Happy Trails

I mentioned my little Sunday hike on FaceBook and how I got lost........well, not lost, lost. It's just that the Tim Ernst hiking trails guidebook I took with me (and left in my car) is 17 years old, and during those 17 years, it seems the green trail (as opposed to the red, blue & white trails that criss-cross it) has expanded from a 5 mile loop to a 10 mile loop, and about the time I thought I should be returning to my car, I wasn't even close, so I wandered around for a while, never feeling scared or panicky, just irritated with myself. I had never gone hiking alone before. There's a group of (mostly) ladies called The Happy Hikers that I hike with sometimes in the fall, winter and early spring. They range in ages from 30-something through 80, but don't let the age fool you. The older ones who started the club can often out-hike the newbies. Anyway, this experience has left me contrite and convinced me that I should hike with the ladies, even though they tromp through the woods faster than I would and don't take photo breaks, so half the time I'm running to catch up after I've snapped a couple of quick pics, and the highlight of their day is not being in the woods nearly so much as the lunch afterwards at some nearby diner. But I digress.

I'll have to say here that my family has told me not to go hiking alone, too many America's Most Wanted stories of deranged madmen hacking up unsuspecting females on lonely park trails. This Sunday, though, I thought, I'm 61, and I can do as I darn well please, but as I got out of my car at 11:50, put on my hiking boots, got my water bottles, etc., I did feel very alone. Luckily I still had the old mace gun in my pack, and I took it out to see if it still worked. No spray, just a dribble. I decided if I got attacked by a deranged madman, I'd have to ask him to kneel and look up so I could dribble mace in his eyes.

But on my own, I had plenty of time to examine every leaf. (That's what Jim says I do. He won't go with me hiking. He has bad knees. I think men have specialized pain receptors so that they only hurt when they're asked to do something they don't like doing. He goes to hunting camp several weeks out of the year, and he always comes home with tall tales and yarns about the fun he and his buddies had building stands, riding 4-wheelers, and stalking defenseless animals. He never says, "I sat in the cabin the whole time because my knees hurt.")

I had a lovely day, for the first 2 hours, till about the time I thought I should have reached the trail head, and I ran out of water, and my little pocket camera's battery pack died, and the Pterodactyl mosquitoes discovered me. I had my cell phone, and I could have called Jim, but what would I tell him? "Uh, honey, I'm lost in the woods near the wild grapes and just after I passed a clump of red fungus"? But it wasn't as if I were a thousand miles from Nowhere. From a bluff I could see the Arkansas State Capitol building in the distance. If worse came to worst, I could have swum the river, gone shopping, and then taken a cab back to my car. At 3:30, I gave up on the trail, went to down to the highway and made my way back to my car on asphalt, not the ending I had envisioned, but 5 more minutes in the shadowy depths, and I'd have been a goner, anyway, sucked dry by those blood-thirsty mosquitoes.

The best photo ops always come after the battery dies, and so I didn't get the covered bridge, the pool of lily pads, the waterfall, etc.; I've posted a few of mine, but I'm not a nature photographer, and I rarely can resist the urge to paint or at least run a couple of filters on them. My favorite photographer is Dave Finley http://www.pbase.com/davedebbenmoladatodd/izard_county ;my second favorite would be Tim Ernst http://www.cloudland.net/ Tim is more famous, but I don't know him personally. Dave is my son. Check out all their sites for some gorgeous wildflower photography. I guess I'll have to be content with chasing the Happy Hikers through the woods.

Some Photos

I'm obviously attention deficit disordered, easily distracted by sparkly things and whatever floats in on the current, and so this blog may never have a permanent focus. Today I got out my Canon Rebel camera and plan to take it, along with my little buddy the Canon PowerShot, to Florida, so I need to practice up on using it. Isn't it cool how patient cameras are? I discovered some pics from last winter just sitting in there, waiting for me to do something (anything) with them. Poor things. So, I'll post a couple of them today to make amends.

