Greetings from Jim and Choyce

We've missed them at the park the last couple of years, but did hear from them the other day:

Keith,
How are you and Pat doing? I was just surfing and came on your blog. Choyce and I are doing well, we're getting ready to head south as soon as Christmas is over. How's everything at Rockport 35? Do all the same folks still come down? If Choyce ever gets tired of walking on the beach we may come down. We really enjoyed the few years we were there. Tell Allison & Tony and others we said Hi.

Jim and Choyce Capehart

Jim is the brother of Joanne Hickman and favored us with plenty of guitar music at the jam sessions.

This site, as Jim discovered, is a good way to keep up with your friends from the Rockport 35 RV Park all year long.

Our National Anthem the Right Way

Do you enjoy the singing of our National Anthem by today's "stars" who feel the need to embellish it for us? If you don't, I think you'll enjoy and appreciate the rendition provided by the men and women of our service acadamies in the above YouTube clip.

This was presented a few years ago at the Super Bowl game.

This is the way I like it sung; hope you enjoy it, too.

Thanks to Julee, who sent it to me, we can all enjoy it!

Julee Arrives; Rockport Social Season Begins

I just received word that Tom and Julee arrived at Rockport 35 RV Park late Monday.

Tom already has his fishing license and Julee has her wi-fi hooked up and is working down her list of emails.

Julee said it is hard to get anything done because there are so many people who stop to say, "Hi!"

But that's one of the neat things about this park: all the great people who chose to live there, for "ever," for the winter, or for a week or month. It's like going home! And for us it will be, as this will be our fifth winter there.

Tomorrow Julee'll be at the Women's Club playing bridge, I suspect.

An Experiment

This is posted more-or-less as an experiment. To see if I could do it and if it would work, really. (I could, and it does!) As Pat reminded me, "it really doesn't have anything to do with Rockport 35 RV Park."

True. But I'd be glad to see you; aren't you glad to see me?

Reference is made to a contest on The Lime Springs Page. That's a site, sort of a blog, actually, related to my hometown. The contest is to identify those in a 50+ year old picture. Readers of this site are highly unlikely to be winners, but try if you wish!
It's here: http://ls4.us

Portraits

You might have read that back in August Pat and I took the trailer to Washburn, WI, where she attended a workshop on painting with watercolors. One of the subjects covered was painting portraits.

Until this class, she had generally avoided portraits because her images didn't seem to come out looking enough like the original subject to be acceptable.

That all changed because of the class! There, she learned a relatively easy way to create portraits. (Easy for artists, that is. It's still magic to me.)

Here's a sample with which she is nearly finished. This was from a photo I took last winter. Because we know the person, we know that the person and the photo both have plenty of "character"—always good for a painting.

Enjoy!

Eagles

Yesterday Pat and I took advantage of the rare beautiful day and took our annual "leaf drive." The leaves were well past their peak, but we always enjoy getting out on the curvy, little-traveled, roads of NE Iowa.

The first observation of note was this lone eagle perched in a tree.

Further on, we saw another in a tree, then two soaring over the Mississippi River at Guttenberg while we were eating lunch. On the way home, there were two in a field, feasting on a dead deer.

Altogether, we saw six eagles in four different locations. A new eagle-spotting record for us!

The brilliant yellows and reds had faded from the leaves but there were many shades of browns. Still, they were pretty to us.

We only saw about three combines in the fields. Harvesting in Iowa is nearly three weeks behind normal, due to wet weather. Even the soybeans are not all harvested yet.

A Marvelous Painting

The link below will take you to a web page showing a very interesting painting.

The page includes notes by the artist regarding why certain things are as they are in the painting.

Clearly, the artist is trying to send a political message with this painting. You can ignore that—if you wish. But take a few moments and run the cursor over some of the faces in the painting. What a history lesson!

This would be great to do with your grandkids or neighbor kids! There are lots and lots of lessons to be learned or taught lurking right in this one picture!

Thank You, Allison, for sharing this!

Here's the link: http://www.mcnaughtonart.com/artwork/view_zoom/?artpiece_id=353