Would you like to see one of my previous house paintings?

This is the McCune Mansion in Salt Lake City. I did it probably about 10 years ago.

Continuation of my revery

Well, as you can see I just can't seem to get the pictures into the right place but I will get there, eventually. I also noticed a misspelling after I published but, oh well, I think you get what I was trying to say and I don't want to have to rewrite everything. I promise I'll be more careful.

Back to the beauty of my discovery.....I really would love to do a painting of this but we'll see. I'm still working on 2 other paintings and have my mosaic hearts going at the same time.

All in good time.

Well, I still haven't figured out the picture thing

Contrasts-Some fun things and some not so fun

Okay, so this is where I talk about some good things and some bad things about taking care of my mother. Those of you that have never cared for an elderly parent have no idea of what the adventure will be like. I am here to enlighten your very experience.

Which do you want to hear about first? Oh, you say the bad things, so you'll be prepared? Well, alright. Let me just throw in a little picture for you to study-maybe for a future test. Better take notes. Oh, and I won't put any yucky bad thing in my blog. Nobody wants to hear or see about that. Besides I don't want to ruin ALL the surprises you have in store.

Sooooo. If you decide that you don't want to do your parent's laundry and would rather have the care center do it you might want to watch over the clothes. I've heard tales of clothes winding up on the wrong people. I mean, do you really want your dad to wear a pink t shirt? I don't THINK so. So, one day I pulled out all of my mom's clothes-she has a lot- and took pictures of all of them. That was after I labeled every last one that my sister hadn't done already. This is not an easy job. Especially when your parent is yelling at you wondering what you are doing and why aren't you entertaining them. This killed my already ailing back.

Moving all the stuff out of the retirement home (now that she's permanently in the full nursing care center) has gone on for 3 months, if you can believe it. We even had grand notions of taking her bedroom set that no one wanted to a used furniture store. We located a store and sent them an email with lovely pics of it. Each time we tried so hard to get it over to the store something would happen to prevent it. Finally on Tuesday we thought we could finally do it. Of course the shop was not going to be open long enough. Drat. We just could not work it out. So we all felt the Deseret Industries would happily receive it. We just plain old didn't care anymore!

Okay, I just can't wait to tell you all about the good thing I discovered while driving on the street just north of the care center! Hidden by luscious foliage is a gorgeous Victorian type 3 story mansion. I just couldn't believe it! So, I had to bring my camera and take some pictures. Then to make things even better I discovered (which I should know by now) how wonderful it is to put them onto Photoshop and be able to work with them. I WISH I had had this years ago when I was doing all my house paintings. It would have saved me a ton of time. I can zoom in on any detail and see what is there. I don't have to go back to the house and take more detailed photos. Shadows can be lightened and darkened again after I've found out the information in the structure that I need. So, I am in heaven over this new discovery.

Plus I felt like I was in the Secret Garden. There were so many garden areas that sparkled with fairy light or were mystery in their velvetly darkness. I am not kidding. It is so wonderful.

WELL....somebody had to do it!

Okay. One of Chris' favorite things to do (besides getting a sledge hammer and tearing things out) is to rent big big tools/toys and go to town with them. Today he rented a boom so he could trim the pine tree in the front of our house and the pine tree in the back (actually our neighbors...we only trimmed our side...with their permission). What a huge mess it was to clean up. In fact there are still branches all over the backyard that need to be sawed into pieces. My job was to clean up the front yard (10 bags later). But it was great to be out in the sun and not inside on such a great day. Then we finished the evening off by going out to dinner at one of our old time favorites, Little America. The food never tasted better!

I'm still figuring this out!

Well, I still can't get the pictures where they are supposed to be. So I'll just throw a few more in from Easter.....ta da!

Trying out ETSY

Okay. So, I decided to try putting my hearts on Ebay and told Gracie about it. She said that a site called Etsy would be a lot better. No, I don't know what Etsy means or where they got the name. Anyway, it's a site/store that sells original art, etc. If you key in "mosaic hearts" you can find my first item. It's Hester Prynne from "The Scarlet Letter". I had to pick a shop name-so I picked laughinghorse. I'm sure no one will remember that I have a laughing horse design that I put next to my signature on one of my paintings. It's the painting I did of the lion at the Utah state capitol building. I never realized that that would come in handy some day.

I'm hoping that this will be a good thing for me. When you think about it it will be seen by people all over the world. I'm going to add more of them next week. Plus I'm going to put my prints on there as that could be a good way of selling them. Keep your fingers crossed. It sure is a lot easier than calling and pestering people. That's what got me burned out on my art business before.

Other than that....the newest thing for this week is that we got Tom settled into the Sunrise care center. I think it will be a good thing for him and a lot easier for the family. Just for fun on Easter I took some pictures of some of us frosting Jan's cookies on Easter. This is the last picture taken of Tom while living permanently in his house. Very sad.