Scattered Thoughts . . .

I recently started getting back into sketching and that has been going well.  I've never really stopped sketching throughout my entire life so I wouldn't expect to have any problems with refining my sketching abilities again.  Painting, however, is something I haven't done much of in many decades.  Watercolor painting is actually something I've never been comfortable with even when I was an active artist in school as well as college.  In college, every art-related class I took was sketching, engineering drawing and architectural renderings in graphite only and then blueprinted.  Back then, we didn't have all large format color printers using today's printer technology.  We only had large format blueprinting available.  Consequently, it made no sense to render any original drawings/sketches in color. Lukey and Kenzie were staying with us for the long holiday weekend last weekend and they also did some sketching but I noticed that they were very reluctant to use t

The day after our cruise on Lake Champlain, we did some typical tourist sightseeing around Waterbury with Lukey and Kenzie.  It was a quiet weekday morning so we beat the tourist crowd.   We started at Cold Hollow Cider Mill... Tasting the apple cider...   I found it to be a little bitter on this day but the taste does vary from season to season. After tasting the apple cider, we roamed around the store looking for things to purchase.  (We found plenty and went home with plenty.) Making the cider donuts... The kids and Gee had planned on getting some apple cider slushies but the slushie machine was being cleaned so they had no slushies available.  We did, however, get a dozen freshly made apple cider donuts instead of the slushies...  oh...  and quite a few other products that would have been purchased regardless of whether we got slushies or not. This is a view from out behind the cider mill looking toward the Worcester Range (and our house)... After the cider mill, we went to Lake Ch

W e had a really nice birthday barbeque celebration in the backyard this past weekend.  Although it was a bit smoky from the Canadian wildfires, the weather was actually quite nice for a change! The company was good.  The food was good.  The drinks were cold.  There were plenty of games to play.  The rain stopped just long enough for us to set up the yard on Friday, have a great time together on Saturday and then clean up before it started raining again.   Looking at these photos, it seems to me that everyone had a good time! As always, the kids congregated on the sailboat most of the day.  At one point, four of the grandchildren were on the sailboat at the same time (photo above).  I have no idea how they all fit in that rather small cockpit!  In hindsight, when I saw that the four of them were on the sailboat together, I should have had Liza place 10 day old Sophia into Lukey or Kenzie's arms too so I could get a photo of all the grandchildren on the sailboat at the same time.