Overheard

My Girl to Buddy Boy:  When we grow up you should be a doctor and I will be your nurse.
Buddy Boy:  No, I want to be an Alchemist.

Turkey advertisements

Buddy Boy is learning about persuasive writing.  This is what they did in class last week.  You are a turkey.  Try to convince the butcher why your partner is a better choice for Thanksgiving dinner.

 

Why I am a bad choice:
I am high in cholesterol and I am very thin and sour and have a lot of feathers.

Why my partner is a good choice:
He is very fat and juicy and sweet and has little feathers and comes with a free bag of gravy.

For some reason this made me laugh, especially the bit about the free bad of gravy.

Central Drug Store

This is a photo I took on our honeymoon of the Central Drug Store in Belize City.  The town is a bit of a dump.  So was the store, but it always makes me smile.  The sign above the door says, "licensed to sell drugs and poisons."  Hmm...  Better look carefully at what you put in your bag.

 

This photo isn't great.  In fact it is pretty bad.  The sun was just setting over the roof of the store and it threw the lighting off.  It is also a bit busy.  Too many people.  I like the table selling orange juice on the left side and the boys leaning on the window on the right.  I like the unnatural minty green color of the building and the bright red in the Coca Cola sign and the shirts.  So I cropped it and painted my version.

 

 

First a little sketch.

 

Here is the finished painting.  It is a lot brighter than the photo, but more true to life.  I like the little curl of orange peel hanging off the edge of the table and the colorful Christmas lights. 

We were there at the end of November and the holiday stuff was in the stores and Christmas carols were playing.  We bought our favorite Christmas CD in a little shop across the street from here, Reggae Christmas.  It has a great Rudolph the Red Rose Reindeer (no that's not a typo) and two versions of Little Drummer Boy. 

I changed a couple of things.  I lowered the window and had the woman with the bag face the other direction.  She was walking out of the picture before.  This is better. 

Did I mention I'm having a lot of fun in my painting class?

Alley redo

Here is a second attempt at a picture I originally did for on online watercolor class a couple of years ago.  I gave a sneak peak a couple weeks ago here.  You can find the first version here.  In this one the colors are much warmer and more true to life.  I like them both for different reasons.  I am trying to paint loosely and colorfully, but not necessarily realistically,  maybe a little impressionistic or even a little expressionistic.  You don't see much of either of those here.  Not a bad painting, but it feels pretty stiff.  Still a lot to learn.

Costumes, carnivals, and more Halloween

We are finally to the end of the Halloween season.  It is a holiday that seems to last for weeks, between the costume planning and construction, then the school carnival and the ward trunk-or-treat days before the actual day.  It get to be a bit much for me, but the kids have a good time.

 

Buddy Boy has known for months what he wanted for a costume.  He wanted to be an Enderman.  In case you don't know what that is, you probably haven't spent much time with the 8 year old male set.  You can read about it here.  In short it's a Mob that lives in the End, from Minecraft, of course.

 

 

 

My Girl in her typically indecisive style didn't decide until we were at the store getting supplies for the Enderman.  It was the sparkly antennae that sealed the deal.  I bought the antennae and lady bug leg warmers and made the shell from an extra large t-shirts, cardboard, and Styrofoam.  She loved it.

 

My Girl and I went to the school carnival.  Buddy Boy decided to attend the Cub Scout campfire instead.  I can't blame him.  He had the lead role in the Cub Scout skit.  He had been practicing his lines for days.  I wish I could have seen it.  I hear he did a great job. The skit was the one about the scientist who invents an enlarging machine.  It went something like this one.

At the school carnival the ladybug practiced her flying...

played with her friends...

My Girl and her kindergarten friends have been adopted by a group of the fifth grade girls.  It is so nice to see.  They are reading buddies and often have lunch together and play together at recess.  My Girl is already sad that these older girls won't be at the school next year. 

went pumpkin bowling...

and ate cotton candy.

It was a great evening. 

Days of anticipation later we finally got to THE DAY.  It started off with the costume parade at school.  Buddy boy got to show off his best Enderman.  I love this photo because you can see his cute happy face showing through.  He is wearing a bike helmet that is zip tied to the upper box, which is zip tied to the lower box.  The arms have yard sticks in the lower portion that he can manage through slits in the sides.  He was quite happy with it.  We even made a Minecraft chest for trick-or-treating purposes later that day.  It was fun to see the positive reaction from the other kids at school and while out in the neighborhood.  Most adults didn't recognize his character, but the kids did.  Even the 20-something guys who live across the street knew exactly who he was.

 

After school we traipsed around town trying to find a place that still had a couple of pumpkins to sell.  Third time was the charm.  We ended up painting the faces, much to My Girl's disappointment.  I had procrastinated and there just wasn't time for the full scale carving.

 

That night we went trick-or-treating with friends.  On our street there are very few kids and not much activity, but one street over is where the party is.  So we made our way up to the park and back and called it a night.

 

As we were leaving we couldn't help noticing the light coming from across the street...

Now that's the way to light a Jack O' lantern.

(It's a kerosene soaked roll of toilet paper, just in case you want to recreate this stunning effect on your own.  Just keep a fire extinguisher handy.)

So there you have it.  The End(erman).

Pumpkin and shadow

Here is my work from today's painting class.  Last week several people were doing pumpkins, so I thought I would do one this week.  I like the strong lighting and dark shadows.  The reference image is here.  I was originally thinking of doing the shadows in blues (complementary color scheme), but the teacher suggested cool greens and purple (split complementary).  I like it a lot better than the blue would have been.

 

So Happy Halloween this week.

