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Last week Ben, Rita, Anna and I possed down to Tacoma to see Juliet’s senior sculpture show.

The art was amazing! Juliet’s pieces were glorious-large metal and rubber structures, but the rubber was this exquisitely translucent material in delicate shades of green and gold.. It looked a lot like glass, but flexible. The shapes curved sensuously and organically, like leafs and flowers, growing up from the floor or dangling mysteriously from the ceiling. One was a gorgeous gold chamber that one could climb inside and meditate in, or simply gaze in awe at the mosaic of gold fragments bound together to create the structure.

I wished I could take it home with me.

Yay art!

All the show pics here.

Otherwise, I’m pretty damned happy with the way he turned out.

Had myself a sweet little wander down at Carkeek last week.. Couldn’t resist the sand and stones and seaweed-they wanted to be a sea lion.

Mo’ pics here.

Wooohooooo! Finally enough good sticky snow to make a nice big sculpture!

See more pics on flickr.

Aaaaaaah, it isn’t really winter ’til I’ve made a snow beast.

When Hell freezes over, the Devil Ducks call on their Ice Queen.

Yay snow! Unfortunately, it wasn’t terribly good packing snow, but I did manage to sculpt this sweet Duck Queen out on the hot tub. I was quite pleased when I was able to pluck the daisies, complete with their little fresh-fallen snow caps and poke them into her head for horns.

The alder cones and catkins made perfect eyes and eyebrows.

More pics of ducks and my late night snow walkabout here.

It was an awesome Turkey day! Sam, BB, Delayne and I farmsat on Whidbey Island and Rita and Ben came out friday evening for to cookandNOM!

Mmmm…

Quite an eventful holiday.. The three goats(Merriment, Snow Princess and Chardonnay-or as the kids call them: Butt Goat, Nice Goat and Starved Goat) turned out to be quite skillful escape artists and so we spent quite a bit of time rounding them up and juryrigging the gate shut so that Merriment(Butt Goat) couldn’t eat ALL the hay.

Not to mention calming the hyper young german shepherd, Savannah(and cleaning up poop-not my favorite part). She spends much of her time locked in the laundry room, so she’s VERY ENTHUSIASTIC when let out. Luckily, our group included some avid dog fans, so she was well taken care of, even if she did still spend much of her time watching(~pantwhinepant~) the ladder for the poor cat which hardly ever comes downstairs, except to make a mad dash for the kitchen loft where her food is.

The kids had a great time feeding the chickens(Rowan practically adopted them) and ducks and we all enjoyed wrangling the goats and petting Velvet, the donkey, who seemed a bit depressed this time around.

It was lovely to get ‘lost’ in the forest, which is honeycombed with paths to yurts and cabins and farmsteads. We also took a day trip out the Double Bluff Beach and there was much sliding down bluffs,

log walking, admiring clay bastions, stacking rocks(on Delayne’s part) and I made a very odd cliff creature in the sand/clay/sandstone bluff. Most of the oddness due to the act that the head I was carving kept shifting and falling off. Oh well, it was fun.

Our feast was splendid and abundant. We had turkey, stuffing, mashed ‘taters, Rita’s amazing juiced orange sweet potatoes, cider…

(possibly a little too much cider?)

garden pumpkin and Ben’s delicious gravy(made at the risk of his life and to the detriment of his pants).

Dessert was a most delicious triple berry pie that Delayne and I found at a sweet bakery in Langley. He and I had a lovely little browse in an amazing import store there. They have gorgeous rugs, bizarrely cool hats, exquisite gemstone jewelry and these ginormous chairs carved from whole old growth tree trunks-all smooth oiled wood loveliness. I absolutely lOVE them. If I had a few extra thousand smackers, I’da brought one home for sure. As it was, I rang every bell in the place and brought three of the sweet little ones home. Amazing, hand beaten metal bells from India-they all have different tones and I chose the sweetest three of all the little ones.

Aaaaaaaaaah, such a marvelous time. More pics of farmy goodness and all our adventures here.

I’m so lucky to have such brizilliant friends and family.

Made these interesting characters in class(’cept for the wizard dude in the back-he’s been lurking on my shelves for quite a while), as demos for my students.

Only a couple classes left.. It’s sure been fun.

The new Mountaineers climbing wall at Magnusson is extremely cool.

So extremely cool, in fact that it utterly defeated Sam and I.

Oh wells, we had fun goggling at it and chasing the resident crow away from our leftovers until he wickedly spilled both of our sodas in vengeance.. Then I took him(Sam, not the mettlesome corvid) to the Brig(where I teach clay class) and showed him the cool whale sculpture and the pea patch and we ate lots of raspberries and then went on a gelato procuring mission, starting with the kidnapping of BB so that she could come eat gelato and go walkies at Greenlake.

More wall, whale and walkies pics here.

It’d been way too long since I saw this man:

It was so nice to reconnect with him. Thank you, Yoni. It’s been a wonderful week of feasting, meditating, partying, gutting punkins, giggling with Sam, beachin’, talkin’, walkin’.. All the goodest, bestest things in life.

I made a flotsam maiden at the beach while he chi gonged, too.

See more pics here.

Aside from the stoopid chicken pox episode, it’s been a fabulous few weeks. My dear friend Yoni flew in from Ireland-well, he’s been living in England mostly lately, but did a sweet sojourn in the isle of Guinness-to visit.

Yay! Sure missed ‘im. It was so good to catch up on everything and see his cool pics of Avalon. Ooooooh.

I had to postpone my Knotty Lingerie party due to Sam’s itchypoxybadness, so instead, Ms Rowan came over and we hung out and laptopped and laughed our butts off. Then, sunday, we had a passel of friends over for pumpkin madness!

Yoni made punkin soup, Rita brought punkin cookies, Ben made punkin pie and we all scooped the guts out of a buncha punkins and made loverly lanterns.

Flickr’d pics here.