2/24/07

Well, today made up for all the badness. I spent half the day at Jacksonville Zoo, and I would have spent more time if my camera battery hadn't run out. Next year I'm taking Lukas here. I can see why it's rated one of the top zoos in the country.

I got there about an hour after it opened, parked in the front row, walked across the street to the ticket window, and within 5 minutes I was looking at animals. Very different from the MN zoo, which seems to be made more for joggers and bikers for the distance you have to walk to see anything (if you're lucky). Granted, the enclosures here are smaller than at MN, but except for the leopard, they didn't seem to be cramped. And there are so many animals here, and they're so easy to see. And it wasn't at all crowded with people.

They have 3 African elephants, and I was so thrilled to hear one of them rumble. They are such NEAT animals.

The walkway that goes by the giraffe area goes up to their head height, so people can actually feed them and touch them.

The leopard had an adequate enclosure with a tree to climb, but he just paced back and forth in just one spot. That was a bit sad, but what a beautiful animal! And the black panther was sleeping half in the sun, with one hind foot up in the air. I was about 6 feet from him (behind glass). They have BIG feet!

A really nice thing about this zoo is that the birds are so easily seen. They have one area that's covered with mesh that you walk into, and you're right in with the birds. The peacocks were free to go wherever they wanted; they weren't in an enclosure at all.

Just a very, very nice day. It was in the mid 70s and sunny.

Oh, the last picture is of a cruise ship along side the road, and in back of it is a suspension bridge that I was VERY happy not to have to go over.

We solved the generator problem for a while. I bought a bigger power inverter to plug into the cigarette lighter and that powers Lukas' Playstation and TV while we're driving. When we get back to MN I'll call around & try to find someplace to get it looked at. We're thinking about picking up a battery and putting in under one of the seats, getting a small solar charger for it, and hooking up a power inverter to it for future travels. That way we wouldn't have to run the generator all the time when we're driving. That will save on gas.

Tomorrow we're going to Savannah, Georgia. We have an appointment Monday morning with Camping World to get our propane leak found & fixed. Then we can have hot water again, and run the furnace! It was downright cold this morning, only 37°.

Hopefully, that will be the last problem on this trip.

2/15/07

Thursday, 2/15/07
Well, it's one step forward and 1/2 step back. We're in Pensacola, Florida. We stopped at the RV place in Baton Rouge this morning, and the idiot who told us to bring it in Thursday didn't know what he was talking about. When we got there, they said they were 3 days backed up. I begged and one of the guys came out and checked the windshield wiper motor. Turns out it wasn't getting a good ground, so he ran a new ground wire. Scott's juryrigged 2nd arm on the wiper broke though. But if it rains I can go out and fix the wiper with a Bic lighter and some tape.

We stopped at another RV place in Pensacola, and asked if they could tell me how to fix the drain so we could hook up to water. The girl came out & looked at it, then went in and got one of the mechanics, and he showed me how to do it. The girl, though, when she knelt down, ripped her pants seam. They weren't going to charge me anything for it, so I made the girl take $20.

So now we're stopped at a KOA east of Pensacola. I hooked up the water and a few minutes later, water came pouring out of the tire well of the RV. Went in and there was water spraying out from the back of our brand new toilet. The idiots at Shorewood didn't do something right. So now we're back to using jugs of water to flush the toilet, and no hot water until we get this fixed. I'm going to try calling the RV place in Pensacola and see if they can get us in in the morning.

Things have to start getting better eventually, don't they?

More of 2/13/07

2/13/07
Meanderings, now that I've settled down. SW Arkansas: 90% of the houses are about the size of a small trailer house, and half of them look like they're abandoned, and the other half look like they should be abandoned. The ones that are abandoned don't have lots of trash in the front yard. Very poor part of the country, but not as poor as Mississippi. Lots of people in Arkansas raise cattle.

