As per usual, you can’t really count on spring being a fact while it’s still March. Or April. Or sometimes May, depending on the year. We have had a “sampling” of various types of weather since last week’s post. Snow, wind, sun, warmish, really quite nice, fairly chilly, and a high of minus 13 one day. And this was all just in the last week. My horse has gone from having no blanket to a light blanket, light blanket with liner, light winter blanket (the night it was to go to minus 17), back to the light blanket with fleece liner, now is naked again. For the moment. I usually carry a selection of horse clothing in the car these days so I can adapt Alpac’s wardrobe according to my best guess of what the next 24 hours will bring. Even then I often get it wrong, so I’ll be glad when we settle in to steadily above freezing and I can forget horse wardrobe needs until next fall (other than fly sheets for summer comfort).
I had a strange little message from the warp in the time/space continuum this past week. At least that’s how I choose to interpret it. I had an extra large load of laundry to do, but nothing out of the usual, just a general assortment of the same stuff we’ve been wearing and I’ve been washing all winter. As I was emptying the washer for another go-round, I noticed a crumpled ball of paper in the bottom of the machine. My heart sank a bit as I retrieved it, unsure what it might be and hoping that it wasn’t anything important. Colour-wise, I knew it wasn’t money, at least. I carefully unfolded it to find that it was a $10 coupon towards the purchase of cross country ski boots from the Bay. Well, no great loss there as I wasn’t planning on purchasing any ski boots anyway. Out of curiosity, I read on to see when I would have needed to buy said theoretical ski boots to use the coupon. It expired October 1981! Now I have absolutely no idea where this came from and how it happened to end up in my washing machine in the year 2010. As I have already noted, all items in the wash load had been through the washer many times, in addition to which I don’t think any of them even existed in 1981. Just another one of those twilight zone episodes that occur in basements every now and then.
Shot one shows the view out our front window last Wednesday morning. I feel it is quite self-explanatory, and mercifully now just a memory.
Of course one go-round at Saluki action photography (as featured in last week’s blog) wasn’t enough for me, so I ended up joining the pack walk on both Saturday and Sunday of this past weekend. As you can see from shot two, there were a couple of dogs that are definitely not Salukis coming along for the outing. Jack is the feisty young Sheltie whose legs are a lot shorter than those of the speed dogs, but who does a darn good job of keeping up with the runners. He does his best to organize them as well, but that’s pretty much of a losing proposition. Lola the German Shepherd made it both days as well, and I have to give her full marks for grit and gameness, as she isn’t built for speed but she hangs in there with the best of them. Such a pleasure to be out in a lovely natural area with a varied and interesting pack of dogs and owners. I won’t venture to guess which Salukis are in this shot as I find it a lot harder to figure out which of them is which, although I do know a few of them (I think).
Now on to the really short legs of the dog world. This is Murphy, the Ebon stables dog, who has taken up basketball as part of his spring fitness program. He is getting quite adept at controlling and maneuvering the ball. He’d really like to be able to pick it up and carry it in his mouth, but despite his best efforts, that’s just not going to happen.
A few of my horse friends wanted to check out my sculptor friend Ric Pollock‘s newest works, so we had a little private showing at my house today. We were lucky with the weather being nice enough for Ric to set up on the front patio area, and a good time was had by all. I particularly like this bird–which I am calling a rooster, but really one of the fun things about these guys is that you can designate them pretty well as you wish. Ric has a show coming up at The Mix gallery (539 24th Street East-near the river) Friday April 16th 6-10PM and Saturday and Sunday the 17th and 18th from noon to 5.
Shot five is yet another of my ongoing unicorn series. I peg away at these every now and then as time allows. The main down-side of doing these is that for every one I undertake, I get ideas for about a half dozen more, so it’s kind of like a never-ending theme and variations. I’m not complaining about this, it’s a good thing, just always ends up taking a lot more time than I generally expect it to! This unicorn is situated in a background that I shot last fall when we were out in the Nelson BC area visiting my elder daughter, although as always I have taken considerable liberties with the original source photo.
©Copyright 2010 by Judy Wood. See original post here.
To learn more about this artist, visit her website.
How about this for a progressing painting? It is the acrylic, and I’m about 4/5 done with it, all caught on tape for the DVD! I’m quite pleased with it so far–the “feel” of the overcast twilight look of it, and the definitive wolfish features in the wolves. I showed how I use what I call “The Foot” tool to pull and push the paint to create the shrubbery and how adding veiled layers creates the feel of the snow. I’ll finish it tomorrow, and then will spend every spare moment capturing the files off the tapes and onto master “dot mov” files for DVD Studio Pro to assemble. Three hour-long tapes on this project, so I’ll have to do major surgery to get the “good stuff” out onto the hard drives. It is a love-hate relationship–takes so much time, but oh, so rewarding!
