Wednesday, January 30, 2013

The rain...just enough

When  I wrote my last blog entry about the rainbow six days ago, it was raining. It was the last of several rainy days we had/will have in January. 


It was also raining on Jan. 12 when I posted this entry about how several times, Segunda has posed under wet umbrellas when we come in from the rain, and how she likes the blue and white toys we got her this Christmas. Random thoughts that come up when an art journalist (Daisy Yellow 6ix2) prompts you to journal about raindrops and treasure.

Today, it is not raining and there is no more rain in the 10-day forecast. Since this is southern California, it's hard to know when we might have more rain.  So, I can't do the photo prompt posted today at A Year in The Life of An Art Journal, which is to shoot a mug (teacup or ????) in front of a rainy window. But I can do the journaling prompt, which is to share a little bit about what the perfect rainy day looks like to me. The prompt also called for dripping acrylic paint down a page, and my thinned blue acrylic paint is certainly very good at doing that.

My thoughts about the rain are that the amount on neither side of Cajon Pass is perfect, although rain in southern California is definitely more tolerable than elsewhere.

On the north side of Cajon Pass where I used to live, it's the Mojave Desert and there is not enough. Any rainfall there is welcomed, because it will be so little it doesn't even bother anyone. And here on the south side, we sometimes have so much rain it's annoying and inconvenient. Yet if we don't have that much rain, we don't have the pleasant green hills we are enjoying at this time.

Although the hills have become green, I would classify the 2013 rainy days as only minorly annoying and inconvenient. I and others have had to cancel or modify running and other outdoor exercise plans, but the rain has not been the type to cause property damage. But that does happens sometimes here. I remember in January 2005 it raining so hard they had to shut March Air Force Base down to visitors until they could sandbag the place, and I remember in I think December 2010 it being so rainy here at the house, water was coming in through the under-sink cupboard in our house. Don, being already unemployed, had managed to spend so much of our money we could not afford to buy dirt for the 10 empty sandbags the Rubidoux CSD had provided each of its households to help with the storm.

Thankfully, we have figured out that even on a limited income, saving for emergencies is a good idea - and that we have not had a weather-related one in awhile.

There may be two reasons, why I am thinking about the desert. First of all, the 6ix prompt for Week 5, posted yesterday, includes "cactus" and bloom. And that had me reaching for a photo I took in 2011 at Joshua Tree National Park of cactus blooms. I am not finished with that one, it will be my second two-page art journal creation and I will post it either Friday or on the weekend.


 But then there is this page, which I did in response to a Two Peas prompt earlier this month. It reminds me of the desert too. It wanted the colors tan and grey, acrylic paint, distress ink and bubble wrap (which is great for stamping a dotted background), And it's the page opposite the "Cat in the Rain" page. I had always hated this page, and knew when I posted it to Two Peas that it would probably get recycled before I finished putting new creations into Art Journal #1. (We're getting very close to the start of Art Journal #2, probably sometime in February.) In fact, within days of posting it, I clipped a scripture about "treasure" from my church bulletin and pasted it down on this page.

 This is how the spread looks now. "Cat in the Rain" has also been somewhat modified since I posted it here. Those little treasures would not stay on the page, so I left two off and finally pop-dotted one on, to give it a stronger hold than glue.

Also, you should know that  "Cat in the Rain" is one of three pages I accidentally created with the book upside down. Although it appears to be near the front of the book, it's actually near the end. And that means that its predecessor, the formerly desert neutral page with the bubble wrap polka dots, was boosted up in the book by all of the pages I had done before it. This means what little bit of acrylic paint I put on the left side dripped not down the page, but onto the crease of the book, thankfully only at the top where I had already covered the page in blue.


What you cannot see well, even in this closeup shot, is that a little bit of the old blue paint from the next page brushed off onto what is now the bottomof this page, and a little bit of the light blue water color pencil, from the project on the opposite side of this sheet of paper, bleeds through at the lower right of the area inside the black frame. These are those "happy accidents" that permeate my art journal. I call them "happy" because more often than not, they create some kind of unintended effect that I actually like. This is one of those times. With two shades of blue specks, it was a prettier page.

To not cover up too much of that, I ended up turning my new journal creation on its side, which is actually how it had been to begin with. This means my blue paint drips now spread across the page like sky. I also added some green ink, symbolic of how the open spaces in my neighborhood have a bit of green from the rains now. The 2013 rains have been just enough.

But I thought the scripture clipping still looked better on this page than the other one.

Thursday, January 24, 2013

A rainbow

It rains here sometimes. Today. Last May. A few times in between.