 



Happy Halloween!

Here is this year's Halloween window.  Happy Halloween!

Paintings

I've really been enjoying my painting class.  Even though it is one more thing to do and one more place to be I'm glad to be able to go.  It is my stress relief for the week.

Here are the things I've been working on.  The colors aren't exact.  It's hard to duplicate the originals and get the colors to turn out right.  The first two are about 8" x 10" and the flowers are about 4" x 6".

This one is an architectural detail of the Brigham City Tabernacle.  It's the light above the front door.  I like the pioneer gothic style of it.  It seemed overwhelming to paint the whole building so I just did a bit of it.  I still rely pretty heavily on photos for my drawings.  I'm working on my drawing skills when I can, but for now I just want to get in and paint.

The light and door had a lot of fussy details so next I did something bright and a little looser.  I actually took the photo of these Swiss cows on a trip years ago.  I would often photograph something thinking that someday I'll paint it.  I've seen other paintings of cows with colorful spots and I wanted to try it myself.  Now I'm painting and I'm digging through my old photos for source material.

These are little pansies that grew in my yard a few years ago.  This doesn't capture the richness of the color, but it does convey some of the freshness of the flowers.  This one isn't really finished looking, but I think I'm done with it anyway.

Hear is a peak at what I'm working on now.  I'm not loving it at the moment.  We'll see how it turns out.  It's a redo of a painting I did awhile ago for an online watercolor class.  I wasn't entirely pleased with that one either, but I like the original picture, so I keep going back.

September

I got a message from my sister-in-law wondering where I've been and what we've been up to.  So here is the short and sweet version.

My Girls has been playing soccer on Saturdays.  The under-6 teams have a practice followed by a game each week.  It's nice and low-key three on three on mini fields.  She is on a team with a friend from preschool and she is loving it.

One morning as I was walking out the door with my water bottle, visor, folding chair, and My Girl in her uniform some 20-something guys drove by in a big truck and yelled, "Soccer Mom!"  My thought was, "Yes, isn't it obvious?"  It makes me laugh, but I'm a little confused by it.  Was it supposed to be some sort of insult?  Were they cheering for their memories of youth soccer?  Were they just stupid?  No one will ever know.

Buddy Boy and My Girl started piano lessons.  I've been thinking about this and chewing it over for years.  I finally found a teenage girl through church to be their teacher.  She is great and the kids love her.  She has a little sister My Girl's age so she knows how to work with the little ones.

Cub Scouts has started up again.  Buddy Boy earned his Wolf badge and is now working on his Bear.

I thought that I would have all this time with both kids in school, but I have filled it up.  I volunteer at the school twice a week and I have started a watercolor painting class one morning a week.  I'm really enjoying it.  It is as much of a stress relief meditation as anything.  It doesn't matter if the painting turns out or not.  I'm enjoying it.  I'm the youngest in the class by decades.  That is a stark contrast to the book club I attended last week where I was the oldest by as least one decade, two in some cases.  It sometimes feels strange to hang out with "peers" who were born after I graduated from High School.  (We have kids the same age so I guess that makes us peers, in a way, sort of.) 

I am also back to teaching.  This quarter I have two sections.  One on Friday and one on Saturday.  Four hours is a long time to be in class for me and for the students, but it works.  At least it is only one prep for the two classes.  I'll miss the rest of the Soccer games, but Dad makes a great Soccer "mom".

When you put this on top of the usual Mom stuff it feels a little crazy at times.  I'll get used to the new pace in a few weeks, until then, it's one day at a time.

Camping with the Cubbies

This weekend we went to Cub Scout family camp with the Pack.  It was a lot of fun to spend time with the Cubs and their families.  We went to Camp Pico Blanco south of Monterey and inland a bit.  It was a beautiful location in the redwood forest.  The trees are so tall.  There are a few oaks and other things sprinkled in, but it is mostly the redwoods.  I was afraid it was going to be cold.  The area is known for being cold and foggy along the coast.  We got lucky.  It was freakishly warm and nice, which meant 70s during the day and 60s at night.  I'm used to either hot desert days or cold mountain nights when I camp.  This was just weird, but I'm not complaining.

There is a little river that goes through camp.  The kids spent a lot of time playing, swimming, splashing, panning for gold, fishing for crawdads and anything else they could see, at all hours of the day and night.

They did find some sparkly sand, but the fish were in little danger since they were fishing with a t-shirt and left over bacon grease.

At the waterfront the river had been dammed to make a little space for swimming, canoeing and kayaking.  In the evening the bats came out and swooped and fluttered all over the surface of the water.  There weren't any mosquitos so I don't know what they were eating or maybe they were drinking.  I don't know.  I only wish they had been around during the day to eat the little flies that were swarming around.

 

While some of the boys went on a 3 mile hike that turned into a 7 mile hike, Buddy boy sharpened sticks and carved his name in the sides.  He was making arrows, because you just never know when you'll need one.

 

 

One of the best things for My Girl was the little sisters.  There were several little girls for her to play with all weekend.  She loved it.

 

They dubbed this notch between two redwoods their clubhouse.  When they weren't in the water, or trying to tell the boys what to do, they were here.

The camp staff had volunteered to come up for the extra weekend.  So the archery and BB gun ranges were open as well as the craft and nature lodges.  The kids had a good time with leather work.  We all did archery.  This was one of My Girls favorite parts.  I really liked the archery as well.  Dad and I went out on a date last week to an archery range for a lesson and some practice.  It was fun to put my new skills to work.

 

We had a good time.  It was great to spend some family time as well as get to know the other families better.  They are a great group of people.