Silverton to Ouray

After weeks of not working on this, I finally finished it yesterday while painting with the Thursday afternoon watercolor group. We critiqued this and deemed it finished. Now, on to painting.....what?

Loop 303 Finished

 While we were gone for a month, the DOT guys finished the northern end of Loop 303, which makes a bypass through the city to connect I-10 to I-17. This takes you through the desert in places we have not seen, which surprised us as we were driving on the other side of the mountains and hills we had only seen from one side.

This part of the desert was surprisingly green for this time of the year. Most of what we see is summer brown on the desert.

One view that impressed me, and which I failed to adequately show in this photo, is the amount of horizontal planes reaching to infinity with these mountains. Living on the valley's desert floor, it always amazes me to see these mountains this way.

Home at Last!

Finally, our son and DIL were able to bring little Zane home from the hospital this afternoon. Also this was Big Sister Aubrey's first time to see her baby brother in person and to hold him as she was not allowed near the NICU.

She looks very pleased, however Zane is very non-committal at this point! Happy, happy day indeed!

Better Photo

I have been waiting to update Zane's first photo here until there were no more tubes and his little eyes were open, and here it is! Patrick had just fed him a lot of milk and he said Zane looked like he was so full...milk drunk!

If all continues to go well, he can go home Wednesday afternoon...Hallelujuh! What a cutie!

Zane Patrick

 I wish to announce the arrival of our new grandchild, Zane Patrick, to our family. Unfortunately, he aspirated meconium into his lungs at birth (a fairly common complication of birth) and has to be in the NICU for at least ten days while they treat the pneumonia and help his lungs to heal, but we are hopeful that there will be no further complications.

I like the name they chose! I can now say I have grandchildren!

Silverton to Ouray

 One day while in Chama, we drove the long trip to Silverton, CO. We had lunch at the Silverton Brewery, where in addition to a good lunch I had a glass of Bear Ass Brown Ale, which was yummy.

This old truck was in front of the pub and many people were posing in front of it for photos.

 After lunch we drove from Silverton almost all of the way to Ouray, a mountain mining town. The evidence of minerals changed as we climbed up toward Ouray. Look at these colors!

 One of the stunning views, along with the snows that were still prevalent at the 10,000 foot elevation.

This is a mining building that I recognized immediately from a photo a friend shot a few years ago and gave me permission to paint. Now, I was seeing it and photographing it myself.

 This is a vista that I brought back to the motorhome and started painting it. You will sorta/kinda recognize this from my version of it in a previous post here. I still have a few more things to do with the painting since I am home now.

This is another of the photos I took with a thought to paint it. Our project for the month of July at the Watercolor Workshop online site is shadows. When I was reviewing this I knew I had to give this one a try for the project painting.

Foxes Revisited Again This Year

 I will begin adding a few photos from our month in Chama, NM here on the blog since we have returned home. For security reasons, I decided not to turn this blog into a travelog this trip and let everyone online know our house was not occupied for a month! So, this will be a retrospective of some of what we saw.

We had a very relaxing trip, preferring this time to not scour the countryside every day while there, mainly because we wanted to relax and we had already seen everything in all four directions on our previous trips to this area.

While doing laundry, I was overlooking the neighbor's property which had a large pile of rubbish, mainly fallen timber, but with some junk interwoven. In this enormous pile was a family of foxes, a mama and three babies.

I grabbed my camera and telephoto lens and started snapping multiple photos. This is the mama, striding from our RV park meadow to skirt around to the neighboring property to take food to her youngsters.

She arrived onto the woodpile and dropped some food off for her babies. She was very warily watching me as I kept recording her movements and probably thought I posed a danger to her babies. Not so...I only shoot with my camera, Mama !

 This is my fav photo of the bunch...look at that little baby peeking out in the center of the photo!

The babies were more of a brown than the adult mother, I guess that is normal. I know less than nothing about foxes, other than I love watching them and photographing them.

Last SWAP Painting

I have been including the paintings I have received from the SWAP (Sharing With Artist Partners) group online and here is the latest one. My SWAP partner was Brenda Knoll and she sent this cutie-pie bluebird to me. Sadly, this will be our last swap, but I have amassed quite the gallery of lovely paintings from all over the world through the years I have belonged to this group and I treasure them all, as well as their artists as friends.