Round-up of Randoms

This post is a round-up of random thoughts that I’ve been gathering, thoughts that don’t fit any category, sprinkled with irrelevant and random photos.

  1. The last time Michael and I drove up the Mineral King Road together, a car with two young women caught up to us. Michael pulled into the next turnout, rolling slowly as he does, wishing the driver would get on it so he didn’t have to stop. Instead, the car stopped, the window went down, and the driver said, “You two are so adorable!” Excuse me? “Adorable” is what young people say to old people! I wasn’t even knitting at the time. (At least she didn’t say “adorbs”, a word that affects me like nails on a chalkboard.)
  2. The largest Catholic church in all of North America has been under construction in Visalia for two years. Visalia?? Central California, huge number of Catholic families, not a lot of priests available for multiple congregations (or however they refer to their separate churches).
  3. The bears are very active in Three Rivers this year, but not as many as in 2015 during and after the Rough Fire.
  4. Three Rivers population has dropped from 2200 to 1800, and there are only 80 children enrolled in the school. Seems like a good place to enroll your children if you want the teacher:student ratio of private school without the expense. WAIT! One week later, the population part of the sign was missing. What is happening??
  5. An old customer/friend called with an art emergency. This means that she needs some custom art and needs it fast. My prices haven’t changed in many years, but the smallest size I draw is now 9×12″ instead of 8×10″, and I tacked on a rush charge. I was a little embarrassed to tell her the price, feeling as if I was gouging her (but come on!), and her response was: “You don’t charge enough”. Oooph. Just oooph.
  6. I bid on a large mural project, and the waiting to hear if my design and prices were accepted, not knowing the competition, not knowing if it is even feasible to the (potential) customer is Not Fun. This is where faith comes in: “Okay, God, I trust you and your plan for me”. (If I say it enough, maybe eventually I will just relax about the uncertainty).

Mineral King After a Summer Storm

If you read this blog through an email subscription on your phone, the photos might not show up. (Some people get them, some do not.) You can see them by going to the blog on the internet. It is called cabinart.net/blog, and the latest post is always on top.

Last week there was such a storm in Tulare County that the marina at Lake Kaweah experienced some real destruction: the docks slammed around, wrecked houseboats, the docks broke apart or sank or both, and five houseboats also sunk. Now they are just in these large jams and people can’t get to them. What a freak of nature storm.

I was down the hill; Trail Guy was up the hill. The evening after the storm, he took these photos in that beautiful glowing light called “the magic hour” by photographers everywhere.

A couple of days later he took these photos out on the trail. This first one is white flowers that I have never seen before. Maybe I saw them and thought, “White, meh”. But I don’t remember.

She Loves Flowers, Chapter Three

I wasn’t joking about loving flowers.

My yard is huge, and these represent little dots of color, scattered all around. It is not like some classic English garden, or as if everything is perfectly placed and professionally landscaped. But oh my goodness, I do love me some flowers.

P.S. This post comes to you after a very full busy weekend. I will tell you a bit about it later this week. Now, hold it down, will ya? I want to take a nap.

Sidetracked and Distracted

Since we are nearing the end of my favorite time of year, I thought I’d give you a break from watching painted flowers develop and show you a bit of the rest of my world at the time I was painting that bouquet. 

There are many distractions when one works at home. 

First, my neighbor has this incredible plant, and I don’t know the name, but the deer haven’t eaten it yet, so I NEED the name, because I NEED this color.

The mail came, and it contained a package of 2 new yarns. I haven’t talked about knitting for awhile; didn’t want to lose any more readers than I’ve already lost because the emailed subscriptions don’t show photos on people’s phones. (Still unsolved; my web designer is still too busy.)

The pinkish red yarn might exactly match the few remaining flowering quince. As a self-proclaimed color junkie, I had to check, and yeppers, it matches. (Destined to be a baby blanket).

I also needed to know if the lavender matched my blooming lilacs.. Nope, not quite. This one is destined to become another sweater that I don’t need; my knitting is a continual triumph of hope over experience, just like my gardening efforts. Sometimes I get lucky and all the parts work out. Usually the sleeves are too tight or too loose, the buttons keep falling off, the ends don’t stay woven in, I find a dropped stitch after wearing it several times, the collar won’t lie down, it is too short and fat, it is too long and tight. . . you get the idea. (Baby blankets always fit their recipients.)

I really did have some work to do that day. When one is an artist in a small town (the sign for Three Rivers says 2600 but I don’t know if all those people really live here) where one’s life overlaps with friends on many levels, one is often privileged to help out. This was fun, but definitely best viewed from the back of a fast horse. (Would take too long to explain and I’ve already stretched your attention span by going on and on about color and knitting.).

On one of my trips back to the house (a 30 second trip on the Zapato Express*), the light was beautiful on the hillside.

The green and the wildflowers are so fleeting; my daffodils no longer look like this.

So, even though all this distraction and sidetraction (that’s a good word, don’t you agree?) is taking me from my real work, I believe that it is an artist’s obligation to absorb as much beauty as possible whenever it is available. That’s part of the business of art.

*Zapato Express means I walked.

Poppy Peeping

The poppies and other wildflowers were at at their peak on March 11. Three friends and I took the afternoon off to go fill our eyes.

First, we had to empty our wallets to fill the gas tank. Welcome to Three Rivers.

Then we headed down around the lake, and up Dry Creek Road, all within eastern Tulare County.

This last photo shows Terminus Dam in the distance, which creates Kaweah Lake. The flowers weren’t fabulous right there at the Dry Creek Preserve, but it was clear and green, which is pretty fabulous on its own. 

We never did get out amidst the flowers but stayed on the shoulder of the road, and actually did no trespassing whatsoever.

