Just found this! Your picture of the DAY, from last May.

My grandgirls are intrepid little photographers~

First Snow!

Just a little bit. Will melt before Santa comes. . .

Clay rabbit with wild strawberries

Picasa has these new photomanipulation effects. This is a "pencil sketch" with a vignette and some darkening. For many years I collected terra cotta animal pots and figures which now lurk in my garden. This is one of my favorites, a rabbit, who has more delicate modeling than most. Before I left the California garden this year, I took some more portrait photographs of my anumals. And tonight I did this with it--instead of writing several emails that I promised myself to write. Anyway, I am blogging almost every other day during blog-every-day-November. Excelsior!

The beauty of the American West

I found a few small green tomatoes that were close to the ground and escaped the frost. Fried them up tonight. This dish is one of my favorites and I missed out on them this summer!
Of course the picture has nothing to do with this. But getting here we saw these beautiful skies and open spaces. Blogging tonight from Eagle, Idaho, where the tomatoes grow!

My first child's second Easter

I just had 800 family slides scanned by Scancafe. This one is from 1957. We were very excited about dolling her up for church on Easter. I made the outfit--daintily flowered dress and pink coat--and we bought the hat and the little white gloves. My husband was in the Army then and we had very good friends in the LDS church group in Lawton, Oklahoma.
If you have slides, I recommend that you get them scanned. The color fades (some films and storage situations make this worse) and there is some deterioration of the image. I imrpoved this a little, but it is still faded, but a lovely part of The Memory Thread.

Morning Mist in the Sierras

Day before yesterday I read on Catherine's blog about November being blog every day month. I remembered that I planned to do that last year in November, and how that plan came to naught. So I thought this was the year I would do it, come what may. There is a link to her blog and to the group blog that I will put here later. It so happened that the first day of  November I was visiting my son's family with his five children under the age of eight. My husband was baking them one of his famous apple pies without his customary equipment and kept asking for help. Then I was tending grandchildren while my daughter-in-law cleaned up the school after the Fall Festival, and got rid of the cornstalks. Actually there wasn't time to set up my laptop and blog. So here we are on Day Two. First Blog.

First is the view from my son's porch into the misty Sierra pines. Now I am in a motel in Winnemucca on the way to Eagle, Idaho--where my other son lives, and we have a retirement house across the street. I think we are pretty close to having to stay there, car trips being what they are. With three dachshunds, which stay in a kennel because Sierra son is allergic to them. The trees are turning yellow along the Nevada Highway.

Election Day is almost here; a relief from all the lies on commercials I have seen in the last week while we watched the Sacramento TV stations.

photo, a photo by jhhymas on Flickr.

Haiku Sunflowers

Spent all day at Fort Mason with the lovely haiku people. This was to get a good grip on life, before I leave here again. The reading was great, the restaurant was vegetarian and very good, and the companionship was spectacular, as were the ornamental sunflowers.

Morning shadow

White against white. . .

August blooms!!!

These buds just popped out the other day. These epiphyllums bloom from mid-April until NOW!!

My mother's window 1987

I don't know why, but I had a feeling I should visit my father.I hadn't been back for a long time. I flew to Cleveland by myself and spent a week with my folks in Shaker Heights. My mother had me sort loose pictures from a huge box that she had been assembling in the living room. The box was called, I think, a barrel; it was the type used by movers to ship large table lamps with the shades on. It took me 22 hours (one fourteen-hour day and and one eight-hour one, honestly!).just to look at and touch each photo. Using a long bench we used to have in the garden, I sat on the sofa and sorted them into piles according to life events. When you left home or married, you and your family got a new pile. So there were piles for each of the seven children with our new families, a pile for our growing up years together, and a pile for both my mother's family and my father's family before they married. I put the pictures into looseleaf albums, which my mother enjoyed taking apart for various projects for the rest of her life.

But that is not the story I meant to tell when I began to post. That story is the two nice long talks I had with my father that were more intimate than I remembered ever having with him. Those talks alone were worth the visit. This was in January, and it was snowing. I also helped my father shovel snow from the deep slant of the driveway. It was powdery snow and easy to shovel. Dad said it was good that it was not wet snow, "Wet snow is heavy. Sticks to the blade." After I did one side of the driveway, he neatened up my edges.

