As you might gather by the gap in my postings, it has been another busy week with both art and soccer (keep reading for the art part)!  Eli is in the final week or two of both league soccer and school cross country, with the championships for the latter last week, and….DRUM ROLL and MAJOR HOLLERING please…. ELI WON!   Yes, Eli won the Busline Cross Country Championship (Class B) on Tuesday!  Close on his heels (literally) was his best friend Ben, who came in second.  Both Boys and Girls teams won with undefeated season for the second year in a row (ya think Coach Morse is doing a fantastic job or what?!!!).    That was followed on Friday by Eli winning the Winthrop Invitational Cross Country meet, a course with lots of hills–best of all, they were competing against seven or more teams they had never raced, including the Class A Champion Cony Middle School Team AND he did it setting a new course record!  And to everyone (at least from our area) utter delight, both boys and girls won the team championships too!

And they're off! Eli is the arrow on the right, his best friend Ben W. on the left, and a passle of other middle school boys. This photo shows maybe one-third of the runners!

Eli crests the last small hill before heading into the chute and the finish line at the midcoast Maine Busline League Cross Country Championships

Eli WINS, with Ben close behind.... wow!

In August, I came across a bit Jane LaFazio posted on FaceBook about a sketchbook “On Location” class she is teaching online via Joggles.  Very uncharacteristically for me, I signed up on the spur of the moment, and I promise I’ll get caught up on blogposts and share with you the great stuff I did.  THEN she had a new class on Mixed Media Journals starting in October.  I really want to get in to the habit of using journals for my art, so I signed up right away.  Here is part of the first lesson:

The lesson was using water-soluble pen; first you sketch (well, I sure do!) in pencil, then ink, allow the ink to dry, erase the pencil and then "wash" the ink to shade. Here's the outlining.

The pitcher with *complicated* kitchen utensils (that spaghetti scoop was hard!) and my sketchbook. A while back I'd heard that drawing eggs is good practice in seeing shadows, so what is why the eggs on the spoon rest.

The two sketches. I've finished the page but haven't taken a picture (get with it Sarah!), so will do that later. Anyway, I'm reasonably pleased.

Now we’re off to the soccer league playoffs for all of Sunday, then more cross country and soccer next weekend and the following one….

As usual, crazy busy, but looking for a brief reprieve soon….

On Sunday, there was a Fruit and Fiber day at Hope Orchards, down at Hope Corner (across the street from the General Store).  I decided that I really need to begin exercising…after about 21 months of being a pudge, it is really getting to me, and life has settled down enough that I can re-focus.  So I asked hubby if he would pick me up if I walked the 3 miles to “town” (an intersection in rural Maine qualifies as a town).  The answer was yes, as long as it isn’t when the Patriots play!  So I went before 4!
It was GLORIOUS!

Then Paul came rushing in one morning and said quick, you gotta see this sunrise (at 6:30 a.m.), it may be picture worthy.  It was!

Hubby on the porch off the living room, but the camera metered on the sky...erk

Then I figured out how to get the camera to take a picture the way I was seeing the sky…WOW!

OH MY! Worth getting up to see this!

All this week I have been on a rip and a tear to clear the last things out of the storage unit that held mom’s stuff.  When she moved here in 2008, I rented the unit for things that wouldn’t fit in her small 2-room place at Quarry Hill (assisted living).  Since she was still kinda with it, I didn’t feel like I could sell it off or get rid of it, because I wanted to have it to give her if she asked for something (painting, memento, etc).  Last summer when she moved to one room in the memory loss unit, had to rent a second (kaChing) unit.  Emptied the second one about a month ago.  This one, before I started liquidating things about a year ago, was full, front to back, floor to near ceiling.  This week it had two large pieces of furniture and 31 BOXES of books I had to sort through.  After selling some to an antique dealer (as reference books), sending some off with a used book store guy, more donated to the Camden Public Library, and yet more to Goodwill, this is how the unit looked at 3 p.m. yesterday:

Hallelujah! The great emptying is DONE!

When Paul’s dad died, there was an “estate sale lady” that basically took care of selling everything off from the house, took a percentage, donated the rest, and we cleaned out the house.  Nothing like that here so it was dribs and drabs to liquidate things.  I have promised my kids I will do my best not to depart this earth and leave them with so much STUFF!

This morning, the drippies have arrived:

Even in heavy mist (the weather station said it was raining tho it was really just wet air)! it is beautiful here...this was about 7:10 a.m.

And this glorious view off the other side of the kitchen porch/entry:

The back 40 (well, OK, maybe the back 4 acres), and I really need to clean up the flowerbeds for winter!

AND, drum roll, this week we modified the membership at the Y to include me, and today I began!  I will NOT regain that weight!  I will NOT be a pudge!  I WILL get healthy!  Now…off to play as a reward to myself…taking Jane LaFazio’s mixed media journal class at joggles.com and can’t wait to get started on this week’s lesson!