And sometimes we have rainbows after that. But sometimes we have to make our own.

My art journaling prompts have on more than one occasion inspired my handmade rainbows. Daisy Yellow's prompts have recently inspired a rainbow redo.


Celebrate Rainbows! she said a few years ago in her "Jump Start Your Art Journal" series of prompts. I discovered this series of prompts only last year, and did this rainbow one in May. It was okay.



Day before yesterday, rainbows were on the Daisy Yellow blog again. 6ix 4 challenged us to use a rainbow, sky blue, curious, heart, bird and a window or pocket on an art journal page. Also, at Two Peas in a Bucket, In The Mood To Scrap challenged us to create a project with punched circles and dots. Ok, how about punched hearts and dots?

The photo of the curious cats, actually on each side of a sliding glass door, was taken in 2012, sometime around May. The inside cat is my tabby, Lombard. (Not the same cat in my "treasure" art journal page that was 6ix 2.) The other cat is Creamy, who lived next door and really bonded with my cats until his owners decided to move to Hesperia. I am not sure if Creamy went with them to Hesperia, or if he ended up down the street here in Jurupa Valley at the local animal shelter. I would have liked to have taken him when the neighbors offered, but Don felt three cats was one too many. Plus Creamy was not housebroken, and that's in fact why he was out in the rain on the day this photo was taken.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

The spiritual dimension of being content





Two new prompts on two of my favorite art journaling websites, Daisy Yellow and a Year in the Life of An Art Journal, have led me to create my first two-page art journal creation. Art journals perhaps typically are two pages, but up to now, mine all were one.

Daisy Yellow's 6ix 3 prompts were decadence, magenta, a tree or petals, rubber or eraser stamp, painted polka dots and a diagram. The idea on her prompt is to use all six. When I saw this prompt, I immediately thought of some rose petals that were drying out on the floor of my craft room. They had been given to me by a sweet 6-year-old girl who was volunteering at the same race I was on Saturday, the Citrus Heritage Run. The girl is "Marcie's daughter." (I think I know her real name, but her Mom's is enough for those that need to know.)  I knew I was going to use the rose petals on this page, along with eraser-stamped painted polka dots, but I wasn't sure what else I would do.\

Then I read "A Year in The Life of An Art Journal's" first official prompt for 2013. Although my initial year of joining in on these prompts, 2012, didn't seem to have much of a theme, most of the five or six years "A Year in the Life of An Art Journal" has been around have. In 2011 it was music.  This year it is beverage-filled mugs. I have so far focused on mugs that hold tea (or maybe coffee) but the prompts could possibly be interpreted to be mugs of cold drinks as well. So far means this official prompt, and the one posted earlier this month, a warm-up exercise, that for me focused on tea, but not a tea mug.

The new prompt asked us to focus a page on whatever "one little word" or New Year's resolution we are focusing on in life all this year. There are actually two parts to this year's prompts, which are posted twice monthly, and you can do both parts or either if you want to participate. The first part is to actually take a picture of your mug in some setting that incorporates the prompt. The second part is to follow specific, but short, directions for creating a more artistic rendition based on the same prompt. This week, those directions were to use water colors and sprinkle salt onto the wet page.

Unlike the last prompt where I merely stained the page with a teabag and then drew a calming ocean scene onto that, I actually gave some thought to my collection of mugs this time around. My "one little word," in case you missed an earlier blog post about it, is "content."

Part of being "content" will probably soon mean figuring out soon how to make Starbucks-style drinks at home and drinking them from the nice  too large collection of mugs we have here, as we have all but sworn that restaurant off. (We did pay them a visit yesterday.) But for now, one mug in particular especially reminds me of being content. It is my mug that I received one Mother's Day at my in-laws church in Lancaster. That mug has a scripture, Proverbs 103:2 on back, and originally came with a little book filled with devotionals. That's plenty of stuff right there to help me fill my mind on the things above,  which is what I believe is the key to being content. Not to mention that I got that mug because I'm a stepmother. I remember having to defend my choice to accept the mug to my brother-in-law that year, but once I explained it, he understood. My shorter explanation, for here and now, is that after eight years of infertility followed by a divorce, (and watching all the other women over 30 in my church receive special Mother's Day gifts and bask in their glory) each Mother's Day, I remarried and became a stepmother. Don and I have agreed since the first Mother's Day after our wedding that I should claim any recognition given to the moms. And sometime after that, I decided instead of pursuing adoption, I would be content to love my stepchildren as if they were my own. (If that's possible.)

