Spring at the Gulf

We are counting down our time here on the Gulf Coast. It 's been too cool and  windy to 'do' the beach very much but for day to day living it has been fine. Sweater weather is the norm. Since the 1st of March we have been inundated with college age people wearing very little and surrounded by deafening bass sound until 4:00AM  Perhaps this area gets so much money from them that it is worthwhile to sacrifice sense and sensibility. I don't think this wild frenetic behavior would be tolerated in New England. If I am mistaken I would like to be corrected. We would have left had we not been working here.  That said, it has been lovely, Larry has been singing and recording other karaoke singers and I have been teaching pastel painting. The above painting named Emerald Coast - (Oil- 16 x 20) was done at Seaside which is on 32A, a road following the 'emerald' coastline, part of a series of beautiful new towns.  My daughter said she studied Seaside in one of  her landscape architecture classes as it is a designed town of recent vintage along with Watercolor, Rosemary Beach and others.  The clarity of the atmosphere, the intensity of the sunshine, the blue/green water and sugar- white sands I have not seen anywhere else.
Larry thought he'd try his hand at oil painting and selected a subject that appealed to him. After a few hours he said he hated it. Not his cup of tea. I urged him to finish it so he could have a painting under his belt and a feeling of accomplishment.  He tried again and gave up after an hour and I agreed that if it is torture, forget it.  It is not a lack of stick-to-it-tiveness because he spends hours at his music.  I thought he might be another dabbler, a Winston Churchill or Tony Curtis.

I am exercising my formerly broken ankle on my delightful 3 speed tricycle. It is better than a stationery bike inside.

We are going to New Orleans in a couple weeks to see Larry's cousin, Dean of Music at Loyola.  After that we will wend our way north to Minnesota to our next job, stopping to see among other things, Choctaw Indian mounds, Ole Miss, Oxford, MS, named after Oxford University, England.  I will continue to collect info for my next children's book which I plan to collaborate with my long time friend Carol Ann.