Gourds | Cindy's Country Corner

It’s been a busy summer here – what with Sister Vacation and the vegetable garden and the preserving of plums, peaches and figs and the preserving of the garden harvest of tomatoes, peppers, green beans and corn and baking zucchini breads and eggplant parmesans and making pesto with the garden surplus to freeze or give away.

AND, out of 16 summer-ish weekends, I’ve entertained 10 additional weekenders. Now, don’t get me wrong, I love visitors! But, I want every single one of them to love where I live as much as I do, so I overly fret if they will eat well and have a wonderful time.

AND, then there’s the BIG outdoor projects – the bush whacking, hedge trimming, stump digging, chain-saw cutting, building plant shack endeavors– those super dirty, sweaty, back-breaking, knee-slamming, neck cracking jobs that have resulted in scratches, scrapes, bruises, achy muscles and poison ivy.

AND, of course, there’s the on-going job hunt, and creating my own web design/writing business. And, learning the quatrillion things that I don’t know about creating my own website design/writing business.

But, still, I find a bit of time here and there to indulge my creativity. I’ve made a ton of new and exciting foods using zucchini and eggplant and figs and plums. I’ve experimented with making yard art using all kinds of different media – concrete, old windows, rusty wire, window springs, twigs.

Indulging my creativity is good for my soul.

Today, you can see some new gourd art I’ve created since the last time I posted pictures.

What have you been up to?

: Crabby

Lizzy

Kaleidoscope

Stained Glass

I guess I have to say that I do have a New Year’s Resolution for 2012 after all.

Keep Moving Forward.

Everyday. No matter how large or small the steps.

That’s it.

I think it came to me because of my current employment situation. If you don’t know, the company I worked for closed on June 30, 2011. So, I am unemployed. In the past six months, I’ve had two potential positions that, in the end, didn’t work out for me. Funny thing is, I’m pretty cool with that. At this stage of my life, I really don’t want to find another job working for someone else. I’d much rather spend my time and effort working for myself. So, for the first few months of unemployment bliss, I tried to come up with an action plan that would lead to self-employment, while looking for potential outside employment. I stumbled, floundered, pretended to be working on a plan, vegetated, worked on a few house projects, played on the computer, read, planted a fall vegetable garden and found myself not moving forward in any productive way.

It was getting to me. I knew I should be more productive, but just couldn’t find my way. So, after a lethargic few months the heavens of inspiration finally parted and I find myself with so very much to do!

One, is my gourd art. (I grew several hundred gourds on our back forty a few years ago and have kept them for some future projects.) The next step is to add a page to Cindy’s Country Corner and offer them for sale! I need to set up a ‘shopping cart’ and my paypal account on my website to make it easy for gourd lovers to buy them. That will happen in the next couple of days. In the meantime, if you are interested in having a gourd of your very own (they will go fast and make great gifts, btw), comment on this post and I’ll reserve the one you want! Prices range from $10 to $25, plus shipping.

Here are some photos.