PAINTINGS

I have finished several paintings lately and finally got some great pictures of them. I have a new camera and it takes wonderful pictures of my paintings. I will share a few with you. Most are from my "flower period." I saw some oil paintings of single flowers on a black background in Santa Fe last summer and decided to do my own set. I have completed four. I did the rosebud back in the summer and took that picture with my old camera. The others are more recent. The last one I did was the iris and it is my very favorite.

I also did one of a red hibiscus with a green background. It had fun with it!

In the fall I painted a landscape of Fajada Butte in Chaco Canyon, NM. I took the picture when we were there last June. Bet it does not look that warm there today!

More recently I discovered water colors and am having a grand time exploring the possibilities with that medium. I have not figured out how to achieve the detail with water color that I like, but I am looking forward to seeing what I can learn once the holidays are over. Right now I am up to my ears in creating Christmas gifts, baking, wrapping, decorating.

A NEW PROFILE PICTURE

Thanks to Joe, our Ranger guide in Chaco Canyon, I have a new profile picture. He suggested that I might need a picture that was a bit more casual, so he took this one of me on a windswept knoll out in the middle of nowhere. Another friend said it looked like "gone with the wind." I was glad that I had not started out the day with a specific hairdo because the wind out there was really wonderful! It reminded me of my growing-up days in the Texas Panhandle where the wind rarely stops blowing. I LOVED it!

I also think my picture was taken without any makeup. That morning we had climbed up a 300 foot cliff and I had "sweated off" all of the makeup I started the morning with.

When we reached the top of the cliff, the view was glorious! Thank you, Joe!!

IN NEW MEXICO

My husband and I are having quite an adventure in New Mexico. We are staying with a Forest Ranger friend in Chaco Canyon and have spent the last couple of days exploring Indian ruins in a beautiful setting. Our friend's dinner table looks out directly on Fajada Butte and it changes with the weather and the time of day.This morning we got up and he said we were going on a little 3 1/2 mile hike. I was excited until we reached the place and he showed us the bluff we were going to climb before we began the hike. It was a sheer bluff but he said the trail was not too bad. The sign had an arrow pointing straight up!
We started climbing up a small crack in the bluff and we climbed and we climbed and finally got to the top. The view was wonderful and the descent was MUCH easier--mostly on the seat of my pants!

This afternoon we drove to a ruin that is quite a distance from the other ruins located close by. We went with a group of Sierra Club people who are here doing volunteer work in the park.
The road was little more than a cow path and we dodged afternoon showers and vivid lightning all the way out there. It was a beautiful site with a building that had been built about 900 A.D. It is a stretch of my imagination to think about people living in this vast wilderness that many centuries ago. And their buildings were quite spectacular!On the way back we even saw a herd of elk! And more adventure tomorrow!