Busy Days

Oooooh, today feels like Fall.  It is dreary and gray out. I'm at home alone, so it is a great time to try and catch up here.

We were away from home a lot this summer.  West Virginia was home for a month.  I spent all of August at my favorite place on earth; a farmhouse on the top of Allegheny Mountain. Friends came to visit.  Family came to visit.  We crafted.  We spent nights outside watching major meteor showers.  I saw the Northern Lights!!! I sang to cows.  I missed friends while I was there, but never missed a day of living in the suburbs.

The week after we came home, we hosted family as my uncle was to be buried at Arlington Cemetery. As always, it was a sad day but visiting with family felt warm and fuzzy and comfy.

Days later, Mark and I headed down to Florida.  Friends rented a house on the water for a month and invited us to spend a week.  We did a bit of paddling, including sharing a paddle with an alligator.  Trying to maneuver myself onto a sit-on-top kayak from a dock, as a gator was watching nearby, really freaked me out.  It turned out to be a four foot gator who could not have cared less about us, but it was very exciting.

From Florida, I drove to Charlotte, NC to spend a week with my daughter.  She flew east from L.A. for training related to her job.  As she did work things, I spent my days in the pool, thrift shopping, and working on my TeachersPayTeachers shop.  Few people can make me giggle as much as my daughter does.  We slept a lot and giggled a lot. Luckily, we left town a day or two before the riots started.

Now that I am home, I am carving like a mad woman; as non-stop as possible.

Mark Paddling - Scherenschnitte Portrait

Now that Snippyville looks more inviting, I feel like spending more time down there.

Here's a snip I just finished.  It is of Mark paddling the kayak last summer. 

I had done a rough snip of it a few months ago and liked it enough to do a larger version.  Here's the practice one.

Kayaking Snip

Lately, I have done a good bit of snipping.  Because it was going to be a part of Mark's Christmas present, I couldn't post any of them.

Here is one that I may use either as a sketch for a linocut print or either snip it again to be framed.  I am pleased with it, but would like to improve on it a bit.  It's of Mark kayaking last summer.


scherenschnitte 3" x 4"

Travel

Hey, Folks.........I've been on vacation for a week, and am now trying to catch up on the rest of my life.

We went kayaking on the Colorado River at Lake Powell. Here are some fun shots of the trip.

I'd been so paranoid before we got there that this was going to be a trip with a bunch of uber-outdoorsmen. I just knew I was going to be the only woman and all these men were going to be disgusted at having one woman along. When the first two women showed up, I was ecstatic. When the next three women appeared, I was so overjoyed. The trip included six women and four men.

The first day out, there were wind gusts of 50 to 70 mph. Torrential rains hit later that night.

Did I mention we were camping?

When I got lost in torrential rain in the dark on the way to dinner the first night, there were a few tears. Maybe a little cursing too, but after that it was all good.

Snippin' and Paddlin'

This snip does not in any way, shape or form represent Fall '08 for me. Not as of yet anyway. My time is coming. I watched yesterday as my neighbor raked leaves into a pile and her preschoolers jumped in, screaming with joy.


This is a shot from yesterday. It was unseasonably warm for a fall day in Virginia. My cousin from Dallas is in the DC area for a professional conference. She's as outdoorsy as we are, and seemed happy to be out paddling on the river "back home."

Paddling With Friends

On Saturday we paddled on the Potomac with two of our outdoorsy friends. Here's how they got one boat to the put-in.



Awesome!!!

The rapids that we went over probably wouldn't even qualify as Class 1, which is just fine with me. Here I am, about to go over some little riffles. Every time I got to some, I'd raise my arms and yell "woooooooooo" as if I were about to go over a roller coaster hill.



We did a lot of pulling up behind eddies. (You paddle up behind big rocks so that the water flow doesn't pull you downstream again.)



Sometimes there were papparazi there.

Blogs, Sloths and Crabs

I've been so excited the last week as I got mentions in a couple of blogs I enjoy.

One was a mention on "The Crafty Crow," which has really wonderful craft ideas to use with kids. Cassi spotlighted my blog post about Elementary Stitchery. Some of her readers left comments and questions on that post, so I thought I'd follow up here with responses.

Someone asked if I used the big plastic needles with my older students as well. I do. They're cheap and work well with the burlap and yarn. You can get them at most craft stores. I'd buy the blunt metal ones if I was working with a few kids, but for the hundreds I do work with, the cost for those is a little bit prohibitive.

Now, my little going-to-second-grade friend, Marian, is often seen on her blog stitching. In this photo she is using a hoop and much finer cloth than I use in school. The needle seems to be smaller as well, but perhaps not sharp.

