I was walking home from buying some groceries when…
I saw a banana attack a pizza! The banana was just lying there when it got up very fast! The pizza got up and tried to run away but it was too fat. The pizza was just too slow to escape the banana! It tried to jump but the banana was too fast! And the banana and the pizza ran away and I walked home.
What a crazy day I had today! I wonder what new adventure I will have tomorrow!
By Zia
Here’s that new piece of art I mentioned the other day. Pronghorn are not common up here in the Rockies (at least, I’ve never seen them here), but whenever we take a road trip to Santa Fe, we always spot a herd or two in the desert. They are striking with their tan, white, and black color patterns, and look more like they belong on an African plain.
I worked this piece as I did the buffalo I painted not long ago, but in a softer, more realistic style. Like the buffalo, it is painted on a slice of beetle kill pine, although this one is a much thinner slab, about a half-inch. I washed it with an oil ground of blue, letting through all the glory of the beetle markings, and painted the pronghorn over it once the ground dried.
I really like the visual interplay of the pronghorn and wood, and the way they merge together. When working on beetle kill, I just have to let the wood paint itself, since I’m not exactly sure which parts will take the oil wash and which will repel it. Here you can see that the outer arc of the wood really soaked up a deep saturation of color, while the inner part of the semi-circle only took it lightly, even though I washed the tint evenly across the piece. The wood is much more dense in the center–the same thing happened with the buffalo painting, to a lesser degree.
I have one more large semi-circle of beetle kill, and I’m working a third animal of the American West on it. This one is being ornery and putting up a good fight, but in the end, I’ll wrassle it down and hog tie it, then set it free to gallop across the beetle kill prairie.
The pronghorn and buffalo are now available in in my shop.
We were pretty stoked when Zia’s study on Fruit Decay took 2nd place for her grade level at the science fair Thursday. Her friend Lola got 1st, which made both of them very happy. 🙂 There were lots of ties (one was a 5-way tie!) which I actually thought was nice, since more kids got rewarded for their efforts.
She had a lot of fun over the weeks of running the experiment, recording the data, and putting together her board documenting the rotting fruit–she must get that love of fermentation from her mama, haha. And there are already ideas floating around the house for the next science fair.
I know I said I’d post beetle kill art this time, but I’m going to save it for later–this is too exciting to wait! (Not that beetle kill isn’t exciting, LOL.) When we bought our home, there were a few small unfinished parts, such as the uncovered jacks at the bottom of the support posts. There was also a 1/2″ channel in the floors between the kitchen and living room, but David recently put in the floor transition pieces you can see above. No more gap filled with crumbs and beads and spilled juice, poor us. Haha.
Log homes have jacks so you can adjust them every few years due to the house shifting. We’ve been wanting to make ours more aesthetic, and yesterday we finally did. 🙂
We found a sheet of copper at Atlas Metals in Denver. David priced it out beforehand, and if we had ordered the custom-cut, hand-hammered copper made especially for post wraps, it would have cost us over $400. We paid $100 for this sheet, and used a lot less than half of it. I get the rest for jewelry making–yay! David cut the copper, he and I hammered it by hand, and he wrapped and screwed the posts.
We really love the way they turned out. Every aspect of our house has texture, so the hammered copper fits right in and adds a dimension of brightness. Hammering the copper was the most time-intensive part, but it was also really fun, and both Caleb and Cash tried their hand at it. (Zia has her nose in a book these days and barely looked up.)
We also got snow last night, and it feels like we went from summer to winter in two days. Monday was one of those strip-off-your-clothes, sit-on-the-porch, and soak-in-the-sun kind of days (not me–I just heard about it when I got home). That’s how you know you’re far enough from your neighbors–or more accurately, that’s how you know you you’re a hillbilly.
We went to this little free harvest carnival at CCU yesterday. The kids got lots of candy (mostly to sell to the dentist) and there were bouncy houses, tractor pull rides, ponies, cotton candy, sno cones, popcorn, and ring-toss types of games which they played over and over. Caleb and Lauryn came too, but they wandered off to eat candy under the trees and I somehow missed getting any pics of them. After the carnival, we stopped by Vitamin Cottage for a gluten-free tasting fair, where the wheat-less ones among us had their pick of wheat-free treats. (We all did, actually–the food was pretty yummy, except for some pretzels which even the dog wouldn’t eat.)
Thursday there was a costume parade at school that Cave Girl was really excited about. The kids all made a gooey slime craft and ate interesting parent-made snacks–which to me looked a little less than trustworthy. The costumes were really funny and some were a little freaky. There is just something about painted-on bloody noses, dripping fangs, and dangling eyeballs that I will do my darnedest to steer my kids clear of for as long as I can, although Zia is already enamored by such atrocities.
We brought Iron Man, and though he loved the pink slime and sticker crafts, he wouldn’t walk in the parade and we ended up carrying him through the halls lined with cheering parents, since he was completely freaked out by the other costumes and wailing his head off. Good times. I’m sure the other parents thought David was in some kind of costume with his hat and boots, haha. Bad Cowboy Captures Small Heroic Screaming Iron Man.
We managed to avoid the real Haunted Halloween school night and the neighborhood trick-or-treating, due to some fancy footwork on my part in making deals to swap those out for petting zoos, hay rides, and harvest carnivals. Good job, Mama. Sometimes you just gotta congratulate yourself when the rest of the world raises a puzzled eyebrow. 😉
Besides all that trauma fun, we’re loving our now-dirt-christened truck, romping it up and down the highways and watching small cars scurry out of the way. We just finished Zia’s lengthy science fair project on rotting fruit, we’re nursing a couple of very sore throats, and my theology is being shaken and reshaped by Rich Mullins’ The Jesus Demos, which are rough, fuzzy, and out of tune, since he died suddenly when they were in formation stage. He told close friends they would be his greatest work yet, and if you stop to listen long enough, I believe they are. I can’t seem to get enough–his songs fascinate me with an understanding of God that I think many good Christians never quite get. I want that understanding, badly. I also really liked the movie Ragamuffin, which tells his life story.
Next up: new beetle kill art!
