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New website is coming soon.  Thank Jimmy for making me a new better site!  It should be done today or tomorrow.  Please come back to check them out.

Finally my photographs came back from the printing and mounting company. I opened the box and found out that the hanging bars on all the photographs fell off….. How am I supposed to hang them??? And the mounting job was poorly done….

It will be a battle tomorrow talking to this company. Wish me luck….

The exhibition still opens this Friday though.

So this time, we went back with all the equipments we needed to observe birds, such as egg sandwitch, egg nog, and binocular. It was probably the best sunset of the year. Amazingly beautiful.

Bitter Lake Sunset

The air looked pink and more birds than last time. The bird we wanted to see was the sand hill craine. They are the one frying in V-shape. Very big beautiful gray bird.

sand hill craine

After observing the birds by drinking egg nog, we decided to drive the path around the park. And see what we found.

Porcupine!!

He sure did look pointy.

So here is our pumpkin lantern.

Hubbit-o-lantern

The Hubbits are coming.

My Roswell show is coming up next month (opens on November 21st at Roswell Museum of Art) and I am getting ready for it. We have just made a trip to Albuquerque to pick up some plexi for framing and now Jimmy is slaving away to make frames for me. Thank you!! The show title will be “Secret Tribe of Hubbits” and it is all about my imagination of secret creatures. Right now I am waiting for my photographs to come back printed and mounted. I have never sent out my prints, so I am a bit worried about how they willcome back. They will be here next week and hopefully they will look great. Images of the new work will be up on my site shortly after my exhibition.

Jimmy working with our new plainer

I have been hearing loud noises coming from the sky recently. Today I went out to find out and it was at least 40 birds flying in perfect V-shape heading toward the Bitter lake. Yes, the birds are back! I came to Roswell at the end of January which was too late to see these migratory birds and I have been looking forward to seeing them. I heard that the birds come into the lake close to sunset, so Jimmy and I went to Bitter Lake wildlife refuge to see them flying in.

sunset and birds

We watched for a while and the bird traffic seemed to last forever. It was amazing to see birds flying in a V-shape. I have never seen these birds fly and I was impressed to see them take turns to be in different positions in the same V. Also when groups meet, some birds depart the original group and join the new one. Why is that? Because each group flies at a different speed or member birds are cooler in some groups? Or do they ever think? I wanted to stay and watch them but the sun went down and it started to get cold so we left. Next time I am coming back with hot coco and a blanket.

I have never seen so many fries… Here is a Texas style cowboy tater that we found at Eastern New Mexico State Fair. It was really good at the beginning but we started to notice vegetable oil dripping from our faces…

Cowboy likes fries

After this tater, I still had to consume a funnel cake. Who can pass up a funnel cake at the fair??

For the past 3 weeks, Nancy and Jimmi (our new friend from Colorado Springs) slaved away to make a float for the Democratic Party to participate in the Eastern New Mexico State Fair parade. Many artists on the compound also helped painting, and I think we did make the BEST float in that parade. The theme of the parade this year was “86 years Down Home Country Fair”. Here is our float.

click on image to enlarge

The theme of our float is sewing. The big thing in the front is a ballot box wrapped with a quilt with words such as change (yes we do need changes!!), peace, etc. The red thing at the end of parade is a giant pin cushion with the names of people who are running for office. The round things in between are buttons. Everyone who pulled the floats wore T-shirt which said “powered by people” since all other floats are on trailers pulled by trucks with stinky exhaust.

on main street

Reactions from people are little cold since Roswell is a big republican town, but we heard cheering here and there. We walked about three miles on main street. It was actually my first state fair to go to and also to participate. It was a good experience after all.

hayride

And here is me after the parade getting a ride back to my car. Hayride!!

shot gun shell

Roswell is pretty and I am loving it, but there are some things here that make you feel that you are in the wild west. If you drive a couple of miles out of Roswell, you will see a whole lot of nothing. And in this “nothing land”, people go out and practice shooting. The bad thing about this is that I am shooting my photographs (not guns) in these fields, and I heard so many gun shots pretty close to me. Right now, my project is about these evolved bunnies living secretly in the lands of New Mexico, and I dress up like bunny to do my photo shooting. So, for them, I am a really good hunting target to shoot. Anyway, I found many empty shells on the ground and started to collect them. 22, Winchester 270, 726, 30-30, shotgun shells, etc. All kinds of them. Coming from Japan, possessing of gun still startles me and I am not appreciating it at all, but I found the shells to be beautiful objects. I am using these to make one of the tools that the bunnies use. I am not telling you what exactly I am making. You will see it in the exhibition in November in Roswell Museum of Art. (I think).

moon rising over Comanche hill

Jimmy is finally here in Roswell. He got here on 15th and since then I have been taking him around Roswell to show him the pretty spots. His first day here, we went to Bitter Lake wildlife refuge (7 miles away from the residency compound). It was just before the sunset, and the sky was turning into a pink orange and the moon was rising over Comanche Hill, which was definitely a Kodak moment.

We drove the path around Bitter Lake and parked the car to have a better look at evening sky and we found this thing. It was a very big shiny object, much bigger and brighter than star and moving slowly across the sky. First, it was bright white light and started to turn to orangish color. Definitely it was reflecting the sunlight. What was it??? A satellite? No it was too big and too close to the earth’s surface. A weather balloon?? It could be. UFO?? That would be really cool. Well, later we found out that it was a weather balloon flying over the Roswell sky. I still haven’t seen UFO yet here in Roswell but this was something close. Weather balloon, that’s what people always say, right?

weather balloon