Because, really, who ever gets tired of Bay Area sunsets???

Posted on December 29, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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So yeah, my two daughters and I, along with a couple of my brothers and a nephew and niece, all went down to that dog park overlooking San Francisco Bay.

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If I look happy, it is because I was just petting a bunch of dogs.

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I love this spot.

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There are my girls, Mollie and Jessica, watching the sunset, with San Francisco in the background.

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And that is my brother, Henry, rushing over to the water to take a photo.

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I never get sick of the sunset photos.

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Or the Bay Area.

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I love that city.

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I love the colors!

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It is the artist in me.

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A vase that looks like a sunset, a heart trapped in glass… and a real sunset… that looks like a vase… maybe?

Posted on December 29, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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My mom loved the vase I made for her in my glass blowing classes.

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It now resides on top of her old player piano.

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My wife loved the little vase I made for her in colors that match our remodeled home. She was actually moved by the heart in glass.

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I mean, it isn’t anatomically correct… but when you tell a woman that she always has your heart… well…

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I also have some photos from that dog park down by the bay.

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I have enough pictures to do another post, so I will give more details later.

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Sunset over the Golden Gate never gets old.

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San Francisco looked lovely.

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And the sunset colors really do match that vase I made for my mom.

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I took most of these with my good camera.

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But it isn’t that good for selfies… so… I leave you with this last photo taken with my phone…

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Yeah… I took a photo of my thumb…

Posted in My art, My travels, Pictures of me, Stories of my life, sunsets | Tagged , , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

That crazy Christmas dinner… that we do twice… part 2…

Posted on December 28, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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The flaming plum pudding, a staple of our fancy English Christmas double-dinners. I won’t tell you about plum pudding again. I do every year. Search back for it, or Google it. But it is hard to take a picture of a burning dessert in a dark room. You can’t use the flash or it drowns out the flames. But the shutter stays open for a long time, and any movement of the camera makes the photo blurry. This is one of my better photos of plum pudding.

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Our second Christmas dinner was as good as the first one.

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We had the same pan-roasted potatoes as the night before.

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We had the peas, and the small Yorkshire puddings.

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And, of course, the roast beef.

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The biggest difference is that on Christmas night, I got a green paper crown in my ‘cracker’, and on the second night, I got a purple one.

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And now, a few random photos of my little cousins.

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I might stop at their house in Santa Cruz on my way home to San Diego, to babysit the two boys, so their mom and dad can go out on a New Year’s Eve date.

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Unless I get sick. I might be getting sick. About one third of the people here are sick, have been sick, or are getting sick. That is the downside of having 15 or more people living in one house for a few days.

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But hey, traditions…

 

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That crazy Christmas dinner… that we do twice… part 1…

Posted on December 27, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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Christmas dinner at my mom’s house in the San Francisco Bay Area has evolved into a complicated, two-headed beast. We do a full, traditional English Christmas dinner on Christmas day… and then we do it again the following day. It is mostly because one of my brothers and his wife and three kids don’t come until the day after Christmas these days. So we have one fancy dinner with friends and whoever is here… and then we do it again. They are both big productions, with anywhere from 15 to 25 people attending.

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My little cousins came for the second dinner this time. That is Clark, helping my daughter, Mollie, put the crackers on the table. You might remember him from times I have stopped in Santa Cruz to visit. His little brother is here too, but might not show up in this post.

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When I say ‘crackers’, I don’t mean snacks. These are the English kind. A colorful paper tube that you pull apart and it goes ‘snap’ with a small explosive charge. They contain a paper crown, a small toy, and a piece of paper with some bad jokes on it.

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It is all just part of the madness.

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You have to go with the flow. There are a lot of people staying at my mom’s house for Christmas week, and many more coming and going. If you look past Clark, you will see one of the tikis I carved for my mom.

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Somehow, my mom found little holiday headgear for them.

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Anyway… where were we?

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Oh yes… the table is almost set…

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And the second roast beef for the second Christmas dinner is resting…

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Not as rare as would be acceptable at an actual English dinner… but… mmmmm.

Join me later for part two of dinner, part two. HA!

 

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Christmas monkey!!!

Posted on December 26, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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Hey, don’t judge us… we have weird Christmas traditions.

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Okay, technically, giving cheap rubber masks as gifts isn’t really a tradition… yet…

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It might be, starting next year.

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My 94-year-old mother. She makes a good koala.

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Ummm….

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We do have a tradition of giving matching… and often silly… pajamas. This year, the ladies got some fairly tasteful night wear.

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That is sort of scary, but my younger daughter, Mollie, loved it.

