And school begins!

I've been working for the past year trying to get my state residency changed so that I can go back to school and not have to pay 10k a semester as an out of state student. I had originally thought I would only live in Arizona for two years at most and then finish my degree, but my eyes were soon opened to the fact that it would be more like 4 years. I wasn't sure if I would get residency for this fall. After all, I had a lot of difficulty finding a job after I quit school and was unemployed for two months. I wasn't sure if that would count against me. However, I finally got the letter in the mail and I'm happy enough to say (for tuition purposes) I'm an Arizona resident now.

This is a huge deal. I love school and it broke my heart that I had to leave- but to pay that much per semester for a state school would have been crazy. I feel like my life is now beginning again. The past year has felt rather uneventful and I feel like much of my time and energy was wasted on a job that wore me out and almost ruined my ability to draw and paint ever again. Did I accomplish anything? Not really. I have lived here for two years now. I lived in New York City for two years and when I compare what has happened here in that amount of time, in all honesty New York was much more of a life changer. Two years here have been a difficult learning experience. Two years in New York was like a dream. But then they always say that you just remember the good things about the past and the grass is always greener on the other side. Anyway I'm excited to start living again and this summer I will try to take classes at the local community college (I'm able to take 4 classes there before I max out on transferrable credit/requirements) and then in the fall I will continue with classes at ASU. I will also need to get a part time job.

This year I will also be turning the big 3-0. A major milestone...I've lived pretty much a third of my life! Hopefully... Unless I die earlier, lol.  The idea of turning thirty is rather scary. I guess I don't really want to talk about it much. Let me just say that this is the year that I need to evaluate my life and what I've been doing and where I plan to go. It's time to start thinking seriously about the future and how I will be supporting myself (making a career out of what I do). I can't continue to work lame jobs forever, I need to grow up. So I'm going to be paying more attention to my goals. And that means being much more productive as an artist, and focusing on my own talents and the things that *I* should be doing.

This little boy is my model of motivation this year:

The sunflowers, and what became of them

My sunflowers did a few things I was never expecting, such as blooming multiple flowers on one stem. They looked great and I really wanted to cut them and put them in a vase and paint them. But I only had a few and felt that cutting them would be too mean for my first sunflowers ever. So I let them be and eventually they died of old age.

I thought that the birds would be attracted to them (especially the largest one) but I was wrong. A few times I saw a bird perched on the biggest one, but I never saw any missing seeds from any of the old blooms. Maybe the birds knew something that I did not- that most of the seeds were empty! It's true...after they died I took all the seeds off of them to inspect them. They looked terrific from the outside, but on the inside there was nothing to be found. Out of every 20 seeds or so, 1-2 of them actually had seeds in them. The rest were hollow, and if you pressed each one hard enough, you could "pop" it with your thumb and index finger. I'm not exactly sure what happened, but it was kind of disappointing. Oh well.

I have more sunflower seeds which I'll probably grow and then cut & paint the flowers...however I learned that it's pretty hard to grow them here because I'll have to keep them protected from the evil mystery insect that likes to eat them. I can do that well enough with tulle baggies that I've sewn.

All of the dead sunflowers. Ready for harvest!

Big fat husks- too bad they don't contain anything!

The empty sunflower bloom looks so cool with its strange geometric pattern.

Regular Cherry Tomatoes

It looks like my once flourishing cherry tomatoes have now lived their life. With the coming of the burgeoning heat and the limitations of their pots, I think they are rather overwhelmed and no longer have the strength to churn out pounds of fruit. They are all clearly dying. They still have been producing quite a bit, although the tomatoes aren't getting as ripe as they were before. The ones that I've been picking are still a little tart and yellow, no matter how long I wait for them to become more ripe.

I've learned a lot from my cherry tomatoes. Next time I grow them I should probably provide them with more support than just cages, and it wouldn't hurt to place them next to a wall. They grew much more than I expected them to, and because of this it became much more of a puzzle of how to get them to stay up and not fall over.

I had about 4 pounds in the refridgerator that I was planning to take to church, but I forgot to take them and after a few days I decided I would just throw them into the compost. I know it's a huge waste, but nobody wanted to eat them and I didn't think they would last another week. I also cut off a lot of my big tomatoes, some eggplants, small peppers, eggplants and zucchini in as well. My peppers have not been doing well and of course once again I tried spraying them with soapy water- but this killed half the leaves on them. I can never get the soapy water trick to work. They have been producing peppers, but either the sun is scorching them, or they have blossom end rot and I need to get them some fertilizer.

