I will be displaying and offering for sale numerous pieces of my photography at two events in the coming weeks.

The first one is Arts in the Park in Webb City. This event will feature various local artists, music and art related events. It should be a great time and hopefully lots of my Joplin area friends and fam will come out and participate! Arts in the Park will take place from 9-2 on Sep. 11 in the pavilion area of King Jack Park.

I will also be returning to Cider Days in Springfield this year. Cider Days was my inaugural festival last year and since then I have made giant leaps in terms of quality of photos, framing, and my overall setup. It is a fall themed arts and crafts festival and it will take place Sep 18-19 on Walnut Street between National and John Q Parkway.

I’ve been preparing for weeks and I have what I believe to be my best works yet! I also have some new canvas wraps that are pretty cool. So I look forward to seeing everyone at the festivals!

I realize this is kind of old news for many of you, but for those who don’t know, Mini-Poco now has a younger brother. His name is Levi and he was born last saturday night a few days ahead of schedule.

While Jaylee looks very much like my sister, early indications are that Levi looks much more like Jimmy. Which I suppose makes sense. I participated in the introduction of Jaylee and her new brother. This photo was one of the few times she seemed to be interested in him…most of the time she was pushing buttons on the medical equipment or saying “Hi Guys!” to strangers walking down the hallway.

They are back home now and all is well. It will be fun to see why nephew Levi’s personality turns out to be.

This weekend Steph and I celebrated my birthday (which yes, was 2 weeks ago) by taking a short weekend road trip to Dallas. Items on the agenda included watching a Red Sox v. Texas Rangers game, the aquarium, and Pinkberry. The main theme of the weekend was heat…110 when we arrived Friday and 108 on Saturday when we went to the game.

Here we are preparing for departure.

We had dinner at this place called Tillman’s, suggested by Lyndsey. It was in a neat little area called Bishop Arts District and was the best burger I have ever eaten!

Another goal of mine for the weekend was to take a cool photo of Dallas.

I found suggestions on the internet that this parking garage was a good location to photo downtown.

A few minutes later the tall building’s green neon came on so I took another pic…

I got a good deal on the downtown Sheraton on hotwire!

The aquarium was super crowded saturday, but that didn’t keep us from having a good time.

Clownfish have always been my favorite… even before Finding Nemo.

This has always been one of my favorite buildings.

Saturday night was the ball game. Sorry Lyndsey we had to cheer for Boston. I was surprised how many Red Sox fans were at the game.

Red Sox ended up winning 3-1 so it was a fun game! Temp was still 101 when we left the stadium at 10pm!

I’ve been 30 for almost a week now and I have to say it doesn’t really feel any different. It was a fun birthday weekend… my homey Ian came down and we hung out on saturday, enjoying some food at the Undercliff, which Ian kept mistakenly referring to as “Hangover”.

Steph arranged for a party Sunday afternoon, which turned out to be a lot of fun as well. I supposed if anything made me feel more like an adult it was the nature of my party in that it was only a few close friends and family, complete with wee-children. And of course it was entirely appropriate that I had from Emma blowing out the candles. I guess that is the true indicator of becoming an adult… when you let a toddler blow out the candles on your birthday cake!

At any rate, I had a wonderful birthday weekend and I’m looking forward to what my “30’s” will bring.

About a year and a half ago I saw some tubes of oil paint on sale and bought them. Last weekend I finally decided it was time to give them a try. Considering I’ve only done one oil painting in my life and that was 12 years ago, I wasn’t really sure what to expect. I do ok with acrylics but oils are a different ballgame.

Here is the sky before I started texturizing it. I could have done it all nice and blendy looking, but I like paintings to look more like paintings and less like photographs.

The mostly completed sky.

I really struggled when it came time to put in the ground. It kept wanting to blend into the sky.

A week later I came back and touched up the sky and added the trees. Not the world’s greatest oil painting but I’m happy with it!

Overall I really liked it, except for cleaning. On areas I want to blend, I like the fact that the paint takes weeks to dry. However on areas I don’t want to blend… well I haven’t really figured that out just yet. My solution was to start the painting and then finish it a week later. I have no idea how Bob Ross manages to make an entire oil painting with a background and foreground in 25 minutes.

The other night I participated in an impromptu kayaking trip. By the time we got on the river (Center Creek) it was almost 7:30 so we really had to work to get back home before dark – we just barely made it.

We did the route I loosely refer to as “Upper Center Creek”, from Fir Road back to my house. I like this route because it was the very first route I did in a kayak. It’s about 5 miles and has some nice rapids and passes the old lakeside park. The only part I tend not to like is the Dyno factory, and the pipes of water (?) that drain directly into the creek…which I find fairly disturbing. Each year the river changes a little bit because of floods – sometimes clearing out debris, sometimes creating new obstacles. This year there seemed to be a lot more obstacles than in previous years, but it was fun nonetheless.

We stopped to release a sea turtle that was snagged on someones trot line, so if nothing else we accomplished a good deed.