There must be a lot of political power playing in their transportation department. The road we were driving on would be potholed and narrow for a few miles, then it would widen up with nice new tar and wide shoulder for a few miles, then back to old and narrow, etc. That went on from Mena to the Texas border.

There is a lot, LOT, lot of uninhabited land in Louisiana. From Shreveport to Alexandria to Baton Rouge, once you got out of town, there was maybe one truck stop/casino. Then it was miles on miles of pine forests, no houses, ranches, small towns, just forests.

2/13/07

Tuesday, 2/13/07
This has been the trip to hell. Well, maybe not that bad, but today when I hooked up the water, and water came pouring out underneath the RV, I came in & sat down and cried.

The generator started acting up in Arkansas, and then quit altogether in Texas. I think it's just a circuit breaker or fuse, but I can't tell. And without the generator, Lukas can't play his games while we're driving. Then we got lost in Texarkana trying to find the road to Shreveport. We eventually got to Shreveport, but it was raining so hard we couldn't find a campground, so we just got on the freeway to get to the next one. Then the driver's side windshield wiper quit working. We pulled into a truck stop/casino & tried to figure out what was wrong with it, but couldn't get it figured out. So we spend the night there. We finally got down to Baton Rouge and into a KOA. That's when I sat & cried. I hooked up the utilities, turned on the water, and water came pouring out the drain under the RV. I called Shorewood RV where we had it winterized and they said that when they winterize they leave the drain plugs open, but the idiot couldn't tell me how to get them closed. So we called around to some different place to try to get everything fixed. Camping World said they could do the drain plug thing Friday, but couldn't do the generator or the wipers. Another place couldn't do the generator until the 22nd. Called another place & they can look at it Thursday. Oh, and I got to unplug the toilet today, too. How fun! I really miss Lukas' toilet seat with the wash feature. This summer I'm going to see if Scott can get that hooked up in here.

And in the meantime, I'm looking at these $200,000 rigs parked next to us, and have major RV envy.

Oh, well, it was 80° here today, and I'm barefoot and in a sleeveless shirt. It could be worse.


Sunday, 2/11/09
It's hard to believe that just yesterday when I woke up it was -19°, and here we are in southern Arkansas, 49° and having spent several hours driving through mountains!

I love mountains! I LOVE MOUNTAINS! Did you hear me, I Love Mountains! There is something about them that just brings a smile to my face and makes my heart sing. Especially when I didn't expect them. I did not realize that this area of Arkansas, Oklahoma and Texas has mountains. They're dry mountains, but even so, they're tall and blue, and when you come around a corner through the trees and see those tall blue images, your first reaction is "Are those mountains!?!"

I'm glad I didn't know they were here; David would never have wanted to come this way, and I had resigned myself to not seeing any until next year. So for me, what a wonderful day.

We've put in 2 long days of driving. I finally saw a coyote, in Iowa of all places, in a corn field by the freeway. Last night we stopped at a rest stop in Iowa (I really like Iowa rest stops; they all have free wireless), but the problem with stopping at rest stops is that truckers do to, and they leave their trucks running, and every so often the truck releases air pressure or something like that; not very conducive to sleeping. So we started out this morning at 5:30. It's 8:40 now & I'm very tired and I'm going to go to bed. Lukas and David are going to stay up a bit longer, since Lukas slept until 10 this morning.

Love you all,
Betsy

Feb. 7, 2007

Only 3 more days before we leave for Florida!!!

I am so ready to leave; it seems that it’s been just one thing after another for the past couple of months. Our Internet has been up and down a dozen times a day, and the telephone company says it’s our router. Well, today after work, Christian and I are going to buy another router (again), and if that doesn’t work, I don’t know what to do. And then last weekend, the furnace started acting up. The guys changed the furnace filter and that didn’t work. Monday morning it was down to 51° in the house (it got down to -25° that night). David went down and reversed the filter, and it’s worked fine since then, thank goodness! Amber went lame again, so she’s back on bute. And this FRIGID weather! It all just wears you down after a while.