The other blog mention was from Brit Gal' in the USA. Sarah is a funny Brit who is living the good (though sometimes tornadic.......is that a word?) life in Oklahoma. She kindly awarded me mention and then sent me off with the instruction to award others.........which I have yet to do. Argh. Hopefully she won't yank my "award" away from me for my slothful ways. (I swear....I stay busier when Mark is taking his vacation with me than when I am working full time.....)

The next few days will include more crab feasts, visits with family, weinie roasts and paddling. Probably not much posting. So "talk" to you soon. Hugs......jan

Eattin' Crabs in Montross

Lord have mercy, I am pooped. Mark and I spent the better part of last week at our friend's river house in what is called "The Northern Neck" of Virginia. It was a gorgeous get away with lots of kayaking, seafood eatting and beach combing, plus a bit of staying up too late. So I could use a good nap or two.

The snip above is of Mark and me (though I am really not that svelte) eatting steamed Blue Crabs on the screened in porch. Oddly enough, I just realized that I dated the thing 2007. What tha??? I guess it doesn't matter. We were eatting crabs in Montross in 2007 also. I gave the snip to our friend who owns the house and he set it next to the paper cut Christmas tree forest I cut down there last winter.



One of the things we do every day down there is shark tooth hunt. There are a couple of barrier islands about a half mile off shore in which these teeth wash up on the beach. Usually I will find one tooth every fifteen or thirty minutes. Mark and I ventured about a quarter mile further to a more grown over island with lots of stinky marsh mud (which to me smells like home as I grew up in a woody/marshy spot an hour south of this river house). I hit the motherload back there finding 40 shark teeth within an hour. Mark found one here. Weird. Usually I am the person in the group who finds the least, so when I started picking up one right after the other, without taking a step, I wasn't going anywhere until I scoured every inch of the place. That was fun. Stinky. And I sunk up to my knees in black mud a time or two. But fun.

We got to the river house a day before our friend and his other guests arrived. During that time I finished stitching a couple of ATCs I made for myself.



I also read the book "The Nanny Diaries," another good beach read book that was better than I had anticipated. I subscribe to the book choosing theory that "Best Seller" means that I might have half a chance of getting through the book and half liking it. When I choose books for other reasons (such as choosing "Theodore Rex" after hearing the author on "Book Notes" on CSpan....and then spending six months getting through it), they usually have less enthusiastic results than when I choose them based on the stamped seal of approval of the masses, "Best Seller."

I did get a beautiful tan somehow, though I diligently slathered myself in SPF 50. Tanning is usually a futile act, as my darkest of tans will only have a shelf life of around 36 hours. A few freckles may remain after that. As I am hovering on the precipice of my 51st birthday, and am seeing more lines and wrinkles form on my face, I am more likely to seek the highest SPF known to science than to try and get brown for a day or two.

I also managed to stick to my diet at the river house, though every time I heard someone crunching on a Frito, I wanted to cry. (20 pounds lost in a little under 5 weeks!)

Mark and I are on vacation together this week and will be in and out. No plans are made at the moment. When I am done with whatever we do I will surely be pooped once again.

Quiet Snipitude

Mark and I have been down "south" the last few days. Our friend, Rob, graciously let us vacation at his river house on the Potomac. We had some rain, but it was no where near the amount we anticipated. No phone. No internet. A lot of time to play. I got a lot of paper snipping time in. I couldn't ask for a better vacation activity than quiet snip-i-tude.

The paper cutting above is of my daughter and granddaughter. They have established a garden in their previously barren L.A. backyard, and are thoroughly enjoying the experience. It's interesting to watch this happen, as my daughter has never been interested in such things up to this point. Now she is obsessed. Yea!

My second favorite snippery of the vacation is this one. Fairies shopping. I'm not a shopper but the idea of fairies doing the mundane is kind of interesting to me.

Shoe fairies. I'm not into shoes either. I wear "broken in" Birkenstocks. Maybe this image is a subconscious wish that the shoe fairies would turn my comfy footwear into something more fetching.

Paddling. I thought I should snip something that represented my other activity of the week.

Fairies on leaves. I think they were too small in this cut, and get lost amidst the foilage.

Intersession and spring break end within hours. I enjoyed my break, and would honestly relish another week off to play. It will be fun to see the kids again, though. It's so funny how much they appear to grow over each break time away.

Winter Paddle on the Potomac

Sunday paddle at Mason Neck.......near George Washington's home, Mt. Vernon.

Temperatures in the upper 30's.

What a difference paddling in the winter. No speed boats. No other paddlers. No hassle parking at the boat landing. Five or six eagle spottings. HUGE great blue herrons. The sound of the wind being sliced by a gull. Cold hands and feet. Relatively low tide that kept us from going too far back. Exhaustion.