What's been going on?

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 Here are some recent pieces of mail art, including one that I added pieces to related to music. I sent it to a Mail Art call exhibit in Columbia - theme city of music.

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Besides, making my own Mail Art, I've been busy scanning mail coming in for the bicycle themed exhibit.  This is in conjunction with the UCI World Races which will happen very soon here in Richmond, VA, USA. Exciting!

Oh I have to get busy posting and making signs and lists of participants for display at the venue.

 We took a few days away from the city. My DIL found a lovely Airbnb for us to stay in at Duck, NC, on the Outer Banks (OBX)

It was a great location, short walk to the ocean, and to the sound.

It was wonderful to hear the sounds of the waves, again. Two of the days, the no swimming flag was up, as the ocean was wild! We were sad to say good bye but are already thinking of our next stay there.

So many days have gone by....

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 Why have I been gone so long?
So many things have been going on and all good!

For one thing, we went off to the beach for an entire week, renting a beach house with family and friends. It was delightful. We could see, and hear, the Atlantic ocean from the house, a short walk along a wooden path took us up over the dune onto the beach. The beach was very lovely, with hardly anyone on it as it's early in the season.
The weather was perfect.

Our grand-girl had a great time in her gigantic sand box.
 We can't wait to do this again.

A couple of the cards above were made at the beach with scraps of paper cut from the beach brochure.

 We saw the sunrise on the ocean and the sunset on the sound. How perfect.

The water was too cold to do more than walk along the edges.

 We saw lots of dolphins leaping and lots of pelicans flying, often they were in a line low over the dune. Both the dolphins and pelicans were closer than I'd ever seen before. How perfect.

One day, there were several bicycles parked on the board walk to the beach, behind our house.

I took this photo and used it on my new bicycle blog, for entries to my Mail Art call. See it HERE and do send me something.

This has been something keeping me busy. Also, while at the beach, I set up a blog to archive the artists coloring book that my honey produced. You can see it HERE.

Some images...

For some reason the photos of the irises and the tulips, which were taken using my cell phone, look somewhat like watercolours. Spring has sprung. The tulips are all over my neighborhood but I've only seen one iris in bloom so far. The ones in the vase came, alas, from Trader Joe's (yes, I finally made it out to the far west end of my city to shop there, and quite honestly, it was worth the drive.)
Ryan, our 8 year old cousin, was visiting for Passover, and made this lovely addition to Smitty "bedroom." I don't know how much Smitty dog likes it, but we sure do.
I'm showing you my old, and only bicycle, which has a flat tire, but will soon be put in working order. My neighbor wants to take me on an excursion. He'll be fixing up my bicycle in preparation. I've been to the gym 3 times in 2 days to ride a stationery bicycle to get myself prepared, since I haven't ridden my bicycle since I broke my arm 3 years ago this coming June. Here's the thing, the bike had nothing to do with my breaking my arm. What accounts for my not riding my bicycle since then? Fear? Could that be it? I'm going to over-come it and see where my neighbor leads me. I'll keep you posted on this.

Courbet at the Grand Palais

Yesterday, in spite of the fact that I have a cold, and we weren't sure how the metro was running because of the strike, we decided to go see the Courbet show. We took the metro from St. Paul so we wouldn't have to change trains. The train came quickly but was very crowded, we squeezed on, and six stops later were at the Champs-Elysees right in front of the Grand Palais. The line, which wasn't very long, was not for tickets,. but rather for security inspection of bags and going through the detector like at an airport. The poster for the show is of a self-portrait done in 1843-45 and one of our friends said it looked like a crazy Johnnie Depp.




The show was very extensive, with 120 paintings, 30 graphic works, and 60 photographs. There were lots of people viewing the exhibit which always amazes us when we come here. People really do go to art exhibits. Children, too. It was time for a chocolate chaud(hot chocolate) when we finished so we crossed over to the Petit Palais for their cafe, snagging a couple more of those Phillipe Starck cup and plate sets for our collection. The museum was closing early, at 4:30 they said, because of the strike! We didn't get the connection but there it was.

We strolled down the Champs-Elysees towards the Place de la Concorde. It was crazy with cars as usual, but I caught this bicyclist seemingly alone for a moment.