Another view of the yarrow. For some reason, yarrow has always been difficult to photograph. Ah well, I keep trying.

It’s a beautiful morning, though it’s turning cloudy and we’re due for rain and perhaps a thunderstorm this afternoon and evening. I can see catalpa flowers falling slowly – one by one. Don and I were outside early this morning and the scent coming from that tree is heavenly. By the way, all of the wild phlox and the wild roses have lost their flowers. Their time is truly fleeting.

I was so excited when a box from Denmark arrived in the mail yesterday. Huzzah! Here is the beautiful easel made by Hanna of Atelier Hannas Mini  on Etsy. The easel is hand made using beautiful wood, and it works!

Isn’t it gorgeous?? You can see that the easel is adjustable. I’ve already played with it. Hanna is so talented. This one took a long time to get here. Hanna had to make it and she was awaiting some parts that come from England. It was worth the wait.

I had to try out one of my mini paintings, which suddenly looks like a big canvas! I think I’ll eventually put a work that is in progress on the easel, so it looks like our resident artist is currently working on a new painting. We’re going to assume that there is a big window on this side of the easel that floods the room with light.

Truthfully, I’m a little jealous of the artist. She has this lovely space, a large easel, a comfy chair and lots of light. I work at the kitchen table with a small “sort-of-an-easel” and am surrounded by kitchen stuff. I hope she knows how lucky she is!

Okay. Business stuff. As you may or may not know, the email versions of my last two posts didn’t go out. Traffic to the blog greatly decreased because many of you rely on the email to tell you I’ve posted, even though you know that 99% of the time I post every day. That means lost ad income.

Last night, at 3:30 am, both of those posts went out. Go figure.

Here’s the problem. I, and many, many other bloggers, use Feedburner, a free service owned by Google, to send out updates of our feeds, as well as email versions of our posts. For the past several years, Google has virtually ignored Feedburner. It is impossible to get any sort of help when something goes wrong. In doing some research, I learned that Google recently announced that they were going to do some work on Feedburner, but had decided to  get rid of email subscription services. So, as of July, it is no longer an option. That means I have to find another way of sending the emails and all the alternatives cost money. And I didn’t particularly want to invest any more money in the blog.

But I have over 400 subscribers, so I have to face reality and choose a new service. Truth be told, I’m not at all sure how many of the 400+ still actively read the blog and Feedburner doesn’t supply any information as to who, specifically, doesn’t read the blog. All of the alternative services determine pricing based on subscriber count.

I did some initial research yesterday and I’ll keep on working on it. I have to make a choice soon, as the emails will no longer go out as of July. In the meantime, I hope the current problem has been corrected and you subscribers will get your emails on time. I promise to do my best to find an even better service than Feedburner. Thanks so much for your patience.

Stay safe.

Happy Sunday.