To pick myself up a little, I decided to try doing oil painting again. It’s been 35 years since I’ve dabbled in that. I’ve got about a dozen ACEOs started, but I’m having to wait until they dry before I can work on them more. I’m going to have to look into how to do wet on wet so I don’t have to wait. It would be nice to just sit down & do one in a sitting. I also am trying gouache painting. That’s different working with an opaque watercolor.

Well, nothing more to post.

1/22/07

Well, do you want the good news or the bad news first? Oh, the bad news? Well, the RV needed new back brakes (the calipher froze on the rotor and ground it down, so the rotors needed to be replaced. I think I got the terminology right). $1,000. The radiator is leaking and there's an exhaust leak that's making an engine sensor come on. They want another $2,000 for that, but I said I couldn't afford it right now. Hopefully, it'll keep until this summer. Less than 3 weeks until we leave for Florida.

The good news? I finished another ACEO! There's a story behind this one. Last summer the Minnesota Zoo had to destroy a family of meerkats because a 12 year old girl got up a tree and over the fence far enough to try to pet one of them, and one of them bit her. Because the parents wouldn't let her have the rabies shots, and the zoo didn't know which one of the meerkats bit her, they had to put the whole family down. Shortly after that I started watching Meerkat Manor on the Animal Planet, and they are such neat animals, I decided to do the drawing and name it 'In Memory Of.'



I also fired up the kiln last night & annealed the latest batch of beads. There were some nice ones in there.

1/7/07

This weekend has not been productive at all, other than making 4 beads.

I'm trying to find a way to be more productive (i.e.: prolific) with my drawings, so I thought I'd try making some ACEOs with pen and ink line drawings followed with a watercolor wash. I tried putting the watercolor down first. That took about an hour (too much of a perfectionist!), and then tried to do the pen & ink over that. I'm trying to get away from doing everything in stippling (takes SOOOOO much time), so I tried doing lines and crosshatching. Well, that doesn't work too well. The watercolor clogs up the pen.

So I tried doing another one. Did the inking first (about an hour), then started on the watercolor. About half way though it, I noticed an imperfection in the watercolor paper, a indentation all the way through the length of the paper, which didn't show up until the paper had soaked up enough water to swell. So that one's down the tube.

So now I'm going to try doing one more. I'm starting on it tonight, and will try to finish it up tomorrow. I have to run the RV down to Rogers to get the oil changed and the brakes and radiator checked out. Less than 5 weeks until we leave for Florida, yippee!!!!

1/5/07

Well, I've jumped onto Artbyus to try to sell some of my prints. I'm doing OK on ebay with my beads, but it would be nice to sell prints of my drawings too. Here's some pics of a couple of my latest bead auctions on ebay. These turned out nicely.







I still want to do a watercolor wash on the Leopard Cub ACEO & see how that turns out. I'd like to try doing that with the ACEOs and post them on Artbyus.

12/28/06

Oh my goodness, the developers are getting closer, at least in my dreams. You see, I have a recurring nightmare, for 16 years now. In my nightmare, the developers have claimed part of my land, and there's nothing I can do to stop them. Last night, they took about a quarter of my land and put houses on it, and on another chunk they took, the house was 3 feet from my bedroom. And Scott (my nephew) had built me a horse barn and they took one stall (go figure!), and on the south side one of the developers kept parking her car and another vehicle by my house. The worst part of it was that dozens and dozens of people were lounging on my porch and deck on both sides of the house watching the buildings go up. Finally I went out and started chasing them off and told them to stay off my land. They were like swarms of locusts! They kept coming back. I had to go out and lock the doors of the car because little kids were going into it and playing with things.

Gosh, could Freud have a field day with me.

I called into work today and asked for the day off, but Lynn already called in, so I'm kind of on call. If they need me, Val'll call me. But in the meantime, I'm going to try to get something done. It's so nice and quiet, everyone else is sleeping.

