96

I actually went for a 2.8km run yesterday in the beautiful weather, which I forgot to mention.  Also, I built a dam until my fingers went numb from the icy-cold, lovely, babbling water pouring down the hill.  I succeeded in diverting the flow, to my engineering hearts' great satisfaction.

There are wood frogs already in the pond, and every year they delude me into thinking that there are ducks on the water, which is thrilling, and which does sometimes happen.  The thought of the ducks which I can hear but cannot yet see, causes me to stalk painstakingly up to the pond, like a jaguar, except with turquoise trousers, but no, it is the quacking wood frogs.   Which of course stop, alerted by my skulking presence, long before I can actually even see the their watery home, devoid of Mallards.

Wood frogs are amazing little things.  They hibernate in soil or leaf mould, and just before winter their bodies build up urea and glucose which act as "cryoprotectants" to limit the amount of ice that forms and to reduce osmotic shrinking of cells. These wonderful little creatures survive the whole winter like this, during which their bodies freeze and thaw several times.  They can survive if no more than about 65% of their total body-water freezes.

The frogs refused to sing their mating songs while I was the intruder, but a male cardinal and a tufted titmouse sang to one another.

There are also ticks, the scourge of warmer weather.  I don't like killing anything, but there are a few exceptions: ticks, mosquitoes, flies.  I picked several of them off my turquoise legs and happily crunched them all between stones.

I met a doe with two youngsters, who were very interested in me and let me walk towards them slowly for a few minutes.  They even started to approach me on their long skinny legs, and then, as I moved ever closer, the mother decided I was not safe, snorted and turned her white tail on me and the younger ones obediently followed suit. 

And today was a full day's painting at the course I am taking with my friend every Wednesday evening.  It is tiring painting for five hours in one day.  Long ago at Art school we used to paint for that amount or longer, every day. The perfect life!

So my painting today is the man-made object, and I hope no one is offended.  We were talking the other night with some friends, one American and one South African couple,  about how strangely different American society is in one way, that people are very prudish about nudity.  (Of course, it is a double standard because absolutely everything is highly sexualised: music videos, tv shows and a lot of advertising.)  The American woman explained that it is understandable because they are descended from the Puritans, but it is so very different from liberal little Grahamstown, where our children grew up running around naked in summer, and where all our friends' houses were filled with Art and paintings and some were always nudes.  It never crossed our minds that it was strange, it was perfectly natural.  In America, our boys had friends over who exclaimed how lucky they were to have pornography all over their house! I have never seen a painting of a nude in anyone's house I have visited here.