I discovered this photo of my computer room, taken before the new PC and new monitor. It looks neater than usual, and darker, must have been a dreary winter day. This is my sanctuary, and it's off-limits for remarks or nagging by my perfectionist hubby. I'm a pile maker, and I'll always have my piles of magazines that I will get back to eventually, stacks of papers, books, etc., and I try to confine them to this room...............mostly. At the moment, there are 2 computers and 3 monitors. Sometimes I can't bear to let go of things..........I work on the Dell with dual monitors. I LOVE that Deck lighted keyboard, even though I'm a fast touch typist (thank you Ms. Johnson in high school). It's shorter (no number pad) so it fits on my tray beside the Intuos.

There were photos of the little ice storm we had, just looking at them here in early August makes me feel cooler.

And the red Gerbera daisy pic was taken this morning. I can never capture the dew as well as I'd like, just another of my life goals. I have so many goals, but then that's what keeps us ticking, isn't it?

A peek inside my kitchen

I want to thank those of you who have signed up to follow my blog, especially since I don't know where we're going yet. I guess that's the problem with having so many interests; I like to take photos, do crafts, decorate my home, read, paint with traditional paints and with digital brushes, grow things, write, study any number of things like psychology and Taoism, collect things (sort of), etc., etc. So, I've decided to dabble in lots of topics here at the beginning till something "feels" right and then take that path.

Today I wanted to show you one little corner of my kitchen where the baker's rack stands. I would like to have a larger one, but the kitchen has so many windows that there's not much wall space. I'm in the process of making some decorating changes; I'll share those with you as they evolve.

My nephew, Shawn, once told me that I have so many cool things in my house, but that I need to come up with better stories than saying they came from garage sales; just between you and me, though, that wire chicken & eggs, the tassels, and most of the rolling pins were bought at garage sales for next to nothing. The idea of putting twinkle lights in the glass canisters was shamelessly borrowed from my friend, Sybil, who used to be a buyer for M.M. Cohn and has lots of good decorating ideas.

I've got some Fiestaware dishes there as well. My whole kitchen is filled with Fiesta. I don't collect it, but I have a hard time not buying it when I see it. Does that mean I'm collecting? I have 3 cabinets full of it, one in cool shades of blues and greens, another with warm colors like red, yellow & orange, and a third where some dramatic colours are gathering, like black, chocolate and lilac. Mine is mostly contemporary; I got interested late in the game, and the vintage pieces are astronomical. We saw a chipped vintage lilac dinner plate at Canton for $300.

Most silk flowers that I see around are too chintzy to decorate with, but Hobby Lobby has some fairly good ones, (of course I wait till they're 50% off) and I go with Sybil to wholesale houses where they have the really good stuff, which is where I got the ceramic vase that looks like horns and the flowers I arranged in it. And that's a little peek at some of my decorating.

mural

I got word today that the mural is hung, but when I was painting the panels on my computer, I envisioned it being hung in the entrance to the Rainbow Casino in Vicksburg, MS, and that someone involved with it would send me photos of the finished piece. Turns out, it was hung in the gaming area, which operates 24/7, and no photos are allowed there. So, I'll post some of the 12 panels here, and Jim & I are headed down to Vicksburg Thursday, just want to see it for myself.

They had a certain look in mind, but otherwise I was given fairly free rein, using the reference photos (taken by renowned photographer Jack Robinson) of vintage roadside scenes along the highway heading into Vicksburg. At one point, though, I thought that it needed some cotton bolls and cotton fields, which to me represent the rural South back in the day. I was informed, in no uncertain terms, that there would be no cotton in any of these images! I guess cotton means different things to different folks............. I worked on it, off and on, for about 6 months, and now that it's done, I would like to start over and do some things differently, but that's how I feel about most everything I paint. The mural is said to be 96 feet long and 8 feet high. Each of the files is huge, the largest one being 250 MB, which is bigger than the hard drive on my first computer, but I've whacked 'em way down to post here, and for now they'll have to do, until I can figure out a way to get photos of the mural.................