Another self portrait, using the camera’s timer. She took this shot as a reference for her artwork.
Category: AZ Buettners (page 7 of 10)
I visited Joe today and helped him move some stuff. I got a photo of him and his cat, Squirrel. (We called her Molly when she lived with us.)
Below are a few photos of Tiger. There’s even one where he’s with his mom, McGonagall. When Tiger was younger and smaller, they looked even more alike. But now he’s huge and his mom is quite small.
McGonagall was the first cat we brought in from outside. We were worried that we were feeding her too much because she started getting really fat. It took us a few days to realize that she wasn’t getting fat, but that she was actually pregnant. She gave birth to Tiger, Freckles, and three other siblings. (We found homes for the other three; they were named Aggie, Clementine, and Kalamazoo. We still see Aggie from time to time, though she’s since been renamed.)
McGonagall is very reclusive. It is hard for a visitor to the house to catch a glimpse of her. In fact, there are a lot of days that go by when I don’t see much of her either. But on this particular day, she was curious about me crawling on the floor with my camera.
Marie took this photo of Tiger while setting up her new room:
I got this photo of him sniffing at the camera:
Marie took this photo of herself yesterday.
She’ll often look for photos of people, animals, plants, etc on the web to use as references for her artwork. E.g. if she needs to draw a horse, she’ll look for a photos of horses. She usually doesn’t copy them exactly – she’s interested in the shading and the proportions of one part of the body to another, things like that.
She told me that it’s sometimes hard to find good references because of the lack of resolution on many of the images published on the web. This is one of the photos that she took of herself to use as a reference. She put the camera on a piece of furniture and used the self timer to take this photo. Aside from cropping and scaling, I’ve done no editing on it.
Joe came over yesterday to help his Mom with some chores. In this photo, he was helping his Mom move the futon from the workout room to the new guest room (which is Marie’s old room).
I made another pass through some of Marilyn’s photos last night and found a few that I like of Bow Tie Arch and one of Corona Arch.
Marilyn took this photo, in which I appear, on our hike out to the area in the morning. It appears that I was taking a photo of Marilyn at the same time as she was taking a photo of me!
This photo of Bow Tie Arch was taken late in the day. It shows more of the area than the rest of the photos. Corona Arch does not appear in this photo, but is only a short ways off to the right. When hiking out to Corona Arch, you pass in front of Bow Tie Arch, going from left to right in this photo. One of the things that I immediately found interesting about the scene was the discoloration or perhaps growth (lichen, perhaps?) where the water runs down when it rains. The dark streaks are either black or a deep blue depending upon how you view it.
Here’s a closer look at Bow Tie Arch and two of the small dry waterfalls below it.
Finally, here’s a shot of Corona Arch. What surprised me about this photo was how bright and golden the arch appeared even though the sun was on the other side. We had gone back later in the day to get photos of the arch from this angle thinking that the photos would be better. But this one was taken in the morning.
She was practicing the Maple Leaf Rag at the time. She’s beginning to work on The Easy Winners too. Minutes earlier, she was listening to John Arpin playing it to get a feel for how it goes. (She listened to a different version, one that we have on CD.) When Marie begins working on a piece, she tends to play it very softly, even though her Dad would like her to play it louder so that he can hear it too.
Tiger wanted to visit the balcony too, so I let him join Marilyn and Marie who were there reading. He eventually made his onto the roof, and began his prowl.
But the roof wasn’t interesting enough for Tiger. He wanted to get down to explore the yard too. He found a beam onto which he could jump. He pondered his next move:
His next move was to see if he could squeeze into a tight space…
…so that he could crawl along another beam:
Of course, it’s natural to want to rest for a while after crawling on your belly.
But it only required a short hop to the tarp-wrapped, folded-up ping pong table to get down.
Once he jumped down, I scooped him up and brought him inside. He’ll have to wait for another day to prowl the yard.
Now that the kittens are gone, we’ve been letting our cats out onto the balcony. They enjoy sitting on the cat gym that we built for the kittens. Sometimes, they watch birds as Callisto is doing here:
Earlier today, I let Freckles out on the balcony, where she too watched birds for a while:
But, then she got bored, and started to explore…
..venturing to the top of the roof:
Marie became worried about Freckles so she, too, ventured out onto the roof. She caught Freckles…
…and returned her…
…safely to the balcony.
