Whenever I visit my mom in the Bay Area, I always end up taking a few pictures of the sunsets from her deck…

I particularly love it when the fog or clouds combine with the sunset to make the sky look like molten lava…

On the other hand, I hate the stupid telephone wires. You might remember I did one whole post where I removed all the wires in Photoshop, but that takes a long time.

Telephone wires are the natural-born enemy of the sunset photo…

And TV antennas… what can you do?

Oh well… As an artist, I always respond to colors. The Bay Area has spectacular sunsets, but there is one other thing that stands out about the bay area when you are talking about colors. Because in the Bay Area, people tend to be unrestrained when it comes to how they paint their houses…

The Bay Area is not a conservative place. People express themselves. And what better way to express yourself than by getting a little crazy with how you paint your house. Hey, I am talking about house painting here… try not to get distracted by the statue of the crazy elk. You are supposed to be looking at that blue house.

Admit it, that is just plain whimsical. Maybe you don’t want to live in that house… or even have it next door to your house… but if you drove by that house now and then, you would almost have to smile, right?

I mean, that is one happy house. If you think I am exaggerating about the houses in the Bay Area, do a search on my blog for: ‘weird houses’, or ‘crazy houses’ or some other such combination of the word house with any word that means ‘unusual’, because I have done a whole series of pictures about this before, but I can’t remember what I called any of them… and that would give you an excuse to poke around through my old posts… and you know you want to.