Anyway, sorry no pictures for this post... but yeah...I'm a little tired of tomatoes right now! hah.

Dreaming about my new room! and...drama?

At the beginning of July I will be trading rooms in the house I live in. Currently I'm in the smallest bedroom, but will be moving on up to the largest which used to be the garage but has been converted. I do feel pretty bad for my roommate who is moving out of it and into my room though...but she was told that I would be moving in in July by my landlady- so it's not like I'm forcing her out against her will. She's known about it all along. However, my moving into the largest room isn't completely unnoticed by the others. I think one of my roommates was pretty jealous when she heard about it. She has what is considered to be the master bedroom, but every now and then she expresses dissatisfaction with it. Such as the bathroom is too small, she has an ant problem, the room gets too hot, etc. And so anyway, I could tell she wanted the largest room because she told her sister who is moving in that they could possibly share it (Even while she KNEW that I would be moving in there). Well, she then decided that she didn't want to share with her sister and talked about having the room to herself, etc. etc.... The story goes on from there but there's not much need in talking about it. The only way I'm giving up that room is if I decide to move to Utah or some other state.

I can fit in my present room, however the closet doesn't fit all of my clothes and I REALLY want to paint, and I'm afraid to paint in a room with carpet (the big room has a fake wood laminate) and I really want to unpack my drawing desk which I haven't been able to use for a few years. I still haven't unpacked it from when I shipped it from New York City. I could probably fit everything in my little room if I had a loft bed, but it would still be very cramped and not a comfortable work environment.

Anyway, so my landlady is updating the bathroom and closet because the closet is pretty much useless and the bathroom is a tad....strange. There is a door that leads out from the room to the outside, and it needs to be replaced as well.

I'm already thinking of ways to decorate. My current plan is to split the room into two parts. One section will have my bed, dresser and nightstand and then the other will have my computer desk, drawing table, and possibly even another desk for painting on. (Or an easel? Although I really don't like using them for some reason.) My reason for splitting the room is that :

1. It's big enough, so why not?
2. I like to keep my work environment separate from my 'home' environment.
3. The room echoes and dividing it would dampen that effect.

I just don't like to be doing homework, or drawing and then look over and see my bed. Sometimes I draw on my bed, which I don't do for pleasure but for the lack of sitting space. And that's not good because it just makes you tired. With two areas, I can clearly define the function for each space: One is work, the other sleep and relaxing.

So my new task is to find a good way of dividing the room. At first I thought maybe a curtain would do, but would that be too cheesy and teenager-ish? I saw a terrific tablecloth and bought it thinking I could use that- and I could, but it still lacks some sophistication. Plus, it's only one sided. So I went to ikea's website (oh ikea, you solve everything in my life!) and they have a GREAT idea. They have room dividing panel curtains!

Here are some examples:

These are just a few. This panels can be mounted on a sliding metal bracket and attached to the ceiling so that they can move. But I could probably hang them with a few thumbtacks just as well. They are super long, too- which is good because the ceilings are about 100 inches tall. AND they are cheap, priced as little as 3.99 each. Woohoo!

Here are some ideas for floorplans (Large pics so you can see) :

As you can tell, I'm super excited to move in. I'm nervous and I'm afraid once I get in there I won't know what to do with myself. But I've been waiting for this room for a year, so I just don't know what to do with myself!

The giant zucchini attacks!

My zucchini has been doing well- although since it was crowding out my eggplants, I had to cut off a bunch of leaves and even a small stalk (or vine, rather) that was not budding anything. Also, the leaves of the zucchini have become the home of hundreds if not thousands of whiteflies. I'm not sure how to kill them. When I move the leaves to spray then they just fly out and land somewhere else. I've also discovered hoards of aphids living on the bottom leaves that touch the ground. I tried my best to spray all the leaves with soapy water- but I think that all these insects are leading to other problems. I found some dark sooty spots both on my zucchini leaves and eggplant leaves and I'm not sure what it is, but I think it was caused by the aphids and whiteflies. I'm trying to correct everything, but it's hard. And frankly if everything were to die at this point, I think I'd be okay because I've got tons of produce from all my plants and they have definitely lived up to expectations. (Well beyond that, actually.)