At some point I took this picture of the kitchen window, looking out at the snow. It is very characteristic of the small still lifes my mother built here since 1957, when GE transferred Dad to Cleveland and we left The Farm overlooking the Mohawk River outside Schenectady. Mom liked colored glass bottles, no matter how humble, and didn't throw them out. She also was always starting little slips that broke off from other plants, or that people gave her. I like to assemble little groups of this and that also. My daughter-in-law calls my living room The Museum! Her children love to play with the little Zuni animals and all the other things, some of which I have had for almost my entire life. 

My father died unexpectly in April after my visit. I have always been glad I went.

from the phone

this rose struggling through summer heat

Self-investigation via iPhone

I'm deleting photos from my phone, but will keep this one of my granddaughter learning about her eyeball!!

My brother Dave came to visit me

 And Rosa next door had a party for her friend, Pauline. They had silly string in a can. It was pink!

LIttle girls in pink slippers

I found this tonight when I was looking for something else. I love the contrary motion of the child at upper left; I love the way the pigtailed girl in black is looking at the photographer, and the grin on the blue-dressed blonde.  My granddaughter is in pink. Recently, she has gotten her driver's license. Time flies--whether you are watching or when you are not.

And I prefer this--Picasa has new tools!

 

How quickly they grow!

I have spent much of the day installing and trying to work with the new Adobe Lightroom 4. It's pretty complex and tonight I went back to Picasa on the laptop. I worked with one of the shots from several years ago. Plumas County has a ballet class; I've taken a lot of photos there. I've just cropped and enhanced this one. Perhaps photos are really my art, although today a new set of Coloursoft pencils came. I am going to try them on toned paper. Good night, dear neglected blog. I have been following Roz Stendhal on her blog. She is Johnny-on-the-spot, with at least one long post everyday. She also sketches and bike rides every day. And she seems to have a life, also. How???

My Uncle Merwin

ELBERT MERWIN BUTLER
This was just recovered by my cousin, Susan, from a family album. Merwin was
on Okinawa in World War II. He was the youngest of my mother's siblings. His wife,
the glamorous and kind Aunt Wilma, lived upstairs from us for some of the time he was away.

I love a DAY MOON!

And here is the one we saw when we went to Walgreen's to pick up the thyroid medicine for our little dog, who has probably been thyroid deficient for years, but vets just accused her of being fat! I think we have finally found a good vet here, after a few tries. I've been fighting with computers for an hour, trying to get this picture off the card and up. My fault with the Mac and the Java updater (I told it to take a hike!) with this one.
Tonight I am reading The Yellow House about the few weeks Van Gogh and Gaughin spent together in Arles. Very cool--I wish the book had colored pictures.

Love of trees

I splurged and got myself the Big Book of the new paintings of the Yorkshire Wold by David Hockney. It is called The Bigger Picture and I have just spent a very happy evening with it. BIG reproductions of lots of bright paintings and some examples of earlier work as it relates to his output as a whole. There are lots of trees in these paintings and I was reminded of the rhythm of these aspen trunks just west of our house in Michigan. I am getting lonesome for these woods, and hope we will manage to get back there this year. Did you know that when aspen grow in a clump like this they have the same DNA? They grow from root shoots of the one start. In this picture, autumn has begun with the yellowing of the bracken.
One of several essays is by Margaret Drabble, who grew up nearby, and whose mind is full of memories and poetry. It is an example of the kind of personal essay I have so enjoyed experimenting with--following the feww movement of the mind. I wa inspired to come here tonight.
I am having trouble getting started with my projects-- I have new art materials and notebooks started and sometimes I lie awake at night planning what I will do the next day. Which would be good if I actually did much/any of it the next day. I need to write letters, send presents, sketch and haiku. Whatever. . . I love this blog and am back, I hope. Kisses and goodnight.

The Rainbow of Promise

Grandaughter 2 came for a visit and left me this. I'm slowly coming back from other places to you, dear blog friends!