I must be finally growing up.

Learn, Schmearn

I accidentally took black and white photos on a day full of beautiful bright natural colors. This became an opportunity to learn how to use the colorize tool on Photoshop Junior (actually Photoshop Elements).

I am not impressed. 

Let’s try it with another photo.

Better, but still nothing to get excited about.

Now I will use the tool to adjust color.

This isn’t very good either.

What did I learn? That if I mess up and accidentally take black and white photos, it is a waste of time to try to make them look natural.

How about if I just stop messing up when the pictures are important?

Good idea.

Not on Purpose

Remember in the olden days when we took photos and didn’t see them until our film got developed?

We have gotten used to looking at them instantly, which is great in theory, but what happens when you are outside in the bright sun and cannot see the screen? Cameras rarely have eyeholes, and the ones that do are small, blurry, inadequate, scratched, or just dirty.

Additionally, if you cannot see the screen, you cannot see the controls on the screen. Sometimes this creates accidents.

A little over a week ago after a storm (not the snowstorm), everything was so beautiful that I laid down my paintbrushes and headed out with Trail Guy to see some natural beauty. The wildflowers!!

THEN, without knowing it, I had a camera accident.

How would I know? I couldn’t see the screen. When I put on some glasses and moved into the shade, I realized that the color was absent, so I randomly pushed the controls until color appeared again.

This flowering pear is the first to bloom in the neighborhood (mid-February) and the last to lose its color in the fall (sometimes late November). This photo might have looked okay in black and white.

It took quite a bit of button pushing when I got home to restore the normal settings. I don’t know how it switched to black and white and doubt if I could make it do that again, at least not on purpose.

Now I am going to experiment with something called “colorize” on Photoshop Junior. This is an opportunity to learn.

Peculiar Sights

Remember Peculiar Sights? I used to post peculiar sights as a regular feature on the blog, but somewhere along the way, I either stopped noticing or everything became normal. 

The photos from Mineral King were taken in late August and early September, obviously pre-fire; I have been waiting for awhile to gather enough peculiarities to put together a blog post.

  1. This little concrete building is the object of much speculation in Mineral King. One day someone is going to tell us what it was for and then we will know. It is up to the older generations to pass on their knowledge and up to the younger generations to keep track.

2. Yes, that is a cat. I was stunned. After I confessed to a possible Cat Disorder, the cat man graciously allowed me to take this photo. (A trailhead ranger turned them around – pets are not allowed in the National Parks on trails or in the backcountry).

3. This dog was just covering trail as if it had the right to be there. It wasn’t until I looked at my photo that I saw he was wearing socks. (Also turned back by the trailhead ranger).

4. Can you see the cat tail below the sparkly skirt? Is this peculiar, or is it the fact that this little bitty trooper walked 9.5 miles (and then wrestled with her brother and rode her bike when she got home)?

5. I don’t know what this is, which is what makes it peculiar. It is in Orange Cove, photographed in February of last year.

6. This is no longer a peculiar sight; turkeys run amuck daily in our yard (counted 36 on a march last week), but at the time, the scene struck me as something worth photographing.

7. This deer has an additional spike (look closely).

8. Excuse me??

And thus we conclude a look into some of the more strange scenes of my little world as a Central California artist.

More Peculiar Sights, here, here (9 years ago!),and  here (almost 10 years ago!!).

Autumn Break

Today’s post is a break for you from my normal bloviations about art.

Something red caught my eye on my commute* out to the studio last week.(Feel free to get a pumpkin spice something to accompany these photo.)

And this, which looks like a symbol of wildfire to me:

Meanwhile, Pippin has been very delinquent, refusing to come into the garages at night, running around like an unruly hooligan. This makes him very tired during the day.

Tucker has had a campout or two, but likes to wait outside my studio for me to finish work.

Two out of three, always two out of three. Jackson is hiding somewhere. When he appears, one of the others will go away. 

We all sleep better when there are three cats safely locked up in the outbuildings.

But wait! There’s more! Why are these August flowers still blooming in October? (Don’t look a gift horse in the mouth).

It was still raining ash and the light was still orange last week when I took these photos. 

P.S. Happy Birthday, Blog Reader Anne!

*50 yard walk? 100 yards? how about 35 seconds?

Mooney Grove V

Today let’s look at some of the more unusual pieces of Tulare County’s Mooney Grove Park. It will require a little bit of talk today.

Hugh Mooney often gets credit for donating the family’s acreage to Tulare County, but this sign says the Mooney family sold it the County for $15,000.

Maybe Hugh used that rifle to shoot squirrels. They are certainly a plague on the place now. Active squirrel holes are rampant.

What’s this? A platform to put a thingie for Frisbie golf, which can now only be called “disk golf”. There is an entire course for this popular game on the north side, but I saw the gizmos (“holes”) in other areas too.And here is another platform which used to hold a statue called “The Pioneer”. The plaster statue crumbled. (End of the Trail in plaster was traded with the Cowboy Hall of Fame in Oklahoma City for a bronze version).

There are 2 hills in the Park on the east edge. They were created with the dirt dug to form a recharging basin in the park. The formation is useful as an amphitheater, and one hill has a disk golf “hole”. When I went to Redwood High School, I used to look through the fence at a little log cabin that appeared to be abandoned. It was. After I grew up and became The Central California Pencil Artist (a self-ascribed title), the Boy Scouts reclaimed it, disassembled it, moved it to Mooney Grove, and reassembled it. I drew it as a fund raiser to help pay for the enterprise. (I wonder if I still have a copy of that drawing. . .)

Finally, I leave you with this Peculiar Sight.

Tomorrow we will conclude our tour of Tulare County’s Mooney Grove Park.