the last few days...

Get comfortable, this is long...and hopefully not too boring or braggish (is that a word?)

Saturday night, we drove out to Pa. once again for 2 of our kids, and saw this beautiful sky.

I am not usually one to boast about my kids because-1. they don't care for their parents to do this, and 2. because I don't think it is necessary. Of the four, this one gets the most angry, but here I go anyway, so please forgive me. Modest Daughter number 2 and about 50-60 other young adults from her University were honored Sat. night for their grades, service to their school, community, and/or the outside world through Who's Who in American Universities and Colleges.
Each student was invited up to the front of the room, and their activities of the past 4 years were read to the room of their peers and parents. Quite an impressive lot of youngsters.

She will be doubly mad at me for putting her photo here, but maybe she won't see this? This was just after she received her award, and she was moving very quickly because she was very relieved to be able to sit back down again.

We are very proud of her.

After the dinner, our girl went out with her friends as kids will do, and we followed the dinner and celebration, with her brother #2's hockey game which coincidentally was about 15-20 mins. from where we were. It was a bit cold for me as I was dressed in a cocktail style dress and high heels. What a story that was.....When my daughter read the invitation and details to me over the phone, I heard "business casual" however, when we talked to our daughter again, about 15-20 minutes into our trip, my husband asked again about the attire. We were headed to a country club for this dinner, so he had concerns about his lack of a suit and tie, though he did look very handsome in what he was wearing. Uh Oh. Business attire is different, I found out....We did the quickest turn-around in history. Now, he wears a suit every day for work so he just had to reach into his closet. He could have done it blind-folded. I haven't had to dress up in quite some time- though I have nice enough clothes for funerals, and lunches, but this was different. I was ripping through my closet for a dress- they were all under wraps- and different sizes too- as I lost a LOT of weight a few years ago- after having PUT ON a lot. Still in there was a dress I'd worn to my parent's 50th wedding anniversary party that was 16 years ago, March. I figured if I didn't make any crazy moves, and held my breath I could wear it. Phew! Thank goodness it had held a special place in my heart all these years, because of my parents, or it would have been gone LONG AGO! We got to the dinner just as everyone was moving into the dining room.

Did I say how proud we are of our daughter??

P.S. the hockey game brrrr was good, too.

Moving on....

Welcome to my imagination. This oil painting I call Taking a Dip. I used left-over paints that were on my pallet. My husband was like- "Huh?" My daughter number 2- "um, Mom, haha, don't name your paintings!" Hahaha. It is small- 8x10- and I probably will paint over it someday. But for now, I kind of like it. LOL.

Here is a watercolor sketch I worked out very quickly on Sat. before we went out. It is of a neighbor's house. Some drawing and painting mistakes are obvious, and I don't think the neighbor would like it very much- as I've actually cut off a wing or two of this very large house (I say this laughingly.)

This next is from a photo that I took a few months ago- at about 6:30 a.m. I painted this yesterday. It is a watercolor, and again, I started to overwork it. Everytime I look at it though, I see something else that I could change. I have to literally tell myself to WALK AWAY! I am still learning. What can I say?

It is snowing today, so I took these photos from my drawing table. I love this view. It is the same from my front door, from an earlier post, but it feels like a hideaway up here, and I love those pine trees that I can see, but oops- they don't show up very well in the photos!

And while I'm at it, I picked up this fabric in 1973(!) while visiting London, England, thinking I would make a dress. (Think about the year!) It isn't wide, 36"??, but I must have bought about 5 yards!

I have so many fabrics, and more ideas than time to play with them, but I don't know what to do with this fabric. I almost feel like it would be a sin to cut into it after all these years!! Any ideas, anyone? The photo on the right was supposed to be flipped. That is a CD case to try to give an idea as to how BIG those flowers are.

So this is it. The end of this post. I wonder how many of you made it this far??

Boy, it is really snowing out there...