Wednesday September 10

It's a beatiful fall day, cool and crispy and a little rain. The trees are starting to turn colors in town. I can see several along the creek that look really golden. I think they are cottonwoods. Fall is my favorite season.

We had what could be considered a crowd at the art group this morning!! Nine of us were there, and Terry baked a yummy peach pie. I should have taken my camera and taken a picture of all of us.

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I started a watercolor on my 300 lb. paper, and it looks like it somehow got damaged in the 25 or so years it was stored in my basement. (Who can figure?) I started with the sky, and there were lines across it. I didn't think the colors looked pure, either. I will try something on the other side of the paper, but it could be damaged too. Can watercolor paper get too old??

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Sepia pencil, about 15" x 18"

Bathtime

This is Tracy's dog, Bogie, and Rowdy, the cat. When they first got Rowdy as a kitten, Bogie would lick him. As time went on, this became a daily routine with the two of them. Bogie cleaned and cleaned the cat, and the cat loved it.

Monday

I thought I would work on some paintings I have started today, but it didn't happen. Barrie has been here almost all day. She has been on the laptop on the home network, and has been printing out some things. She brought up a bunch of files and papers, and I have been scanning some documents for her and printing them out. She didn't bring Kasey, but has gone to get her now. Then I guess we are going out to her dog lot to feed the dogs.

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Click on images for a larger version.

This is Jarvi, a red heeler. She is the one who got sprayed right in the face by the skunk the other night. She actually didn't smell too bad today. She had a bath with "Skunk-Off".

This is Shorty. He is Kasey's dog, well at least, Kasey is his baby.

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The eyes have it!

Sunday Afternoon

Two More Works from the past.

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While going through my slides, I was surprised to see that I had painted this cabin before. The slide is dated 1979, It's interesting to comare this one with the one I did recently. I posted a photo of that one on August 26th.The notation on the slide says it is 16 x 20 and was sold. I don't remember that I painted anything that large. Maybe it was 16 x 20 with the mat. As I look at the differences in my work then and now, I am pretty sure I painted on 300 lb paper at that time, and now I am using 140 lb. I have some large sheets of the heavier paper, so maybe I will try something on it.

This is a pastel, 16 x 20. I'm not sure, but I think this might still be here - in the never-never-land of my basement.

Saturday, September 6

Barrie and Kasey Visit:

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Barrie and Kasey spent the afternoon and evening. We had shrimp, steaks, and fry bread for supper. Kasey, as always, made sure we were entertained every minute, until she wore down and had to have a nap. We can get Barrie's laptop on my home wireless network by using the card that came with my router. But couldn't get it to print on the shared printer. So frustrating! She hasn't really had the time to try to get on the internet at one of the public places. Maybe we will get it working yet.

We had a wonderful evening until Barrie went out to put the dogs and some things in the pickup. In the dark, the animal down by the fence looked like a cat to the dogs, so of course they tried to chase it. Big mistake. The nice calm skunk who eats cat food on my porch didn't stay too calm when two heelers came at him. The dogs will have to stay in the back of the pickup in the shell camper tonight, the smell immediately came in my house, and I'm sure both Barrie's and my clothes smell. When Barrie woke Kasey up to go home, Kasey wrinkled up her face and rubbed her nose.

I didn't even try to scan any more slides today. I'll just wait for the new scanner. With a scanner that I don't have to wait on to warm up, or adjust the bulb, and it will scan four slides at once, they should go pretty fast. Yes, I know - Murphy's Law. Something will go wrong. But I will think positive!

Barrie looked at some of the slides tonight - holding them up to the light with one eye closed, and she said she can't wait until I get them scanned so she can see them. A lot of her childhood has been captured on those slides. Neither of us wanted to go drag out the old slide projector and try to look at them on a white wall.

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Two more from the slide box

Two more I scanned this morning:

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I spent a lot of time scanning two more slides. The chickadees are in pastel. It was about 15 x 24. I gave it to an aunt, and she had it for years. Family remembers it hanging in her house after she moved to Texas, but no one seems to remember what happened to it or where it is now.

The roses are watercolor, 8 x 10. I tried several times to paint roses on watercolor greeting cards last winter, and they were all a dismal failure. I don't know where this painting is, either.

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I did it!! - - - I ordered a new scanner. If I am going to make it through these boxes of slides, I had to have something better. The one I ordered will scan four slides at one time, has some new kind of light that doesn't need to warm up, so it will be much faster. After spending all that time scanning just two slides this morning, I wanted to scan a VCR cover to make an insert for a DVD case. I got the dreaded message from the scanner "has encountered a problem and will have to shut down". I tried starting it again, and all it did was hum. I turned it off for a while, and maybe it is working now. At this rate, I won't live long enough to scan my slides unless I get new equipment!

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Barrie and Kasey are coming tomorrow, and I promised something yummy to eat. That was a rash promise, but hopefully I will dig back in my memories (and recipe books) and come up with something.

Scanning

It took me forever to get two slides scanned this morning. Let's see, do I need a new scanner, or do I need to practice more? I've had this scanner for at least ten years. It does a good job, but has always been very slow and kind of "klunky" to use. I do have quite a few slides I would like to get scanned and store, and a new one would be nice. Something to think about.

