A visit with Rose

I have meet RoseLNZ before but tonight I visited with her at a neighbours house just about half a mile up the road from where we live. I also meet her husband and got to see this car they imported from Alaska.

Thats Marc (with a "C") and me and Rose standing by the corvette.

A busy New Year

Well I have neglected this blog of mine for a few weeks haven't I now.

Lets see now what have I been up to hummmmmmmm.

Ok well there was Christmas, oh I got that down there in the last post didn't I. I never did get any photos of our actual Christmas event this year as it was pretty much a non event with how things where around here but we did have a nice day non the less and I enjoyed the camping trip, other than the sandflies. Nick actually has video of me cooking breakfast with his bee vail on to keep the sandflies off my face while I was cooking.

I got to go to Christchurch again between Christmas and New Year for the x-ray and scan I had to have on my shoulder. I also got to get a refund for the toy of Marc's that was missing the part on Christmas day and that resulted in me then being able to purchase it $35 cheaper at a different store :)

The results of my shoulder pain is this 'Impingement Syndrome.'

Next there was New Years Eve which may as well have been the middle of winter here as it was so so cold and we had to light the fire. We had all the young people from our kids youth group around to see the New Year in at our house. I made dips and savouries etc and they also bought heaps of chocolate type food, chrisps and juice drinks which we are still benifiting from. They all watched some videos that some had made themselves and then they played "Buzz" which is a playstation gameshow quiz type thingy.

On Jan 3rd it was our 20th wedding anniversary. I bought us a new lounge suite which we desperatly have needed since our old one has been slowly falling apart for about the last 5 years and finally bottomed out (had to fix it) not so long ago. The old one had been bought 20 years ago with money we got in lieu of wedding gifts. This new one is a nice dark brown leather and I spotted it at the local funiture store for half price. We also went out to the local posh resturaunt where Jesse works and had him wait on us for our anniversary dinner.

Since then I have been setting up a gallery at deviantART. A friend paid for a sub for me for my birthday which is not till later this month but anyway I guess he didn't want to risk forgetting it, wish move on his part ;) Anyway with the sub I have been able to set the CSS code up for the journal to how I want it to look and has been a great learning curve for me with this being my first attempt at writting the code myself. All I did here with the blog CSS was to insert my own stuff as and where I needed it so doesn't count really as my first.

I also had a go at completing a vector portrait illustration of David Bowie as Jareth. This I did really to just prove to myself that I can do this sort of work but I may very well do a bit more of this yet.

Just about at Christmas time I ordered 3 books from Amazon.com for myself for my birthday. They where meant to arrive closer to my birthday according to Amazon's EDD but they all arrived this morning ..... yahhhhhhhhhhh .... I love new books.
The books are .....

• Collage Unleashed by Tracie Bautista. I just love the way this book is layed out and it comes with permission to use graphic provided in it along with a few templates to photocopy etc.
• Visual Chronicles by Linda Woods & Karen Dinino. I have been wanting this book for sometime but was to expensive to buy in the shop where I found in here in NZ. It was actually cheaper to buy all these books from Amazon and have them shipped than to buy them in NZ
• Digital Illustration by Lawrence Zeegen. This has some amazing grungy style 60s - 70s style commercial artwork in it along with some step by step illustrations of how several things where done using Photoshop. I have got a promise from Nick that he will get me Photoshop for my birthday, at academic prices due to me being a teacher of course ;)

I have also gottem my sewing machine out in the last couple of weeks and have it set up in my bedroom and beleive it or not I have actually had a play on it. Its not intended that I actually make any garments on this thing but I was hoping to play with some creative textiles since Nick gave me that book called "Stitch" for Christmas.

I have also managed to read a book called "The Time Travellers Wife". A great read if anyone is looking for something to relax with. If anyone has ever meet someone at the wrong stage or point in their life and found themselves day dreaming about what could or might have been then you will understand how the author might have come up with this story.

With not being at school I have also managed to keep the house resonably tidy, more so than usual and I have actully been making the bed every day and putting my clothes away off the floor .... beleive me when I say this is a major achievement for me

Before the end of our summer holidays I need to sort out Marc's school uniform for when he starts school at the end of Feb and I have to do a school books purchase trip to the city as well. I was also hoping to do a seperate craft gallery and buying trip of my own to the city sometime.

Apart from the weather here I am actually having a good summer break as usually I am inclinded to get depressed if I'm not busy enough. Negativeness from close friends can however have quite a marked effect on my state of mind as well. Hopefully the business will over-ride any effects that anything like this might have.

Ok this is long -- It won't let me put any pics in right now either so will put them in with an edit later.

Our Christmas

Some of you will know of the hassels that we had with the usual family gathering that we expected to have here this year and how that was all messed up.

Anyway we ended up having Christmas breakfast with my mum and dad and my sister and her hubby and baby. We did the gift giving and opening thing after breakfast. Marc's major gift that we got him has to go back to the store cause it has a part missing which makes it useless. Thankfully I still have the docket and should be able to get the whole thing replaced. Fortuntly I had bought Marc something else as well so that he didn't miss out completely on Christmas morning.

At around 2pm we packed up the kids and our sleeping bags and the extra food from around the house that I had gotten in for the family Christmas that didn't happen and we went bush. Well we went over to the remote valley where we get our honey crop from and camped out for the night.

