Saratoga Springs

While I'm home in NH, I decided it would be a good idea to drive over to New York to check out the Saratoga area, since we'll be moving back in July.  There are three apartment complexes we have a choice of staying in, and since we've been starting to look at houses, I wanted to check out all the little towns near Saratoga to see what they were like.

The drive to Saratoga Springs from New Hampshire is about 3 and a half hours.  My favorite part of the drive is stopping at the Vermont Country Deli.  They have the best giant cookies ever!

We had a lot of little towns to drive through, but unfortunately, its hard to take good pictures while you're driving the speed limit and looking out the window of the car, so I don't have a lot of pictures of the towns we drove through.  Many of them were really cute.  Some were a little too rural (without even a stoplight...) and some were a little too built up.  After driving through all of them, I have a much better idea of where I want to start house shopping!

On Friday I had appointments to visit some apartment complexes. It's all a little overwhelming, but I'm glad I visited and know my living options for when we get here.  We'll probably live in a furnished apartment for 6-9 months while we try to find a house. 

I'm really excited to move back home, especially because I'll be the closest to my family I've been since college (and even that was an 8 hour drive!).  And the Saratoga area is beautiful and there's tons to do there.  Only 3 1/2 months left in Germany- I'm sad we'll have to leave, but I'm looking forward to going back this weekend and enjoying the rest of my time there.

Downtown Seattle

Sunday we'd had enough conference and decided to explore downtown Seattle.

We saw the Pacific Ocean and the Olympic Mountains.

We went to Pike Place Market and saw them throw fish at the Pike Place Fish Market.

We saw the Sculpture Garden.

We went to the Seattle Museum of Art.

And we walked around... a lot...

It was a great trip to Seattle!  I learned and saw so much!!

Sessions, Sessions and More Sessions, and of course, FREE STUFF!

The art conference was AWESOME!  I went to a whole  bunch of workshops on making art projects, saw some seminars about cool things like the Google Doodlers, and got a bunch of free samples from the exhibition hall.

Here are some of the coolest parts of the conference:

Making Art Projects:

I learned that you can use the recycled paper insulation (for your house) to make really cool paper mache sculptures. 

Definitely making these at my next job!

Cool Things I Learned About:

Google Doodlers:  One of the Google Doodlers gave a talk about how the doodlers make doodles and showed us a whole bunch of different doodles.  He also talked about the Doodle 4 Google competition (which all kids reading this blog should do because it is super awesome, and if you win, you get your doodle on Google and all sorts of other good stuff.)  Check out some awesome doodles here.  See what I learned about here.

Wayland:  Wayland is a marine artist that makes giant murals- in fact, he's made over 100!  He gave a really inspirational talk and showed some images of the murals he's made.  We even got to do a "draw along" with Wayland.

Wayland painting in the exhibition hall.

FREE SAMPLES:

All I have to say on this one is I'm glad I brought an extra suitcase.

Seattle is also a really cool city for Art Glass.  We saw a lot of fancy glass art, espcially by my favorite glass artist, Dale Chihuly. 

West Coast Here I Come!

Thursday I left for the west coast, which is very exciting because I've never been further west than Texas.  This year, the National Art Education Association's annual Art Educator conference was held in Seattle, WA.  Since I'm not teaching, I figured at some point I should do something art-teacher-y, and this was the best thing I could think of.  Since I have no art teacher friends in New Hampshire, I brought my mom along for the ride.

We left NH at 6am and arrived in Seattle around 2.  After a harrowing ride in the "downtown airporter" (we walked the airport from end to end looking for it- thinking it would be with all the other "airporters" (which it wasn't), ended up finding the shuttle in the PARKING GARAGE, got in, though the driver couldn't find our reservation, drove into Seattle, stopped at a bazillion other hotels to pick people up, even though the van was full and couldn't fit anymore people, arrived at the hotel where the driver insisted we hadn't paid yet even though we had paid online, paid AGAIN, and finally were left off on the hotel curb...) we made it to the hotel!!

After getting our bearings and taking a rest (the plane ride to Seattle is surprisingly long), we went to the Crayola Opening Night Event. 

Me inside a cool sculpture.

 The event was held at the Experience Music Museum which happened to be right next to the SPACE NEEDLE.  You can't visit Seattle without going to the Space Needle....



Even the outside of the museum was awesome.



The Space Needle.  Very needley.

The Museum was really cool inside.  There were a lot of make-and-take events sponsored by Crayola, like a fish printing station and a "make a latte out of model magic" station, and lots of desserts and COFFEE.  The coolest thing in the museum was definitely this:

Super amazing guitar tower.

After we'd had enough dessert and music museum, we decided to go up the Space Needle since it was night  (which is the best time to go up) and we were right there.

The view from the top was AWESOME!

Friday and Saturday of the conference are full of sessions about teaching art, and learning about art, and making art, and getting free art stuff... 

I'm Here!!

I made it safe and sound to NH.  Of course, I couldn't arrive on time at 7:00pm as planned, my plane didn't get there until 11:30 which made for a pretty long day of traveling.

