Ian's Graduation at Berkeley

Ashley and Ian

The day before Graduation N&P came out and we all signed up for the Big Bus Tour of SanFran

Sitting atop the open air bus.

One Group stayed at a Hotel in Berkeley and took the local bus to the ceremony. We had to walk through campus from the stop. We took a few picks at some familiar Berkeley landmarks.

The Carillon Tower

The other group stayed in Emeryville and took a car to the campus. Here is the view from the Disabled seats. We were right behind all the graduates. We were glad we didn't have to sit on the cement steps like everyone else.

Can you find Ian?

Each different Engineering major got up at a time to get there name announced.

After the ceremony we headed to a reception and took some pics of the family.

What is a graduation without pictures?

Poppop and Lucie. She was an angel through the ceremony. Everyone took turns holding her.

Ian with his friends.
We had a great weekend visiting California and catching up with family. The next Day we were headed to Yosemite for some hiking.

Woodcarving and Printmaking Class

This Spring I took an art class at the Denver Student Art League in Denver. They have great teachers and many variety of classes. Teresa Haberkorn is an artist and printer and I had been wanting to take a class with her. The  building is south of downtown in an old school building built in 1893. Each room is set up for a specific type of art like ceramics, printmaking, painting, live model drawing, and sculpture.

Here our teacher demonstrates how to ready the ink for rolling on the woodcut.

Here is the design I chose and the visual image I drew from.

We use a bench hook to hold our piece of wood and cutting tools. The type of wood is poplar plywood.

Inking the outline onto the other pieces of wood.

Here is the mat board assemblage we made to register our prints. (So they line up every time)

After I carved the outline out we made a print to the other pieces of wood I will be carving for each color.

The first step in printing was to do a tan background.

We only had 8 people in our class. This is our room. Note the huge drying rack on the left where we left our prints to dry.

Second color is blue. Printed onto of the tan.

Next is Brown for the hawk.

We hung up our prints from everyone in the class.

Drying rack.

We had two printing presses for our class.

Cripple Creek Overnight in the Jail

The jail is also a museum. They had to pay an employee to stay all night with us in the jail. She was very knowledgable about the comings and goings of the ghosts in the jail. She even knew the names and which rooms we would find them.

We headed down to Cripple Creek Saturday afternoon for our overnight in the Jail. I had never been to Cripple Creek. It is a city that has basically turned into a casino town. Old storefronts have been transformed into casinos. There was a snowstorm predicted and we ran into some whiteout as we went over the pass before we got to town.

Here is the town of Cripple Creek. There are beautiful mountains surrounding the town. Great views on the drive there. There are old mine buildings all over.  Very historic.

Sharon and I left later than some in the group who were heading to hike before. We had some time before we were to meet everyone for dinner. So we drove 4 miles further to see the town of Victor.

We did not see many people at all here.

It was fun to walk down the street. In the prime time of the city of 1900 the city had 18,000 residents. Now the population is 400 people. Gold mining was the mineral of the mine shafts.

This diagram shows the use of the many mine shaft hoists that were seen all over. They were used to lower people into the mine.

Dinner at the Imperial Hotel and Casino. It was a good Italian meal- even had gluten free pasta.

This was the room where dead bodies were stored in the winter until the ground thawed  to bury them. Amy the ghost was in here and liked it when we read the bible to her.

This is the center of the jail and how we got into each cell to sleep for the night. Three ladies left after our ghost tour and declined to sleep here.

This picture shows Orbs (the circles). What is an orb ?  Why do they visit ?  Where are they from ? This unique phenomena is considered to be spirits of people that take on the shape and appearance of traveling balls of light energy, or possibly ectoplasm. Orbs are a temporary mode of travel for spirits of deceased people who have crossed over into the afterlife. And there are other theories as well.t

They had costumes we could put on to take a picture. This was a lot of fun with a great group of people. Several husbands came along but mostly just some Adventurous Women.

This is the cell where I slept. I brought a cot and it was kept at 60 degrees. I slept well except we had to get up at 5 am to clear out by 6 AM.  We all met at another casino (Bronco Billy's) for a 49 cent breakfast before heading home.