While I was gone, behold by some miracle my zucchini got smart and started to pollinate itself...or some kind of mystery insect did the job, because I got a few of them while I was gone, and there was even a giant one that popped out of nowhere. Behold, pictures of the royal majesty:

Those were my first eggplant and pepper. My roommate cut them off, however she didn't bother to refridgerate either of them, so by the time I got home I had to recycle them into the compost.

I measured it and trust me....it was huge!

It ended up being 18 inches long and 13 inches around at it's widest point.

I cut it open thinking that the seeds would be really large and thus the zucchini would be difficult to eat, however....I was wrong! The seeds were small and I probably could have easily eaten it still.

However, I have tons and tons of zucchini in the freezer, so I had no choice but to put it into the compost. =(  Oh well. I wonder how big it would have gotten if it hadn't have been cut!

If I have lots more zucchini, I think I'll take it to church and put a free sign on it! I just don't know if I can take any more!

My TALL cherry tomatoes

I've now discovered the difference between indeterminate tomatoes and determinate ones. These are clearly indeterminate because they are growing up to the sky. When I came back from vacay, then I had them on a six foot pole which was sagging backwards due to the weight and length of the plants. I went to Lowes and bought an 8 or 9 foot? pole...whatever was the tallest they had and then came back and tried to prop it up with the help of another wooden stake.

Poor thing was toppling over when I got back.

Staked up and looking much better.

I really didn't want them to grow any taller. I mean, while it's amazing that they have even reached this height, I haven't planted them in a good area, nor do I have the ability to allow it to keep growing so tall. So while I do wish I could let them keep growing, I had no choice but to cut off the tops to stop them. If they grow any higher then it will be too difficult to take care of them. They are truly interesting-looking though, and sometimes I wonder if they came out of the jack and the giant beanstalk fairytale.
Here are some of the tomatoes on them:

Before I left, I cut off two bunches of their tomatoes and put them in my closet. According to my mom, you can take tomatoes that are green, wrap them up in newspaper (usually individually) and then put them in your closet where they will get ripe over a longer period of time. And it's true! It really worked.

Before unwrapping. I was so nervous opening them!

 When I unwrapped the tomatoes, I was afraid that they would be moldy- but they weren't! In fact, they were all perfectly ripe! The experiment was a success! However, on a major low note......they didn't taste so good. Unfortunately they had pretty much no flavor at all. If they tasted like anything, it was a cardboardy-dusty taste. NOT appetizing. So while I saved these tomatoes and was able to eat them myself, they didn't taste so great and maybe it wasn't worth the bother since they ended up tasting so poorly.

They look great! But taste? Not so much.

But anyway, overall I like the way these tall indeterminates look, because they are definitely interesting (a little out of the ordinary) and their height is impressive. Since I've been back I've been able to taste the ones that come off directly from the vine and they taste great! I've been eating them in salads every day. My plan to eat more vegetables by having my garden is definitely working.

On to the Garden! - My regular tomatoes

Okay what I'm going to do for a few posts is have a different post for each plant in my garden so that I won't have to do one big whopping post for the whole entire thing. This post will focus on my regular tomatoes.

My regular tomatoes are doing great, however I've noticed that many of them have large cracks in them where it looks as though they have burst open. This might be because they got too much water- and they probably split when they started to be watered by timer rather than me doing it by hand. It's okay though. While they don't look very visually pleasing, it doesn't really affect the inside of the tomato unless ants or some other bug tries to eat it. Each tomato plant has lots of fruit on it, maybe about 15 tomatoes each. Two of my plants are starting to grow tall, and another two aren't growing tall at all because I accidently cut off the tops of them thinking they were suckers. (oops!) But that's okay, I probably don't need more tomatoes at this point.

When I came back from my trip, one of the tomatoes was falling over in its cage and was being supported by my old big sunflower. I went to Lowes and bought some more wooden stakes which have become lifesavers. Tomato cages can only help so much.

I've added stakes into the ground to support my plants. This is my before picture where I stuck the stakes in but haven't tied anything to them yet.

Here you can see where I started to tie up the tomatoes.

I've already had a few of the large tomatoes ripen, however one I threw away due to pesky insects, and the other is in the fridge and I confess I haven't tried to eat it yet, but maybe I will tonight. Here are some pictures of the tomatoes I have on the vines:

One of my (new) roommates mentioned she tried to grow tomatoes once but apparently the birds kept taking bites out of them. I haven't had any problems with the birds eating my tomatoes at all- which has kind of surprised me.

