“In the garden of the mind it is always at once the blossoming of spring, the peak of summer, and the cusp of autumn.” Finches, flowers, 8x10.

My daughter Ivy is a senior at VCU in Richmond this year (in painting and printmaking), and for the second time was invited to participate in a gallery exhibition called “Environment at Risk.” RVA magazine featured her painting in its article about the exhibition, which I thought was pretty great!

Workshop is clean. Morning air is like a summer apple. It is all the excitement of going back to school without anybody making you sit still all day.

After a few hours, Chesterton’s Junk Drawer (you can’t throw anything away until you remember why you saved it) becomes Zeno’s Junk Drawer: you can’t finish until you sort half of it, and then half of the rest, and then half of the rest… Until at last, late in the afternoon, you find yourself with Occam’s Junk Drawer, and chuck all the rest of it in the trash. Such is the progress of philosophy.

Cleaning out the workshop today, and facing a little problem I call “Chesterton’s junk drawer.”

Stocking up on woodenware for the holidays before the weather turns cool and I can spend full days in the workshop making more interesting things. Got a shaving horse in a semi-spare bedroom for carving, another on the front porch for sanding, and buckets of half-made spoon-like objects.

Another storm last night makes eleven inches of rain in the past nine days. Fall greens and carrots should have gone in the ground last week, but the soil is going to have to dry out a bit before I can clean up the summer stuff.

The earliest examples of Pennsylvania German “fraktur” were illuminated hymnals, so I thought I should try a bit of music.

Experimenting with an actual scene here. Interesting to carve and there’s a lot I like about it, but the limitations of the medium make it hard to get too realistic, and I can’t decide whether it works.

Particle board, particle board
Looks just like a regular board
What is it made of? Nobody knows.
Particle board.
Is it compressed
Or is it a mess
Could it be totally worthless?
Who came up with particle board?
Degraded board, particle board.