Thankfulness and Quarantine

We hit the 6 week mark since our schools closed and they will remain closed through the rest of the school year. This makes me sad because my boys have really awesome teachers this year and this was the first school year where I was actually able to volunteer more in their classes. But I understand and I’m not complaining, just sad. I can only hope that the hot summer climate and folks continuing to maintain social distance will allow us to go back to school in August and not have to start a new school year virtually.

I know that we are tremendously lucky in that my husband still has a job and I am able to continue to do freelance work from home. I’m grateful that I am able to be home to help my kids figure out online schooling and that I never got rid of my old MacBookPro, so both of my kids can have their own designated school space. I’m grateful for Google Classroom and for our amazing teachers and how they have moved curriculum online almost seamlessly.

I’m thankful that I don’t typically struggle with anxiety when the world isn’t dealing with a pandemic, but I have am definitely having my moments with what’s going on in the world. I have a harder time falling asleep at night and when I do, I dream of things happening to me and my family that I cannot control. I dream of swimming in a lake only to have it suddenly turn into an ocean and waves are coming over my head. I dream of hiking in the mountains and rocks are falling from above us or winds are threatening to blow my kids off the trails. Why is it that in my dreams, it’s Mother Nature who’s out to get us??

Local fishing pond. It hasn’t yet been stocked this spring, so it’s been nearly empty!

We are chugging along, figuring out a new sense of normalcy in this utterly unique time we’re experiencing. Yes, there have been pandemics in the past, but this is the first in this day of instant access to news and social media. I think sometimes it’s a tremendous help. Other times it’s a hinderance. I have had to make a point to stay off of Facebook more than a few days these past weeks just to give my mind and stress levels time to settle.

Here are a few more things I’m thankful for:

· Bicycles - My 6yo got a mountain bike for his birthday so now we can do bikes rides together. We’ve been exploring paved bike paths and trails and getting some exercise that doesn’t involve whining from my kids.

· Watercolors - I’m not sure why, but I’ve been so much more inspired to paint these last couple of months. And thanks to technology, a clip to hold my iPhone, and my son’s encouragement to create a YouTube channel, I have done a couple of time lapse videos of new paintings. I have more in the works (in my head), so stay tuned! I want to make a bunch of picturesque spots on Utah’s BLM and public lands, so that’s been my current research.

· Virtual Taekwondo Classes - We’ve been a taekwondo family for years. My oldest started when he was three (he’s now ten) and my youngest started just a couple months shy of his 2nd birthday. Then I started taking adult classes about two years ago. Martial arts have been amazing for my kids when it comes to agility, focus, and discipline, but for me, it’s the longest-running workout program I’ve ever done since adulthood. Our studio has almost-seamlessly moved all of our classes to Zoom. They’re adapting and changing the curriculum to work with the tools and space that we all have at home and it’s been so nice to be able to keep that evening routine in our family. Between my boys and me, we’re doing 4-5 classes each week. They keep my stress and anxiety manageable and are a welcome bit of near-normalcy.

· Virtual Yoga - My gym closed in mid March where I happily enjoyed spin classes, yoga, and lap swimming. I really miss the swimming and spin, but they’ve created yoga classes I can do at home, any time I want. I’m so, so thankful for them.

· FaceTime, Zoom, and Google Hangout - We sang happy birthday to my niece via Zoom when she turned three and we couldn’t be there for a birthday party. We received multiple videos from family and friends when my youngest celebrated his 6th birthday at home. My oldest read a book to his cousins via FaceTime (and will do it again). My kids chat with friends on Google Hangout or Zoom while they build things in Minecraft together. My husband did a Zoom call with our cousins to share how we make mac n cheese. We regularly FaceTime with my sister, brothers, or my parents and eat dinner together. We chat with cousins who live in other states and countries and this pandemic has brought us closer. My kids’ teachers are using Google Hangout to teach lessons, administer tests (my 6yo went up a reading level, yesss!), and spend time with their students.

· Outdoor Spaces - Since the stay-at-home recommendations came from our governor, all city parks, splash pads, skate parks, and bike parks have closed. There is even caution tape wrapped around pavilions that shade picnic tables. We aren’t technically banned from leaving our neighborhood to explore outside, we’re just advised to maintain social distancing. So a couple of times each week we head out to find some wilderness to play in. We’ve driven past quite a few trailheads and parks to see nearly-full parking lots and just kept on driving. Sometimes we end up at our local fishing pond, where we’ve barely seen anyone there, or we drive an hour or more to a more remote spot to enjoy a picnic lunch, some hammock snuggles, and maybe some fishing if there’s a pond or stream. Even some sand to dig in or trees to climb can be enough to keep my boys happy. In these unique times I am SO thankful for where I live.

