Happy Fourth of July

Our Fourth of July parade is over!  We had a few glitches, but over all I think it went well.  We had everything ready so all we had to do was slap the streamers, etc. on the truck with some masking tape when the truck arrived at the parade site.  We had to be the most colorful float.  Small but so festive looking. 

The problem came with our feeble sound system.  Not that we didn't give it a grand try.  We had a recording of Judy Garland singing Over the Rainbow, but decided at the last hour almost that we wanted some Sousa music.  We tried everything we knew without luck.  So we were going with Judy on our little CD player.  We cranked it up and got nothing out of it after everyone gave their opinion of what went wrong. (It worked fine when we got home).  So we had to ditch that idea.  As luck would have it however, Betts had insisted on this humongous bell that we had added to the float.  So all was not lost as we rang the bell all the way down Main St., waving our streamers and passing out candy and flyers welcoming to our church.  As it turned out anyway, the frontiersmen with their muskets were right behind us so it took the big bell to compete. 

My painting hiatus

Need to get back to my watercolor painting soon.  I notice I'm losing my artist eye.  I haven't been noticing the different shapes of trees and the individual aspects of each flower.  I fleetingly noticed an interesting sky today, and wondered how one would capture it. But didn't take it the next step further to figure it out.  How I enjoy riding along looking at the countryside and observing it with a more critical eye. I appreciate the world in a different way than ever before.  I'm itching to get out and try some al fresco painting here in Montana.  Not that it will be any good but how inspiring to try it, anyway.

Maybe I'll fix Michael a special breakfast in the morning for his birthday.  Not biscuits and gravy, though.