Camp Creek Press

Taking our art materials outside.

Drawing and painting in nature.

Appreciating some of the beautiful places in our community: parks, gardens, arboretum.

How could you resist?

Well, here's how (to do a resist!): Draw with oil pastels, then do a watercolor wash. The area drawn with the pastels (oil! not chalk!) “resists” the watercolor. Crayons also work to do a resist, but the oil pastels have more vibrant color and depth.

Now get out there!

Just heard this word this week. With the rising cost of fuel, more people are opting to look into the fun things to do in their own area — just like we were discussing in my last post.

So here's another vote for visiting and appreciating everything your own community has to offer. Take a stay-cation!

Think of the benefits:

• Sleep in your own bed every night!
• The cleanliness of your room is not in question — it may not be 100% clean, but it’s not in question!
• No packing!
• No unpacking!
• No kids whining in the backseat while you’re stuck in traffic! No missed flights or lost luggage!
• Best of all — at the end of your stay-cation, you won’t be totally exhausted and in need of another vacation.

For our part, we sat down and did a little online research and came up with a long list of places to hike and paddle this summer that are within an hour’s distance from our house. And we live in the cornfields of the Midwest, so if we came up with 30 new places to explore, imagine what might be available to you!

Check out:

Get Away on Vacation — at Home

Real Simple: Kick Back, Relax, Vacation at Home

Ideas for the At-Home Vacation

Great Tips/Ideas for Spending Your Vacation at Home

A man travels the world over in search of what he needs and returns home to find it.

George A. Moore

Our art class is visiting a different garden or nature preserve each week. Every time we visit one of these places I think of the people who work so hard to create and preserve them. A bit of woods, a bit of prairie, a special garden — so many wonderful (free!) resources right here in our own backyard.

Our own garden is blooming and growing, gorgeous with color, alive with insects, butterflies, birds, bees, toads. There are anthill cities, ladybugs stalking aphids, birds feasting in the mulberry tree and squabbling over birdseed. So much free entertainment! And when the sun sets, stargazing. There’s so much to do without ever leaving home.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend!

The creek flooded its banks and made a temporary lake behind our house.

The temporary lake brought a new temporary pet — a baby snapping turtle. With the woods and the creek in your backyard, it’s easy to adopt a little bit of wildlife, watch it, feed it, learn about it, then let it go again.

Last year we found a box turtle just getting into the road and brought him home for a couple of weeks, then carefully returned him exactly where we found him — except, you know, about 12 feet further on his way, on the other side of the road. Turtles are so slow, and pickups so fast.

For it was rather exciting. The little dry ditches in which Piglet had nosed about so often had become streams, the little streams across which he had splashed were rivers, and the river, between whose steep banks they had played so happily, had sprawled out of its own bed and was taking up so much room everywhere, that Piglet was beginning to wonder whether it would be coming into his bed soon.

Right now just about everything is calling more loudly than the computer and the blog.

There’s the garden, the landscaping, the toads, the frogs, the flowers, the berries, the clouds, the breeze, the trees, the anthills, the garden snakes, the kites, the lake.

It’s a rising chorus not unlike the peepers and tree frogs who are so loud in the creek at night we have to close the windows to sleep. All the glories of spring, demanding our attention. It’s absolutely deafening.

Soon it will be 95 degrees and we’ll retreat to the cool indoors every day around noon, and things will pick up again around here. I actually taught an art class this week (that wasn’t rained out!) and remembered to bring the camera, so I’ll have that to share.

But for the moment, just imagine the sound of the screen door slamming. We’re on our way out. But we’ll be back in soon.

In the spring, at the end of the day, you should smell like dirt. — Margaret Atwood

And I’m not the crocodile.

So, I have a big project that’s just eating me alive. I want to share! But it feels a bit too soon. Soon, however! Soon I will share!

May is a transitional month. We’re done with the “school” year, yet summer’s not here yet ... we seem to wander outside at least every other hour, and yes, we’re working in the garden, but we’re also doing a lot of holding the porch steps down with our back ends. And drinking lemonade. Summer’s not here yet, but we’ve already had gallons of lemonade.

We are working on projects — lots of projects! But, alas, we are not finishing projects — not any projects.

There are road trips being planned — I can tell, because there are maps and atlases and guide books strewn around. But no one’s gone anywhere further than the corner, for an ice cream cone. (Summer’s not here — but ice cream is.)

Too much going on right now, yet can’t find anything completed and ready to share. Sigh. Ah well, soon things will settle down. We’ll get used to the warm afternoons and the bright blue sky, the flowers and the birds, and we’ll get back to work. Soon.