Now remember that I had already decided, before I read the Year in an Art Journal prompt, that I was going to use rose petals on my Daisy Yellow 6ix page, right? Well, guess what's on the front of my teacup? Roses! That's what made me decide these prompts had to go together. I've already combined Daisy Yellow's prompts with each other, and with some of the past Year in the Art Journal prompts,  into single pages of my best artwork. But as this was only the third 6ix prompt, and the first two had produced some nice pages without outside assistance, I wasn't sure I would have had room for all this prompt goodness on a single page. But they had to go together.

So, my process was:

1. Use my two shades of red water color pencils to create the background. I was hoping when I activated them with water the darker red would smear into a shade that at least resembled magenta. But that didn't happen. That background is red, just like the tea mug.

2. Use two rubber flower stamps and red ink to create a "rose bouquet." I had initially thought I was only going to do that on the top (Daisy Yellow) side, but for a number of reasons, I decided to stamp bouquets in several places on both sides. I also thought I was going to color the leaves green, and I started to do so on the first bouquet, but I really didn't like how that looked, so I

3. glued the rose petals down over most of that.

4. Misted the Year in the Life side of the page with red mist, and dabbed an eraser atop a pencil into the wet mist to create polka dots on the Daisy Yellow side.

5. Drew a circle diagram across both pages.

6. On the Daisy Yellow side, glued pieces of scrapbook brand strips, a star, and the cherries from the last package of Cherry Dr. Pepper I drank inside the circle. Just to make sure I had something magenta on the page, and also to remind myself that things in the circle can be eaten by moths, I glued a magenta winged creature, not sure if it is a butterfly or moth, on the edge of the circle. I also stamped cake, ice cream and music notes in there. Note that both the ice cream and the music notes are also rubber stamps, while the cake is acrylic. Also note that one of the tiny pieces of branding strip is the letters "EP," which a few people will recognize as Echo Park Paper's logo, but most everyone else will recognize as my initials. I chose this logo, and put it near the center of the circle to focus on the I-centeredness of decadent desires. My decadent desires include scrapbooking supplies and nice food. (including chocolate and ice cream.) Don's, which I find myself often sucked into and enjoying anyhow, are primarily his passions for music and acting.

7.  On the Year in the Life of An Art Journal side, I wrote out Psalms 103: 1-5. While verse 2 is great by itself, the five verses taken together are very good advice for someone who wants to be content. In summary, they say, praise God and do not forget his benefits.

Coming across this passage of scripture this week was one of those God things. I also made a decision for 2013, perhaps even a resolution, to spend more time in God's word. To that end, I am reading "Breaking Free" a Beth Moore study I first did at High Desert Church in Victorville sometime in 2003. This week, I am studying the benefits of having a relationship with God. These primarily are being able to know and believe God, glorifying him, finding satisfaction (contentment) in him, experiencing his peace and enjoying his presence.

Looking back at the thoughts I had in my head 10 years ago, I can see that God has already done a lot for me, and just one of those things is to deepen my awareness of how wonderfully he can work in my life. Being reminded of that, I am so much more confident that whatever happens this year, if I focus on being content, God will be there for me. The verse on the tea mug was just a further reminder of that, and a reason to blog about it. Sometimes God will use two different mediums in one day or one week to drive home the same passage of scripture, and when that happens, I consider it a passage God really wants me to understand. While this week, they were different scriptures (the Beth Moore study focuses on a section of Isiah 43), being reminded of God's benefits twice this week is obviously something God wants me to keep in mind. I will!

Saturday, January 12, 2013

The cat and the rain


This picture of Segunda is an older picture, but with some rain this week it and Daisy Yellow's 6ix 2 prompt kind of sum up how I feel about some things. So last night, I made this art journal page following the prompt: Use lime green, rain drops, acrylic paint, ogee pattern (I've done a very poor job on that part of it, but it's the pattern where lines curve in and out to form near circles), grunge (I've grunged up all the edges but I think it's only visible near the lower left corner) and treasure hunt.

My initial thought was that, unlike last week, this prompt had nothing to do with journaling and everything to do with art, except  drawing. Instead of the cloudy rain drops, and the cat under the umbrella, I was going to drop mist onto the page (the nearest color mist I have to the blue green scheme is purple) and save it for another journaling prompt. Which may or may not have come to me.

But I'm behind others on this prompt, and quite a few who have done it before me focused on hand-drawn raindrops and umbrellas. Which led me to think of this photo, one of several I have of various rainy days when our curious cat posed under the umbrella.

A number of other people used "treasure hunt" as a journaling prompt only, but I had always known this page would have a few jewels. The blue and white ones remind me of some toys I gave the cats before our Christmas trip, which Segunda had claimed and hidden within hours. Segunda, of course, hates rain. So I would not want her or her treasures rained on.

