It was a beautiful last morning walk of 2024. The clouds cleared away to reveal a beautiful sunrise.
Good-bye 2024! It was fun.
Do I go under or around? |
Scenes from the Road of Life
We left Everglades City early having decided not to do the airboat ride. Instead we wanted to get to Everglades Park as soon as possible.
We drove across the state on Hwy 41 and entered the park at the Homestead entrance.
Darrell is having a problem with the cord for his headphones, which he'll need on the flight home. So, I went in search of a replacement. The google machine sent me out to Dunedin, north of Tampa Bay. I arrived a bit early so I sat under a tree and sketched. Much to my horror, little worms were falling off the tree onto me. Yuck. But, I stayed until my sketch was done. Then freaked out thinking there were worms in my hair.
When Darrell got home from his class we went to dinner at Columbia, a restaurant that came highly recommended. It was started in 1905 and occupies a beautiful building. It is very popular.
I did this line drawing with my fountain pen.
We finally got out of the house and made it down to Lincoln Park for a snowy walk in the park. The snow is about 5-6" deep, dry but crunchy. It's cold, too!
I made it a short walk because it was too cold and I was worried about slipping and falling - even though it wasn't really slippery.
Jelly wore her little coat and ran around and looked to be having fun.
There's a little tree that people put Christmas ornaments on every year. I wanted to see it with snow on the ground. That didn't happen before Christmas, but it finally did (the day after).
Seems to have been a while since I pieced such tiny pieces. It's not my favorite thing, but it's not bad.
These will be the parts for the next row on the petals.
In 2005 on Darrell's birthday - November 18th - we planted a tree out front of our house on Wells Street in Renton. The idea was for it to provide shade (eventually) because the house faced west and in the summer the sun would beat in to the upstairs bedroom windows and it could get incredibly hot, too hot to sleep.
Planting the tree in 2005 |
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November 18, 2015 |
You'd think X would be a really tough one. It is, but after I looked in the dictionary, I came up with some interesting results:
Xanthium is a common weed, basically a cockleburr. I painted from an image of the Canada Cockleburr - Xanthium strumarium var, canadense.
Xanthophyll is a yellow or brown carotenoid plant pigment which causes the autumn colors of leaves. Cool, huh?!
Xylography is the art of carving on wood.
And, of course, my very useful X-acto knife.
It was another perfect morning for an early walk. We've been going right after sunrise, usually around 6am, in order to have Lincoln Park mostly to ourselves. We saw a sparkling ferry: