AI Watercolor: Home Sweet Home

 

Exploring the AI feature in my photo app has become a bit addictive, especially the watercolor feature. I spent quite a bit of time playing with it. All my photos in my phone are organized in folders so I can find a specific photo easily. Yesterday I chose photos from the "home sweet home" folder.

The view out of the kitchen window is very accurate.

The "Good vibes" neon sign turns on in the early morning and in the evening. We have a few of such signs in our windows - the Geek found them.

The pantry - just open IKEA shelves in our breakfast nook.

I had to laugh what AI did with one of our book shelves. Do you see the little dragon in the left picture? Well, we don't have a dragon sitting there - there is a piece of the Berlin Wall. Obviously, the dragon is way more fun. Now I wish we had a little guy like that.

Some pictures from the garden. I love how all the colors are so well coordinated in this top image. They are coordinated in the original photo as well, but not quite as well.

These are some shells and rocks I found at the beach. The dry seaweed turned into these colorful scrolls.

My collection of garden lights and terracotta birds.

Another collection - this time empty bottles of different shapes - at sunset.

I love the Moroccan lights on our porch, a present from a former neighbor in our old neighborhood. They were part of her wedding decoration.

I'm sharing with Nicole's Sunday in the Art Room. 

A Room of Her Own

 

Nicole has a wonderful new challenge called Sunday in the Art Room. While I may not be able to join every week, I will try to do so as often as possible. This week she starts off with showing our art space.

When we bought our current home almost 14 years ago, I was very excited because I would finally get my own room. Before that I was "arting" on the dinner table while we always had our meals in the kitchen - that kitchen was big enough for that. Only when we had guests would I pack away everything. But now I have my own room which we call the "studio", and most of the time it's a big mess. The photo above was taken a few years ago, but not much has changed since then. It's probably even messier now.

The window faces South and in the winter the sun shines right in, so I got a few curtains from my favorite Swedish retailer. They are light and transparent, and the sun is no longer shining right in my face.

The following photo I took from outside looking into the room - you can see the tree reflections. The two big boxes on the ground in the left corner are our grab-and-go boxes. The book you can see in the upper one is the most beloved children's book of both my brother and myself when we were kids, but also of my daughter. She was the one who requested that we put it in the grab-and-go box.

The book shelves mostly hold art, garden and nature books. I have put both mine and other people's artwork up there as well.

Just a couple weeks ago I did organize some of the mess on my work table. I placed the containers with my brushes, pens etc. on a lazy susan with my Talavera Frida catrina in the middle. 

On a different note. I don't know how you feel about the recent events in Minneapolis, but I am so furious that we spontaneously decided to join today's protest in downtown. This sign made by one of my German friends says it all:

Laughter And Joy Were Living Here

This house... a regular, completely unspectacular Ranch style house, sitting in a neighborhood nestled among the slopes of hills. Work was in walking distance and so was the elementary school.

The California poppies loved it here, too.

There was a Liquidambar next to the house that exploded in the most fantastic colors in the fall.

And so did the Crepe Myrtles in front of the house.

The mailbox was guarded by a colorful coyote and the house was decorated for Halloween and Christmas.

The backyard had a colorful garden that became more beautiful each year.

It had a pear tree with a purple clematis growing into it.

At Easter there were egg hunts in the backyard with the help of whichever neighborhood cat was residing there at that moment.

We lived a lot in that backyard. Roasting marshmallows over the fire pit, drinking wine in the evening and chatting with each other, having breakfast on the beautiful redwood deck with pancakes and homemade plum jam made by my friend Jo who had picked the fruit from our plum tree.

The plum tree is not there anymore...

We celebrated many birthdays here...

baked cookies for Christmas...

and the girl learned how to inline skate, do hula hoops with the Geek and cheered for the German soccer team.

We took photos for Christmas cards - and not all of them made it in the final selection.

In 2012 we bought our own house and left the neighborhood, but we still stayed in touch with some of our neighbors here. These were 11 very happy years when we made a lot of memories.

We will need those memories.

Last weekend, we went up to our old neighborhood. There isn't much left.

When she was little, Kaefer loved to climb this gate in front of our house.

The gate survived the fire. As did the street sign - sort of.

And the school? It completely burned down. It hurts to see what is left of it. This was Kaefer's kindergarten class.

I prefer to remember her first school this way...

*******

The Redwood Credit Union, our local paper The Press Democrat and our State Senator Mike McGuire have set up the North Bay Fire Relief Fund where every donated dollar goes directly to aid relief efforts and help the victims of the fires.

Don't Fence Me In!

But that's exactly what we did - we fenced ourselves in.

We started out in January - the month was so dry that it was okay to start right away. The Geek designed the fence and then one Saturday afternoon began building.

Everything of this fence is handmade (except for the nails and screws and stuff like that). We bought the redwood and then set up the miter saw and cut, cut, cut. After I had asked him, the Geek showed me how to handle the saw and I was happily cutting the pickets.

The Geek dug the holes in the ground for the posts, sometimes with the help of Kaefer. I was the one who screwed the pickets in place for a big part of the fence, slowly working my way along.

Until, one day in March, the fence was completed. It was a day to celebrate.

It feels so much nicer now with our fence. We will keep it in this natural state, even though the color will gradually change to gray. But that is okay.

I'm linking this to "Good Fences" at the Run *A* Round Ranch for the first time - this definitely is a good fence!