Jesse our eldest has his gun licence and so the two older boys had fun with some pest iradication. There are wild goats which are classified as pests and they got three of them. There is a plague of rabbits and I'm sorry to those that might keep rabbits as pets but when they are in an enviornment that is not their own they can cause a lot of trouble for the farming and other activities so ....... they popped off any that they could find. Possums are also a pest there cause they eat our native bush and there are also the odd wild cat that pray on our native birds. They also shot a wild pig but it ran to ground in a thick bit of briar and so they where not able to retrieve it. They also tried their hand at eeling and used some of the goat as bait.

We also had the chance to check out how the blue borage is flowering for the year and it looks like we might get a bumper crop this year as the hill sides in places are just so blue with flowers.

We got home about 3.30pm on Boxing Day (26th) all feeling very tired from the jiggling and the fact that Jesse's snorting and sleep talking kept us awake. We did take Marc with us as well but for some reason he is not in many of the photos.


Click on the groups of photos to see them larger. Notice the blue on the hillsides and the river flats. The Blue borage has not been this blue in a good few year and if we get the warm weather now it should mean we have a good season and a good crop.

Sticky ATC's

Ok so Jam is sticky hence the sticky ATC's.

At digitalartquirks where I hang out a lot these days we got into doing a collaborative team ATC effort with the following results for the group that I was in.

Each of us started an ATC card (Artist Trading Card) and then passed it to the next person in our group to work on. They in tern then passed it onto the next person in our group of three to finish.

The theme of our jam session was "Down the Rabbit Hole" which to me means "Alice In Wonderland" and anything that we can glean from this story. We all had to use free stock images or things that we had got as freebies or giveaways although if we wanted to we could have collaborated and found out if our team members had purchased the same things as us as well if we wished.

I got a bit of track with the last one I did but hey that makes it more quirky doesn't it ;)

These are our results -- if you click on each one you will see it larger -- I think thats how blogger works with these.

Awesome View Check This Out

This photo was taken on the weekend by NASA. It shows a space walk happening right over New Zealand where we live. Unfortunatly we are right under the cloud but I have circled where we are.

Click on the picture to see the full view at NASA's site.

End Year Activities

Those of you that check with my blog regularly will remember that I intended to do the "Art in response to 60's music thing with my year 10 (grade 9) students as an end of year activity.

It was a lot of fun, well for most anyway. The boys in the class didn't cope to well with it so I got them doing some cleaning jobs, at their suggestion.

This here is a peice of work that was completed -- with a little help from moi.

School is over now and it is meant to be summer here for us. Notice I say meant to be cause we have been having really crap weather and more rain and cold than sunshine.

We had our end of year event with our kids Sunday School lastnight and it has been the first year Marc has been going. He was involved in several items in which he was so so cute.

He played the part of Zacceus that climbed the tree and he also was one of the sunflowers in the story "The Sower went forth to sow"

He did have another one that he was to shy to do. A song he has actually learned at daycare about the wise man who built his house on the rock. Nevermind maybe next year.

Here is our cutie little sunflower.

If anyone is interested I have set up a gallery at Deviantart. I am putting in it a lot of my traditional artwork that is not digital or scrapbook related. Some of it you might recognise as some I have scanned and used with my digital work. Anyway if your interested in seeing my work then here is the link. There is also a perminant link over to the right as well.

Fairytale War of the Witches

I have been busy this week and meant to post this earlier but anyway ......

Last weekend there was our little towns Christmas street part at the village green. It was the first year that this has been done and along with the singing of Christmas carols and Santa's visit there was a fairytale character dress up competition as a part of this event.

This event was meant to be held on Saturday evening but last Saturday the weather was so horrible with rain and wind off and on most of the day that it was put off till the Sunday evening. Sunday was sunny but it did get cold in the evening and some people got changed out of their outfits or took their little ones home before we got to present them with their prizes. However in spite of this we did manage to pick out the best outfits with some help from the photos that had been taken.

Myself along with another woman and Andrew Spencer, a local photographer where asked to do the judging of the fairytale characters and yours truely was elected to get up on stage with the mayor to present the prizes.

The catagories we judges where

• Best Female -- this was a fight between two witchs -- not that they where aware of it lol with the old hag with the broomstick winning.
• Best Male -- For this we chose a Knight from the tales of Robyn Hood.
• Best Couple -- We had difficulty with this one as we where unsure of weather it was meant to be a fairytale couple or a coupld as in like a married couple etc and as we struggled to identify any fairytale characters we went with a couple that had gotten Little Red Riding Hood and Fred Flintstone together -- I wonder what Wilma was thinking ;)
• Best Boy -- Was a Red Dragon made out of painted cardboard boxes.
• Best Girl -- Was a Pink Fiary Riding a Pink and White Unicorn
• Most Original -- Was a boy dressed as one of the Characters from "The Pirates of the Carribian" movie. The Character that looked like his face was an octopus, I don't know the name, maybe someone can tell me ;)

And I also had to judge the Best Fairytale Hair for my sister, the hairdresser, who couldn't make it to the event on the Sunday evening. This was won by a local woman in a Medievle Princess outfit with braided hair -- she maybe was Repunzel I'm not sure.

It was a very cold evening and hopefully next year it will be warmer and there will be more people that will get into the spirit of the event.

Check here for some shots of the event.

If anyone is interested in seeing more of the pictures from this even and you have my email address then let me know and I will give you a link to see them. Andrew does not have everything visible on his blog or at his website.