I listed some beads on ebay last night. They had a 15¢ listing day, so I got Christian to come help. These are a couple of my favorites.

12/22/06

Well, thankfully the weather didn't get as bad as they thought it would. They were saying about 5" of snow, but we only got about 1" (so far). I didn't have to work today because it was early deadline this week (& next week too), so today is Monday for me.

I tinted a print of my Leopard Cub ACEO. It turned out OK. I did it with colored pencils. Maybe I'l try one with watercolors.


I've been in kind of a slump lately with my beads. I just can't get on a roll. I've been making some lentil florals. I'm going to make about 4 or 5 more so I have enough for a set to put on ebay.

I also started a Meerkat ACEO.

12/19/06

Back home and caught up with sleep.

Bob is recovering. The nurse said the first 24 hours were the most critical, and he's past that now. He will be in the hospital for a few weeks, then he will move to the 'transplant house' in Rochester, or rent an apartment in Rochester. He has to stay in Rochester for 3 months.

I finished the elephant ACEO, named it 'At Rest.' I'm going to start a meerkat ACEO. I've been watching Meerkat Manor, and have gotten interested in them. They're pretty neat critters.

12/17/06

I want to be home. I want to be home. I want to be home.

I'm in Rochester waiting for an update on my brother Bob's surgery. My brother Bill called me last night from Rogers to tell me that Bob was scheduled for a heart transplant at 10:00, and he (Bill) had just gotten in from Nebraska and had no way to get to Rochester. I called my sister Elaine and we decided that I would pick Bill up, go to Mpls. and pick Elaine up and then go to Rochester. About 10 miles from Rochester Bill got a call that they rescheduled the surgery at 5:30 a.m. They wanted to keep the donar body intact until they could find recipients for the other organs.

When we got to the hospital, Bob was awake. He's lost so much weight in the last few months. He's been through so much in the past few years.

It's about 12:40 pm right now. Last we heard was about 9 am; they were hooking him up to the heart lung bypass machine. So it's wait and try to stay awake until a recliner or couch is unoccupied. I tried taking a nap in the van this morning after he went into surgury, but it was a bit chilly. This is a day that I will be glad to see the last of.

12/14/06

Darn, I didn't realize it's been so long since I posted! I finished the leopard cub, just have to do the watercolor wash.



I'm just about done with another elephant ACEO.

I've been busy doing auctions on ebay. Christian is taking over the listings and paperwork so I can concentrate more on the bead making. It hasn't been fantastic, but I'm getting rid of some of my bead inventory. More money to buy more glass! Just what I need :)

Christian is also redoing my website. I've got to get it updated, since there are about 8 drawings that aren't posted on there yet. And I also want to get some of my better beads posted on there. But I want it to look nicer than it is now, hence my son the data base manager is going to work on it.

11/24/06

Well, I accomplished neither of my goals, really. I did work on the cub ACEO a bit, but didn't finish it. Maybe tomorrow. And the Bullseye florals turned out OK, just not as crisp as the ones I used to do on the hothead. I'm tempted to find it and get it put back up along side the big torch.

Maybe tomorrow....

Thanksgiving Day

Been a while since I posted! I finished the Civil War drawing, finally!! It turned out rather well. I have to sign & send one to Terry, Lukas' lawyer. I'll number it #1 and maybe in a hundred years it'll be worth something. :)



I've been going back and forth between drawings and torching. I should be out working outside, since it's been soooooo nice out. Supposed to be in the 60s today. Not bad for the end of November. But this is the last day. Boo-hoo!

Today, my goal is to finish inking my leopard cub ACEO. Then I'm going to try doing some floral beads with Bullseye glass. The Moretti melts too fast and just smears. I spent so much time learning how to do those on the Hothead, and it's frustrating not to be able to do them on the big torch.

Well, Lukas is stirring, so it's time to quick get back to drawing before it's time to get him up.

