After the Rain..... Chalking In The Park.

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 All of the previous murals are gone.  Wiped clean from the sidewalks...by the rain.   I figured when the rain failed to let up that the Murals were doomed.   But FEAR NOT!  Oh People of Wellman...  For I am Yet Not Bored! 

I can't believe it, but yesterday I actually got back out there and messed around with another cat scene.  I picked a really bad section of concrete.   Here is a little tip on sidewalk art:   Don't Choose a Rough Sidewalk Patch!   It eats up the chalk and takes 

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forever to finish.  I'm sure most people would figure that out right away, but not me.   Because once "confidence" enters your brain,  you begin to do things that would normally cause you to hesitate.  

But it all turned out.  Not exactly like the inspiration piece, but close enough.   And who really knows anyway?   I have to tell myself, "There is no right or wrong answer when it comes to art." ( A "Yoda" Quote, I think....With some embellishments.    Who ever said Star Wars was good for nothing? )  Maybe that is my style... Maybe that is my intention! Maybe that is the limits of my skill... Who is to say?   Just Do it!  ( A Nike Quote?   Why should they get the credit for that? Mom used to tell me those words all the time.)

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But today went a little better.   At least the sidewalk was a little easier to work with.  I should also note that it has been overcast the last two days and there is a threat of rain at any time.  In fact, it began raining on my mid "chalking".   Thankfully, it was only a light drizzle and let up after a few minutes.  

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Cheryl finds Shaggy caps
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Other than that,  not much else is going on.   I should mention Cheryl ran 12 miles on Sunday.  

 And we have been consistently finding Shaggy caps all around the trails in Muscatine and Iowa City.  Unfortunately,  Shaggy caps and Dryad Saddles are the only edible ones we have been finding.   And Dryad Saddle is a little too tough for Cheryl's liking.  In fact, we still have a bag of them from this Spring!   

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But I will take the Shaggy Caps any day.   They are tasty and now that I know they dry up well, we can find as many as we are able and keep them for later.  Bring it on! 

Hope everyone is enjoying the Autumn Weather.   This morning it was just under 50 degrees!  (Chilly for my bike riding...)  But Cheryl is enjoying the cool temps.    I guess Runners like things colder.    

Oh,  I discovered a few things about blogger. Namely:  If you want to move pictures around, you have to give them a title first.   Otherwise, the paragraph the picture is in will become the caption!   To demonstrate,  I will leave the "Add Caption" in the picture so it is obvious.  

Captions for pictures are kind of optional for me.  Sometimes I add them, other times, I let the photo do the talking.  But now that I can move the pics around the words,  things are looking better.  Cheryl said I was becoming a handful whenever I would try to blog.   I mean... It was not like I was yelling at Her! I was focusing my anger at a computer program....   Which is actually quite harmless.  And funny!  If you think about it.    But now the fun is over now that I figured Blogger out.  At least in the short term.

Thanks for stopping in. 

My Chalk In The Park.

Cheryl looks at my latest Mural 

Well, Things are becoming a little to real for me as the only celebrity in a small town. The Chalk Drawings have brought about fame I am becoming uncomfortable with. Yesterday, the supervisor of the park flagged me down and told me I could keep doing chalk drawings anywhere I want.. Including the Band Shell! I guess I should be happy that she did not tell me to stop drawing and start scrubbing.

Running in Muscatine.

We spent the morning in Muscatine as usual and ran along the river. The Dryad Saddle Mushroom has been blooming out again. They usually fruit in the Spring and the Fall, so it makes sense... even with the lack of rain.

Dryad Saddle

Shaggy Cap

I did not harvest any of those, but Cheryl did find some more Shaggy Caps to harvest. The ones we missed a few days ago had become too old and started to turn black. Ink caps are so messy when they disperse their spores.

 

Rough day making a Raccoon.

Drawing on the sidewalk is a hit and miss affair for me. Some days everything flows just right, while others are just a fiasco. On those days, it seems there is nothing I can do that will work out. But yesterday was one of those days where everything seemed to work out just fine. 

Rocket the cat helps.

I even had Rocket, the neighbor's cat, follow me to the park and "help" with the process. Mostly he acted as my "Lovely Item: so people will not be creeped out by a 50 year old man playing with crayons on the trail. I don't know why, but a friendly cat flopping around near by seems to make you more approachable. ( At least I hope so....) Perhaps the theory is because Cats tend to be fussy when choosing who they hang out with. And if they are willing to hang around someone as odd looking as me, I must not be that bad. (Plus, Cats probably think most humans do strange things all the time, so this behavior is normal.)  

