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Another KY WonderKid is due almost any day now. Called yesterday just to see how Callie’s feeling…she’s so over being pregnant and can’t wait to be done with it. They don’t know what they’re having so 2 year old Shelby will either be the only girl with 3 brothers or she’ll have a sister sharing her room.😎
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Started out the day with a phone call at 6:05 a.m….this is becoming comical. And this time is wasn’t Kim’s phone, it was mine. The ringer has been turned off but it still vibrates which is what it was doing way too early this morning. Bah!! It was work related. I went back to sleep right after hanging up.
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After a good filling breakfast, we headed out
for Saguaro National Park. Stopped in at the visitor’s center…bought some
things at the gift shop, watched a 15 minute movie, took some pictures and then
headed out for a drive through the park.
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The loop we were on was gravel and rough but
very doable in a truck. At a pull off
area we saw a woman doing plein air
painting or so I thought…I asked Kim to stop so I could talk to her. Sure enough she was and while she wasn't as
illustrative as Bob Ross, she was very gracious about allowing me to take
pictures and answering my questions. She was using two nearby cactuses as her
inspiration and as we talked it was fun to see her painting start to resemble reality. She is a retired art teacher
but just a novice at plein air painting. Our library occasionally has workshops on
plein air painting but this is the first time I’ve seen it in practice. Seemed
like an interesting way to spend some time outside. artistsnetworks.com
explains it this way: Plein air painting
is about leaving the four walls of your studio behind and experiencing painting
and drawing in the landscape. The practice goes back for centuries but was
truly made into an art form by the French Impressionists. Their desire to paint
light and its changing, ephemeral qualities, coupled with the creation of
transportable paint tubes and the box easel—the precursor to the plein air
easels of today—allowed artists the freedom to paint “en plein air,” which is
the French expression for “in the open air.”
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We rode up to Signal Hill which is where the
petroglyphs are located. We didn’t walk
up to see them because of the time factor but they’re seeable from the parking area so we
thought we’d just take a look from down below.
However, the location of the sun made it very hard to make out the
drawings; I was able to zoom in with the camera to get a shot to show everyone
else.
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The other day when we went crested saguaro
hunting we were following a list put out by Saguaro Park of eight that are
located within the park boundaries. We
found 4 of them...another one involved a mile hike and two were located in
another area of the park. But we were unable to find #5 and #6 on the list. We went to the area located on the map and
despite driving that road a couple of times couldn’t find them. Today we followed the written description and
voila! we found #5 on Signal Hill Rd. Number
six was supposed to be in the same general area but all of us were looking and
we just couldn’t find it. Perhaps
another day.
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Through Facebook we learned that some
Bakker cousins are hanging out in the Mesa area. When we knew that Vickie and Dan would be
visiting us, we made plans to meet the cousins at Organ Stop Pizza. A visit to
Organ Stop has become one of our rituals when we’re here. Sharing the experience with others is part of
the fun for us. So we met Lori and Ken Larian and Jimmy and Sylvia Bakker for
pizza and a time of catching up. Jim
Bakker, Lori and Jimmy’s dad, was a cousin to Lloyd, Kim and Vickie’s dad. The Jim Bakker family had 7 kids and the Lloyd
Bakker family had 8 kids...there was a lot of catching up to do. I wasn’t totally out of the memory loop
because we all attended West Ottawa and their youngest brother Randy is my
age. Anyway, fun evening!
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Went scorpion hunting, taking Vickie and Dan
with us. Found one in the same pile as
last night but in a different spot. It
was under a weed and didn’t move so at first we thought it was a dead
scorpion. Dead or alive a scorpion is a
scorpion, right? When I started to pull
back the weed to get a picture, it moved and eventually slipped into a nearby
hole. I got a picture, weed and
all.
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No morning walk this morning but I still
managed to get over 8,600 steps.
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No bike ride today.
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