Mother's Day Collages

Two collages I made for Mother's Day 2012. My wife found places online where these were selling for $50 and up. We figured we could do something similar for much less. It was really fun going around our hometown looking for natural letters in our surroundings. We ended up spending only about $6 per picture including the frames.

Of Cowbirds and Starlings

This morning as I was getting ready for work, I noticed several birds on my front lawn. Three in particular drew my attention. Two were brown and rather large, and the third was sleek black and about two-thirds as big. The smaller bird I identified almost immediately as a Starling, as it had the tale-tell yellow beak and yellow streaked feathers. The other two puzzled me for some time.

              
As I watched the trio wander around my front yard, it was obvious the Starling was hunting for food. The two brown birds were tagging along and, appeared to be bullying the Starling. It wasn’t until the Starling found a big juicy bug and rammed it down one of the other two’s throats, that I realized what was going on. The Starling was trying to teach these two juveniles to hunt, the problem? They were juvenile Cowbirds.

             

Book Review- The Freshman Detective Blues

The Freshman Detective Blues by P.J. Petersen

I was quite surprised at this one, I read it many years ago and I forgot a lot of the story. There is enough about relationships in the plot to keep girls interested. As the title implies it is written for high school age children, though I really enjoyed it as a twenty-something year old. Eddie and Jack discover a skeleton in the bottom of Muir Lake which opens up a boatload of questions about what happened at the marina nine years before. At the same time Eddie attempts to woo Wendy Westfall on a scrounger's budget.The character dynamics I found quite entertaining, and the descriptions of boating, scrounging, and tinkering accurate.

I read this for a better idea of how to write scenes that involve boating and docking in different environments.

Book Review- The Fireball Mystery

The Fireball Mystery by Mary Adrian

A good book for young readers. The main topic of the book is astronomy, although the plot does take place in a boathouse community, so boating is also a major theme. The two children (Tim and Vicki) who are the main characters have a canoe and their father purchased a nearby island which they visit regularly with their new friend Joey whose dad owns a rowboat which is terribly slow. The children are stargazing on the island when a small meteor strikes nearby. They return to the island to find that Tim's new telescope is missing, and so they embark on a number of investigations to find both the meteor and the thief, not to mention the source of the mysterious lights seen at night out on the island.

My main purpose in reading this book was to get a taste of how authors portray boating for a book that I am working on about a mouse who learns to sail (Voyages of the MS Rodent).