There is one treasure that has been rained on the past seven days. Last Sunday, I had taken fiveweeks off Riverside Road Runners. Three because of a nagging cold that I wanted to be sure was better before our trip, and two because of the trip itself. Although I timed my Sunday run on the beach of Cayucos to take place at the exact time the Roadrunners would be on the streets back home, by Jan. 6 I was looking forward to getting back into that Sunday morning routine. However, Don wanted to go elsewhere at 10 a.m., which is later than I would usually get back. We agreed I would go to Riverside Road Runners only if it was not raining.

I woke up at 5:30 and it was not raining. I got dressed and was already to go, except I could not quickly locate my purse. And after what was probably less than a minute of looking, I heard Don cry out from the bedroom "It's raining!" Drat. It was so little rain the Riverside Road Runners had no problem with it. But I missed a sixth week in a row.

Last Sunday night, my friend Terri - who got me into Riverside Road Runners - found me at church and told me I needed to volunteer for the Citrus Heritage Run, which was today. So I did. And now, come rain or shine, I will be back there to actually run tomorrow. Don't rain on my treasures!

Tuesday, January 8, 2013

The last part of my trip

I imagine I will, soon enough, be posting more about our trip to  Colorado here. But for now I wanted to give you a look at a picture from the latter part of our trip, when we were at Cayucos. I don't have as many pictures from there, because the regular digital camera was dead, and we took most of  our pictures with an improperly loaded film camera. Plus, I just didn't take as many pictures!

The only ones that turned out were a few I snapped during my 6.2 mile run along the beach on Dec. 30.  That's because I didn't lug my big film camera on that run, I took my cell phone. Here's one of those.


Today, I attempted to draw the picture for my art journal. What do you think? I wish the blue was showing up more here. I also wish  the burlap I put on my previous art journal creation wasn't hanging down on this page when I  try to photograph it.


In the upper left corner, I wrote a list of four things I find calming. They are: 1: The ocean. 2. Running, 3. Art and 4. A nice cup of tea.

And if you care about my art journaling process, note that, as I did yesterday's creation, I started out by staining the page with a teabag. At the end, I added a little bit of blue with my water color pencils. In between, I drew the bird on the rock, and wrote my list with my favorite lead point pencil. (It's nothing special, just a nice pencil I received as a spouse appreciation gift from the Air National Guard back when Don was still in, and was being honored for his service (at March) during Operation Enduring Freedom. Hard to believe Don has been out of the Guard for two years as of today.

Monday, January 7, 2013

Where is our future?



Now that I'm back from my vacation to Colorado and Cayucos, it's back to reality in the Inland Empire. Such as it is. We possibly will live right here in this golf course condo for the rest of our lives. Sometimes I am tempted to go back up to Gualala, Calif., the Mendocino coastal village where I first worked after college, and see if the Independent Coast Observer needs a reporter. And if they don't, to go down the coast until I find one that does. However that plan, does not suit Don well, so I am pretty sure it will not happen in his lifetime, and I hope I'm well past retirement age after that.

What is a more realistic plan is to find a small town in the Rockies, or even another part of Colorado, and settle there. I am pretty sure the town we end up would not be in or near Denver, because that's just the conglomeration of suburbs we would be trying to escape if we left southern California. But it could be Colorado Springs. Or Durango. Or ?????

It's not a decision we will be making soon. Don has obligations here. He won't finish with CBU until the end of 2014 or counting student teaching, the middle of 2015. And he's obligated to be on the Jurupa Valley Planning Commission until the end of 2016. So I don't see how we could possibly go before then.

Meanwhile, I need to find something to help pay the bills until August 2014, when Don's income increases with his eligibility to start collecting Social Security. Although Congress has decided not to put a 100 percent tax on federal unemployment benefits, I will exhaust mine sometime in 2013. If jobs continue to be impossible to find, but there is some way possible to get the start up funds, I will start my own business officially. And if succeed in making Pen Porter a bonafide, legitimate company, I will be reluctant to move away from my clientele for a very long time. I think I would stay in business for at least 20 years, maybe longer.

And then there are parents to think about. Mine are very healthy, thank God. The possibility right now is more likely that we will need to stay in California so they can take care of us, not vice-versa. But someday that could change, and I am my parents' daughter.

Don's mother needs more care already, but that is primarily given by his sister, and to a greater extent than Don at least, by his middle brother. However, we want to be there as a backup, as it is hard for Nancy to do this without a break.  And we enjoy spending time with our parents.So, as long as there are parents, that is another good reason to stay in California.