· My Mother in Law - My MIL was visiting us from California when shit got serious there and shelter-in-place orders were put in place throughout most of the state. She tried to fly home early on and missed her flight. Since then, we just convinced her to stay here. Our house is small (feeling smaller than ever right now), but she has her own bedroom and bathroom. Best of all, she’s cooking up a storm for us and making both my life and my husband’s life easier because of it. She’s enjoying trying new recipes and experimenting with new methods. Knowing that she’s taking care of dinner helps me not stress about having enough time to get my own work done AND be there to help my kids with virtual school. Her presence also lets me leave the house while my husband is at work and take a little alone time when I need it.

· Hammocks - Just because.

What are you thankful for during this tough time? Any positive things coming from it?

Kula Cloth Design Contest

I’ve been a fan of Kula Cloth since I discovered them over a year ago. They make reusable, washable, antimicrobial pee cloths for when nature calls and we’re out on a trail, camping, or on a run with no restroom around. There becomes no need to pack wipes or toilet paper and it’s better for Mother Earth to have less in landfills. They easily clip onto backpacks or fanny packs, they dry quickly, and the best part: they come in beautiful prints; many with artwork created by fellow women artists.

CLICK HERE to vote for my artwork!

Image by Zion Adventure Photog - Arika Bauer

Kula Cloth launched a design contest this week to have a new design printed and asked artists to submit designs. I submitted this watercolor painting I made from Red Cliffs National Conservation Area in southwestern Utah. It’s one of my most favorite places on the planet and home to the endangered desert tortoise, loads of unique wildlife, petroglyphs, and some truly amazing landscapes. Because it’s BLM land, it’s at risk of being developed as the surrounding cities need to accommodate growing communities. There was a proposal to build a highway through part of Red Cliffs and I don’t know if that plan is still happening or if conservationists are still fighting it.

Click on this image to get to the voting page.

Here are a couple gorgeous photos from the Red Cliffs area by Michelle Craig:

Image by Michelle Craig Photography

Image by Michelle Craig Photography

Here are a couple photos I took last year from Red Cliffs:

It’s a stunning part of Utah and worthy of protection from development!

In case you missed the link above, here it is again: CLICK HERE to vote for my artwork! Feel free to share the contest link on social media and vote for your favorites. Voting goes through May 7, 2020 at midnight. Thank you to everyone who’s voted!

Valentine's Day 2020

We don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day. Both my husband and I think it’s a very commercial holiday; we didn’t even celebrate when we were dating. The fact that the anniversary of our first date is January 31st (22 years!) was enough for us to just skip Valentine’s Day all together.

Since my kids started school, we’ve done a smidge more, but still not THAT much. I do step up to reasonably-above-average in the parenting department and make custom valentines for their class parties. Every year I expect them to ask for boxed sets from the store and they continue to surprise me with wanting something fun and custom.

Last year I vowed to not send candy to school. This year I vowed to not send food at all. We scoured Pinterest for ideas and saw fun sayings to go with toy airplanes. A thorough Amazon search for inexpensive airplane gliders at different sizes, price points, and availability to get here within a few days (because you KNOW we didn’t start these until a few days before Valentine’s Day) and we found these great gliders! They came in clear poly bags (which I really liked) and had a bunch of different color combinations.

I took the same cartoon faces I made of my boys from last year and turned them into pilots and I LOVE how they turned out.

I don’t think I will be able to get away with these same cartoons next year. I’ll have to make new ones.

The card stock was printed with two per 8.5x11 page and then I trimmed them with a paper cutter and folded them in half. Two staples attached them to the clear poly bags.

We found a bunch of different sayings for these, and these three were the winners. I wanted to use “you’re so fly” but my kids had NO idea what that meant. I think I showed my age.

Price Breakdown:

Airplanes: Amazon, $16.99 for 36. I ordered two boxes total for my kids’ classes, so $36.44 including sales tax.
Printing: Office Depot, color printing onto #65 card stock, $17 including sales tax
Paper Cutter: already had one
Stapler & staples: already had those

Total: $53.44 which was just about $.74 cents per valentine. And since there are 26 kids in each of my kids’ classes, we had a few extras that we gave to teachers, neighbors, and a few non-school friends. This was definitely more than I wanted to spend, but my kids LOVE how they turned out and so do I. I may have to add these to my Etsy shop for next year!

My Favorite Books

I’m an avid reader. There’s nothing I love more than getting sucked into an amazing story. If there happens to be multiple books in a series; all the better. As a kid I loved reading what most girls read in the late 1980s: The Babysitter’s Club and Sweet Valley High. I loved Beverly Cleary’s Ramona books and the Little House books from Laura Ingalls Wilder (I’m pretty sure I’ve seen every episode of Little House on the Prairie on TV).

