Jessica and Daddy at Vines Gardens

This afternoon Jessica and I went to Vines Gardens for a nice long walk and to take some pictures. Jessica brought her camera, and took lots of very good pictures and also quite a bit of video.

Here are some of the pictures I took:

This is a faux-painting version of one of my pictures:

Here, Jessica takes a picture of a frog in one of the fountains (which wasn't on at the time):

Here's the frog (though this is actually a picture I took):

Jessica's Awards Ceremony

Today was the final awards ceremony at Jessica's school. She received an E/S Honor Roll Certificate, as she has throughout the year (for getting all E's and S's on her report card), and also, for the first time, the Citizenship Award!

We are very proud of our little girl!

Incredibly enough, Jessica is only two days short of being done with first grade. Where did this year go?

Elyse's Ballet Recital

Today Elyse's ballet class had their recital! She was very excited about it, and it went very well.

Ms. Brooke helps Elyse get her hair into the required ballerina bun:

Elyse makes her entrance:

And the girls dance!

Elyse with her best friend and her best friend's sister:

Christmas Day 1973, Tucker, Georgia: For Sharon

When I think about happy times and happy places, this is a perfect distillation of what I see--not just this day, but any day when all of us cousins gathered together in that red-brick house, surrounded by our parents and grandparents and aunts and uncles, with the swing set and playhouse in the back, and the apple trees to climb, and the metal storage building where Pa kept his riding lawn mower out back, and the train set in the attic, and running and laughing and arguing and yelling and eating, and sometimes TV, and not wanting to go home at the end of the day.

It was so wonderful to be young, and to have siblings and cousins to share it with, and an abundance of grown-ups who loved us.

I wish we could go back and do it all over again. I wouldn't change a thing.

* * *

Very early this morning my cousin Sharon, topmost in the picture above, left us after a year-long battle with a rare form of brain cancer.

I can't believe she's gone.

How can it have been forty years already since this picture was taken? How can it go by so quickly?

Goodbye, Sharon. I'm grateful we had so many times like the one shown above. I'm so sorry you had to leave so early.

(Although I am not posting this on a Thursday, I am nonetheless labeling it Throwback Thursday.)

"Elyse in Contemplation"

I created this from a photo I made this afternoon at Stone Mountain Park while Mommy and Jessica were inside Customer Services getting their pictures taken for their membership cards:

Spring Sing

Every spring, Elyse's current preschool puts on a concert called the Spring Sing. This year's was today, and their theme was Under the Sea, as you can see from the jellyfish and submarines and octopuses in the pictures below:

Rock City and Fairytale Nights

Today we drove up to Chattanooga to visit Rock City. We go there a lot, but we always love it, and today was certainly no exception.

This area is used on the weekend for formal pictures with the Easter Bunny, but today it was open to anyone:

This year they're doing a new evening Spring Break event called Fairytale Nights, which we went back for. (Fortunately, our annual pass got us in to it for free.) It was kind of like a fairy tale-themed renaissance festival, with characters in costume greeting you and trying to engage you in conversation throughout the trails. Here Snow White talks to a little girl who isn't Jessica or Elyse:

And here she talks to Jessica and Elyse (and Mommy too):

Elyse got her face painted:

(This was taken at the hotel, with Elyse in her nightie.)

We enjoyed the afternoon at Rock City; the Fairytale Nights evening was fun, but it gave Jessica a lot of anxiety knowing there were characters around every turn who were going to talk to her, and extra anxiety knowing there might be monsters lurking about. (We never did see the Giant that Jack warned us about. Thank goodness!) I'm glad we did it, but especially glad we didn't have to pay to get in.

Lots of Recent Faux-Paintings

I've been working on various techniques for transforming photographs into painting-like images in Photoshop Elements. Here are some of my most recent efforts:

These two are from pictures I took on a daytrip to Madison, where Anna and I lived while I was in graduate school at GCSU, last Sunday:

The last four are from a long drive I took on Wednesday, going east on U.S. 78 almost to the South Carolina border:

The Underground Theater Goes Dark

Tonight I saw a play--for the last time I'll ever be able to--at the Underground Theater, the community theater at the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Atlanta. After forty-four seasons--their first production was when I was only three!--they're retiring. They went out with a wonderful production of Mary Chase's HARVEY, one of my favorite plays. It was only the eleventh production I've ever seen there, in the thirty years since I first saw 84 CHARING CROSS ROAD there (starring my high school English teacher, RoseMarie Mason); I'm sorry I didn't manage to see more of their plays, and really sorry there won't be any further opportunities to see more.

More Digital Paintings

I'm continuing to refine my photograph-to-digital-painting skills. Here are three of my best recent efforts, all taken from photographs I made in the last five years:

Faux Watercolor

Yesterday and today I went on a solo road trip up (and then back down) U.S. 441 through North Georgia, the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, Gatlinburg, Pigeon Forge, and Sevierville, TN. I took lots of pictures, but the one I like the most is the one below, which I've done a lot of processing in Photoshop Elements and Picasa to make it into what I intended to be an Edward Hopperesque watercolor:

Panola Mountain State Park

This afternoon we went to Panola Mountain State Park for a hike. It was a beautiful day and Panola is a great park, though the girls did insist we stop about every thirty-five feet for Cheetos, so it wasn't really much of  hike. Still, we'll probably go back someday soon.