Well, I'm back home. It was just a rotten day. I and my sister went down to Albert Lea for my aunt's funeral. I haven't seen my other aunt or uncle for about 4 years, not since we moved my mom up to live with us. About a couple of years ago I had to move my mom to a nursing home because her dementia and other health problems (plus trying to take care of my handicapped son, who has now gone through 6 operations to keep him out of a wheelchair). (I'm NOT looking for sympathy. I felt grateful that I was able to do what I did. I regret greatly that I couldn't do more.) But anyway, my aunt is my mother's younger sister, and they look so much alike. I just broke down bawling (and now I'm doing it again!) on her shoulder and told her she looked so much like mom, and that I miss mom so much. For heavens sake, I'm 50+ years old, and crying on my aunt's shoulder like a little kid.

Anyway, enough of that.

I finished the Chickamauga, Georgia drawing. I have to get it posted on my website, along with the other 4 or 5 drawings I've done since I last updated it. I started an another ACEO, a leopard cub. No more leaves for awhile!

10/27/06

I started working on a new ACEO using Suellen Ross' technique of laying down the ink first, followed by watercolor, and then colored pencils. I'm not at all happy about it. It's too nitpicky! And then when I went over it with the colored pencils, that covered up the ink, so I'm going over with a final layer of ink, which doesn't go over colored pencils very well.

I think I'll just go back to ink followed with a watercolor wash. Anyway, here's the aceo partially finished.



I treated myself to a day of my own Tuesday. I had to go to the doctor for a followup on medication (new happy pills just aren't working), so afterwards I went down to the cities, stopped at Dick Blick & bought $150 worth of watercolors and pen nibs, then went to the zoo & took pictures. It wasn't too bad after all the school kids left; it was rather noisy until then. I got some drawable pictures of a camel and tiger, and some cute ones of prairie dogs. There's some nice texture in the prairie dog pics, with all the rocks.

The studio is progressing slowly. The boys got one end paneled, and the wall between the studio & foyer built. I'm making Dutch doors for that wall. I got the plywood cut out for the lower one and got a couple of the quarter inch plywood pieces glued onto it. Tonight I'll try to get more cut & glued on. And hopefully, this weekend they'll be back up to get the skylight put it. That will make a BIG difference in there; that and the ceiling fans.

Wed. 10/11/06

It’s been a non-productive week, kind of. Fired up the kiln last night to anneal my beads, and blew the fuse 3 times! Finished up by running an extension cord to another outlet. I will be so glad when the boys get my electric in the studio hooked up, but it probably won’t be for another month. I HAVE to get them to re-do the ramp in front. They have just a temporary one right now, and when Lukas & I went out this morning, the moisture on the wood had frozen, and his feet shot right out from under him, and he ended up flat on his back. I slowed his fall a little, but at 170 lbs. I can’t catch him like I could 10 yrs. ago.

Today it was back to work. I was happy because I figured I was going to have Friday off because we’re on early deadline this week, but my supervisor said I have to fill in Friday for the proofreader. Bummer!

Elephant ACEO

Monday, October 09, 2006

I finished the elephant ACEO last night. One week for a drawing. Amazing!



Today was not a good day. Really a depressing day, kind of. Did a little bit of work on the Civil War drawing, and labeled a lot of beads, and took a nap. Yippee....

Elephant ACEO

It's Sunday afternoon & I'm watching the Vikings lose, again. Well, I've only got another couple of hours to go on my ACEO. It takes 1-2 hours per square inch. But I am kind of liking this finishing a drawing in a week. My other drawing, a picture of the Chickamauga, Georgia Civil War battlefield, is just about done too. About another 5-6 hours left on that one. That one is taking a long time; it's about 6"x9".



Sunday, October 08, 2006

My nephews were up yesterday. They got my wall insulated & sheetrocked. No more north wind blowing through the cracks. Nice.