Rocket the Cat Naps.

Whatever the reasons, Rocket stayed with me for more of the project and only left when the guy next door started mowing his lawn. It was a beautiful day yesterday, and I really could not see any reason not to be outside most of that time. I was too windy for bubbles, and even for chalk! 

He sleeps while I work. 

 But I did manage to get enough chalk to stick to the trail to make an oriental dragon. Granted, it was a much simpler version, but I liked the design. I even had enough extra colors to fill in the sky around it. You might notice that there is nor orange. You would never think just how limiting a lack of orange color could make things. Cheryl says she has more chalk coming later this afternoon. 

Finished!

 And the disaster "do it yourself" chalk I made two days ago might actually be salvageable. Who knows? I guess we will find out soon enough. But for now, it appears that the rain is going to wash away all my previous designs and clean up the park for me without any scrubbing required. Lucky me! I guess I could use a day off anyway. It is possible that the rain will subside mid-afternoon and I may be able to go out later... If I have the motivation and energy. 

Closeup.

 The Park Supervisor said that people have been walking through the park more trying to find my drawings. That does motivate me to do my bit to help keep people active. Not that I care about that really.. Mostly I just want them to notice my art. And leave me alone... Contradiction? Yeah, I'll admit its a strange thing. 

The kids are helping me out.

One parting thing to mention before I sign off, the Kids from the Day Care have decided to join in on the park decoration. Some of them are actually pretty good! I'm going to assume that they are girls as the "theme" for most of the chalk drawings was "MERMAIDS!" (Not that boys are incapable of drawing mermaids....)

Some have serious drawing skills. 

 I noticed that the only thing that was missing was a black shade, so I left them a few charcoal brickets. A day later, they found them, but I don't think they knew what to do with them. Mostly it looks like they just wrote their names on the sidewalk all over. Well, Maybe they will figure it out later. It took me 20 years to learn that charcoal was the "Black Chalk" that people used. ( I actually discovered it by accident.) Hope everyone is having a fine Sunday today. I feel bittersweet about the rain, but I also hate looking at my art for too long. Having mother nature wipe things clean and allowing me to rebuild can be reassuring, in a way. It makes it seems like it never happened... Like a ghost in the night. I like that mystique. Not to mention that eventually, Stockings are going to take all of our time and the temps will make it a bad idea to be out there drawing on the ground. So this is just a phase, as most of my hobbies tend to be. Thanks for stopping in

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A Very Large Frog. Blogger Still Angers Me.

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It is not every day that we see a frog of this size.   In fact, I don't think I have EVER seen a frog of this size in nature.   Or in captivity, come to think of it.  I know there are "Cane Toads" in Austrailia that are huge... And in Africa, there are a number of Bull Frogs. (Lots of big creatures in Africa, ....  So toads and frogs had better be something of a match.)   

The strange thing is,  we found this thing along the Kewash trail.....

Where there is no water!  There are no ponds, rivers, or streams.   The best thing we could guess was the he came from small drainage ditch that looked like it had been dried out a long time.  

Judging from the size of this guy, I could assume he has been living off of field mice!   I'm sure he could easily eat one if one got too close.  Add in that the moisture of the fields in the form of Humidity and heavy dews might be able to keep this guy hydrated for a very long time.  Perhaps he does not really need a pond after all.  Bear in mind,  he is not a toad! 

We did find it in the same area where we found that Snapping Turtle all those years ago.  THAT was such a strange thing that we nic-named the section of trail "The Turtle Road."   A snapping turtle of that size probably came from the same body of water.    But this body of water is not obvious to us or anywhere near the trail   He is a frog. ( Frog vs Toads are like Turtles vs Tortoises..One is land based, the other is water)  Sorry!  My Biology Nerd kicked in there. 

I found a Tomato Horn Worm on my tomato plants yesterday.   I wanted to bring him inside and hatch him out, but Cheryl reminded me what happened last time. ( Wasp had already laid eggs on him and he died)   I figured I would let him  eat that backyard plant as we currently have more tomatoes than we know what to do with. 

And lastly,  A few more chalk drawings in the park.   Things are getting harder now that the heat had kicked back up.   Add in that I always seem under time pressure and mindful of observers.  Today,  and entire class from the middle school came up and watched me!   What can I say?  Sometimes the art flows and other times it does not.    

