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I really need to tackle the garden, which has become enormously wild and woolly this year. I just couldn't find the motivation for it somehow.

Art class this week was looking at light reflected on wet paving slabs, but mine isn't finished yet.

I painted this last week though:  my beloved old dogs Az & Mollydog.  A typical pose: Molly full of enthusiasm, Az looking doubtful but also a bit mischievous.
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I'm slowly nudging in the direction of hoping to actually make saleable art, and in preparation for that distant happening, I made a quick website : https://victoriaclare.com/

I've started thinking about perhaps adopting another dog, though I'm not sure. Rosie seems to be enjoying being an only one. But I do like the look of Anton. A scenthound might be a nice change.

We took the mattress we borrow every year from my mother back to its home again (we only need it for the one week when we have 5 guests at once!).  We've got very good at wrangling it up and down the stairs by now, and the mattress itself is a seasoned campaigner, a little scuffed at the corners.

This weekend I remembered to order vegan cupcakes for T's birthday (thank goodness they are now in Victoria, which actually has vegan food suppliers so it's much easier to send them things they might like!)  I also made a chocolate hazelnut fudgecake for us, which is very nice.

Oh, and I FINALLY finished writing A New Road or a Secret Gate which is a story about Elrohir meeting Amrod & Amras.   It has a slightly unexpected ending and I couldnt' work out how to make it work for ages, but finally I did, which is rather a relief.  

Gambara the Volvo, with over 146,000 miles on the clock, passed her MOT with flying colours, and didn't even need a new tyre! 

Blimey they build Volvos solid.

What else has happened?  Pp and I went to Colin the Art's Open Studio private view thingy, and were much amused by this one of his paintings
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Rosie Roo got a sore ear, I think possibly a wasp stung it.   She'll throw a wobbly if a vet tries to look at it, so I'm giving it a couple of days in the hope that it will be better on its own. 

It's all right, she came back!

Rosie Roo has actually been very good for a long while now.  It's almost like having a normal dog! 

... for it is wet, though not as wet as it was this morning.  The bluebells are out in selected patches of the woods, though only in the sheltered spots so far.  The word is going around that the bluebell season will be short this year, because everything is coming into flower late after the cold spring.

I'm not sure.  Often the bluebell season is cut short by dryness, and it's definitely not dry.   But the flowers are late.  The primroses are flowering in pale greeny-yellow abundance, and the blackthorn is still in bloom!  I think of blackthorn as a March flower...

Rosie is definitely slowing down a little.  I wish I knew how old she was, but since she was a stray, I'll never know that.  But since I adopted her in December 2013, and I thought she might be about 5 then, she's maybe 9 or 10 now.  It's hard to tell with a pale cream dog, but I think her muzzle has gone white. I wonder though, if she is actually a few years older than I thought: 9 is young for slowing down in a whippet X. 

We are studying raindrops on flowers in art class next week.  I must dig out some photos as references.

I worked on a large painting I've been fiddling with for a while today, but it's still far too unfinished to photograph.  Here's one I made earlier:
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We decided to go over to Mount Edgecumbe on Saturday, since the weather forecast was good.  Of course, when Saturday arrived, it was snowing, but we thought let's go anyway.  And in fact it was quite pleasant down by the sea, although it would have been a sunnier day today.  Here's the folly and Drake's Island and Plymouth in the background.

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Long ago, I was in Haye-on-Wye on what proved to be a bitterly cold and icy day.   Most of the shops in Haye-on-Wye sell books and book-related items, but books will not keep you warm (well, maybe they will if you buy enough of them to build yourself a house, but I was on holiday and therefore not inclined towards a longterm building project.)

But there was one shop selling hand-made woollen crafty items, and so I flung myself into it with gratitude, and, throwing economy to the wind in the interest of not actually freezing to death, I  purchased several items (knitted, if I remember rightly by Marches Matrons from Alpaca-wool).  I think I bought a scarf,  a pair of mittens, and this hat.  I am not sure what I did with the other items, but I still have the hat.   Usually I wear it with the flower at the back, because I feel the flower is somehow a bit too much on me.  Rosie, however, carries it off with style.

Because of Rosie's long aristocratic nose, and tendency to look down it disdainfully, her elegant form, her pointed ears and ability to float lightly over muddy ground,  I said that Rosie must be an Elf Princess.  After some discussion with Pp, we agreed that if Rosie was a Middle Earth Elf Princess, she would be Aredhel, White Lady of the Noldor.   Because Aredhel is the princess notable for not staying where she is told to, but instead unwisely bogging off and doing her own thing, with unpredictable results.

So here is Rosie, imagining herself as Aredhel.