Bye Bye 2010

The weather was awful for New Years (sub-zero temps, snow and strong wind), but we made the best of it! Rachel, Chris, Matt and I made a late dinner of king crab legs, steak, cheddar cheese biscuits and garlic potatoes and stayed in with our champagne. It was a fun New Years Eve!

Blizzard

The snow is finally here! If only it had come in time to get a day off of work. :-) Matt and I braved the elements to go out for dinner, but as you can see from this shot of a street light and the lit up snow beneath it, the flakes were really flying.

Rox

Roxanne was awesome and let Rachel and I dress her up and take some pictures. It was really fun and I got a ton of good shots. I will do a Flickr album later with the best photos, but I picked this to put on the blog. It was a tough choice though! The whole idea was to get Rox (the most happy and optimistic person I know) to look a little scary and dark.  Originally, I planned to turn this into a black and white, but I really liked her green eyes played off the green background.

Bug

Stash gets very excited when she sees a bug on the wall, as she did in this case. I know I take a lot of pics of her, but when its as cold, dark and ugly outside as its been lately, there aren't too many things to take pictures of.

Lizards

Matt bought these two decorative wooden lizards when we were on vacation in Zion last year. I can't wait until the days get longer! I like tking outside pictures and have a hard time finding subjects.

Geese

The weather has been amazingly warm. We were even able to go for a walk in the park without coats. It almost felt like Spring! I had fun taking photos of all the ducks and geese skidding across the ice covering the pond, but my favorite photo was the geese coming in for a landing.

Christmas Day

I had a wonderful Christmas and I hope you all did too! I spent a fun couple days with my family. We opened gifts, ate breakfast, opened more gifts, ate dinner and caught up on Christmas Day. We had a big dinner of prime rib and smoked pheasant, with a pumpkin cheesecake for dessert. Oh, and I got an awesome "guerilla-pod" from Matt, which is basically a bendable tripod that can be used to hold a camera steady in unusual places without a flat surface. I used it to take this picture of all of us around the dinner table.

Christmas Eve

The weather is actually warm and clear on Christmas Eve! That is certainly unusual, considering the rest of the country is under snow. I took advantage of the nice weather and went out and saw my dad do his lessons with Daisy. For an 8-month old lab, she did great. He threw dummies and had her sit until he told her to go get them. It was very fun to watch!

Winter

It doesn't look like it is going to be a very white Christmas. It is 50 degrees and clear and the forecast isn't going to change. At least our family will have no problem getting here! Here are the trees that I took a picture of earlier, but without the yellow leaves.

Bread Rat

Becky got this little rat for me in Germany (I have quite a few rat/mouse figurines). It is made out of bread that was somehow hardened and laquered to preserve it. I have always thought it was cool.

Shutter

I did this photo by slowing down my shutterspeed to 15 seconds and spinning it in little circles while taking a photos of my little Christmas tree. I want to do some more cool light drawing photos in the future. I am glad I figured our how to do it.

Festive

Festive Kitty is festive! Against her will, I might add.

Baking

I spent all day cooking and baking Christmas goodies! I ended up with cookies, peppermint bark, truffles and peanut brittle. That brittle is hard to make...it took three tries before I made a good batch. Here is the pretty peppermint bark after I put on the dark chocolate.

Nutcrackers

On Saturday, Rachel and I went down to Denver, saw the Nutcracker ballet, walked around the 16th Street Mall, and had a nice dinner in a cool restaurant. Everything was so pretty and covered in Christmas lights. Unfortunately, I left my camera in the car and we were parked far away. So here is a picture of a squirrel I saw that morning. :-)

P.S. I have to give Matt credit on this one. He saw the squirrel right outside and called me to bring my camera.

Kitty

Matt and Stash like each other now. I promise.

Rainbow Rider

It is finished! This summer, my dad told me he thought I should paint a cowboy riding a bucking fish. I thought he was joking and that it was a ridiculous idea. However, he brought it up again. Someone else then told me about a cowboy named Casey Tibbs who was called the "Rainbow Rider" because he always wore bright colors, particularly purple shirts. With that tie-in, I actually started sketching it out. And now I give you, "Rainbow Rider," the most ridiculous painting I have ever done.

Flowers II

More pretty flowers!

