P is for Lake POWELL

Here are the last of my Lake Powell shots. Actually I have many more, but these are the best, I think.  So hard to choose.

That's us over there on the shoreline on the left hand side of the photo.

A closer view.  The house boat is beached with anchors.  No tides to worry about here.  Anchors always are a source of concern when we have sailed off the California coast.  Haven't done that for a long time.  But the tides and wind -- and other boaters, make anchoring a tricky thing.  We would usually set turns at anchor watch if we were anchoring overnight.

The scenery at Lake Powell is spectacular for miles and miles. 

Red sandstone sculpted into all kinds of weird and wonderful shapes.

The best time to take photos is when the sun is creating shadows and that wasn't always the case  when I took these photographs...

...so I had to adjust them a little. But just look at the reflections!

This was one cave that is a favorite  -- very deep.  Owen decided to dive in and investigate.

Just look at these striations -- just like molten rock frozen in time!

This one is interesting  because if you look closely you can make out what looks like an angel carved into the rock, just to the left of the shadow.  Of course it is known as Angel Rock.

And this is one of my favorite shots of the whole trip -- both my sons deep in conversation about the course home at sunset and the performance of the boat.

Both of them are very experienced sailors and pretty handy with mechanics too.  Level-headed and not likely to take chances, they have been keen sailors since they were young teens and have carried this love until now in their mid-life.  They have owned boats since they were old enough to buy their own and every summer vacation is spent on the water somewhere.

This is my contribution for ABC WEDNESDAY letter P.  To see more entries for this project headed up first by Mrs. Nesbitt and now by Roger Owen Green, please click on this LINK

Every Inchie Monday and a couple more Doodles

The prompt this week for Every Inchie Monday is LIGHT.  Not an easy subject to portray on one inch square.  I have already seen a couple which have been posted and they're pretty nifty.  Here's mine:

I'm almost doodled out, but I can't seem to stop.  They are so easy to start and then you  get caught up in adding patterns to it.  Pretty soon you're hooked and you can't wait to add the colors and extra embellishments.

Ah well, here are two more I have done this weekend:

I call this one Caterpillar.

This one is "Flower Rainbows."

To visit Every Inchie Monday and see other interpretations of LIGHT please click HERE

OH! OH! OH!

Here's another post for 'O' for ABC Wednesday in addition to the one below.  Please visit the post before this one which is my official ABC Wednesday entry, but I couldn't let this  pass:

Take a look at this mountain lion in my son's backyard on Tuesday night.  Definitely an Oh! Oh! Oh! Only a young one but Momma and Poppa are out there somewhere.  My son lives on the edge of town but definitely not rural.

See this caught on his video cam. HERE

O IS FOR....

O  IS FOR OPERA AND OVERTURE

I know a lot of people do not like opera, but bear with me for a moment please.  This video clip is of what I consider to be one of the saddest pieces of music I have ever heard.  Even now when I hear it I get prickles down my back.  You don't even have to know the story to hear the sadness.

  

It is the overture to Verdi's La Traviata.  Even if you don't like opera, just give this piece a try it's only three minutes and see if you can't hear the poignant sadness that is in the story about to be performed. Of course it is a story about true love that is doomed from the start and ends in the heroine's death and the hero's devastation.

I learned to love opera in high school where our school choir performed several.  I also learned to love it from my father who had a variety of pieces recorded on His Masters Voice and would play them over and over again.  I'm sure he didn't realize that I, as a ten year old child, was absorbing them without knowing and cultivating a love for such music. I certainly didn't realize it.

I actually like a lot of different kinds of music, including the Beatles, the Mamas and Pappas and the Beach Boys among many others.

This is my entry for ABC Wednesday, for the letter O.  Why not click HERE and see what other topics our participants have chosen for their  'O' entry.  You won't be disappointed.
Thanks Mrs. Nesbitt and Roger Owen Green

EVERY INCHIE MONDAY...

EVERY INCHIE MONDAY'S THEME this week was SILVER.

Oooh!  That was a tough one.  Couldn't come up with anything very interesting or unusual.  The biggest problem being the fact that I use Prisma Color pencils and their metallic silver doesn't scan very well.  But I did my best and came up with quarters and dimes as silver in change.

Just to remind you, INCHIES are small pieces of art done in any variety of media  but displayed on one square inch.

If you would like to see what others have done on their inchie for this theme please click on this LINK. I actually think my sister, Kaybee's effort is brilliant.  Am I biased?  Go take a look.

