Shannon Larratt is Zentastic

I went to the park today with Nefarious and after kicking her boots off from the swings, she stomped around the park in her bare feet for about ten minutes before putting them back on… Haha… I remember when I was a kid, my brother and my favorite spring game was playing in the creek behind the barn. The top half would be frozen, and the bottom part was open (that is, there was still ice on the top half of the creek, and the bottom was completely thawed). We'd run along the frozen part with our sleds, and then right before it turned into water, jump on the sleds, and skip along the water, eventually sink into it… Totally soaked, sitting in icy water, over and over. So I'm not too concerned.

She's asked to come swimming in the winter, which I know is safe because plenty of kids around the world do it, but mostly because of how far the water is from our house I don't think it's a good idea and haven't agreed. Very brave little girl!

We all did a bunch of painting as well… You can see what I'm working on below, and I posted a couple closeups of the progress on my art blog as well. Well, now Nefarious is in bed, and Caitlin has gone out with her friends, so I have an evening of trying to complete my far-too-difficult mission of getting five stars on every song on Rock Band on expert.

I watched this video of an elephant painting a “self portrait“. It's really quite something — if you don't have patience, skip to the end to see the image.

That said, not that elephants aren't incredibly intelligent and self-aware animals, but this is actually a remarkable feat of animal training, not of independent artistic impression (I'm reminded of a book I greatly enjoyed, Why Cats Paint)… I watched some other videos and all the elephants repeatedly create the same paintings. Impressive, but not quite as exciting.