And, although we have much against our state, our personal reasons listed here are just four more reasons to stay on top of a long list of other really good things about our state. So, I will be content to stay here for now.

For the art journalers: I used a new series of prompts at Daisy Yellow, called 6ix, to inspire this page. These will  list six colors, materials, techniques or topics to use on a journal page. At this point the only one she has posted is the one that inspired this page, which was to use "teabag," "California yellow," "vermillion,"  "pencil," "fabric" and "decision." This page also was slightly inspired by an ongoing series of prompts she calls EDM. I am not sure what EDM stands for, except that they are all about drawing objects. The one she posted most recently was to draw something "vintage" or "retro."

So, here's my process: I used a tea bag to tea stain this page. (And the one facing it, which will fit in well with my next planned creation.) I wasn't sure what shade of yellow is California yellow, but since I knew the page would be about deciding whether to stay in or eventually leave California, any shade of yellow I use is California yellow. Vermillion is a dark red, so I used my red and yellow water color pencils to add more color. The yellow is highly visible here, but the red has faded in with the other colors. This includes brown, because I used my brown water color pencil to draw a "Welcome to Colorful Colorado" sign I photographed on the state highway we took into Colorado on our November 2009 trip there. I am not sure that the sign is "vintage," but it is in a retro style that could be. I smudged all the water colors, including those I used to draw the sign with, with the water brush because I love that effect. But then I drew the sign over. I wrote the words on the sign, and in my journaling, with my best lead-point pencil.




Saturday, January 5, 2013

Content and balance



Over the past two days, I have made two pages in my art journals. These are the first two since I went on vacation. They're both following prompts about the New Year. One asks what our One Little Word we will focus on for the year is. A lot of scrapbookers do this, last year my word was supposed to have been dream, but turned out to be believe. I am participating in the art journaling prompts from three websites (Two Peas in A Bucket, Daisy Yellow and A Year int he Life of An Art Journal), and I think all three prompted us to do pages about our One Little Word, although in the latter's case, it was actually a prompt posted in early 2012.

In 2013, I believe my word will be "content" the title of my first page. A member of  Daisy Yellow's Facebook Group, where I have previously shared this, has reminded me the word could have multiple meanings. The first one Webster's lists means "satisfied" and that is the meaning I had intended to focus on this year. But one of several other meanings is "topic addressed in a written work." In this sense, it has historically been used as a plural, usually in the phrase "Table of Contents." But while Webster's does not count this as a meaning yet, I believe "content" is now also a word we can use to describe the written work itself, as in "Web content." My new online friend chose to focus on that meaning in her comment about my work on Facebook. And that is interesting, because she doesn't know what most of you followers do - that I am a writer by profession. I have been a newspaper journalist and a public relations specialist in the past, but I could be a professional Web content writer if  either one of two things happened - either this blog somehow paid me at least 2 cents, or if all of my vast writing experience somehow causes me to get at least a freelance writing gig sometime soon. But until I find that - or even a job that does not involve writing - I will have to be content.

Which brings us to balanced. This page here actually combines two art journal prompts, one from Two Peas,which specifically asks us to journal about  finding balance in our lives, and the other being A Year In the Life of An Art Journal's last prompt of 2012, which asks what we are most looking forward to in 2013. In my quest for contentment, my life will become more balanced in 2013. There is a lot more I could say about that, but most of it is very personal. Let's just say though that I know this year I will become more assertive when someone makes demands on my finances and on my time, because 2013 will be a very difficult year if I don't become more assertive about this.So this new assertiveness, which will bring balance to my life, is what I am looking forward to most.

Friday, January 4, 2013

Colorado and the California Coast








Here's a sample of more than 100 photos, perhaps more than 200 taken over the two weeks of Dec. 20 through Jan. 3. We took what was essentially a two-week vacation during this time period, although we were back home the night of Dec. 26 and morning of Dec. 27.

The first part of our vacation was to take a trip to see our grandkids. James is a sweet boy who likes cuddling, so he was happy to get plenty of attention from me. Two-year-olds are not cuddly, and Abigail has definitely a more established bond with Grandma Kane than with her California grandparents, but she warmed up to Don and me quickly  and I hope will look forward when she's told she will see us again. At this time, we have no idea when that will be.

The second part of our trip was to Cayucos, California a beach town north of San Luis Opispo and Morro Bay. We spent New Year's with my parents.

It was so much fun. I am now trying to get life back to "normal," whatever that is when you are unemployed and have been for awhile. So as I process it, I'll probably post more about this trip, most likely in the form of scrapbook pages. Stay tuned.