A Little Color

On our recent trip to Great Britain, I picked up some oil pastels and sketch book at a shop in Oxford. I've doodled swirls and fleur-de-lis-type objects in the margins of notebooks meant for lecture notes since high school and college. On the guest bedroom wall in our friend's home in Oxford was a 4' x 5' painting of colorful swirls. I was in awe. A few days later after we had made our way north to the tip of Scotland, I took out the few art supplies I had and started swirling and twirling colors myself. This is what came of my time in Freswick:

Colors Twirling
oil pastel on paper

Hiding in plain sight

How fun it is to explore the world with those you love. This past month, my parents flew to Austria to spend two weeks living life with us. As a surprise, my sister and her husband joined us all on a side-trip to Italy. Venice, Cinque Terre, Florence, and Rome! Jonathan and I had never been to Rome, and what an amazing city it is. I was skeptical, imagining it to be overcrowded and dirty. Well, it was crowded, but I didn't notice the dirt. It was stunning. The weather was uncooperative, but it didn't matter. The photo is of us with our matching 'IKEA Family' umbrellas sitting on steps in the ancient Roman forum. The bright orange color kept us together. I was separated from the family in the Colosseum, but I spotted several of these umbrellas and found my way home. Check out the rest of the photos here.

"I'll take some perspective, please... pesto on the side."

So we sneaked away for a long weekend, which we spent mostly in Cinque Terre. It was great - cappuccino and fresh foccacia for breakfast every day, pesto on everything (Liguria is the birthplace of pesto), and hikes from village to village on the craggy coast of the Italian riviera. We stopped in Florence for the day before catching our night train home - just enough to whet our appetites for more of Tuscany next time. But the most valuable thing was the change of scenery - regardless of what the scenery was. Sometimes you just need a little perspective, and distance is the only way to get it.