Yet ANOTHER Doodle

This one turned out quite different from what I intended.  I had wanted to do one with mostly straight lines, not too much curving or circles.  Then I was going to call it Angles, anticipating it might have a lot of geometrical angles.

But it had a mind of its own.

Once I put in the central triangle and drew the lines in it, I was off in a whole different direction.  The straight line design below the triangle was something I wanted but didn't know what to do with.  Then the border on the right hand side crossing the line below the triangle gave me a look I liked and wanted as well as a right angle. Then I found a curving triangle above the original triangle, one side with V shapes and its opposite with dots. Finally, I definitely wanted the rope, even though it had curves. I just liked it. It's quite amazing where creativity will take you.

Eventually it all came together with the triangle emerging in my mind as a Gemstone, although my husband says it's more like a stained glass window. But too late, I had already decided on Gemstone as the title.

LEAVES FOR LEONTIEN

Just came across this project through Scriptor and Black Jack.  I have just finished a doodle which I call LEAVES, so I thought this might be a good thing for me to do -- to send love and prayers to Leontien, who who is having a hard battle with cancer and whose friends are showering her with leaves.  Can't think of a better place to leave this doodle.

This is for you Leontien with love and prayers. To see all the other leaves or send some yourself, please click HERE.

N IS FOR .....

The Narrows at Lake Powell

The day after the wedding, we were taken on a tour of part of Lake Powell. (It is a very large lake!)  The newly weds showed us some of their favorite places.  Today I will show you what I call the NARROWS.

It was a couple of miles long.

It widens and narrows again. In one place a sort of basin area opened up and there we stopped for a while for a swim.

Getting narrower.

Almost spooky.

In some places it was narrow enough to almost touch both sides with your arms stretched out.  But it was plenty deep, though in a couple of place we had to watch for underwater rocks.

Then we hightailed it out o' there!

******

This is my entry for ABC WEDNESDAY, letter N.  Thank you to Mrs. Nesbitt and Roger Owen Green for adjudicating this project. To see more fascinating entries please click HERE

More photos of Lake Powell coming up later.

EVERY INCHIE MONDAY

Our prompt for Every Inchie Moday this week is OCEAN.

So the challenge was to illustrate this theme on one square inch.  

Here is my effort:

I would have done better if I had used pen and ink to outline then it would have shown up better on this post, but other than that I was pleased with the way the wave spray came out.

To see more inchies on this topic, please click on this LINK

TWO MORE DOODLES

I have a lot of fun doing these doodles or tangles.  The challenges are:  
to know when to stop; to choose appropriate colors and, the most difficult, adding shading to make it look three dimensional.

I just call this 'Blue and Green'

This is 'ROSE'

I have a couple of more doodles August 30th and September 17th.  If you would like to visit them scroll down to the end of each post.

M is FOR....

M is for...

MERE

This word, as I want to use it, doesn't even appear in my dictionary, which admittedly is only a paper-back copy of the Oxford American Dictionary (Heald Colleges Edition). We usually know the word when used in a sentence such as "He is only a mere child".

But it has another meaning and it is a good, genuine word when used as in the title of this photograph:

HORNSEA MERE

(Courtesy of Wikipedia)

British readers will know the word, I expect. It is another word for a kind of lake.  So what is the difference between a mere and a lake?  

The most simple answer is that a mere is a shallow lake. At Flamborough we had a mere on the village green for many years.  It eventually disappeared, probably because the land was drained when new houses were built around the Green.  I remember it as a fairly large body of water but very shallow, which sometimes almost dried up.  The land was then muddy, boggy and swampy. When it had water, it wasn't deep enough to hold fish or sail a boat on unless it was a toy boat.

Hornsea Mere, just down the coast from Flamborough is in a whole different category.  It is large enough to have a marina and a thriving sailing community. It is also a great bird migratory area and well known by avid birders. Hornsea Mere is the largest freshwater lake in Yorkshire. But it is still shallow.

In putting together this blog I learned something new  about meres -- as well as a new word. A mere is a body of water that is broader than it is deep and it usually has a THERMOCLINE.  This is a layer of water that is  like a blanket that separates the cooler, deeper water from the surface water. Since a mere doesn't have much, if any deep water, the thermocline often mixes with the surface water.  Sunlight and wind-waves affect the temperature of the water at the surface.

If the mere is deep enough to contain fish and you enjoy fishing, it is in and around the thermocline that you'll find them because that's where the oxygen is  (nearer the surface) and where the fish will look for food.

So here ends your fishing lesson for the day.  But more importantly we have learned at least two new words:  

mere (if you didn't know it before) and thermocline. 

