My insane birthday present: a tall internet pole for better reception in my rural area. Securing a guy-wire in the dark, and later doing final tension adjustments in daylight.

Hi Everyone!

In the first week of October, I turned 39. This is my last year in my thirties, and next year is the big 4-0. Next year is also the year I anticipate finishing my house and getting started with hosting art events and vacations at Sirona Falls. It seems like too much of a crossroads of milestones to not celebrate, so perhaps there is a big launch party/housewarming/grand-opening/40th birthday party on the horizon for 2026!? If I manage it, you are all invited!

Thinking about the future fills me with so many conflicting emotions. I have so much excitement about this project coming to fruition after so many years of grueling work, and I have so much fear that it could all go up in smoke. I try not to get into politics on here, but I think it is relevant to discuss how we cope with fear and anxiety about the big things in the world when we exist in our own separate little microcosms, with so little influence on those big things. I always come back to how we have to focus on the microcosms, the local, the community level, the scale at which we can have meaningful influence. In my own personal microcosm, I celebrated my birthday by having a very stressful work party. I begged a few family members and close friends to help me with a difficult and dangerous project that required strength, balance and no fear of heights. It also required my boyfriend and I to do weeks of thinking and planning to make sure it all worked and we all stayed safe. I am going to share the specifics of this project in a future newsletter, so for now all I will say is that we were raising a tall tower on my roof to get better internet so I can do my online teaching from my new studio. The project was totally nuts and we hit so many snags and problems and hiccups where things did not go as expected. Despite weeks of preparation, we were not quite ready when my helpers arrived, and of course additional unanticipated problems happened, so an hour and a half of anticipated work turned into over three hours with everyone on the roof and us finishing in the dark. No one got hurt and it all worked in the end, and my friends were so generous and patient with it all, despite working late and hungry while our nice dinner down on ground level gradually got cold.

Like I said, despite all the stress and problems, at the end of the day it all worked out. The next day, I cried. Tears of relief and tears of gratitude. I am so lucky that there are people in my world who show up for me in so many ways. So much about my life and the crazy projects I am doing requires that I ask for help. It is humbling. Many people are afraid to ask for help and afraid to be beholden to others afterwards. I felt uncomfortable, and like I was asking too much of my people. But I also remind myself that I show up for others too. And that helping each other builds connection, community, and love. My friends and family showed up for me in a moment that I needed it, in a way that quite literally changed my life. Before this project, the internet that I was able to get was mediocre. Fine for emails and entertainment, but for my teaching online it was horrible, with lots of frozen frames and dropped zoom calls. I had to move back into the office I had been renting before while we worked out this plan. After the project, I tested the internet and it is excellent, definitely good enough to do my teaching, and so far just as good as my rented office. So this means I can properly move into my new studio, give up renting this office, actually live in my new house. That is so huge, so meaningful, and so beautiful. I want to cry again just writing about it. It makes me have hope that we will all be ok somehow.

I tell this anecdote now to bring it back to where I started, talking about the politics that I always say I am not going to talk about. Whenever I get discouraged, I remind myself that what is happening locally is so much more important than we give it credit for, and is something I can have a real impact on. Many people only vote once every four years, during the big presidential elections. But there are local elections every year, with one coming up very soon. I got my mail-in ballot recently. If you are in Pennsylvania, the deadline to order one is October 28th and the link is here. I hope you all will also show up for local elections and make your voice heard. Show up for your community. Show up for your friends. And do not be afraid to ask your community to show up for you when you need it. It truly matters, so much. Every one of you who reads my newsletter and follows along on this journey… your interest and attention and time are a gift. It matters to me. Your support matters, and I am grateful.

Ok… Onward from my sentimentality! So it is high time that we move inside the house and on to finish work with this newsletter. I want to start by talking about ceilings, which will be our Featured Project. The Superheroes of the month will be some friends who helped me with said ceiling project. Finally, for our Nature Spotlight I want to discuss how the reservoir becomes a stopping point for the fall bird migration, so we get some really cool shorebirds that are otherwise unheard of in central Pennsylvania, including the iconic Common Loon whose call you have heard in basically every movie that wants to have a spooky nature sound in it.

Love,

Elody

Pictured above are the 2024 Calendars. The 2026 Calendars do not yet exist!

Support Me: Calendar Pre-Order Season Begins!

It is never too early to order your 2026 calendars!

Each year I create a calendar of my paintings, selecting from the range of work completed in the previous year, as a fun artistic re-cap for the year. Each month has a reproduction of a unique artwork and the dates on 4.25" by 5.5" pages, connected with a ribbon for hanging on a tack or nail. 

