Painting

Today I signed up for a painting class through the Grossmont Adult School. Classes are held throughout the district...which covers a lot of miles. The painting class is held in the Lakeside Community Center. So I thought it was perfect for me. When I got there I found out that it is a pastel class. Most of the students have taken the class before. They came with supplies...I didn't.

I decided to continue with the class. I do have a set of soft pastels that are years old...Hailey has been using them lately and she has created some very pretty work. I used to paint and take art classes but when Hailey came to live with me I put my art stuff away. She was 18 months old back then and it was not easy to keep her out of stuff or work with a small child needing attention. At the time I was also a resident manager of a mini storage facility. Hailey is seventeen now and I could have gotten back to doing art but just haven't...maybe it is time now.

For today the instructor gave me a piece of Canson paper and let me use her pastels. This is what I created from a photograph she passed out to the students. Scanned the painting on my scanner twice and put the scans together. I know it needs more work. My pastel doesn't look very much like anyone else's.

And Hailey let me have my pastels back. Just kidding...she would never keep my stuff, and she knows she can use them any time.

Spring in Borrego Springs

Borrego Springs is a lovely desert community that is even better when the flowers bloom. My blog readers will know that at least once a spring we like to take the drive over the mountains to the desert. This year I got a photo of a silver puff. There were few desert primroses today. I don't know if that means we misssed them, they will bloom later, or that this year is not a good one for them. Lots of rain did turn the desert floor yellow with flowers and they may have prevented other flowers from blooming.

The camel is the real deal. There is a camel ranch in Ramona and a few of the camels were near the road. So we stopped to take a few photos. You can see our day was foggy and overcast. It even rained on us the way over to the desert.

The sun shinning on Salton Sea. Salton Sea. It is an interesting place to see but it really smells bad when the fish die off. The sea is 30 miles from Borrego Springs. This was taken from Montazuma Road on the way down into the valley.

When ER first came down from Washington State he wanted to see Salton Sea. Guess there had been lots of TV adds promoting the Salton Rivera resort there. I didn't think much of the place. Been there before and thought it was a big smelly place. URF! Anyway on one of our first dates we drove over there. Rented a small motor boat and floated around for a little while. ER saw the resort and the empty dusty streets of the subdivision...only a few miserable looking houses were built on the sandy dessert, and he could understand why I was not impressed by the place. Back then there was a gift shop there and I got a silver charm of an out board motor for my charm bracelet. Still have it.

 Looking back from the valley floor to the edges of the clouds we left behind.

The silver puff. I had been looking through my Sonoran Desert flower book and had seen a photo of this flower just the day before. So really nice to actually see the flower and take my own photo. Yea!

Since I had seen the real thing on the way over, took this though I have photographed this sculpture before.

It is great to see even more of these metal animals. Borrego Springs is turning into a Museum of metal art!

Hailey taking a photo of the ORV sculpture.

Along Montazuma Road on our way back home. There were more of these yellow flowers here than I've ever seen before.

Ocotillo close up.

On the way home we stopped in Santa Ysabel and had the lovely breakfast buffet. Hailey just sat and read while we ate the great food. Then we bought her Jack in the Box in Ramona on the way home. Teenagers!

Super Moon

It was cloudy, but there were breaks in the heavy clouds and the slight overcast that still covered the moon was thin and the moon did shine through. The first of the photos shows the moon rising through my olive tree. Then for a few moments the moon shown clear of the heavy clouds and I got the whole moon in my camera lens.  It was not totally clear and that does show in the whole moon photo.

 

Here is the photo from last night to see the difference. The orange color in this photo is because of my jpg camera settings. The above photos were taken in raw.

Moon Rise

Tomorrow the moon is going to be closer to the earth than it has been in about 19 years. It will look 14 % larger than usual. It will be a great photo op. Here though they say it will be raining tomorrow night and if not rain at the least cloudy. I will be out with my camera if I can but just in case I took some photos of the moon tonight.

I started as the moon rose behind a neighboring eucalyptus tree. My camera is the Olympus E3 and the lens is my 500mm bigma. I used a tripod.

Julian California with Snow!

Julian is a lovely old town in the Cuyamaca Mountains east of San Diego. Julian began as a gold mining town and became a farming community. Julian is famous for apples. Snow in Julian doesn't happen every winter. We had cold rain storms with snow in the mountains two week ends in a row. People flock to the mountains when it snows and both weekends saw hoards of people and their children running around in the snow as seen on the TV news. Today the skys cleared and the people went back to work and the children back to school. We drove up to see the snow. The first photos are at a lookout east of Julian with a view toward the desert.

We decided to drive back through Julian as we had not stopped on our way through...I wanted to take photos there.

Then I saw this pretty little school on the way back towards Santa Ysabel

The Julian Pie Company has a store at Santa Ysabel so we stopped to buy an apple pie. It was still warm from the oven and smelled like cinamon and apples. The Julian Pie Company makes wonderful yummy pies with light flaky crusts. Their apple pie is the total best!

We took a small detour to see the Mission.

 

We decided to drive home through Wild Cat Canyon. We took another detour up to the Country Estates and got a good view of the snowy mountain.

After we got back home from our little day trip we enjoyed a hot cup of coffee and  fresh apple pie.