flowers

It's the start of summer, which means once again it's time for the Belmont Shore Stroll and Savor. I don't know how she times it so well, but Rita always happens to be out here for it. Let's go eat! First we need tickets. 12 tickets for $10 means that each ticket is worth $0.83. We started with 36 tickets, but before the night was over, used 60 for the 6 of us.  Finally we allowed enough time to get to Long Beach. In the busy LA traffic it took nearly an hour. But we'd left early enough to arrive at 5pm. Too bad the event starts at 5:30pm. Some places were getting set up early though. At Thai Gourmet, Jacob dug into a plate of chicken pad thai, while Theresa sampled 1 krab and cream cheese wonton. And La Strada right next door all of us, and especially Rita, were disappointed not to see Bruschetta on the menu. Before coming, I jokingly said that we'd probably spend an entire book of tickets on bruschetta. Instead we consoled ourselves with spinach pizza, peppero

Entry into the Pasadena Chalk Festival is free after your first year. The only thing the organizers request is a 12"x12" painting that can be auctioned off. All the proceeds go to the Light Bringer Project which brings art to the children of Pasadena and the greater Los Angeles area. Since it was my year to choose the mural, it was also my year to provide the painting. Obviously we're doing a rectangular poster for our mural. I wanted the painting to match our mural, so I had to figure out a way to make the rectangular poster fit on a square canvas. In the end, I moved Adventureland to the side and tried to made it more wood tones. There's one other change I made to the poster. The classic poster calls it the Jungle River. I've changed it to what's it's more commonly known as, Jungle Cruise. Since I'm using a think 1" canvas, I wanted to wrap something around the sides. On one side, I wrote Disneyland.  On the other side, since the poster cut off

Happy Fathers Day! The reason for all the hard work on the mural yesterday was so that today we could all go up to the festival together. I didn't need to drive up early to put in hours and hours of work. Alli getting into the spirit by chalking up the driveway. The mural survived the night! Ruston and I just needed to fill in the letters, touch up a few spots and we'd be done! Ian wasn't too happy yesterday when T told him I'd left to work on my chalk art. He really really wanted to come help. He was excited to help out today. Grab some tape and pull it up Ian. Of course Alli wanted to help out too. Excellent! We're done! Time to check out the other artist's work. But first, lunch! As is tradition, we're headed to Islands at the Paseo. As soon as we walked in, Ian wanted to know why we were eating at the Tiki Room. Even our booth was surrounded by Tiki masks. We felt right at home. There's even birds in perches above us. This is totally a Tiki Room rest