Well,  now the fun begins to see if I will be able to post this on blogger.   My patience is at an all time low as I tried making my own chalk today and failed miserably!   After a brief moment of profanity,  Cheryl said she would buy me more chalk.  The last set of 100 had no Orange!  And it now appears EVERYTHING I want to put on the sidewalk has some orange in it.  Just my luck.   But I digress!   I shall see if Blogger will be more forgiving today.   Wish me luck!

UPDATE!  Blogger still angers me.  What the heck is going on?  I cut and paste the HTML and it does not work... And the Compose Mode is now WORTHLESS!   HUrry and Fix IT BLogger!   (Sorry for the venting.. it has been a day.) 

Finding Fall Mushrooms, Running The Mississippi, And Fighting With Blogger!

Moments after giving up on ever solving the new Blogger, I was somewhat surprised to discover that I accidentally figured something out. I have been fighting with the new Blogger format for the last several days, and I am not alone! Apparently, several of the other bloggers that I follow are feeling the same frustration. I have been blogging for over 10 years... and nothing was wrong with the set up! But Blogger "fixed " something that was not broke.. and now it is broke broke! But I digress.

I discovered that the HTML mode and the "Compose" mode are NOT what you see in the final posting. This is both confusing AND frustrating as you are unable to see exactly where you are putting your pictures unless you finish posting things. And only then will you see that all the words and pictures are where they need to be. There is a Preview button, but that is frustratingly slow and annoying.

So this entire post is pretty much me trying to figure out how to put my pictures in where they need to be. By the way, I tend to put a lot of pictures in AND I usually download them all at once. The old way would allow me to shuffle them in to my paragraphs simple enough. It was never the best, but it worked for me and I learned how to deal with it. THIS way.. Forces me to download one picture at a time. What if I want more than one picture?

So this way is just far more complicated than I really am used to. I used to be able to focus on what I wanted to say and dod not have to worry about how it was going to look or if things would be messed up in the process.

If you struggle to juggle, use fewer balls! So that is why there seems to be random photos in this posting. TO see if I can get things to work out on purpose, rather than by accident.

Anyway, I may as well post the pictures of our Muscatine adventures today. In addition to running along the Mississippi, we also found a small cluster of Shaggy Cap mushrooms. They are ink cap mushrooms, so they will begin to dissolve their cap as they spread their spores. For this reason, many people do not eat them, as they appear to rot before your eyes.

I wanted to see if I could get some to dry up. They are a tasty mushroom with additional health benefits. Foraging for them in the wild is the only way to get them, but that usually means you have to eat them immediately. However! With our dehydrator, it may be possible to keep them in storage without them rotting away!

I have been working on dehydrating my tomatoes... with mixed success. Cheryl says she will end up juicing them for sauce. We shall see how things turn out. Well, that is all for me today. I can see that I seem to be messing things up again. If the Preview check is working properly... which I assume it is. Very Frustrating Blogger! Downloading pictures takes forever and is ticking me off as well. I should probably end this before I say something bad. Hope everyone else who is struggling with Blogger is having better success.

An Experiment with the New Blog Format.

With all my complaining on the blog..ABOUT the blog, Far Side Of Fifty has offered a hand and a hint on how to deal with the random picture placement the new format throws at me. So this will be a test to see if I can figure it out. By the way, I'm NOT a "Coder". Yes! Two college degrees and I know how to use computers..just not program them. ( Not everyone is so high tech!) But I do have the ability to learn... and I'm not too old to do so. ( My Dad would say that when he did not want to do anything.) So here it goes!

I wanted to post a few of my latest chalk drawings on the blog on a random day. I had so many pictures of the Visiting Relatives and the Mall Closing that I simply had not where to fit them in. Add in that to make room on my computer, I ended up deleting some! So, Best to cram them all in now while checking out the advice from a Fellow Blogger.

Flaming Oes!

Looks like there are still gaps in the text. And, being a wordy writer, I tend to enjoy writing a vast epic and then adding in the pictures after I have finished the narration. This method, seems slow. But... at least it appears to be working?

  I flip from HTML to Compose to see if the pictures are going where I want them to.  I really miss the old Microsoft ONE program that allowed me to place pictures, videos, and links where ever I wanted them and the text would automatically surround the pictures with no gaps in text Ah, the good old days.

All right, 

I still do not have the hang of things,  so looks like it will be trial and error from now on.     Right!  Anyway,  The local's have been pegging me as the "total Wierd Guy" Now that I draw with chalk AND play with bubbles.    Next they will see me flying my kite in the park and wonder where my "handler" is.  ( That would be Cheryl... if she was not so busy ignoring me and doing her own thing.)  I guess many people in small towns don't see sidewalk artist very often.  

