Makenna turns 11

This past Monday was Makenna's birthday. She turned 11. Hard to believe, but true. We spent the past weekend helping her to celebrate. On Saturday night we took Makenna and her friend Kristen to Cape May. No, not Cape May New Jersey, but Cape May, the restaurant in the Yacht and Beach Club at Disney.

Here's a shot of Makenna and Kristin on the beach outside of the hotel. Makenna likes to go to this restaurant mostly because it's a buffet and on the buffet they have steamed clams.

Makenna loves steamed clams, don't you Makenna? All you can eat? Um, ok.

What Makenna didn't count on was having our waitress, Karen, make her stand on her chair and have the whole restaurant sing happy birthday to her. Oh well, it was fun!
After dinner we hung out on that beach watching the fireworks from Epcot.

On Sunday we went to New Smyrna Beach for a bit of family time in the sun. Rich and I had gotten Makenna a new skim board for her birthday, so we put a big bow on it and packed it in the back of the van with all the other beach stuff. When we got to the beach Makenna got her new skim board. Makenna was happy then.

Very happy, see.

Here's an action shot.

On Monday, Makenna's actual birthday, we hung out and played Clue a lot. Makenna wanted to have a really low key day for her birthday, mostly playing Clue, going to the Cat Protection Society (her new fav place!) and watching a movie. We did all that (National Treasure was the movie) and had her friend Amalie over for dinner and more Clue.

What a nice birthday and birthday weekend Makenna had.

We all had.

Happy Birthday, Makenna!! We love you.

Katie's Wedding Weekend

We spent the first weekend of October in Cherry Hill, NJ for Katie and Billy's beautiful wedding. Katie is my and Rich's niece, his brother Joe's littlest. Well, not so little anymore, remember when we played Barbies, Kate and I french braided your hair?

Oh, she's not listening, she with her HUSBAND. Clue, got one right here.....oh well.

Rich, the girls and I flew into Philadelphia on Friday afternoon, rented a car and met my brother in Philadelphia for lunch at Jones Restaurant at 7th and Chestnut. Comfort food at it's finest.
We spent the afternoon trekking around Philly, we walked to Chinatown and saw the archway at the entrance. It was cool being there. Lots of things to look at, smells (not all good!) live turtles by the box full, and fish in tanks and on ice, produce, lots of Chinese cats waving one paw.

Two of the most interesting things to me were #1 this little scoop like thing in a curio shop, cute, about the size of a toothpick, sweet little alien looking thing on the end made out of bead painted very primitively. I asked the woman behind the counter what would you use this item for, what little bit would you be scooping up with this. She replied by pointing to her ear, ok, so I said it a little louder, more pointing, then she says the word "ear". Ahhhh, now I get it, you clean your ear with it. Ok, ewww. I think I was better off thinking it was a cute little mustard scoop or something. Well, I guess it sort of is. Ha!

Oh, I left you a note on the bulletin board, did you get it?

There it is. Ok, second thing that was interesting to me was that I spent the whole of my time in these shops all through Chinatown trying to find some traditional Chinese stationary and couldn't find any. I love stationary sets from different countries. I love paper from different countries. It was fun, actually, because it gave me something to converse with the shopkeepers about.
Me: Do you have any stationary?

Shopkeeper: Yes yes, right this way....
Shows me the dictionary section.

Me: No, no, stationary,writing paper, what do you call it when you write a friend a letter (gesturing, smiling) put in an envelope (more gesturing) send it...
Them: Shoulder shrugs, no word for this. Hmmm

At one shop the shopkeeper and I went through some of the fun animal flash cards because this was as close to the section where the stationary set might be as she could get and she wanted to show me about how to learn Chinese. I said all the Chinese words phonetically printed out on the cards, some of them not so phonetically correct in English, but trying. It was fun and she only laughed a little at me. We had a nice time together.

All this and no stationary.

After the Chinese fun we headed over to this awesome gelato shop on 13th and Sansom, Capogiro Gelato. It was unbelievably yummy. From there back to our car at 8th and Sansom and our tired dogs get a rest as we head to New Jersey to stay the night with Rich's dad. That was a great day.