Upon arriving at the airport, I checked in, went through security and was sitting happily at my gate munching on apples and reading my kindle when an airline attendent came over and told us all that the plane to Munich was simply "broken" and was cancelled.  So we all trudged down into the baggage claim, claimed our bags, went back upstairs, stood in the hour long line (and I was only 4 people from the front) and made new travel plans.

Unfortunately, my travel plans re-routed me through Dulles- my LEAST favorite airport EVER because of their crazy "mobile lounges" and long lines and disorganization.  I've never successfully or easily boarded a plane or made a connection in Dulles.  BUT, I did want to get home to Boston.

Crazily, from sitting on the plane, taxiing at Dulles at 8:45 - just 50 minutes before my next flight - I managed to get off the plane, walk down the mile long corridor to customs, get my passport checked, claim my bag, get my bag checked through customs, re-check my bag, run through the airport to the nearest flight listing board 10 gates away, check my flight, and scramble to my gate BEFORE IT EVEN STARTED BOARDING.  Amazing.  I may have to rethink my opinion of Dulles... or only travel through Dulles after 8:30pm.

So I successfully got on my third flight of the day and made it home to Boston.  An hour and fifteen minute car ride later, I was home in my house petting my ridiculously fluffy cat, and an hour after that, I was happily sleeping (at what I felt like was 7:00am!!).

Needless to say, today was a day of taking it easy.  Though I did bring my sketchbook in case of creative inspiriation.  Sure enough, I was fascinated with my sister's angelfish who has survived an angelfish-on-angelfish attack.

Here are some quick sketches.  Maybe fish drawings will be my new obsession after alphabet books!!

Spring in Dresden

Today was SOOO warm.  We spent the morning and early afternoon walking along the Elbe.  It was beautiful.  AND, the flowers were out and the trees are budding...

Everyone was out walking, jogging, riding bikes, rollerblading and enjoying the views of the city.

We walked as far as the new bridge they are building.  We havent walked down by the river in so long that we were very impressed with the progress.  Last time we saw this, it was just a few pylons on either side of the river!

Tomorrow I'm off to the US!  Hurray for the English language, free refills on soft drinks and free bathrooms.  It'll be nice to be home for a while!

N is for Nashorn. And also New Hampshire :)

Here is my latest alphabet book page.  N is for Nashorn.  Nashorn is German for Rhino.  I already have an R for Rhino page... and also an R for Ratte page (even though Rat is the same in both languages).  But I think Rhinos are so awesome, that both the English part of the book and the German part of the book need one!!

I tried really hard to make it look like the first Rhino, but it was so long ago that I forgot what colors I used and even though I experimented for 15 minutes, I couldn't figure it out.  So he's a little pinker than the first one.

N is also for New Hampshire, which is where I'm going on Monday!  It will be nice to have a break from speaking German... though it is a little sad because the weather here is just starting to get nice.  BUT, hopefully when I get back it will be nice all the time and I'll have lots of outside adventures to post about!

Back to the Alphabet

After an alphabet break I decided to jump back into it yesterday.  Unfortunately, I don't think I was really "feeling it".  I made B for Bee and so far it's my least favorite letter :(

I think it's the eyes?  or maybe the purple "b"?  I don't know... anyway, the good news is I kind of knew B was going to be one of my least favorites, which is why I wanted to get it out of the way.  I've finally finished all my sketches, so the rest of the alphabet pages will go in order of those I like least to those I like best.  Just wait until the last few!

So, here it is...

In other news, the frog prince cake went over really well.  Everyone loved it (might also be because they don't really  make "American-style" cakes here, and they're way better than the stuff Germans call "cake").

I did get to paint a few faces, though a lot of the kids were shy, and it was a bit tricky since they didn't speak English and 4 year olds are REALLY hard to understand if you don't speak their language well.

I took a few pictures, but since I couldn't really ask the parents if I could put their kids' pictures online, you'll just have to trust that I painted some really cute princess faces!

A Frog Prince Cake

I wanted to post this yesterday, but the frog prince cake took a lot longer than I expected.  I think the actual frog structure was harder to assemble than the alligator....

BUT, after many hours...

Frog Prince Cake!!

Today the frog prince cake and I are off to a Princess Party.  I also get to do some face painting today!  Hopefully the kids aren't too shy and I can snap some pictures!

Another Cake...

After my last attempt at cake-baking in Germany, I was (apparently) so successful, that I received a request to bake another shaped cake for a friend of ours for her daughter's birthday party.  It's a princess party so the cake is going to be a frog prince.

This time, I cheated.

It IS for a child's birthday though, and I picture little kids liking funfetti.  NOT strawberry lime.  Plus, not having to make my own cake cut down on preparation time by about 3 hours.  Awesome.

So after 2 hours of baking... Here is what I had.

You tell me how that's going to make a frog prince cake, because I surely had no idea...

The rest of Day 1 of cake making consisted of cutting all those nice rectangular cakes apart and making them into this:

hmmm... hope it looks better with green frosting!!!  

On tomorrow's agenda... finish cake.