During a little snack break on our hike up the Horsetail Falls in Desolation Wilderness, a butterfly apparently really liked me. At first it landed and stayed on my t-shirt sleeve, but after a quick flight around, it chose to land (and stay) on my hand.

At first it was just hanging out, opening and closing its wings.

But then, it deployed its long tongue…

… and started to lick me!

I could feel the moisture and cold of the tongue poking at my pores.

It was tickling me.

I don’t know if I tasted sweet or salty or sun-tan lotiony, but it liked me. A lot!

After a good 5-10 minutes just sucking up my juices, my hand got tired and I tried to shoo it away (gently), but it was hanging on… a few seconds later it flew at its own will… Goodbye my ephemorous friend. I hope I fed you well!

This week I sketched a little more the sides of the canvas, giving more life to the walls and added a bicycle.

To refresh your memory, it went from this:

To this:

And it’s funny because as I draw on the bumpy canvas with my pencil, I know I’m going to cover it all with paint and probably loose all the details I’m creating right now. But you know, it helps me get the picture better in my brain and in my fingers. Plus, I don’t care how long it takes me to get this done… the process is relaxing.

Once you’ve got one, you can’t think of not having one. Well, it could be a Vespa or any scooter or motorized two wheels.

Today, I had to bring in my Vespa LX150 to get a flat tire replaced. That meant dropping off the scooter at the shop and then busing back home. A few hours later, when it was done, I had to bus back down to the shop and scoot home.

Riding the bus made me remember a few things…
* Public transportation really saves on general gas consumption per person, especially when it’s natural gas (which I don’t think was the case today).
* Buses are dirty.
* Buses have a wide variety of human characters, including a woman who sat next to me and had old school headphones on, with techno music blasting through them. So far so good. She slided back the headphone off one ear and started talking. I was thinking hmm, she’s on the phone. But the music was still blasting and although I couldn’t understand what she was saying, she seemed to be repeating the same thing over and over again, with the same laugh at the end. So, after hearing the same foreign phrase about 10-20 times, I understood that nope, she wasn’t on the phone. Just had the same thing to say out loud over and over again and it seemed to be funny.
* It took me 10 minutes to walk to and from my 20 minute bus ride. The walk was nice but the whole trip took forever!!
* Buses smell. I actually hold my breath anytime I see an obviously very dirty person come my way.
* I don’t like riding the bus
* I love my Vespa.

And I’ll say it again: I love my Vespa! The trip home took me 8 awesome minutes instead of 30-40 minutes by bus. I have full control over my route, I feel the air, considering other vehicles I use a limited amount of gas, I feel in touch with the city and its streets, I am in an active mode and I can park it anywhere.

Seriously, once you have one, there’s not way to conceive getting around town without one.

While we were in Nice (France) this past June, we took some night photos of the Vieux-Nice. I especially like the one below, because it reminds me of Van Gogh’s Arles cafe. The blues, reds and gold. So, I decided to make a painting out of it and this time I want to share my process.

I do not have any formal art training, just casual sketching here and there and only in the recent years have I ventured in adding color to my pictorial “essais”.

I am attempting this project on a narrow 10×20” canvas and have gotten to only the sketching the outlines part of the process.
I don’t have a set process, but this time it felt good to start that way. I actually used a ruler to measure things out, which could be cheating, but you know what? I don’t care.

The lines are very geometric for now, but will only be guides for more freedom later.

During our France trip we managed to “get away” for 3 days in Italy. We went to this protected park called “Cinque Terre“, which hides five gorgeous villages on the Italian Mediterranean coast. Oddly, Cinque Terre is little known from the French and even their very own Italians! On the other hand, Americans and English speakers in general seem to be the ones in the know. Go figure!

The landscapes at Cinque Terre are memorable and made me want to come back and spend a week or 2 or 3, to explore every beautiful corners it offers. The most striking are the vineyards… they are on the hills’ steep terraces and have to use this crazy machine on rails to harvest. You’ll see it in the slide show. On our way back, we made a quick stop in Monaco… ahhh la Vita e Bella!!

Yes, my baby sister, Aurélie, got married while we were in France. Not only that, but she got her daughter, Luna, baptized too! And guess what? I got to be one of the wedding’s witnesses and Luna’s godmother. Didn’t go there for nothin’!

Aurélie and Michelangelo (Michel) celebrated the events in the lovely village of Valbonne. The festivities started at 10am and we decided to wrap it up at 2am (suggesting that people we still partying after that).

Happy times.