Words I misspell

Did I spell misspell right?

Without the aid of microsoft words spellcheck, I would be a horrible speller. In fact I'm probably making dozens of mistakes right now because I'm not using it to type this out. But I've noticed that I continue to misspell the same words continually no matter how many times I see them written out. Finally I decided that I would make a list of all these words just for fun. Here are the words in their misspelt fashion:

1. recomended

2. dissappear

3. proffessor

4. liscence / lisence

5. milennium

6. wierd (I mean I always thought it was I before E except after C, you know??)

7. neccessarily

8. dissappointed

9. moniter

10. docter

11. seperates / seperate

12. definately / definitly

13. recognise (now that I google this, it appears to be spelled okay? I'm not sure now.)

14. occasionaly

*I should also note that for some reason when I was younger, I used to spell catalog as catalogue. I don't think that wore off until the end of highschool.

When I look at that list, half of those words look right to me. I have problems with using multiple letters in succesion.....succsession...wait........succession. ARGH! like cc's, epe's, ff's, and ss's. I don't expect to ever start spelling these correctly. But I just wonder if anyone else has the same problem with them like me. Don't worry though, I NEVER spell 'lose' as 'loose' and I'm proud of at least that accomplishment. I also say the proper 'anyway' instead of 'anyways,' due to my friend teasing me about it in highschool. However, do make the grammatical mistake of saying 'on accident' rather than the correct 'by accident.'

After researching the on/by accident issue, I found an interesting website that lists a lot of spelling and grammatical errors.

I'M BACK!

I'm back from the lovely NC where I had a terrific time with friends and family. The weather there was a tad hot, but after living in super HOT Arizona, I was fine with it and I even welcomed the humidity. When I first moved to the East Coast, I really hated humidity and it took me many years to appreciate its positives. I hate humidity for messing up my hair when I try to keep it straight, but I love it for keeping my skin soft and smooth. Arizona dryness gives me lots of wrinkles and I felt like I shed off a few years in my face when I went home. Humidity also makes it easier to breathe. But anyway....on to the good stuff!

Yes, the garden is still alive. However, since I have been gone it has become a jungle out there. It will take me a long time to blog about it- and probably many posts, because there is so much to say. While I compile everything, first I will spend tonight writing about something that I wasn't expecting when I came to North Carolina this summer. That is. . . .

THIS.

It looks creepy right? It's a cicada. BUT not just any cicada. Of course I'm used to the cicadas that pop out every summer and leave their shells on tree branches, but those are different. They are common and typical. However this particular cicada has been waiting underground for 13 years before emerging.

Here's the story: I went home and when I got out of the car I heard this odd, extremely loud sound. Honestly it sounded like a UFO was about to land. The sound was high pitched and didn't sound at all like cicadas. I asked my dad what it was and he told me that it is the sound of the 13 year cicadas and I was completely astonished. Can you believe that insects will live underground for 13 whopping years only to finally emerge, mate and die? All within a few days and weeks? It's wild to think that their entire existence revolves around them mating and dying and then waiting another 13 years. From what I've heard, there are 17 year cicadas as well. That's so crazy!! My dad told me that earlier the sound was much louder- even deafening and at first they had no idea what it was. (My family has only lived in NC since 1999- so we narrowly missed the last time they were there which was in 1998.)

I just couldn't get over it. As I walked around outside there were holes everywhere in the ground where the cicadas had popped out (my moms friend said she was walking her dog when she happened to see a patch of ground where the cicadas were practically pouring out of!), there were many dead ones lying on the ground, others flying weakly away from me as I walked about. On the trees were many empty shells they had shed, still stuck in place on leaves and twigs.

Although I was only in NC for a week and a half, already towards the end of my trip the sound they were filling the air with had cut in half and it wasn't as loud. Most of them had died and in another week or so they will probably be all gone. It will be another long 13 years.

Now for the pictures:

An empty shell.

Lots of empty shells.

Holes in the ground where the Cicadas have emerged.

Okay now brace yourself, because you might find these pictures gross and/or disturbing. But I went to the backyard where I saw a bunch of grubs feasting on a plant. A closer look reveal that they are probably the cicada larvae that have hatched already. I guess they need to eat a lot before they go into the ground!

GROSSS! haha!

Here are some youtube videos where you can hear the sound they make: