Carving Characters

The week started with a trip up to Mesa, Arizona, for a big woodcarvers’ show. The competition had hundreds of entries, and so much creativity you could almost drown in it! I took a few pictures of works that caught my fancy…

I’m not sure what these birds are… except amazing!

I loved this bookworm! Maybe I’ll try one someday…

This looks like a book “that almost writes itself!”

I’m not sure if Grandpa is rescuing the kiddo from Grandma with a rolling pin… or he’s the one in trouble for playing during chore time…

I get a kick out of the rough characters.

This amazing piece was made from cactus skeletons!

One carver called this his self portrait.

This was one of my favorites! What’s not to like with two old folks playing with birds?

Here are a half dozen eggs… wooden eggs, given a bit of personality.

Bill and Mary were exhibiting many cool projects, and I stopped to admire these chip-carved icicles. It looked like a full week’s work to make one of those! Bill showed me how to design them, and how relatively simple they were to carve… and gave me one as a starter project! He said he’d give it to me if I took a picture of the completed project. I did the one I’m holding below in just a couple of hours. It’s pretty rough, but I learned a lot and it was fun!

On the way home from Mesa we stopped to do some birding. We saw more clouds than birds, but it was very pretty.

The other day I noticed one single, perfect little poppy growing in front of our motorhome. Below, you can see it where the palm shadow crosses our sidewalk. Or just look at the closeup… [A couple of days later there were three around the base of the tree, now about 20!]

I used to think Denver was the king of weather changes… but Tucson can do that too! It’s been cold… and one morning we woke up to see SNOW! It stuck on cars, and even on our folded up chairs.

Before we went to Baja, we thought a Dash Cam would be a good idea. It is, but only if you remember to turn it on. Or off after a drive. We forgot a lot… When I originally installed it, I ran the power wiring to the cupboard that houses the audio equipment. That was good for not having to worry about batteries, but we kept forgetting to turn it on or off. So I wired it across the cabinets over the windshield, down the A pillar, and under the dash where it can now turn on and off with the ignition. The task sounds a lot easier now than it turned out to be! I had to remove the instrument cluster to get the wire pulled. Everything takes far longer to do than to think up!