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Here are two pencil drawings I did in the past. I once entered the rodeo drawing in the County Fair, and the judge said it was "too clean looking". I notice that I made notes on some of my slides that the piece sold, and some of them even have the name of the purchaser. I have no idea what happened to these two drawings.

I vowed I would not listen to the Republican convention, and for most of the speeches, I did have the "mute" button on. But I was kind of interested in hearing what Sarah Palin had to say. Well, she is a politician through and through, and knows what she is doing. I think she could be a good vice-president if McCain gets elected.

I couldn't help but laugh at some of the convention-goers. I can't imagine appearing in public dressed in a red furry hat, or some of the other outlandish costumes I saw. They looked like they were having a great time, chanting and waving their signs. Me, I'd rather eat barbed wire.

Wednesday, Sept. 3

Something differnt

This is what I did in the art group this morning at Rendezvous Pointe. I think maybe I needed a break from mountains, skies, trees, and lakes. It's not a serious painting, and I had fun doing it.

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I have been thinking about the photos of old drawings that I don't have on my computer, so I got the boxes of old slides from the closet and looked through them. I found the ones I was looking for, plus more. I must have scanned some of them at one time, but they must have been lost when my hard drive crashed. So it looks like I will be busy scanning slides for a while. I also have more slides that I should do while I am at it. Then I will have it all taken care of, store them on my hard drive and the back up drive, and probably put them on CD's.

I just wish I could come up with a good way to organize them. Right now, they are mostly organized by date. I have tried putting them in files for mountains, wildlife, landscape, etc., but that really isn't working for me.

Several years ago, I went through old photograhs and slides, and really cleaned house. I threw out a lot. When a box of slides contains 36 photos of deer on a hillside in the snow, and none of them are very good, it didn't bother me at all to throw them out.

Hoping for Snow

I am so ready for snow! I don't do anything in the snow, I don't ski, or snow machine or anything like that. Heck, I don't even shovel my front steps! I just like looking at the beauty of it.

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Here are a couple of photos I took last spring. The top one was after a wet snow, and the old seed heads of some daisies collected the snow like little hats. The other picture of the snow on the pine branches just appealed to me. Could be a reference photo for a painting for a Christmas card.

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I have another laptop computer (yes, I know, it's ridiculous to have three of them.) It's an HP, and I got it out today. I put the wireless card in it, and it was immediately on my home wireless network. I know when I got it that it would be better for editing photos, as the screen is much larger, better to edit photos with. The screen is larger and easier to read, but it also larger overall and heavier. Maybe as my "old eyes" become older, I will start to use it more than the smaller Dell.

I'm hoping the computer I gave Barrie will work with the wireless connection at public places.

I am watching "Terms of Endearment" on TV right now. I think I will turn it off before she dies.

Etchings

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Quite a few years ago, I took a class in "Etching" through the Adult Education Program. The high school artroom had an etching press. Etching is such an interesting process. It involves melting wax (I think) onto a steel plate, then scratching the image in to reveal the plate. Then putting it in acid to eat into the plate. After you clean it up, you ink the plate and roll it through this heavy duty press to emboss it on paper. You can repeat this inking and printing process as often as you want. My explanaition of the process is pretty elemtary. I remember my biggest problem was getting dog hair into the wax during the melting process. Then the acid would eat the dog hair away, leaving the steel plate exposed, so it became part of the image.

Anyway, here are two of the etchings I produced.

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I went to sleep last night to the sound of rain on the roof. So Nice!! Seems like we have had a very dry summer. Today it rained, and also spit a little snow. As I live on the hillside, I can't see the mountains from my house, but I can see the mountains to the northwest, and I could see they had fresh snow.

I read on Judi's blog that Vicky has flown home, and that Judi is deep into being grandma and a school teacher again. Sounds like she is having fun, but we miss her!

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Saturday August 31

Yummy Enchiladas

Barrie wasn't lying when she said she made good enchiladas. She brought chicken enchiladas for supper, and they were delicious.

I gave her my old laptop computer. I had a wireless internet card for it, and it found my home wireless internet, but we couldn't get it on line. I have done a little more reading, and think maybe my wireless network is protected, but we are hoping she can get on the public wireless servers, like at the library and Rock Rabbit, and motels. There's got to be a way to add that computer to my network, but I haven't figured out how. The main thing she needs it for is to practice her typing, and how to use Microsoft Office applications. And I even found a CD with "Mavis Beacon Teaches Typing" on it. So we installed it on her computer.

There were some photos on that computer that I had forgotten about, and I tried to copy them to a CD so I could put them on the hard drive of my desktop computer. The laptop could not cooperate - gave me the message that it couldn't write to that CD, and to use a different one. I tried several, and I know nothing was wrong with them, but never did get the computer to write to a CD. Maybe another day.

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Barrie also brought her camera and we downloaded some pictures and I printed some out for her. This is Kasey a couple of months ago, eating her chocolate birthday cupcake.

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