. I think most people opted for store-boughten after that, but at least they had had the fun of trying something different (and had avoided the embarrassment of a full glass of swill).

Voracious readers and careful thinkers.

The room was like a stand of willows in a summer breeze, as conversations shifted from side-by-side to straight-across to kitty-corner. Sometimes one speaker had everyone’s attention, the most notable example of this being the round of tales concerning car problems and the kindness of strangers. Awe-inspiring, hilarious, touching — each person’s tale was different.

The food? Fabulous. It was all there — appetizers, side dishes, meats, breads, desserts, and loads of broccoli salad — without any prior conferring.

And as if a balanced meal, instant friendships, and incredibly cute Cardigan Corgis weren’t enough, there was the Perigee Moon. We turned out the lights and watched it rise swiftly over a rooftop.

She scrapbooked a beautiful card for E.g. .

The party couldn’t have been more perfect.

It began at 6 pm, and the last guest left at eleven. E.g. and I took our time loading the dishwasher and putting away the leftovers, finally hitting the sack at midnight.

Then E.g. awoke before 05 00, threw on her winter coat over her jammies, slipped into her rubber boots, and went out to photograph the moon. Happy birthday, you crazy woman, you.

E.g.'s blogfriends, in person!

Maybe I remember the scene because she was relaxed and pleased with her work for once. Mum’s culinary expertise lay in  pork chops, meat loaf, scalloped potatoes, pickled red cabbage, and green beans by the truckload, cheap, nourishing food that sustained seven people on a paint-factory worker’s paycheque. Maybe, on this particular evening, Mum’s face was as bright as that slice of white cake shot with rainbow dots of colour.

Whatever the reason, whenever I think of birthday cake, I think of that one.

I was quite pleased, then, at the card I made Aunt Theodora for her 95th birthday:

Sprinkles, glorious sprinkles.  They shower downwards at a gentle slant, thanks in great part to this nifty little paintbrush:The purple and yellow background dots were made with a round (think “ordinary”) brush, while the words took a rigger, a brush with longer, fewer bristles, so that it will hold a decent amount of paint while producing thin lines; it’s also called a script brush.

And here is a close-up of the candle. The photo doesn’t show the shininess of the blue. I mixed the blue paint with gum arabic, a liquid that greatly slows the drying time, and then coloured in the flame, starting at the top and finishing by touching the yellow to the blue and tipping the card upright. The result wasn’t quite what I wanted; the time I’d tried this before, the yellow stayed yellow and didn’t blend to make green. Will have to keep experimenting.

although I composed the words for the card, there have likely been hundreds of riffs on the same theme in the history of commercially-produced birthday greetings. So sue me. I’ll pay my lawyer with one Cardi, and you can have the other one.

Anyway, the fact that both the plate and the words on the outside of the card use the same colour helps to give a “black and white” effect to the inside — with just a little added sweetness:

There you have it.

No cats were harmed in the making of this card.

A few weeks ago on a Wordless Wednesday post, Barefootheart told me about Illustration Fridays. On checking the link she provided, I decided an Illustration Friday feature might keep me motivated to play with my paints.

I also thought an Illustration Friday feature might get me writing again, as opposed to Wordless Wednesday, which is — well, you get the point.

By the bye, I will state up front that I have never been tempted by Facebook, Twitter, or whatever sixteen other social media have been spawned since their inception. Likewise, I never signed up on the megagigantic Wordless Wednesday list, and won’t sign up for Illustration Fridays either. Consider this your own private salon, you lucky (or at least faithful) readers!

So. When my son and his partner were here for Christmas, they gave us several thoughtful gifts. One was a field guide of North American birds, in hopes that I might use the photos as subjects for my watercolour paintings. They know I like birds.

Fast-forward to this winter’s watercolour class. Everyone in that class, with the exception of me, has been meeting to paint together for years, and they are good. I began that course intimidated and ended up dejected. While they’re all nice people, there’s something to be said for peers.

One technique I did glean from the class is to squint at the subject and paint the patches — in realistic colours or not. I decided to try it with this tom turkey, and was quite pleased with the result.

This is the version in my sketchbook. I haven’t tried making a “good” copy. Maybe someday.

Meanwhile, if you’ll excuse me, Aunt Theodora’s friends and well-wishers are throwing a 95th-birthday-party bash for her tomorrow, and I need to head upstairs to make a card. Ta for now.

If you’re a regular reader, you may have noticed the neighbours’ White Pine in some of my photographs. At the bottom of this pic runs the top of the four-foot-high chainlink fence.

Well, I don’t want to brag or anything, but we got quite the storm last night. High winds, lots of snow, and a bit of rain added to the mix.

The waves from the rain reached only to the middle of the windows. Here on the driveway side, that’s a mere two metres. The wet stuff came and went around midnight, with more snow on top of it.

After my tea this morning, I went outside to inspect. Even the White Pine was surprised at how much snow we got:

By popular request (okay, Jayne  in Australia asked, and I thought Novroz over in Indonesia might not know these birds), I have decided to present a few photos of a European Starling chiseling away at our suet feeder. Since the photos, taken with the zoom lens through the living room window and then tightly cropped, aren’t very sharp, I will plague treat you to four pictures to give as much fuzzy subtle detail as possible.

Starlings are medium-small birds, bigger than sparrows but smaller than crows. (To compare, the suet cage is about 13 X 15 cm.) Males and females look pretty much the same.

Other than their pink feet, the colouration of European Starlings depends on the season and the time of day. In Winter, they’re spottier because they’ve worn their body feathers down to the spots.*** In their new Spring outfits, they’re a little more uniformly black. In Winter, their beaks are darker; in Spring, they turn yellow.

If you squint a bit, you’ll notice a green sheen on this bird’s feathers. That’s a trick of the sunlight that starlings share with other black-feathered birds.

You don’t need to squint at all to notice that the suet cage is now broadside to the camera. The wind that day was spinning the cage like a hypnotist’s watch.

In this photo, you can see the starling’s long, narrow, pointy beak. It works well for picking bugs out of the grass, plucking berries from bushes, or pulling bits of suet from between the cage bars. Starlings will eat anything. They are not picky eaters, like birds of prey. The raptors, however, aren’t jealous. Instead, they graciously rejoice in the starlings’ easygoing ways that have helped to spread their population, in just over a century, from one end of North America to the other.

Starlings also make tasty, nutritious meals for hawks.

One last picture. Here you can see the starling pausing to inspect its artwork. Will it incise “I love Turtle”? Will it fashion a reliefwork basket of tulips? Will it decide which breadcrumb is biggest and best?

The world will never know.

My funny valentine was in fact the work of many starlings, not simply the sculptor seen above. They often arrive by the dozen, some playing King of the Castle on the suet cage while others stand on the snow beneath, catching the fatty crumbs that the mock warmakers drop. Their chattering and clowning in the snow-coated stillness brightens my day.

***Nota bene: I got this part wrong. Starlings get new clothes for Rosh Hashanah, not Easter. Their new suits are spotted, and by Spring they have worn some of the spots off! Please check out Seabrooke’s informative blog entry for more info on these birds.