Aaaand...I'm back. Again.

I apologize for my blogging absence as of late. Things have been busy around the Homestead, and the weather has been so glorious that it's hard to sit down and blog, and I'm hitting it so hard during the day that when evening rolls around, I'm pooped.

First, I'd like to thank everyone for your thoughts and sympathy and cards concerning Sam. I really appreciate it, even though some made me get teary. The sympathy card from the vet's office made me bawl...it had that story "Rainbow Bridge" printed on the front. Ugh. It's been a weird nearly two weeks without the old guy around the house...almost startling not to see him on his usual perches. I even find myself automatically going to clean hair off the furniture or floor, but there's no hair...which kind of saddened me at first, but I have to admit, it's nice to be able to sit down in dark pants. And a bright spot, I walk into the laundry room and automatically screw up my face in anticipation of fragrance eau de litterbox, and instead I just smell dryer sheet. That's actually pretty pleasant. If there's one thing Sam could do, it's leave a stinky litterbox - and his favorite thing to do was to wait until it was freshly cleaned with new litter. Once about eight years ago, I was sound asleep one night and awoke to the most AWFUL stench, and when I got up to investigate I found a nice fresh "bomb" in the clean litterbox. That cat had crapped and woken me up from ACROSS the house. As I was very grumpily scooping out the box at 2:00 a.m., Sam watched with what I swear was a proudly bemused expression. "Heh...yep, I pooped." All in all, the hair and poop were worth the companionship, and I do miss him.

Fall has definately started to fall down around our ears...it's downright chilly at night, and while the days are still pretty warm, the sunlight has changed to it's fall sharpness and the leaves are thinning and starting to turn. And yesterday on my way to town, instead of admiring the scenery, I was absorbed in the annual autumn tradition of dodging tarantulas crossing the road in search of a mate. (Why did the tarantula cross the road? To get some booty!) I don't know why I bother trying to avoid them, as other drivers seem to swerve out of their way to smash the poor things. People. Maybe a few I've spared have actually made it safely across.

Over the last week and a half, I've been engaged in several projects. Work on my fiddle continues, but very slowly. I will be VERY surprised if I have the fiddle made in the next year, but maybe things will go faster than I think. It's very tedious work, made even more tedious by the fact that my teacher is legally blind, and on top of that hardship one of the other students is a very know-it-all yankee who seems unable to shut his mouth. I figure this first one will be rough to get through, and IF I successfully make this one and decide to make another, the process will get easier.

This is my fiddle front. Violet was saving this beautiful piece of sassafras for her use, but insisted I take it instead. The only drawback is that it's obviously not wide enough for a fiddle front, so I had to saw it in half and glue it together. Fortunately, the wood is so nice that once the board was sanded, I couldn't even tell where the glued joint was. So, envision if you will, a fiddle with this sassafras front, cherry sides, and a cherry back. And I already decided on black walnut fingerboard and tailpiece, but those will likely be long in the future.


Gotta go for now...stay tuned! I promise to get back on the blogging track, and I have more pics to add!