What began as a tradition where I ordered a few dozen calendars to give to close family and friends as a tiny annual holiday gift has since expanded every year. Some friends began to request to purchase them to give to their family, friends, co-workers, etc. Now I order hundreds of them! I do a pre-order system and sell them in sets of 5 to keep them inexpensive.

These 5-packs will again be $30 this year. Pre-order Deadline is Nov 15th.

If you are local: Reply to this email and let me know how many you want and I will put you on my list. You will have various payment options, including the website link below, and we’ll arrange pick-up/delivery in early December.

If you will need shipping: go ahead and officially pre-order them through my website here so I have your payment and shipping address all in one place, and I will ship them off as soon as I have them. You will receive them well before Christmas, likely before December 10th.

Left: My studio ceiling just after installation. Right: The ceilings in the kitchen and bathroom on my side with their colorful walls and finished trim.

Feature Project: White-Washed Ceiling Boards

Drywall is the cheapest option for walls and ceilings, but is miserable to work with, and is especially hard to install and spackle on the ceilings. If we had to do some drywall, we decided, let us do it on walls and do something else for ceilings. Gary scored a really good deal on a whole huge order of hemlock boards from a local lumber yard, and they were able to create shiplap edges on all of it for us. Shiplap is an alternative to tongue and groove that is easier to install but still prevents any true gaps between the boards. Even after the final shrinkage has occurred, the gaps that appear are only revealing the overlapping joint. With tongue and groove, any warp or bend to the boards creates a real struggle to get the tongue to go into the groove. In ship-lap, the edges just have to overlap. See the little diagram in one of the pictures below.

Our friends Nell and Chuck had recently built a new home in which they had used a lot of wood on ceilings and walls, some of which they left natural and some of which they had applied a thin coat of white-wash that allowed the grain of the wood to show through. My dad and I really liked the look of it and got some tips from them for how to do it. Thus began my summer of white-washing thousands and thousands of board feet of ceiling boards. Luckily, it was very easy and non-fussy to apply. I used a product that was actually a transparent deck stain, and the process was to roll it on and then brush it out with a wide brush. It went very quickly. Even so, it was days and days and days of work, filling the barn with as many sticks as could be leaned up or put on our special wood-drying racks (vertical boards with long screws sticking out that you could lay long boards out horizontally, stacked one above the next with spaces in-between. We did enough to do every ceiling in the whole house, both sides, except for the basement on my side and some closet/utility space. I got so tired of it that I decided to do some of the rooms with a “h’aint blue” inspired light blue-wash just to change it up a little. Thankfully, I had some days with helpers. I asked on social media and on this newsletter in its early phase, and a few people generously volunteered to come out and paint boards with me for a few hours!

Installing the boards was also a huge project, especially for any ceiling that was on the other side of exterior roofing. First we had to make sure all of the insulation was in place. Installing insulation above your head is the worst, as gravity is against you and not only does it sometimes want to fall out, but the little itchy bits of it are falling down onto your face and into your clothing no matter how carefully you wrap yourself up in clothing and masks. Then, we installed a layer of plastic as a vapor barrier. Then we installed furring strips to create an air gap and for the ceiling boards to nail into. Finally, the ceiling boards themselves, one row at a time, and carefully cutting holes for lighting in the exact right position, to the quarter inch, along the way.

It was nearly impossible to do this without an extra helper, so most days we did this either Tim or Rebecca helped me install boards while Gary cut them to length and delivered them. Later, on the guest side, we had some ceiling install days where my helpers were my brother Joe or my friend Lindsay (who I have not featured yet!) The long days with a nail gun above your head were challenging, but once the insulation was covered and when we were not making mistakes, it was mostly fun and satisfying work. And the results were amazing, I just LOVE my ceilings!

Top Row, Left to Right: White-washed boards that inspired us at our friend’s Chuck and Nell’s new house, example of a ship-lap vs. tongue and groove structure, and the huge delivery of boards. Bottom Image: a panorama of my barn with dozens of drying boards.

Above, Left to Right: Before we could install our boards, we needed to 1) install insulation, 2) staple up a vapor barrier (aka sheets of heavy plastic), and 3) use a heavy-duty nail gun to install furring strips (with our furry friend Luna, Rebecca’s dog, looking on.)

Above: When installing ceiling boards, always keep track of EVERY SINGLE WIRE and pre-cut your PERFECT HOLES in EXACTLY THE RIGHT PLACES. Or else!

TIMELAPSE VIDEOS: Here is a video compilation of some ceiling installation on Instagram and on Facebook.

