Too Tired to Blog...

Not too often am I too tired to blog...but today I really am! I spent three hours this morning, outside in the heat, learning all about metal sculpting with Hugh. What a dear of a man! His wife is too. Today for my first lesson, I leaned to use a number of tools and he had me practice cutting, chamferring, grinding and hammering different pieces of metal. I even took a stainless steel spoon, hammered it flat..then used a ballpien hammer to texturize the steel. In the end, I bent a nice curve back into the spoon. It never occured to me that you could take an ordinary stainless steel spoon and turn it into a piece of art!

After we had been out there for a few hours working in the heat of the day, Hugh's wife Barbara, carried out a tray with ice-cold drinks for us. She had stirred some mineral water into apple juice and it sure was refreshing on a hot steamy day!

The lesson ran a little over the three hours...mostly because Hugh kept remembering one more thing that he wanted to show me. I got to see his larger-than-life sculptures...all "found metal." He had welded them together into all sorts of things, mostly people, birds, and dragons. I also got to see some of his daughter Eva's originals. One painting I recognized from her web site.

Once I was headed home, I called Martine and she invited me out on her boat. So, I stopped at K-mart and bought a bathing suit, towel and sunglasses, then headed over to the Marina in Edgewater. I spent the rest of the day with Martine and Jeff tooling around on the South River. We ended up anchoring on one of the creeks and spent some time there swimming.

By early evening Taylor (their son) and Ashley joined us. I finally got to see Martine's little grandson Tristan. He is ten months old and is a real curly headed cutie. After we got off the boat we headed to La Fiesta, the local mexican restaurant and had dinner together. Tristan entertained us by doing all sorts of cute things...but especially by saying "Uh oh" then looking down as if to see what had dropped. Each time he did something cute, we would all bust out laughing. It was a perfect, but exhausting day!

I just got out of the shower...that was great after feeling sticky and gross all day. Phew! Tired! I'm turning in now...