Kindred Spirits

Okay so, the first part of this post is dedicated to cool D-Glas. Everyone remember this first pic below? The tiniest green shoot of growth?


Well, a couple weeks later the green shoot developed into this... a first solid creeping limb of a Belle of Woking clematis.


The Belle of Woking makes big white flowers. We have dubbed her Viney the Vine.

We think Viney will look nice creeping along the wall of the garage over the woodpile, so we planted her along the back of the yard by the garage. We plan to affix a coil of painted purple wire (nearly invisible hopefully) along the underside of the garage soffit (the underside of the gutter overhang).


While Planty the Plant grows a totally ridiculous 30 feet (see bottom of linked post) in a growing season, the Belle of Woking will creep about six to eight feet. Maybe we'll also grow it west along the top of the fence in back.

That's Viney down there at the base of the fence post. The fence posts are actually telephone pole crossbars. One of our neighbors used to work for the power company, and he installed the fence for a previous owner of our house for the long haul. He says those posts should last a half-century.


In other news, I have given up on the moss slurry sun. Even with the super-absorbant pillow-thingies in the mixture, it still doesn't hold enough moisture and keeps drying out. I took the protective umbrella off earlier in the week. Sniffle. Sniffle.

It's going to rain for eight days straight starting today apparently. So probably the slurry sun will be washed away. I expect I'll try a new strategy next spring - growing a broad sheet of moss, then cutting it away to make a design.


As you know, I have been cutting up comic books. Here's It Will Be PBR from March 27. Since that time I have cut up a bunch, and I have a bunch of pages ripped out, piled up for when I get the urge.

Well, we went to Salvation Army one day after work, and I grabbed an Ultimate Spider Man. The art is pretty amazing. I was going to tear it up and add it to the to-be-cut pile.

Tom, our painter, saw it when I returned home, and he started talking comic books to me. He was so excited that I was a fan. He gave me a pound (i.e. slapped me five) with a big smile on his face - kindred spirits! I couldn't tell him the truth - that I planned to desecrate the book and lots of other books to make collages.

So I told him I wasn't much of a fan, just liked to look at artwork to learn what I could about the techniques - all true. I ended up lending him the Spider Man book that day.

I have the comic book cut-outs on the floor of the yellow art room. One day a couple weeks ago, he was working alone (his partner, Mike, was at his son's eighth grade graduation), and Tom got stranded on his scaffolding. I'm not sure if his ladder slipped and fell or what happened, but he crawled in through the guest bedroom window and walked downstairs. As he walked by the art room he saw the cut-outs lying on the floor. Sounds like he was impressed and wanted to support the project. The next day he brought me a stack of comic books. Mostly they are sets of three... complete mini-series of different characters.

I read three Superman vs. Predator books two nights ago. Last night, I fell asleep looking at Batman: Outlaws.