The wedding was on Saturday and we drove up to Cherry Hill Saturday am, checked into the Crown Plaza- Cherry Hill and got ready for the wedding. Here's a couple of shots from the wedding. It was gorgeous, wonderful, Katie was gorgeous and wonderful, it was fun. Here's a shot of Jordan in her dress, nice huh.



And me and my gal.
And my two gals together.


I'll have to post a pic of Katie and Billy when I get one, they were a hard couple to catch that day.

We hung out at the hotel Saturday and Sunday. On Sunday morning Rich, Makenna and I did a little Letterbox I had brought along with us from home. I want to gather some letterbox stamps from out travels so I thought this would be a good start. We drove to the letterbox site and did the whole treasure hunt, enjoying the woods and the creek along the way. The creek was loaded with iron, it seemed. We had fun in it. One nice thing about doing the letterbox here in Cherry Hill was that it showed us this private little "locals" park we probably would never have seeked out or stumbled over even if we tried. We got out of our hotel, spent a couple of hours outside in nature and had some good time together. Here's Makenna at the site of Box #1

This is the muddy, iron-y creek. Rock throwing and positioning was definitely happening here.



We hung out at Jess's house later that day. Jess is Katie's older sister and she's married to Rob and has Kayla Rose(3) and Olivia Grace(10 months). It was fun seeing her house and hanging out with the girls.
We flew home on Monday afternoon, what a long weekend. Long and wonderful.

Art Class Notes, Class 6

Well, this was my final art class and Diana was bound and determined for us to "have something" for the Student Teacher Exhibit in the gallery. This worked out well for our final class because it enabled us to take a lot of what we had been learning for the session and put it into practice. That might not seem like much, but experimenting with lots of products and processes separately, not in an actual piece of art, is quite a different animal than actually putting it into practice with a piece you care about.

So, this class was mostly about coming up with an image or images on the spur of the moment and turning it into something. It was fun, and I do believe I learned a lot by doing this. Abstract techniques started to gel into something workable.

A few notes on the process......

• I started by just ripping out images I liked from magazines. The really didn't have to match or mean anything, just be something I liked. I came up with a handful and then chose the ones I really liked more than the others. Again, they pretty much weren't related, but I would work on that.
• Then, I painted the background of the painting, a bit of green, etc. nothing too great, just background.
• I started adding in some images with paint, circle, stars...things I didn't mind if I painted over, etc, just stuff. I also added some paper that had been painted earlier and that I had ripped into shapes. This was paper that Diana brought to class, phone book pages painted and layered with the medium (like the tissue) or just painted. One of the cool, and dangerous for a pack rat, things about this class was seeing how just about anything can be painted and used in a mixed media painting. You can paint tissue paper, brown paper bags, advertisements, phone book pages, sales circulars, anything really. The sky's the limit! Paint it all!! Stock pile it all in hopes of painting it! Oh, no, skip that part.
• So, laying in paper, repainting, etc, magazine images in there, and the whole thing is coming together a bit, Then I started painting borders around these images. That really made them look a part of the painting as opposed to just being like a collage, floating around in there somewhere. Dabbing paint here and there, highlighting, etc. I added some cheese cloth, put it in with soft gel medium, painted a bit of white luminescent paint, pink....leaving it in for the texture.
• Just keep tweaking and adding, blending until it feels like a cohesive something. Good luck on that last part, it's the hard one. It'll happen, so stick with it.

That's pretty much what we did for the class. It was a good one. I'm not sure if I ended up with something that will go in the exhibit, I guess it's this or maybe the chickadees. I let you know.

The whole session was good, it was one of my favorites and I'm sad it's all over. I really enjoyed it, the whole class, the creative time, painting again. Diana was great and she brings fun and play to her work and her classes. She's thoughtful and intentioned, but playful and I really like that mix for myself too. I'm so glad I did it.

