Happy Labor Day Weekend! I hope you had a good last week of August. As I wrote the other day, Let Autumn Begin!
We don’t have any major plans for this holiday weekend. David has several projects for clients right now so he’ll probably be working at least part of the day on Friday, Saturday, and Monday. We also have a list of little jobs around the house that need to be tackled so we’re hoping he can take care of several of those. Most of them are 30-60 minutes jobs. One will take several hours. We’ll see how things go. I hope to spend my extra time on homeschool planning and maybe working in the kitchen. Maybe.
This Week’s Artwork
Today’s piece is A Summer Shower (1888, oil on canvas) by Charles Edward Perugini. Someone shared this online a few weeks ago and I immediately made a bookmark so I could use it here. The details are gorgeous.
Here is a bit about Perugini from Wikipedia (edited for brevity):
Charles Edward Perugini (1839 – 1918), originally Carlo Perugini, was an Italian-born English painter of the Romantic and Victorian era.
Perugini was born in Naples, but lived with his family in England from the ages of six to 17. He trained in Italy under Giuseppe Bonolis and Giuseppe Mancinelli, and in Paris under Ary Scheffer. He became a protégé of Lord Leighton, who brought him back to England in 1863. Perugini may at first have worked as Leighton’s studio assistant. Under Leighton’s influence, he began as a painter of classical scenes; then “he turned to the more profitable pastures of portrait painting, and genre pictures of pretty women and children.”
In 1874, he married the youngest daughter of novelist Charles Dickens, who as Kate Perugini pursued her own artistic career, sometimes collaborating with her husband. Perugini’s 1878 picture A Girl Reading, perhaps his best-known single work, is in the collection of the Manchester Art Gallery. It was bequeathed by James Thomas Blair in 1917.
You are probably familiar with at least a couple of Perugini’s other works as I’ve seen them floating all over the internet for years on women’s blogs.
Homeschooling
Caroline and I had a good week of homeschooling. We’ll take Monday off and then next week I hope to add two more subjects in. It was more important to me to get a good start to the year than it was to get everything started as soon as possible.
I remembered something last weekend that I’ve known about Caroline since she was tiny but hadn’t made the connection to how we do our homeschooling now. She does not like doing the same thing over and over again. See these posts from long ago:
I’m not sure why I forgot about this, but it hit me that even though she’s several years older, she’s still wired the same way. She does not like doing the same thing day after day. It isn’t even that she doesn’t like it. It’s that it doesn’t work for her in some profound way. I’m not sure how else to explain it and I haven’t thought it through enough to offer an explanation. But I realized (again) that I need to make sure we switch things up basically every day. Do things in a different order, vary the subjects from day to day, etc. It definitely makes a difference in her ability to focus and enjoy what she is doing.
Homemaking
David replanted our green beans and bush cucumbers a few weeks ago after the summer plants were done. We wanted to see if we could get a second round this summer and into the fall. The plants have taken off in the last week so we’re curious to see what becomes of them. We have no real expectations since we’ve never tried bucket gardening before.
If you read my post from last week, you know all about the bunnies in the backyard. Last evening Caroline went out with David for the first time and one of the smaller ones came right over. She was thrilled!
Work
I hope you downloaded a copy of the Autumn Bouquet Journal Papers I uploaded last night. I thought that design was just right for early September as it’s not quite summer now but isn’t quite autumn either.
I am hoping to add a few things to the New This Month In The Shop category in the next week. I have some partially finished products and need to prioritize them so we can get them done.
How was your week? Is your garden done? Is anyone fall gardening? What interesting plans do you have for the holiday weekend and autumn? I hope you’ll leave a comment. ♥
Free Autumn Bouquet Journal Papers
Love autumn, but it is still summer. Late summer days are often the best. I can wait for autumn, still a lot of BBQ and good wine to enjoy !
Hi Thomas,
It sounds like you have a plan for the next few weeks!
