End of Summer

When I was in school and later, my kids were still in school, I always felt that the first day of school was the end of summer.  After I became a "mature" adult, I began to mark it by my birthday in mid-September.  This year I decided that today was the end of summer.  Two of my daughters and their children came for a brief weekend visit.  The kids all made one last trip to the beach yesterday (it was too cold for me!) and Dan and my son-in-law when on a 4 hour kayak journey.  Dan got stung by a wasp, twice, but other than that I felt somehow, that summer ended.

I haven't been blogging this summer because I've been doing a lot of experimenting with surface design.  Soon, I will be posting some of the results, but I still haven't had time to take any good pictures.  Also, along the way I had a few failures i.e. marbling.   I'll attempt that again.

We did have one little summer trip to Asheville, NC.  I rented a cabin about a mile from the Skyline drive.  The cabin was fantastic, but the driveway was a nightmare.  We got there after dark, I was driving, and I came to what I thought was the edge of a cliff.  I got out of the car and looked and the drive went straight down.  I've been driving since I was 15, but I could not drive down that road.  Dan had to do it with me hiding my head in my lap the whole way!

Here are a few pictures of our vacation.  The hot tub was on the porch of our little cabin and the kid teenager in it is my grandson, Steven.  He and his mother and father and his other set of grandparents all came to Asheville at the same time (but sanely stayed at the Hampton Inn), so we had a nice family reunion.

That's the Biltmore, not our little cabin.  It's well worth the trip to Asheville for a visit if you're never been there before.  We went about 15 years ago and wanted to go back.

I'll be back soon with some pictures of my summer's work and a new tutorial.

Hope you are having a good end of summer and beginning of fall.