home....

We are home and I'm slowly finding my way back into blogland.  One of the first blogs I read was Leslie's Textures Shapes & Color.  A beautifully written account of their getaway in a rustic cabin on the shores of Lake Quinault.    It opens with a serene photo of the lake at either sunrise or sunset.  As I read her account of their search for elk, I couldn't help but make comparisons between our two getaways.  She describes how before daylight she hears the sound of elk, so she gets up, makes coffee and they go out onto the deck to watch the sunrise - oh, god, the only thing I want to see before sunrise is the inside of my eyelids!  Rising before daybreak usually means a trip to the hospital or having to dress and go help someone change a flat tire on the interstate!  Then she describes the wildlife they see watching the sunrise and sipping their morning coffee.  The only wildlife we saw were two bunnies each morning!  They weren't wild bunnies, but escapees from a domestic cage that had made their home on the lawn of the resort.  Then she talks about how they drove to the next valley, hiked down to a river and just enjoyed the beauty all around them.  She could tell there had been some bear/bears earlier eating the berries along the river!  Okay, well, one of the first things Jim and I do when we are away from home is search for a place we can walk a couple of miles each morning.  The first couple of days we walked a very busy road.  Not very nice, but it got the job done.  Then we found a trail along the railroad tracks that was through a nice quiet section of wooded area.  So we are walking and I see something on the side of the path.
"Jim, what is this?"
"Hmmmm. Looks like bear scat."
"BEAR DOO DOO!?"
"Hmmm. Yes."
"Are you kidding?! That's a huge pile! The bear must be enormous!"
"Maybe."
He just keeps walking!
"Well, how old do you think that is?"
"Looks pretty fresh."
"PRETTY FRESH!!"
"Ya."
"Well, do you think it is still around?"
"I don't know."
"Well, I don't want to run into some ginormous berry eating bear!"  He just keeps walking - gotta get at least two miles done! "How much farther are we going?  Do you think we will see the bear?  What if there is more then one?  What do we do if we see it?"
He finally stops at a little creek - I continue my monologue about all the possibilities of horrible things that could happen should we encounter the monster that left the little mountain of bear doo doo.  Thankfully we head back.  On our return  walk, Jim spots several more little mountains of bear doo doo, pulled down small trees and broken branches where they were getting the highest berries.
"Hmmmm.  Well, we will go back to the road tomorrow I think", he says.
You think!!!????
Leslie describes a wonderful intimate dinner they shared at a lodge across the lake.  Well Jim and I had some nice meals out also, however, I got food poisoning and spent a day and a half sicker then a dog with extreme chills, vomiting and other very unpleasant side effects.  Of course our first thought was that I had contracted the Swine Flu and we wouldn't be able to get back into the US, so while I was laying in bed with a huge salad bowl perched on my stomach in case I couldn't make it to the bathroom in time, Jim was on the phone trying to talk to a medical anything to see if my symptoms were Swine flu like!  The next day I felt much better, but very wrung out, so we concluded food poisoning.  Leslie describes how they finally, very unexpectedly encountered the elk that they were seeking.  They  just appeared up in front of them crossing the road.  Well, Jim and I drove into town one afternoon and very unexpectedly parked right in front of one of the best shoe stores I've ever seen! OMG! I found these little red boots to die for, but alas, none my size! And that same afternoon I picked up phone messages from home and we had one from our bank informing us that there had been suspicious activity on our account - so that afternoon was spent on the phone talking with the fraud division at the bank getting false charges taken off our account from a gas station we had stopped at earlier in the day - they swiped our card 6 times for various amounts which alerted the bank and they alerted us! Oh, man.  Leslie has included very beautiful photos in her account.  I only took one photo.  This is it.

This is a picture of the highlight of my trip!  The weather was warm and sunny everyday so we swam almost everyday.  Well this was floating in the pool.  It's one of those styrofoam thingys that I've seen people use to float around with.  Well I thought I would give it a try.  I LOVED it!  Such a silly thing, but I just LOVED it.  It was so nice to just float about without any effort.  I was goofy about it.  I asked anyone who would listen to me if they had tried or wanted to try it!  So that's it.  That is pretty much our trip.  Leslie's trip reads like an article out of a travel magazine. Ours?, not so much - food poisoning, credit card fraud, a floaty thing you can get at Wal-Mart for $3, gorgeous red boots and a 800 mile drive home in one day!  You pick!

I did go into my workspace yesterday and touch everything.  I dropped off a painting yesterday that was picked for a juried show to open this Friday.  Will be back with some experiments I want to try later in the week.  Have a good one everyone!