Down by the River and Easter

As promised, here are some images from Easter weekend (I know you've been waiting with bated breath).

My favorite egg had the barn on it.

 

It seems like the only time we use our green table cloth is Easter weekend, because it works so much more efficiently than newspaper to keep the egg dye off of the table! And because it is used so infrequently, the kids are always suitable impressed when we pull it out.

 

(kids being impressed by the tablecloth)

Everyone got to decorate three eggs. While it maybe hard to tell in this picture, Elora's were quite elaborate and fancy; she was very proud of herself.

 

On Saturday morning, we went to the egg hunt in Faith. As usual, it was a bit cold, but it wasn't nearly as freezing as the last two years. A groundskeeper had decided to spray the park with pesticide the night before the egg hunt, so they had to move the event to the nearby school; luckily, the school is just across the street from the park, so we could see everyone there and we weren't too late!

As usual, Eli and Jonah were in one hunt, and Elora and Joshua got to be in one for the older kids. (There was also a category for 9-12 yr olds).

Everyone did pretty good, considering how many kids were there. Eli even got one egg with two quarters inside!

 

So you see that girl behind Joshua and Elora? I have no idea who that is...but she was very mad about not finding many eggs. Seriously, she's in the background of most of the pictures I took of them, and she is folding her arms and pouting out her lip in most of them. Awww, wee lamb.

 

We also found Easter treats in our living room Easter morning, but I don't want to embarrass everyone by showing their scandalous pajamas.

 

The Monday after Easter was the extent of our Spring break, and we decided to celebrate by driving down to the Cheyenne river for our first picnic of the year, just as we did last year. Luckily, the weather was suitable for our plans.

Every time we go, the shoreline is slightly different ('cause you know, it's a river) and this time was definitely one of the most interesting displays we'd seen, with water where there isn't any usually, and other spots that are usually covered by water that were now exposed and glistening.

 

 

 We all enjoyed walking along the edges of the Cheyenne, and while initially the rule was not to go near the wet stuff at all, I soon relented in the case of Elora and Joshua.

 

 

Mostly because I wanted to walk along the sandbars too, and I knew they would follow me! Luckily, Joseph was keeping Jonah and Eli near him at this point, so I didn't have to worry about them falling in.

This was more interesting than the usual smooth edges of the winding river. So you see those people way, way behind us? They were rock hunters, looking for valuable rock specimens (Joseph talked to them). This wasn't anything unusual, since we always look for rocks and fossils when we are here, and we've found many interesting things in the past. In fact some friends of ours regularly visit this site because they like to collect beautiful and unusual rocks with which to decorate their yard, and they've been doing so for years.

Here are some rocks Elora found:

 

 

 

 After a few hours, it was time for us to go. As we trudged back to where our car was parked, we crossed paths with a man with a badge, a man whom Joseph knew. The man saw our kids with their arms full of rocks, and told us we weren't allowed to take rocks from that site. Wha..? This seemed especially odd because when we had first arrived, another official looking man had driven by us in a truck, and asked if we were with the rock hunters, whom he had obviously talked to before letting them continue on to the river, and that man had told us to have fun.
Hmm.
This second man who stopped us was Native American, so I piped up and said I thought this area wasn't on the Reservation...as everyone knows you can't collect artifacts on reservations, even though I don't think regular rocks count as artifacts. He informed us that one side of the bridge was on the reservation- the side without rocks, where nobody was. The other side was designated as Federal land. He told us that the government had stopped enforcing the "no collecting" law in the nineties, but that his organization through the tribe had been given authorization to enforce it.
In fact, he was down there because they'd been watching all the rock hunters through binoculars, while they sat up on a ridge nearby and staked out the place. For some reason, I found this all incredibly irritating. I guess this comes from being the daughter of a treasure hunter, and a lifelong rock collector. I asked if that law really applied to rocks , as we weren't picking up arrowheads or anything, and any fossils we had were just seashells in rock.
He insisted that these were still "paleo-artifacts" and that if people had big containers of rocks, they had to search them because they might hide arrowheads among their finds. Because he knew Joseph, he said, he wasn't going to go through our things, but we needed to leave all our stuff.
So we dumped most of our rocks along the trail as we headed back to our car, despite the sad faces of our kids. I still think the whole thing was a little fishy.
And while we had fun, the end of our trip left something of a bad taste in my mouth. 

 

 

 

 

 



These were some cool trees growing nearby

 

 

Spring Sunsets

Easter weekend was full of Easter stuff of course, which I will divulge eventually. But it also marked the beginning of sunset season, simply because there were two sunsets that were pretty spectacular right in a row that weekend. Next week it's supposed to snow and be gray again, but we won't talk about that.