Dalai Lama Renaissance

This past weekend Lisa and I went to see Dalai Lama Renaissance, a film that was part of the Global Peace Film Festival here in Orlando. I loved this movie, it was so thought provoking and interesting. Please click on the link for a very good description of what the movie is about. In short, The Dalai Lama of Tibet invited 40 of the West’s leading, most innovative thinkers in their respective fields to his residence tucked away in the Himalayan mountains of Northern India to discuss the world’s problems and how we can solve them. The Dalai Lama comes across as a very kind, intelligent, humble, and at times silly and child-like man. After having seen What The Bleep it was interesting to see one of the Quantum Physicists, Fred Alan Wolf, in this film. He and Amit Goswami keep things funny and "spot on" with their very ego centered, human responses. Loved this movie, thanks Lisa for inviting me!

I wished I could have seen more movies at the Film Fest. There were so many that I wanted to see, but that hour long drive each way, ack.

The idea behind the festival is so good, not just anti war, but pro peace, and peace as it relates to the individual, the community, peace in your heart, peace in your home. From the website "The Global Peace Film Festival was established to utilize the power of the motion picture to further the goal of peace on earth. With a mission to expand the definition of peace beyond anti-war, ideology, activism or specific causes, the Global Peace Film Festival films and events suggest a more personal message as reflected in the daily lives of individuals and communities the world over. "
I liked it and I wanted more.
I read an article about the woman is instrumental in making this film fest happen and she said one of the founding ideas of the festival is from the quote by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr where he says "True peace is not merely the absence of tension, it is the presence of justice. "

Art Class Notes, Class 5

I had a bit of fun this week with tissue paper, liquid gloss medium and liquid acrylics. We made a paper that can be used for many purposes. It all started with cheapo dollar store tissue paper and ended up a stronger, sort of plasticy, thicker type of paper. I could use this for gifting, or even for background in a painting or card. It has a translucent look to it so light passes through nicely and it could be used for wall hanging or maybe even in front of a window. It's actually very lovely to look at and I'm looking forward to finding some uses for it.

The process was pretty basic. What I did was take butcher paper, or freezer paper and lay it down on the table with the shiny side up. Place the tissue paper on top of this. For the class we used very very thin tissue paper but I also brought a piece of tissue I bought at Target for a gift bag. This tissue was a bit thicker and I liked using it a bit better, it wasn't so terribly fragile. Anyway, mix some liquid gloss medium (enough to paint the tissue with) with few drops of the liquid acrylic. The liquid acrylic is very concentrated so go easy at first, then add more if necessary. A side note, I used the Golden Liquid Matte Medium and it as just a bit too thick for this process. The Liquitex medium was a bit thinner and that made it so much nicer to not have my paper ripping at every brush. So, gently gently paint this mixture onto the tissue paper. You can do this however you like, blending, adding other colors, etc until you are happy with the result. I then added stamps, ultra super fine glitter, etc. The stamps I used with the liquid acrylic came out more transparent than the ones I did with regular acrylic. You can see this by looking at the blue paper. The spirals and dots sit right on top of the tissue. The others seem to blend in a bit better. Both results are nice, just different from each other.


This class definitely focused on playing with the acrylics and the mediums. One of the other things we did in class was to take brown paper bags and cut them up into pieces for painting. We then used the matte medium to paint the paper with. This helped seal the brown paper making it much less absorbent, and allowed the lovely brown color to still show through. If you were looking to block the brown out painting first with gesso would be the way to go. We then used this prepared brown paper to do all sorts of painting on and also using texture with. Bubble wrap, cheese cloth wadded up, regular gel medium (not soft) spackled on with a pallete knife....all of these produce lovely textures. I did my brown paper with some blue acrylic, then translucent white liquid, then laid the cheese cloth in and painted the blue acrylic over that. I was planning on removing the cheese cloth to allow a texture to show through, but by the time I go home the paint had dried too much and the paper started ripping when I was removing it. I just let it stay and I think what I'll do is make it into a painting involving an angel or something like that. This is a pretty horrible horrible picture but I had on so I'm adding it...try to overlook it horribleness.

I said try.

Well, that's our 5th class in a nutshell. It was fun and hopefully I'll be able to use some of this stuff in future art work. That's mainly what this class has been about, playing with the medium to learn how it handles, how it works, so that when I want to create a certain look or have something in a piece of work I will know a bit about how to go about achieving that.