Lithos

I got some old lithographs at an antique show a few months ago. They looked like they came from an old biology textbook. I know they are very old, but thats about it. I got 4 moth/butterfly lithos and 4 fish ones. I framed them and have them in my living room and love how they look. Despite being possibly a hundred years old or more, the colors are as vivid as ever. I need to do some research about where they came from.

Fish Drawing

 I entered 6 drawings into the Western Spirit Art Show this year (I got two paintings in last year) and only had one get accepted. Still, competition for that show is very high, so I was thrilled to get a piece in. The drawback...the drawing was one I currently have in the Fort Collins gallery and someone had come in earlier in the week saying they wanted to buy it. So, I either take it out of the gallery and possibly miss the sale, or leave it in the gallery and miss out on the show (and possibly never have the guy come back to get it). I ended up driving down to FoCo to get it and left the guy who was interested another fish painting and my card. Lots of drama for one drawing, which I didn't even think was half as good as my other entries. Oh, well. Here is "Circling Cutthroats" after I brought it home. You can see my reflection in the glass...

Flower

Pretty flower!

Sunrise

I had to be up at sunrise on a Saturday to feed the dogs and horses. Ugh. But it was really pretty outside and I snapped a photo of these birds flying away from me in the rising pink sunlight.

Willow

I house-sat for my parents on Friday night. It is a little creepy out there in the country at night by yourself, but I had lots of dogs to keep me company. Between elderly Izzy and crazy Daisy, Willow is actually the best behaved dog. She has always been my buddy, but I was especially happy to have her company. She even came out to the barn with me and slept on my bed. she was hoping I would drop some popcorn when I took this.

Mirror

I had fun taking pictures of Rachel, and Matt didn't want his picture taken, so I was the only other option. I took a photo of myself in the mirror attached to the top of my antique dresser.  I have lots of things on top of that dresser.

Rachel Part Deux

I was having a hard time figuring out what to take a picture of last night. Fortunately for me, Rachel was around! She has some cool creative ideas, so she grabbed a scarf and I took her photo. I got a whole bunch of them with different light, some serious, some not. Even though there were a bunch of good ones, I liked this smiley babushka one.

Wax

Last year for Christmas I bought some wax-dipped pinecones for Christmas decorations. When you warm them up, they smell really good. The problem is that I got three different colors, so they are three different smells as well.  Which means I can't warm them all up at the same time or my room sounds like sandalwoodlavendervanilla. Not good. They are pretty though!

Wooden Man

I call this, "Wooden Man Worrying About all the Clutter in the Back Bedroom." I keep knocking things over when I'm in there and the clutter is driving me crazy! Wooden Man agrees with me.

Mean Streets

I went over to Laramie with my folks to have lunch with Roxanne. We had a nice lunch at Tommy Jacks. Now that Matt lives in Cheyenne, I never go over the summit. I do miss the cute downtown and all the little shops. Even though the streets are fairly empty on a Sunday afternoon.

Tree

Happy Birthday, Roxanne! Now that it is Rox's birthday (we never used to put up the tree until after her birthday so that it wouldn't get overshadowed by the holidays), I put up my little Christmas tree. My mom got it for me last year, and it it just the right size for an apartment. I have a variety of ornaments I either mooched from my parents or received as a gift from my grandparents, but I still have pretty sparse decorations. Stash is very interested in the tree and spends a lot of time sitting and looking at it.

First Friday

On the first Friday of every month, all the galleries in Fort Collins do a gallery walk. This means that all the art galleries stay open late, have food and invite the artists. Matt and I went down after work to my new gallery. It was really fun, but kind of awkward. I saw lots of people go over and look at my work, but once I got enough nerve to go up to a guy looking at it and ask if he liked them, he ran away like I was on fire. Ruby and her friends came by though, so that made me feel better. All in all, I had a great time and all the artists in my gallery were very nice and helpful. We went and got a late dinner afterwards and I ate some of the best prime rib I've ever had. Good times!! This is a photo of the interior of the gallery.

Statue

I always see this bronze sculpture of two boys playing baseball while I am on my way home from work. I snapped a photo of it out of the window of my car while waiting at the stoplight. It looks cool lit up in the dusk.

Puzzle!

I will give one 8" x 10" print of any of my pictures (that includes any on my blog, website or Flickr www.flickr.com/photos/mollybx) to the person who can tell me what this is (or the best guess if no one gets it).