Home again, home again......

We finished our bear project early yesterday afternoon. All that was left was a little touch up on the painting, a bit of plastic surgery on his top lip (actually it was leather putty), an application of spray sealer, and then coating the eyes with glaze. It was kind of nice to have the time for Jan to show me how changes could be made to fix some minor details. When he showed me that I could take a pear shader and a mallet to change the shape on one of the bear's cheeks, I was a little nervous. But it mashed down fairly easily and a little picking of the hair and you couldn't even tell.

I made a trip over to Cabella's in the afternoon because I had some time to kill. Jan and Alice invited me to a pot luck dinner at his church before I left town. While I was there, they told me that they had noticed I had a head light out on my car when I was following them over there. When I left home, I called Stacy to let her know about when I would be home. I told her to tell Jake I was going to be mad if I got a ticket on my way home (it was his car I borrowed). It wasn't more than 10 minutes later that I saw a car turn around on the interstate and start following me. I was sure I was going to get pulled over and it wasn't long before the blue lights came on. The officer walked up to the car, looked in the window and said "good evening, I'm trooper XXXXXXXX." (I'm terrible with names) Then all of a sudden he said "WOW, that's a cool bear!" I had the bear on the front seat beside me. The car was packed to the top. He spent the next five minutes talking about my bear project and finally he said, "oh, by the way, you've got a headlight out". He just gave me a warning and sent me on my way. Other than one deer that almost ran into the side of the car, the rest of the trip was pretty uneventful and I got home around midnight. It's sure nice to be back home again, even if it seems we live in the land of perpetual winter and fog.

Jan and I made plans for a new project together that I think some of you will be interested in. I'll let you in on more details when we get farther along on it. It means I may be making several more trips to Billings later this year, but they wont last nearly as long.

Here the last set of pictures of my bear project (I promise!)