Cabin Fever

If you can just imagine a grizzly bear in a small cage, pacing back and forth while muttering and moaning for freedom, then you've imagined how I've been feeling lately!  Winter is dragging on with low temps and high winds so I don't have much to do outdoors to keep myself very active.  I go crazy if I become too sedentary! So just a few days ago, when the weather was nice, I took a walk around and explored the terrain above the house.

 

That's my dirty truck.  Our vehicles don't get much contact with water unless it falls from the sky.  I call the infrequent rain truck washing weather.  My hubby will drive right through very large fresh puddles of water and tell me I should thank him for washing my truck!

Exciting views await discovery for anyone willing to go for a ride or a walk through the desert.  One would think that it's a boring, ugly, desolate place, but it's really full of hidden gems of intrigue.  This view of the house sets our location into the large open perspective of the desert.

This is just one of quite a few groupings of cacti I discovered on my little walk-about.  Can't wait to come back and take their portraits in their Spring-time glory!

 
It's great to let the kids run around among the rocks.  Good time to do so without any worries of marauding rattlesnakes.  Notice another pocket of cacti!  Spring is going to be beautiful!  I can almost taste it!

When you don't have access to a play ground, but live in the wilderness, this becomes just the ticket - Rock Climbing!!!  What kid or kid-at-heart doesn't love to climb rocks?!  Speaking of wonderful rocks, this leads me to remember one of my all-time favorite movies, Tremors!  Yeah, I'm a little strange.  But that movie is so much fun!  I love all the characters, the geographical setting, and the unusual foe they must outsmart...like pole vaulting!  If you've seen the movie you know what I'm talking about!

Here's living proof the desert is alive and well even in the winter.  This is my favorite prickly pear, the Santa Rosa.  Gorgeous.  And when it blooms, all decked out in yellow flowers!  Perfect contrast!

And as an artist, I just have this love affair with the agave.  It's a star-burst of spines, but unfolding ever so slowly with imprints of other leaves and spines on each leaf.  It's loaded with subtle colors: soft gray greens, blue greens, purples, blues and reds.  And all the colors change with every nuance of light.  It's something else.  Always worth an attempt at rendering in a perfect painting.

Cabin fever is getting harder to bear!