The first sunset occurred when I was out on an evening walk with the kids. I had Elora run home and get my camera while we were still fairly close to the house. We missed the part that first caught my attention, but I got a few shots of the golden sunset before it was gone.

 

 

 

 I tried to take a few pictures with the kids too, but...meh. They were in fake smile mode...except of course, the shot I got without the sunset in it.

 

 

 

 

 

Luckily we  were  on a walk, because the good shot I got occurred a while later when I saw a view that was perfect. Now this is what I wanted!

 

The very next night there was an awesome super pink and magenta sunset. Unfortunately pink and red toned sunsets always give my camera a hard time. I tried hard to capture it close to how it looked, but be advised that none of these are actually as very pink as the real sky was. I love how just a few minutes time changes a sunset.

 

  

Art Alley

I've always loved to look at drawings of city scapes, especially alley ways and the more grungy parts of town. However, I've never attempted to draw one myself because the idea of having to correctly render buildings and streets with all their right angles and perfect squares was fairly intimidating, not to mention it sounded kind of boring, even if the end result might be nice.

But I've noticed that many of the drawings I've admired on pinterest are those that are more sketchy and not as precise, some even with the perspective deliberately drawn incorrectly.

While I have many pictures saved that are perfectly rendered, here are a few from other artists that I love because they're not:

loish.deviantart.com
























































Pete Scully, Mallet Street, Soho

I love the following painting so much. I think because of the bright orange underpainting.




Reno 7 AM by Mark e. Mehaffey

This last on is the one most like what I wanted to draw:



Jon Shaw

 

I've been thinking for a while that the art alley we like to visit in Rapid City would be a cool drawing- plus it's one of the few photographs of a city that I have taken myself. (I really wish I'd taken more photos in Seattle).

I figured if I could stop myself from worrying about all the right angles, straight lines and perfect perspective I could probably have some fun with it.

I didn't want to recreate the best pictures I had of the artwork we saw there; then I'd just be copying some other artist's graffiti. So I sifted through my photos and found the perfect shot.

For some reason I like city drawings that show all the wires and poles that make the city work, and this photo had plenty of those. It also had regular graffiti so it looked like an alley anywhere.

So as usual, the photo of this drawing doesn't show it exactly right; the colors on the right hand wall for instance seem a litte too yellow, and the road has more blue to it in the real drawing. But for the most part it works.


























I spent the most time coloring the structure holding up the batteries at the top, and the wall to the right; I really like how they turned out. I deliberately did a lot of red in this wooden platform because I was thinking of those pictures with the orangish red underpaintings that I love. I drew the sky last; I didn't want to wash out the blue batteries or power towers with with a blue sky, so pink seemed good. I just wish I'd have spent more time drawing the towers further away like I did on the one in the foreground, since they're in the center of the drawing and you notice them first. Guess I didn't think that through enough.

 

Here is the wall that I think is the best part of the drawing. I spent a lot of time trying to make the windows right, but I only roughly sketched in the bricks so it wouldn't be so uniform and tedious. I like how the brick lines aren't perfect, and I think it turned out great.

 

 

 

I'm still trying to learn about all these art markers I have, and this was the perfect project for it. I would definitely try another cityscape sometime in the future.

 

11x14" Prismacolor and Copic Markers









Bowling

 So we went bowling in March. Our kids have never been, and I'm pretty sure Joseph and I haven't been for at least seven years or so. We went with another family from church and it was dubbed a Primary Activity, as ours are the only two families with kids!

 

Our kids are kind of familiar with bowling because they've played it on the Wii ( another teacher left us the game system last summer when they moved away, along with the resort games that come with it). Because they've played it on the screen, they thought they'd be good at the real game, and it was quite humorous to watch them realize that it wasn't quite the same.

 

For instance, bowling balls are actually kind of heavy.  If you just flick your wrist, the ball flies up and lands with a thump. You need to push or toss the ball in some way to give it momentum, it's not just gonna go...however, when it goes super slow down the lane, you might still get all the pins, as Joshua discovered once!

 

 

The kids were excited about the shoes, the different colors of bowling balls, and the novelty of it all. The two toddlers (ours and the other family's) had their own lane, the older kids had one, and the adults had a third. Eli was having a great time, until he got distracted by the candy machine in the corner.

 

 

 The older kids were kind of frustrated at first with how hard it was to play,

 

but at the end we let the older kids use the tool the two toddlers had been using: this special ramp down which they could aim the ball at the pins. They didn't use it every time, but it did speed up the game a bit!

 

As for the adults, we did...okay. I thought I was at a disadvantage, having only played two or three times as an adult, the last time being seven years ago, as previously mentioned. As with most games, I do well at first, then I do much worse by the end.  However, the others with whom we played had even less experience than we did, so my bad score actually looked awesome! And Joseph won, as expected.



 

All in all, it was a fun outing for all.