We made it to Alabama, just outside Pensacola, without incidence. Spent a night in the parking lot of the Flying J truck stop and got in early the next day. Nice to have gas prices back to reasonable again! We will be at the Styx River RV Resort for two weeks.
Spent the weekend on Pensacola Beach and had a nice relaxing time. Visited all of our favorites spots and people. Shane made us a special sushi roll using wasabi oil that was spicy and delicious. We puppy sat a friend’s new puppy, Miss Olympia, a very cute 10 week old american bulldog. Other than geting the pecking order established with her, Jack and Jinjer had a great time running with her on the beach.
I started compiling photos for my new photo essay I have been wanting to do for a long time now, the One Shoe Diaries. Check it out. It will be a great and fun project to do.
Finished another underwater dolphin painting. It is a much larger one this time. I hope I can sell it at the Navarre Art Festival this weekend.
Painted yet another underwater dolphin painting, the best one yet. I started on my “Gulf from Overhead” hyper-realistic painting, kinda hard to shift gears from quick oil painting to slow detailed acrylic painting.
The Navarre show went pretty well. Met some nice people who created chimes, charms and mmore with fused glass. I did not sell my large dolphin painting but it garnered a ton of attention. We sold the usual treefrog, dragonfly and sunsets. The collage we did of the tree frog sold immediately! And the small collage eventually sold also.
Here is a great example of the power of the internet. Most people have heard of the website, MySpace. For those who have not it is a place where people can display a profile of themselves for others to look at, it is a great way to track down or keep up with friends, even make new ones. I guess even find “romance” :) So anyway, Sharon has had a profile on MySpace for a couple of months now. Periodically she has found old friends from high school and such, well this week she located someone much more dear to her. Her half-sister whom she has never met!
Let me start with some background. When Sharon and Rachel were little girls, ages 1 and 3, their father left their mother. The reasons of why and the circumstances surrounding it I am not going to get into. They randomly saw or heard from him for a few years then all contact was lost. The last time she heard anything involving him was around 1998 when he attempted to contact Sharon through her Nanny. And Nanny did not get a phone number for her to call him back, and Sharon never heard from him again.
Now it is 8 years later and through a small miracle Sharon has been able to contact her lost sister over the internet, Elise. When she realized she did in fact locate her sister, she immediately burst into tears. She looked over every inch of Elise’s profile, wanting to know all she could learn about her and the other siblings, Doug and Leslie. Finally she sent a message to her, just hoping Elise would respond positively. That day passed and Sharon did not receive anything back. It was not until that next morning when she logged on to MySpace to find a message from Elise. A very warm and inviting message. Elise too had thought about Sharon and Rachel and always wanted to get to know them and build a relationship. This was the best news Sharon could have asked for. She was going to get to have a relationship with the siblings she always thought about. The email went on to give information about her and her siblings lives. Sharon soaked it all in. That night Elise called and Sharon for the first time spoke to one of her sisters she has never known. It was an amazing moment for her, and eventually for Rachie as well as Elise called her as well. A new family has started to grow. As of yet they have only spoke with Elise but they are all invited down to Rachie and Donnie’s wedding in December and we are all hoping they can make it.
As for their father, Sharon did learn from Elise that he became totally blind and suffered with many health problems, eventually succumbing to heart complications in 1998, the same year that was the last time he last tried to contact her. I am sure somewhere he is smiling now, knowing all his children will get to know each other.
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