 

 I try to tell them it is not a big deal... in fact,   it is kind of strange.  But they insist  I have talent and all that.  ( Seriously,  it is like doodling and filling it in with crayon.   Everyone did these things in Highschool, right?) I wanted to attempt the "Starry Night" with cats.   Let me tell you, copying a crazy man like Vincent Van Gogh is not as easy as one might think.    Still, I think the picture turned out better than the actual drawing.  

I actually had enough energy left over to draw a Chibi Leopard.   I picked a very bad place to put it though.  The sidewalk was very rough and I was running out of chalk colors.   Thankfully I got a new set of colors today.   Yeah Cheryl the Shopper.

Alright,  That was a disaster.  I have used up all of my patience and I think I got one picture to end up where I wanted it to be.   And I don't even remember who I did it.   Frustrating!   I will take another whack at it tomorrow.   IN the mean time,  Thanks for stopping in. 

A Saturday in Marshaltown With Family and Memories.

 

The J.C. Penny is closing in Marshaltown.  And Cheryl's Grandfather had been the Manager there for 25 years ( or so... we don't really know.   It was a VERY long time.)  HE retired and had passed on to the great blue yonder,  But memories still exist of him in the town he called home.  

Andy,  Cheryl's Brother, had scheduled a trip to visit the store one last time before being closed forever.   As luck would have it,  one of the old employees was STILL THERE!  Janet had worked at that J.C.Penny  for 40 years.  40!  IT was her first job and she remembers Grandpa back when she first started ( when she was only 16 years old.)  

We flagged her down and she let us in the back to show us Grandpa's old office and a bunch of old photo books that had been taken over the years.   She pulled out all of the photos that had Grandpa in them and gave them to Andy, along with a bunch of other J.C. Penny trophies and awards,  lanyards and magnets.   I'm assuming Andy has plans for a display in his basement arcade.  

That J.C.Penny store was pretty small.  And a number of people who worked there had been there years.  we even met someone who had been there longer than Janet.   She had transferred to another store, but came back to check things out and say her goodbyes.    Surprisingly, the store was well maintained for being a closeout sale.   Most closeout sales end up looking ransacked after the initial announcement.   Tanya (Andy's wife.)  went on a shopping spree, snapping up all of the bargains.    It looked fairly busy there as well.  It made us question why it was being shut down in the first place. 

Marshaltown Mall... Empty! 

Cheryl and Andy have a little fun in the 
absence of authority. 

Aside from the pandemic, and questionable government policies that have been hostile to business lately,  we figured that the Mall where it had been for all those years (Moved to the mall in 1972?) was on the way towards extinction. Cheryl and Andy ran around like kids,  telling stories of all of the stores that "used to be there" when they were young.  It appeared that only Bed, Bath, And Beyond was the final holdout store. Now that the J.C. Penny store is going,  we wondered what it might become in the future. 

Later, we went out to eat and caught up on what is new in Michigan.  ( Not much, apparently) We did a short walk in the downtown section and checked out the renovation/rebuild of the courthouse.   I believe it was damaged during the Tornado a couple years ago.   But Marshaltown got hit with those high winds a few weeks ago.  There was a lot of damage that could have been caused by that as well. 

Courthouse damage being fixed. 

Flattened corn in the fields. 

For instance!  The corn!   There was huge swaths of corn missing in the cornfields!   Many silos were also collapse from the high winds.   We have seen corn flattened, but uprooted?!   It was a crazy sight. 

Fall Field Flowers are OUT! 

Cheryl runs 10 miles today! 

As for today,  Cheryl and I are relaxing at home.   She ran 10 miles this morning as he cooler temps are right in her zone for best exercise.  I have been chalking and repairing my bike.  ( replaced a tire.)   Other than that,  we plan on enjoying the rest of the day by resting and hanging with the cat.   

Hiro in the Catnip/

Hiro discovered the pile of catnip I poured out on the porch.  It was taking up room in my Hops drawer.   I actually thought the cats did not like it because every time I put some out, they largely ignored it.  But pour out a pile on the porch... and cats go crazy! 

Not very happy with the new layout. 

And finally,  I dislike the Blogger revamp.  It is not intuitive or user friendly.  My pictures go all over the place when I try to insert them into the format.  And I can't seem to be able to send Blogger my friendly imput on what I think of the new lay out.   Hopefully my pics and paragraphs will make sence and I will be able to tolerate things as I move along.   We shall see

Hope everyone is having a fun and relaxing weekend so far.