When my mom realized I could finish a Babysitter’s Club book in a few hours, she lent me her copy of All Around the Town by Mary Higgins Clark. It’s been more than 20 years since I read it and I can still remember the storyline. The next book of hers I read was A Cry in the Night and I was seriously hooked on her books. I probably read more than a dozen Mary Higgins Clark novels before I finished seventh grade. All throughout my teens and twenties, I read novels from Patricia Cornwell, Michael Crichton, Sue Grafton, Michael Connelly, and more that I’m not remembering right now. I remember cutting class in community college to camp out in the library when I was nearing the end of a really great novel; Patricia Cornwell was the reason for many of those days.

This week I learned that beloved author Mary Higgins Clark passed away at the age of 92. She was the author whose words hooked me into so many fascinating stories and I believe she was the one who cemented my love for reading.

I wanted to share some of my favorite books. These are the books or series that I can go back and reread over and over when I don’t have something new to read. For a very long time, I wasn’t ever able to reread a novel. So to make a list of books that I have loved enough to re-love, that’s really saying something.

All of the links in this post are affiliate links. Purchasing anything through these links helps keep my website running and me fully stocked in watercolor paint. It’s very much appreciated.

SERIES:

The Outlander Series by Diana Gabaldon - These will suck you in and you won’t be able to tell what day it is. It’s historical fiction mixed with romance, drama, mystery, and a smidge of science-fiction thrown in. I know some folks dislike the length, each novel is over 1000 pages, complaining that the author spends too much time with the day-to-day stuff that the main characters go through. That’s the stuff I really love; the stuff that makes me understand what 18th century living was really like, and how it could be for someone who’s lived in the 20th century. There are currently eight novels, and number nine is supposedly due out some time in 2020. Oh and there’s a show. It’s kind of amazing.

The Dresden Files by Jim Butcher - I was never a huge fan of fantasy books. Hard-to-pronounce names to keep track of often lost me as a reader. A long-time friend told me I’d like the Dresden Files. “They’re not your typical fantasy books” she told me. I picked up the first four and was hooked by about the middle of book two. Wizard Harry Dresden is such a grounded and relatable character in a very believable world that is both real life and fantasy. Fantasy characters from different religions, mythologies, and more all play a part. There are sixteen books in the series (!!). Book number twelve ended in such a dramatic fashion, I’ve read a few fans wonder if the author is running out of stories for our wary wizard. Gawd, I hope not!

The All Souls Trilogy by Deborah Harkness - These are awesome stories about witches, vampires, daemons, history, science, genealogy, love, action, and holy crap just go read them. You won’t be sorry. The author takes these fantasy characters and weaves a tale that makes it all sound completely plausible in our world and makes me really look at people and wonder if they’re hiding the fact that they’re really a witch or a daemon. BBC is making these into a TV show, the first season can be viewed now. It’s incredibly short, cramming a wonderful novel into just eight episodes, but they really did an amazing job.

The Anne Trilogy by Posie Graeme-Evans - The Innocent, the first book in this trilogy, was one of the first historical fiction books I ever read. It’s a wonderful story that takes place during the War of the Roses in 15th century England. The second book takes place in Brugge, Belgium and is described so beautifully. The author manages to talk politics in short enough spurts to not lose my interest and the main heroine is such a wonderful and relatable woman.

STAND-ALONE NOVELS:

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant - This was the first novel I read that delved into Biblical fiction. It tells the life of Dinah; the only daughter of Jacob from the book of Genesis. In the Bible she’s barely mentioned, but this fictional tale starts with the lives of her mother Leah and sisters. I read it before I became a mom and I loved it so much that I hoped to have a daughter and name her Dinah. That never happened (I ended up with boys!), but I have reread this novel many times since becoming a mom and the book took on a whole other dimension of wonderful and heartbreaking.

The Dovekeepers by Alice Hoffman - After reading The Red Tent, The Dovekeepers was a novel that Amazon suggested I might like. Yup, I did. An amazing story about four very different women from very different backgrounds who find themselves all living on Masada; a fortified city high atop a plateau in Israel and inhabited by Jewish people who were expelled from Jerusalem in the first century CE. The Jewish people were hiding there when Roman soldiers began to invade. Because Masada is on top of a mesa, it took months for the Romans to build a ramp. By the time they got there, 960 Jews had committed mass suicide. Two women and five children were found alive.