Sallie
Hi Sallie,
Yep. Spending time in the garden and visiting with the kids and a couple of good books I have be saving. So far the summer has been too busy and a break is in order for my wife and I.
Tom
We are going to plant some bulbs and flower seeds this week. The weather forecast has rain Monday through Wednesday. The ground will be soft and ripe for planting. Decorating here and there for Fall. Have a good holiday week end.
Joan,Marion and Marilyn
Hi Marilyn,
What kind of bulbs are you planting? We planted some when we first moved to this house and the deer promptly ate them all. I miss my bulb flowers in the spring!
Sallie
What a beautiful painting! I really love that one!
My garden is slowing down for the most part, but the tomatoes are finally producing several ripe ones a day. I don’t know why, but the plants are huge and very healthy, tons of green tomatoes, but they are taking forever to take on color. I suppose I should learn how to make fried green tomatoes. 🙂 After being sick last week, I went out to find 2 zucchini that were HUGE! LOL We joked that we could carve them instead of a pumpkin this year. 😉
Mom caught whatever bug I had last week and was weak enough that she fell during the night Wednesday night. I didn’t find her until early Thursday morning, which required an ambulance trip to the ER to have her checked out. They did a covid test, which came back positive. Three of the other 4 of us had taken tests earlier that came back negative, from 2 different brands of test. I suppose since we did not have the reward of extra payments from Medicare, our tests were not as likely to test positive. (Grrrr…) Anyways, that means we are sticking close to home this weekend to help her recuperate. I hope to have a few meals of grilled meat to celebrate the long weekend. 🙂
So in our small town, they have a street fair every year in October. Where we lived in Indiana, they had the 4H fair in early June, but apparently they have fairs much later here in Ohio. The Ohio fairs are also not exclusively 4H, unlike the fairs in Indiana. Many of our new friends have seen E’s drawings and encouraged her to enter one into the fair. I gave her lots of time to consider, and the deadline for the entry form was yesterday. She finally gave consent to an entry, so we did that yesterday. She’s very nervous and has always been very protective of her art, so it’s been a back and forth emotional decision. We shall see if she follows through. She is very much a perfectionist, so it is stressful for her to open up in that way. I, and everyone who has seen them, think her drawings are amazing. As an artist, she always just sees the mistakes. 😉
Hope you have a beautiful long weekend! I know you are welcoming autumn, but I’m hanging on to summer as long as I can! 😉
Amanda
Hi Amanda,
I hope your mom is doing better! I’m glad you can care for them, but can imagine the responsibility it is.
That’s fantastic that E entered her art. I hope it turns out well for her. If she ever wants to share any here, we’d love to see them! (I know not likely, but I still would love to see what she does.)
Sallie
I’ve been spending a lot of time on a church project, and also did some sewing. We got my Linux computer set up, and I organized a whole section of the garage while looking for one little thing.
Hi Peggy,
Oh, a Linux computer! Which distro did you choose?
Sallie
It is Debian, which I don’t have much experience with specifically, but I am doing okay with it.
Summer is ending. Henry, our peacock, molted early in August which portends an early fall/winter. My garden, which was my first productive garden in this local, was relatively productive. The green beans and peas were bountiful, the carrots and cucumbers were slower but finally produced. The pumpkins are running but have few fruit. I attribute that to the lack of bees/pollinators.
I made some fruit leathers with the peaches and nectarines that were on sale (you posted recently about wanting to make leathers). They actually turned out very nicely. Gratifying.
The new chickens are laying so I have a plethora of eggs. I had set a test batch of eggs into water glassing back in June and I just baked with them yesterday. Who knew….water glassing works wonderfully well to preserve fresh eggs.
I have attempted to load Linux on my older lap top. I am going to have to sign up for Jeff’s tutorial. Again, this was a wonderful suggestion from one of your posts but appears to be more complicated than making fruit leathers.
This holiday weekend was a mix of spending time with old friends and working on end of summer projects
Be blessed.