The First? Last? Days of Spring

It hasn't been a sunny spring at all here.  Normally the temperatures would be pushing the upper 80's by now and we have only had a few intermittent days that reached 70.  It's cry havoc for the farmers, and orchardists. No strawberries, although I had one in my bed with promise of more to come.  So I turned up the lights inside and started my painting.   Monet has nothing to fear yet.  I'm painting my impressions of young fish schooling in a hatchery pond.  I hope they were schooling and not suffering from whirling disease which is stalking western hatcheries.  Fish are a fixture of my family stories.  Dear old Dad was a fisheries biologist and it's metaphorically tangled with my art.  Well, why not, two of us are Pisces, arty water signs.  What surprised me was that after spending some of my young childhood living in or near hatcheries I had forgotten what the fish looked like, where their fins went, the shapes of their snoots.  It took many sketches to start getting the shapes right.  And of course the colors in the ponds are many shades of gray so I took a hard look and used the color a particular shade of gray seemed to contain for me.  This is an early attempt.

Then, this weekend two of my grandgirls stayed with me and shock, the sun came out.  We made it to the Farmer's Market, which was quite spare due to the weather conditions here.  We bought salad greens and shaved ice treats, and noticed many of our favorite vendors were not there.  Then we went home and played with the camera, taking many pictures of how the trees made their own shadowy portraits on the table umbrella in the backyard.

The picture below, is of the support  pieces of a defunct tent gazebo.  I'm sure there a million of these lying in dumps around the country or behind someone's garage.  I'm going to make mine into yard art.  Going to rustoleum primary colors onto them and "artfully" hang some of my accumulated "art supplies" on them.  We can change them out from time to time.  I plan on hanging some of my excess beads on them (I am an addicted bead gatherer).  The girls are going to help with it.  I'm have plenty of material as I'm sure others of you do.  I see stuff on the beach (I could make a necklace out of that, or a collage out of this), on walks, at garage sales, etc.  Artists and crafters have boxes and baskets of "found" materials, don't you guys?  In fact I have a box of baskets.  I used to create custom made stained glass windows for houses and I still have some of the models I made for customers from eons ago.  I could hang those on these gazebo uprights.  I can see the light shining through them already.  Assuming we get any light.

We had a great time, took the girls to an open air play at a local house museum, in another town and it was wonderful. On the way home, I treated my little darlings to a lesson in interesting language when some man drove through a stop sign in front of us on the way home. No harm was done, and I called him an old coot, how's that for the pot calling the kettle black.  I just hope I didn't say anything they haven't heard from their father while he fixes his tractor, then I can blame it all on him, of course he blames me for his interesting language, where would we be without our families?