The Birth of Venus by Sarah Dunant - A wonderful historical fiction (I was on a big kick in my early 30s) that I have fallen in love with after rereading when I became a mother. Alessandra (my name in Italian) is such a beautiful character living in a turbulent and exuberant time in Renaissance Florence, Italy. It goes on about how the Medici family were big patrons of art and the rise in popularity of the friar Savonarola and the eventual Bonfire of the Vanities. It’s ultimately a story of how a headstrong woman would have fared in that tumultuous time.

Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins - One of my oldest friends loaned me a copy of this book one day when we were in our mid-20s. She didn’t preface it with anything other than, “it’s kind of wacky, but you’ll like it.” Yes it was, and yes I did! The author weaves a seemingly disjointed series of tales that include a Dark Ages king who decides he doesn’t want to die, an Indian woman whom he falls in love with, pagan gods, a Paris perfumer, and beets. Toward the end the stories come together in a very satisfying way and asks lots of great questions about religion and immortality.

The Romanov Prophecy by Steve Berry - My mom says I was named after the last Czarina of Russia; Alexandra. The story of her family has always fascinated me along with the mysteries of whether any of her children survived their execution. Steve Berry took what is known about their story and wove it into a wonderful work of fiction. At the end of the novel, he sites all of the sources for the truths in his story too. That weaving of history, theories, and fiction has made me a persistent fan of his books. But The Romanov Prophecy was the first one I ever read, and the one I can reread over and over.

The Agony and the Ecstasy by Irving Stone - Probably the only biography I have read that wasn’t assigned reading for school. I have always been a fan of Michelangelo; even when I was a teenager. One day my mom was watching a Charlton Heston film by the same title and I was intrigued. I stumbled upon the biography one day when killing time at the library in between college classes. I happened to be taking an art history class that semester and checked the book out. It so beautifully explains the struggles that most artists go through, the dilemmas of creating art for oneself versus patrons and paying clients. While Michelangelo is known for painting the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, did you know he didn’t want to do it? And he didn’t think he was a very good painter? He was a sculptor! Go read the book. Even if you aren’t an artist, if you have any appreciation for his art, you’ll enjoy the book.

What would you list as your favorite novels? Ones you can go back and reread when you want?

Traveling Gingerbread Man

My friend Jen has a kindergartener and his teacher was working on a project with the class; teaching them a bit about geography. The teacher sent out a paper to parents asking them to ask friends and family who don’t live in their town to send messages claiming they sighted the Gingerbread Man in their city or sometime during their travels. If they could include a photo, then fantastic. She even went on to say that email messages are fine, and even fictional messages are okay so long as they help the kids learn about different places on the map. They were mapping each sighting on a big map in the classroom.

I kicked it up a notch and had WAY too much fun in Photoshop. Here are the messages I sent:

“Hi Mrs. B's Class!

We are the Wong Family: Alex, Bill, Tommy and Matthew. We're friends of Jaxon's. We were exploring Arches National Park in Moab, Utah earlier this year and you wouldn't believe who we ran into: The Gingerbread Man! He must have been on vacation, exploring the desert. He was so nice by sharing some gumdrops with us and we shared granola bars with him on the trail. He totally photobombed us too! What a stinker!
Love, Tommy and Matthew Wong (ages 10 and 5)”

“Hi Mrs. B's Class,

It's Tommy and Matthew again, say hi to Jaxon for us, we miss him! We were on a road trip with our parents and we stopped at the Bonneville Salt Flats in western Utah to see if we could watch some race cars break land speed records. Lo and behold, we saw The Gingerbread Man too! He was scoping out some rocket cars and enjoying the weather. Thankfully it wasn't too hot, but wow, it gets bright when the sun reflects off of the salt! Sunglasses are a must! Wonder where he was headed next?

Best, Tommy and Matthew Wong”

“Hello, Mrs. B's Class,

Tommy and Matthew saying hi and sharing yet another Gingerbread Man sighting. He must have had the same road trip plans as us this year. We ran into him in the north shore of Lake Tahoe, California and he joined us for a swim in the crystal-clear water. We bid farewell when we got wrinkly fingers and advised him to do the same. Since he's made of gingerbread, we didn't want him to get soggy!

I hope he had a great time on the rest of his road trip!
Adios, Tommy and Matthew”

“Hello Mrs B's Class,

It's the Wong Family again, Tommy and Matthew. We were hiking with some friends in Big Cottonwood Canyon in the snowy Wasatch Mountains of Utah this week and we ran into our old friend, The Gingerbread Man. He said he was hoping to get in some skiing before another snow storm came through, and we hope he found some slopes, because it's supposed to snow again tonight!

We hope you're staying warm this winter.
Cheers, Tommy and Matthew Wong”

A big part of me hopes my youngest son’s kindergarten class does a similar activity… so I could make more photos. Hahaha!