Three Superheros of the Month!

The three people who came up for a day and helped me cover thousands of feet of these boards with white-wash (or blue-wash) were:

Bob Vernon - Bob is a dear family friend whom I have known since childhood. In fact, my whole family lived in his beautiful old log farmhouse for a year when I was 7-8 years old when we were moving to Penns Valley and my dad was building our house. It was a magical time on his little farmette, complete with chasing and being chased by chickens, many hours reading in my special spot way up in a maple tree on the front yard, and infinite other shenanigans. There was a beautiful old elm in the back with a giant swing on it, and when that tree died it was made into boards. One piece of that elm is built into my new house as the top of a breakfast bar by the window of the guest house! Bob is, among many other things, a skilled blacksmith. I have even had the opportunity to play with hot metal in his forge a few times!

Below: Bob working the forge, Bob coaching me through hammering a point, and the view of his log home from up on the hill where the elm was.

Heather House - I have known Heather since I was a teenager, and have always thought she was one of the coolest and most fun people I had every met. She is a force of nature. Since then, I have attended her wedding, watched her raise three incredible and super smart kids (the younger two are twins, were born premature, and her daughter Fern has Downs Syndrome) and have been at the funeral of her amazing husband Will who died after a long excruciating battle with cancer, and watched her struggle with Lymes disease (a journey we have in common). Needless to say, she has experienced way more than her fair share of hardship, and yet she still shines so bright. Every time I see her, she makes me belly laugh. She is so smart and honest and funny and real… there is no meaningless small-talk with Heather. Even if we have not seen each other in two years, in two minutes of chatting we are talking openly about things I often don’t even discuss with my closest friends. I love that about her and am so delighted to spend time with her any time I get a chance. I am so honored that she took time out of her demanding life to come hang out and paint boards with me for a day.

Below: Top Row, Heather on her Wedding day, cracking up with her hubby Will on the left and with me on the right. Bottom Row: photos of Heather with her three kids!

Jeffery Mathison - Jeff is a very talented watercolor artist, whose work features nature and the figure. He has incredible drawing skills and I have known him through the community of artists around central PA for at least 15 years, if not longer. Our paths cross at pretty much every art event of importance in the area, and once we even co-taught a workshop together in West Virginia organized by our mutual friend Erin Becker. It was so kind of Jeff to offer to come out and help me last year on this project, and I was able to give him something in return recently when I gave him some mural paints to work on a community art project that we are both involved in, painting fiberglass bells for historical locations in the region for PA250. 

Below: Jeff Watercolor Painting a landscape on the left and getting started painting his bell project on the right for the Bells Across America Program.

The Common Loon! All of these amazing photos of migrating birds were taken by my birdwatching friend Deb Rittleman, at various lakes in Central PA. Thank you Deb!

Nature Spotlight: Common Loon (Gavia immer)

The Common Loon is famous for its eerie call, inserted into every movie that needs a creepy moment in nature regardless of whether it is appropriate loon habitat or not. Loons spend their breeding summers in northern lakes, and their winters on the oceans. While you might not expect to ever see or hear a loon in Central Pennsylvania, in fact during migration you can find a loon almost anywhere there is a large enough body of open water. Loons, like airplanes, need a runway for takeoff, and need from 30 yards to a quarter-mile (depending on the wind) for flapping their wings and running across the top of the water in order to gain enough speed for lift-off.

Luckily for me, the Ohl/Machlhatten reservoir near my house is plenty big enough. When staying in my tents during the spring or fall, I have sometimes been wakened at dawn to a loon call drifting across the woods from the lake. It is the COOLEST thing, and not something I ever thought I would experience in Pennsylvania, much less on my own property.

It is not just loons who are attracted to the reservoir! We get all kinds of shorebirds and ocean birds during migration: grebes and scoters and all kinds of ducks, cormorants and even gulls. When the lake is lower, it exposes mudflats perfect for migrating sandpipers and plovers. Just another part of what makes my place such a haven for birdwatching! Just a few days ago I flushed several Greater-Yellowlegs (a super lovely large sandpiper species) while walking around the lake. Birdwatchers, if you are coming to visit me any time in the future, don’t forget your binoculars!

If you don’t know the call of the Common Loon or want to learn more cool facts about them, visit this link.

Clockwise from top left: Red-Throated Loon, Black-Bellied Plover, Solitary Sandpiper, and Semipalmated Plover, all captured while migrating through Central Pennsylvania. Below: Deb’s hilarious capture of a Common Loon with one gigantic foot sticking out!

Sirona Falls