I got brave and tore the wrapping off a brand new canvas a couple weeks ago. Here’s my work in progress.  Sharing with Art for Fun Friday , hosted by Gillena of Lunch Break . 

At the moment, I’m one of those old retired people who get up just before sunrise and do a bunch of stuff before breakfast. This morning I did a load of laundry, pruned more dead branches off a woody rose bush, washed a bucket full of flat stones, planted geranium vine cuttings, and weeded the Husband’s Three Sisters patch. All within two hours. I’ve also been dawdling for the past two hours at the breakfast table. Fun! So, what will I do for the rest of the day? There are many possibilities. Paint a few planters Read about estate planning. Dust and vacuum upstairs. Find the bags of dried rose hips and plant some in pots. Pick fruit up high on the avocado tree. Reorganize the collection of stuff I use for making greeting cards. Pull fabric scraps together for a patchwork tablecloth. Write a letter to a friend. File last year’s receipts. Fill in my passport application. Draft the second story about Daddy. Experiment with making concrete sculptures. Do research at Ancestry.com. Or, none

Being that July is Daddy’s month, many of my posts this month will be about him. Today’s post is the first, about his early life. I wish I knew a lot more. We both were born in the lunar year of the Snake, Daddy, 48 years before me. Daddy’s baptismal document, his only formal proof of birth, was written in Spanish. It states that the infant being baptized on July 25, 1905 had been born ten days earlier.  Daddy was baptized on the feast day of St. James, aka Santiago. I speculate that Daddy’s parents may have named him such because of the day.  It is possible that my grandparents also chose Santiago because that’s the name of their town. Santiago, Ilocos Sur, along the western coast on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. In my whole life with Daddy, we celebrated his birthday on July 25. Did he know his real birthdate? I can’t recall. He did enjoy celebrating his birthday with a big traditional Filipino party, that always included a roasted pig, which he turned on a spit for hours