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My wife doesn’t want to be in my blog… but that is such a good picture of her…

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One last picture of the tree before everyone swarmed in, and that pile of gifts was turned into a hurricane of ripped wrapping paper and smiles.

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I still like my mask the best.

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I end this post with some sunset photos taken as we all ate Christmas dinner. I don’t have photos of the dinner. That is because we do the same dinner again tonight, the day after Christmas.

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We had 18 people at dinner last night… Christmas day… and we had the whole English dinner, the roast beef, the Yorkshire pudding, the plum pudding, the cracker… or poppers… which are not food, but those little tubes with the gifts and the paper crowns and the small explosive charge that the English love. My mom invited guests to round out the guest list last night. Today, another of my brothers and his family show up, as well as some cousins you might remember from other posts. Then, we do it all again.

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Lovely red ornament…

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Wait… that is the sunset again.

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I can’t believe it, but, as I sit here, on the morning of the day after Christmas, I am actually all caught up with my photo posts. See you soon!

 

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Christmas, space ships… and a monkey…

Posted on December 26, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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Christmas at my mom’s house in the Bay Area. Did I even do a post yesterday? I was so busy, I can’t remember. A huge, fancy dinner for 18 people… which we will do again tonight… with all the same food… okay, we can get to that later.

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These two photos… one with and one without flash… show the last moments of the quiet before the storm. When no one else is awake yet. Half the family isn’t even here yet.

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I’m not going to bore you with endless pictures of my kids opening presents. Or of me opening them.

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But my younger daughter’s boyfriend and my older daughter’s husband did get some cool Star Wars toys.

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The force is strong in Dashawn.

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But Jason turned to the dark side.

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This drone technology has come a long way. These things can battle with little lasers. They talk. They fly really well.

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They had a lot of fun with those things yesterday, between all the other stuff going on.

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“Scanning for rebel scum!”

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Also, I got a monkey mask… more on that later.

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Well, you knew we would end up in San Francisco during our Christmas trip, right?… part 2…

Posted on December 24, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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No, that isn’t a really long cable car. That is three cable cars in a row.

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But you can’t have a post about San Francisco without cable cars.

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Right now, we are getting ready to eat dinner. It’s Pizza. Because the fancy dinners start tomorrow night.

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In the middle of that photo are the scary glass elevators we rode in for the photos in the last post I did.

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Inside that hotel, we saw a castle made of spun sugar.

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And a giant ginger bread and sugar castle.

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You could go back to any Christmas post from years past, look at the photos of all the Christmas dinners, and they would be the same ones you will see tomorrow.

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But I am jumping ahead by 24 hours.

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Christmas lights in a mall, reflected in a car… that was also in the mall… being given away.

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And with that, I will bid you adieu…

a 11Christmas morning starts early. My daughters wake up, and then they wake everybody else up. And even though Mollie, the youngest, is in college now, you would never know it by the excitement level on Christmas day.

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Well, you knew we would end up in San Francisco during our Christmas trip, right?… part 1…

Posted on December 24, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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I had to go up in a very tall, scary, glass elevator for that photo.

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It’s Christmas eve, and we did our annual pilgrimage to the city.

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Bong, James Bong.

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That’s not even a real dog.

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We always head across the Oakland Bay Bridge from my mom’s house in the East Bay, to look at the lights, and the window decorations in the city.

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Soon, the madness of the season will commence, and you will be along for the ride.

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My daughters… and those guys…

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Right now, there are only 8 people at my mom’s house. Soon, there will be many more. And I mean the ones that are staying there for at least a few days…

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There will be the traditional fancy English Christmas dinner… that we do twice… from scratch… two days in a row…

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But don’t worry…
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We will make it through the madness together.

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More stuff I see hiding in my fence… part 3…

Posted on December 24, 2017 by pouringmyartout

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I almost didn’t see the cute little fish hiding in there.

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But the baby elephant, I didn’t even need to squint. Okay, it is only his eye and part of his wrinkly little trunk, but still…

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Baby It’s Cold Outside… my ass… the anatomy of a date rape song…

Posted on December 24, 2017 by pouringmyartout

pouringmyartout's avatarPouring My Art Out

I was going to do a scathing rewrite of this creepy Christmas song, to try, in a funny way, to highlight just how creepy it really is… but when I Googled the words, I realized that I didn’t need to bother. The song speaks for itself. This song was written in 1944. You have to remember to take it the context of the times. Women were still expected to be virgins when they got married. Reputations could be ruined if a lady spent the night with a man, let alone actually slept with him. But even if we forget that fact and place this in a modern context, it is never alright for a man not to take no for an answer. And pouring drinks into a woman to get her to sleep with you is not okay… then or now or ever.

So, instead of rewriting the woman’s part of the song……

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