Fall is a busy time of year for us

 The first weekend in November we sell our jewels at the Sacramento Arts Festival in the Convention Center in midtown. It's one of our best shows and this year our sales were amazingly good and we had a good time, even though we were on our feet many hours a day talking to hundreds of people. Many of the people we talked to have been customers buying our jewelry for 20 and 30 years plus. It's an interesting linear relationship extending over time. We see them for 20 minutes or half an hour at a show but after many years we build bonds with them and they are friends. This is an enjoyable aspect of the selling our work. Although it's a lot of work doing the show it was actually pleasant and relaxing for us. On our way home we were gifted with a couple of beautiful natural phenomenon.
The first was this great rainbow near Cloverdale. It was difficult to capture it's intensity with my camera but I think it was the most intensely colorful one I've seen in my almost 73 years on the planet. It was a complete arc and sometimes a double arc and was really a treat to see.

 It rained off and on all the way home from Sacramento and when we got to the coast just south of Mendocino we were greeted with this sunset, a row of dark clouds across the horizon and wonderful colors breaking through above. We see a lot of spectacular sunsets on the coast, this one was up there with the best.

A couple of days after we returned and were at the start of our almost daily walk into downtown Ft. Bragg, we spotted this little guy in front of a neighbors house. He was really focused on whatever he was chewing on and stayed in place even though I got quite close to him. There is a lot of wildlife in our neighborhood, some of which wanders up from Pudding Creek on the northern end of Ft. Bragg. Deer, raccoons, opossums, skunks, foxes and so forth.

Our days at Point Reyes National Seashore

We recently spent a few days enjoying exploring Point Reyes National Seashore. We had a very pleasant and relaxing time. We spent our nights in a little cabin called the Hideaway just north of the little town of Point Reyes Station. The first day we visited the Point Reyes lighthouse and Drake's beach. The lighthouse was interesting at the bottom of 308 steps. 308 steps back to the top too. Great views, an excellent vantage point from which to watch the whale migrations. We walked for a mile north on Drake's beach and saw an unusual sight, an otter dragging a dead seagull across the sand. First time for that. On the internet looking up the diet of otters, one writer called them opportunivores, sometimes eating things that were offered up by chance. The otter rapidly drug the gull into a culvert and disappeared into the brush at the side of a little creek and I wasn't fast enough to get a picture. Day two, after spending some time exploring the town of Point Reyes Station (great market with lots of organic produce and an A plus deli that we ate from 3 times while we were there, thrift store, nice little book store, and several excellent galleries and gifts shops) we headed north to the Abbott's Lagoon trail out to the ocean.
Not a long hike, maybe 3 miles round trip, with a surprising amount of wildlife. A coyote walking across a field, a covey of quail searching for food beside the trail and walking within two feet of us as we quietly stood there watching, a great blue heron harvesting food in a shallow part of one of the lagoons, great number of gulls, pelicans, Canadian geese and many other seabirds I didn't recognize. Sitting at the beach, we saw a whale out in the ocean raise it's body up out of the water and saw a half a dozen spouting a number of times. On our way back we found a dead young pelican (sadness) and took a few of it's feathers to add to our feather altar. Day three led us to Limantour beach, a wide and very long stretch of sand. We walked south on it for quite a while and found a pool of fresh water, the end of a seasonal stream, where dozens of several species of gulls hung out and washed in the pool. The 3 gulls at the top left of the collage are Heermann's gulls of which there were many. Deer were also eating from the plant life that grew along the bottom of the cliffs where water trickled out to help them grow, The buck deer in the collage was in the yard where we were staying, harvesting apples that were starting to fall out of a tree while we were there. The residents of the area have left an easement on which deer can come and go from the forest. We're looking forward to returning to Point Reyes at another time to do more exploring including the Tule elk reserve. We did see a few elk at a distance north of the road to Drakes' beach. A very fun trip.

Playing With Photoshop

For years I've been playing with photoshop and manipulating digital images I've taken with my various cameras. This is a sky at sunset in Chico just before Christmas a few years ago, a frame that I created in photoshop and a cucumber beetle that landed on my hand as I was sitting outside eating my lunch.

Once in Santa Rosa, we were walking through Coddingtown Mall and I became fascinated with some manikins that were in a shop window and took a multitude of pictures of them to use in various ways.

They were fun to play with.

The woman was a small doll in a store window along Main Street in Mendocino, about 6 inches high. The professor with the magnifying glass was one of my grandkids toys.

The lizard image was taken at The Living Desert Zoo in Palm Desert near Palm Springs in southern California. The fly and the rose were both residents of Caspar. The background is a sheet of copper that I textured by roller printing in my jewelry studio. Follow this link to see more about roller printing. ROLLER PRINTING

A mandala constructed from one of the multitude of flowers images I have collected.

The Presbyterian church in Mendocino taken through greenery from near the ocean and played with in photoshop to make it more like a drawing.

The flower to the right had just fallen off it's parent plant on a deck at our house in Caspar.
Shortly before I had taken the cricket picture with my new digital Nikon that I had bought to take images of our jewelry. I hadn't even learned how to turn the flash off and it flashed, which was lucky since the reflections on the crickets surface created an interesting aspect to the image. Normally it's hard to get close to crickets but this one had only one rear leg so couldn't move very fast. After a series of portraits, I put it outside and wished it well.

Created mostly in photoshop with a few underlying texture layers from camera images.

Here I am behind the swinging door. I got out eventually and went on with my life.