Desert Skies

The monsoons are here! The storms blow in in the afternoon/evenings. Sometimes all we get is the blowing dust. Thursday we got the whole show-thunder, lightning and rain. The girls got a tad squirrely and the Chicklet camped out in my bed. It was quite "snuggly" with her and about a dozen Webkinz!

A storm came in on Tuesday. Living in the middle of the city makes it tougher to find good vantage points. The above picture was taken from the intersection up the street. Then I drove towards the North Mountain Preserve and found a good spot or two to take some pics.Unfortunately, we've gotten some brush fires too. The sky darkened from the smoke from a brushfire last week.This was our view as we left the Phoenix Zoo last week. The Chicklet had a blast at zoo camp.
After all these years of living in Phoenix, I've never been to Hole in the Rock. The Chicklet went with the zoo campers.
My composition book journals are usually full of words. I'm pretty black and white about that. All words or all images. I don't have a lot of success mixing the two. There hasn't been a whole lot of either lately.

I've had something on my mind and I decided to go see my therapist again. I went in to discuss one thing. We ended up focusing something else. Wham! Where did THAT come from? She recommended EMDR, which we did this past week. My brain is still in a jumble...

Some scraps have been laying on my work table staring at me and I got fed up trying to keep from losing them so I started slapping them down in my journal. I ended up with two spreads.
The waves and tropical leaves on the coral pink page came from the graphics on a brown paper grocery bag. They were white washed with gesso and then I went back in with water color crayons and built some color up. The wave imagery seems appropriately symbolic while I'm trying to deal with a bunch of emotions that have yet to really hit me.

Page Two started out with me playing with what was left of the red paint. I use cheap, white, plastic plates as palettes. I leave unused acrylic paint to dry and then peel off the globs. These clumps of paint are the dried globs from a couple of past projects. It's a lot more white paper than I usually go for but it's raw and to the point. This is the closest I've come to getting a grasp on my jumble of emotions.

M