Self, A B-day/Anniversary and Roadkill

Hi there, well fall is upon us and now the consensus is whether it will snow before Halloween or after. It has snowed before Halloween for the past 7 years, we shall see. We are excited and curious to know what our first winter will bring forth. We know COLD. :0)

This pic is of my one and only mixed media piece at the Kenai Arts Guild Gallery in Kenai. It will be on display the entire month of October. I'm pretty excited about it. A mixed media project is a first for me and I absolutely enjoyed the idea and finishing it. The show is called "SELF" and I was asked to do a piece that represented my artistic self or my past experiences creating art. This is what came out. A very dramatic piece. It's a large piece of painted sheet metal heated by Gregs blow torch, it is wild, I wish you could see it in person. The base of the metal is held by many pieces of gnarly driftwood found off of the Homer beach, one just so happens to look like a snake (lower left). I sketched a portrait, a nude and a mysterious subject, with pencil on the metal. The piece is basically, "A body of work immersed in Alaska."

The guilds Artist Reception happens to be Oct. 4th so Greg and I will be attending. How fun is that?

Other than this news Greg and I will be celebrating our 12th wedding anniversary tomorrow and my birthday, yes the same day and no we didn't marry on my birthday so that he wouldn't forget.....I know what you were thinking. :0) I'm not sure what we will be doing but it's always fun.

I wanted to also share a story I heard last night at work from a guest staying at the hotel. This gals name is Sheri and apparently she was woken up a few nights ago by friends in town calling her to get her butt down to K-Beach rd because someone had hit a moose. Now, the way I understand it is as a local here you can sign up on a list with the borough and if anyone hits Caribou/Moose the state troopers will call whomever is next on the list. Sheri's friend just so happened to be next. 2am is the time and she was EXPECTED to climb out of bed get dressed in some burnable clothing (I will explain this later) and meet them at the crash site on K-Beach Rd. Now this road is a major 2 lane rd connecting Kenai to Soldotna and is trafficked at all hours of the night as well as the daytime. There are businesses and such stretching this roadway so hearing of someone killing a moose on this road is normal. In fact there is a borough sign on either end of this road letting people know of the many moose that die on this roadway. Just fyi to drivers that they may encounter this possibility. Ok, so, Sheri crawls out of bed dresses and heads to K-Beach and she finds a car, very badly mangled in the process of being hooked by the tow and blood everywhere. Great she says. Apparently it was a bull moose (Greg and I have told you how big these get) and she explains that it's Ass was 4 1/2 feet wide, apparently this isn't good, and describes the behemoth it was, now me being a newbie I'm wondering where she's going with all of this. She explains to me how 3 friends bonded that night, butchering the meat off of a moose on the side of a hwy for 3 hours and then returning to her garden shed/now butcher house to butcher the meat. Her friend is cutting, the other disposing of bones, blood and such and her wrapping. Now this whole process has to be done in a quick fashion in order to preserve the meat and so it doesn't spoil. Apparently when your doing this sort of thing you tend to go a little batty/psycho. And her friend butchering holds up his knife and starts laughing so hard he can't stop while the other 2 are just watching wondering what the hell happened to there friend. Hum. So after 3 hours shes dog tired and she looks around to notice that her and the 2 friends and what used to be the garden shed now looks like a low budget Horror movie. Their all covered head to toe with blood, veins and such not to mention what the shed used to look like and how long it's going to take her to clean the damn thing up. All of this for a winters worth of meat in the freezer. She's asking herself, "Is it worth it?" I never got the answer to that question last night. I think when your called on a roadkill and the possibility of never having to step foot in Safeway to by ground round is a good thing. This is the reason she didn't go to bed until the following day after she packed all of her meat in the freezer, cleaned her truck and garden shed of blood and guts, and the pile of clothing was burning in the fire pit out front. Just another Alaskan Moment on Swing Shift.