This is my entry for ABC Wednesday, the fascinating project begun by Mrs. Nesbitt and now hosted by Roger Owen Green.  Click HERE to see more entries in this project .  You never know what weird and wonderful things you may find.

Every Inchie Monday

Today's prompt for our inchie is ETERNITY.

This is my interpretation:

It is a Celtic knot with the word ETERNITY written in it.

  

I chose this because the early English Christians used the Celtic knot as a symbol of the eternal qualities of the Trinity, God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Spirit. The Celtic knot has no beginning and no end.   You can find examples of it all over early Christian manuscripts. 

I was quite pleased with myself in drawing this.  I started drawing Celtic knots almost a year ago and found it quite difficult and confusing.  I found a lot of instructions on the internet  including video clips, using carefully placed dots as guidelines.  So when I started to draw this one, I anticipated that it might be too much trouble.  Still, I sat down and casually drew a knot free-hand without any interweaving. 

Suddenly I could see exactly what I had to do to make it a real Celtic knot.  How come? 

This is the actual page from my sketch pad where I started to decide what I would draw for my inchie.   (counterclockwise):

1. I started with the idea of a ring . Didn't like it particularly.

2. I then drew the quick sketch of the Celtic knot.

3.  I tried again, only larger so I could double the line and have room to write the word Eternity in it.

4. A rough  sketch of how it might look.  Now I knew it would work.

I think this is a prime example of the benefits of practice and more practice.  I had never tried to do a Celtic  knot without some kind of help in front of me before.  I hadn't drawn any of these in recent months.  I was so surprised how easy it was.  

Actually I had more problem scanning and cropping this piece since I still haven't completely mastered the ins and outs of the new scanner.

More inchies illustrating Eternity can be found by clicking here.

CONVERSATION WITH SCRUFFY...

"Hey Dad!"

"See that piece of string down there?"

"C'mon Dad, you know what to do."

"Are you listening to me?"

"Let's play!!!"

"Pretty please...?"

UGH!  I give up!

L O V I N ' I T !!

AT  LAKE  POWELL !

           After the wedding, (see post on Sept. 7th) we all jumped in the lake.  Yes, me too!

I can't swim but with a noodle and another floaty thing to make me stretch out my arms (too much weight in the wrong places!) I stayed in the water almost two hours  on both days.

Looking through these pictures I realized I was 25-30 years older than everyone else.  What was I doing there?....in 40 foot of water!  Having fun, that's what.  The floaty thing was actually a chair you could sit in -- I didn't -- but we were running out of floaty things and it  was easy to hold onto.

The happy couple.

The brother of the groom -- the YOUNGER brother -- (someone tell him to shave off his beard!) and his first lady.

Pictures of the fabulous lake coming up one day soon.  It was gorgeous.  The air temp was about 95 degrees and the water temp just a tad warmer.

This is my ABC entry for the Letter 'L' , -- the Lovely, Limpid, Liquid Lake Powell. For more of ABC Wednesday entries initiated by Mrs. Nesbitt and courageously continued by Roger, please click HERE

An American/Brit

This picture has no commercial value.  It will not be sold and is only included on this blog to share my  art to be viewed by my blogging friends.

I don't know if Google will let me do this, as the logo in it is super-copyrighted.  I'm displaying this,  my original picture as a record of my personal feelings of  excitement,  pleasure and yes, pride at being British born. 

I am an American /Brit.  I love America and am so thankful for all that living in America for more than 50 years has done for us.  

We are some of those immigrants who came over with nothing -- literally.  The Lord blessed us as He has blessed this nation, so that we are now able to live our  retirement years contentedly. We have tried to cherish godly hard work,  concern for our fellow man, honesty and integrity over the years.  These values we have tried to pass on to our sons so that they in turn can contribute to this nation .

But we cannot forget our British heritage.  Our formative years were molded in Britain with the people who dug in their heels and took a stand against evil, who drew on the strength of their unforgettable history and love for their land and sea. They lived out their values during times of unspeakable horror. They fought their way back up from the disillusionment, destruction and pain of two wars which decimated their people and cities.   

As I watched the closing ceremonies I was concerned.  Are today's young people as deeply rooted in the things which made our two nations strong?  Are the pop-star mentality and transient wealth and fame  enough to grow  the healthy  values that will inevitably be needed for the future? The tough love and enduring strength that has been needed in the past century will, I feel certain, be required for the century ahead.  

Am I a pessimist?  NO I am  a realist!

Change will only come when the human heart is changed.