My Day-To-Day Photos

 I had a rather hilarious dream about a suicidal goldfish that I was trying to keep alive. I accomplished this by tying a weight around his wee belly. I decided to try paint it and this is my first attempt. I think it needs some work.

 These are a couple of paintings I did from tutorials by an artist I follow on Instagram.  Andrea Nelson is a fun loving person with a ton of great ideas for teaching the basics of watercolour. 

 I've seen plenty of videos on social media in which a stranger does something kind for an individual.  The recipient often ends up in tears, and I have often thought they were staged. But then it happened to me, and I struggled to keep myself from bawling outright. I could not hold back the tears. It was an awesome experience. 

 A dramatic change in the weather a while ago brought fog and hoar frost making for a beautiful landscape.

 On Jared's days off, we try to get a game or two in. We have had a couple of epic games where we've gone through a lot of cards and almost got tired of sitting there for so long. Well, it was more than almost for me.

 Jared felt I needed this guy to give me a laugh. He presented him to me by saying, "Harrr," in a really goofy way. We named him Stumpy because he has definitely been shorted on his tail. Welcome to the family Stumpy.

 Jared got a  few gifts to help him organize his growing collection of Magic cards. I knew he had a lot, but seeing them all together,  I was rather shocked to see how many he's accumulated.  This stack in front him doesn't include our old cards that we passed down to the kids.

 We picked up Jared at 5:30am and headed out. It was dark pretty much all the way to Lloyd.  After that, it started storming and we we didn't outrun it until  after Plunket. I tried to keep my mind occupied with knitting. Jared slept all the way. The kids didn't even go to bed. 

  We had to go back to Revolver because they forgot to put the disc in a game Jared bought.  Then we visited a Salvation Army where the kids and I found a few things. Afterwards,  it was back to the apartment to relax, play games. Todd repaired Tucker's laptop, we ordered in pizza and called it an early night. We hope to get on the very early,  having decided that if we have to drive a couple of hours in the dark, it would be better to get it out of the way in the morning. I was lazy on the picture taking that day, and only have a couple of shots with Tucker and Babish

 We visited the Wem on Wednesday.  Jared found quite a few things. It's always fun to visit the Lego store. After that, we headed downtown to Warp One and for lunch, Julio's Barrio, a Mexican place we had been to before. We shared a giant plate of nachos. Then it was back to the apartment to play games - mostly Magic.

 On the second day, Todd and I made our way downtown to The Silk Road, a store that specializes in spices. We left with a variety of peppers, cinnamon, popcorn seasoning, lavendar and a ew seasoning bleds that I'm looking forward to trying.  The kids were awake far earlier than we expected,  so we picked them up and went back to the condo to open our gifts. It was a bit of a pain to pack all our gifts there and back, but it was a lot more fun opening them all together than just watching Tucker open his. Jared was very excited about the Atraxa hoodie that Tucker found.  And I cried over the custom card sleeves that were printed with an original piece that Tucker did just for that purpose.  We played a few games including Kerplunk which was a gift to Tucker from Jared. We wanted Indian for dinner, so Todd did a bit of research and found a new place to try. Jared ordered a wrap called a dosa. It was huge and he enjoyed a few meals out of it. It was all delicious,...

 I'm really late getting this done. But, better late and all that. We arrived in Edmonton in the afternoon on the New Years Day. Tucker got his first gift in an unformal fashion. It wasn't even wrapped. We quickly unpacked the much needed vacuum cleaner and put it together.  Tucker got right to work on the living room carpet and was very happy with the results.   For supper, we went to Chinese Chile Hot Pot. A unique restaurant where you chose a broth and various ingredients to cook in that broth. It was a unique experience and it was very tasty. 

 I picked up my paints for the first time since painting the bookmark for Laura at the end of October. I had been watching tutorials over that 2 months and had some idea of what I wanted to paint, but I didn't expect to come up with the process that I did. I wet the entire paper and did the background with the idea of distant hills and then went back and dabbed in the trees. I should add that the texture was added by dropping salt onto the drying watercolour. I really like how it turned out.

 We're on the road to Edmonton today, hence the many blog posts. Brenda sent a couple of New Year's photos of herself and Stephen.