Time to get caught up on what all I’ve been doing the past month… first, I came home!

Flying in to mid-coast Maine at sunset....sigh....those rays of sun I call angel escalators. When I was 4, we returned to the US from living in Argentina. I had never seen escalators before and was entranced! I was also bundled off to Sunday School where they wanted us to NAP (not!). I wondered how the angels got from heaven to earth, and decided that sunbeams must really be angel escalators, so that's what they've been ever since, and now my kids know about them, too.

The best part of coming home to Maine is, of course, the people and the critters starting with my husband, sons, pug and cats!  But coming home to Maine is pretty amazing.   I flew in from teaching at Quilt Nebraska on July 31 to this…how can anyone NOT want to live and be here?

I love these aerial shots, this one taken over the wing of the prop Cape Air plane (about 9 seats I think). This is the peninsula just south of Owl's Head which is just south of Rockland. The airport designation is RKD, but it is really in Owl's Head and is 35 minutes from home.

Then the sun began to set…OH MY!

Just LOOK at those colors!

And the clouds…oh my oh my…

And a different view....love those curling up wisps and that one dark cloud hovering over the sun

And more...

As we were landing...

And a close-up

The color got really intense and dark when I zoomed in on the sun.

And touchdown…

And on the ground...see the windsock in the distance... I think the blob in the upper right is part of the plane/tail.

So much has been going on that I’ve been really busy, have a ton of things to share with all of you, stuff quilty, home-y, but sometimes a mom’s just gotta brag on her kids.  In this case, I need to share what Joshua has been doing.  Many of you may remember the portrait art quilt I did of Joshua playing his guitar a little over a year ago (most of the posts are in April and May 2010….beginning  here.   Well, now you get to hear him play his latest composition….

I know Joshua wrote the music as well as played it, but I think he also recorded a couple of tracks and meshed them on the computer in Garage Band (software on the Mac).  He did this YouTube on his girlfriend’s laptop, and she may not have a built-in camera like mine does (which he used for the next clip).  No matter what, Way cool, kiddo! 

Joshua clearly has talent (and has practiced and played a LOT), which he did not inherit from me!  Music skipped my generation, but mama was good at piano, singing, and loved classical music.  Joshua’s taste is mostly *really* heavy metal, but he writes beautiful music as you can tell.   Here’s another piece that is the type of music he usually plays / shreds:

How he can keep all those notes, in order, in his head and then out of his very fast fingers defies comprehension!  But he does it….and well!  (Proud mama beaming!)

I’ll be back soon (I hope!) with pictures of the painted basement center area, nearly the last fix-up in the studio, some watercolors from a journaling class online with Jane LaFazio, teaching in Nebraska, painting what was Joshua’s room (he moved into an apartment with his girlfriend) and is now Paul’s new office, a shelf for mugs in the kitchen, and other assorted “life” that has been keeping me busy!

No…I have not followed Mama into the great beyond, but instead have been busier than ever (what else is new?).  I am seriously looking forward to some down time in August, but in the meantime had to

• help hang and launch our Frayed Edges mini-group show at the Camden Public Library (will blog about that in a day or two I hope),
• with my fellow Frayed Edges, be the program for the monthly Coastal Quilters meeting and do the artists’ reception at the library
• complete my piece for the local Coastal Quilters Chapter Challenge and then (as project coordinator)
• make some new black drapes and
• pin all the quilts, print the photos, make the tags, etc., in time to deliver next weekend for Maine Quilts (which happens the last weekend in July),
• get son Eli off to a 2-week trip to Australia (SOB… wish I were there but elated as he comes home tonight),
• help get Joshua ready to move into his first-ever-on-his-own apartment (with girlfriend) in town,
• take care of the settling of Mama’s affairs,
• prepare things for teaching in Nebraska at QuiltNebraska 2011 (including ordering supplies and shipping boxes to arrive in time) and
• attempt not to implode!

The Coastal Quilters Grocery Challenge...in a nutshell, pick a food or beverage product, use at least 4 colors and at least one element from the packaging as a motif in your 20.5 by 20.5 inch quilt (since someone will ask, mine is the blue one, top-right)

So as a teaser, I will share with you the photo of the two panels of The Grocery Challenge, an idea I dreamed up for the Coastal Quilters.  The photo above is of the twelve pieces…astonishingly all 12 of the folks who signed up got their quilts done (mine was one of the last few done…no surprise there).   Soon I’ll share more about each of the 12 quilts, the grocery products from which we drew inspiration, and how.   But before that I need to tell you about our group show.  I can’t believe (well….yes, I can) that I managed to not even post a single word here before the show opened on July 1.  So if you’re in or near Camden, Maine, come back here in a couple days or click here to see a bit more.