Thankful Thursday ~ Skies for Days

So, I haven't done a Thankful Thursday post in several weeks. Maybe even a month. Not because I'm ungrateful, but just busy. I guess I should be thankful to have been so busy! I mean, it sure beats the alternative...

We are still in the midst of harvest around here. We're about half-way done. We have all our winter wheat cut, which you can read about here: Winter Wheat Harvest 2015, and we have the barley from Tom and Carol's farm cut. Our barley is still just not quite ripe, but we're hoping to cut it probably over the weekend. Then it will be on to spring wheat. Our crops are not great this year, and it's easy to be down about it, but there are always reasons to feel thankful for what we do have and for what is going well.

Like... THE SKY!

You guys, seriously. Montana has THE BEST skies of anywhere I have lived. There is DEFINITELY  a reason why we are the Big Sky State. The sky here is HUGE and so often filled with fantastic cloud features. Sunrises and sunsets frequently amaze. I try to take photos on my phone and I'm always disappointed that my camera just doesn't capture the brilliance of the sky.

 I took the above photo on a recent bike ride with Harvey through some of our farmland. My favorite type of clouds-- the puffy shape clouds. The thing is, you can only really call it the Big Sky State out here on the prairie where you can actually SEE the sky! Don't get me wrong, I love the mountains, too, but you're all closed in up there and you just get little triangles and windows of sky. Out here, you get the whole shebang. Another reason to be thankful for prairie living!

This next one was near sunset...

Sky almost filled with clouds, but backlit by an evening sun, so that the edges just looked glowing. Love it. Reminded me instantly of the clouds paintings by Georgia O'Keefe, like this one:

Image Source: www.artic.edu
Sky Above Clouds IV, by Georgia O'Keeffe, 1965

Living here can be very inspirational to creative people, and to anyone. Just look around and appreciate the beauty that surrounds you. You can start by looking to the sky!

As somewhat of a sidebar: In my mind, I have a list of what I call Crazy Ideas. The theme of the list is sort of businesses or "offerings" that bring people here, whether encouraging tourism, rural economy, small-town shopping and staying, or what have you. The Crazy Idea list could be a topic for a blog post all on its own, but one of the ideas on the Crazy Idea list is some sort of artist-in-residence home or workshop that would be out here on the prairie. People could come and stay for a period of time and do whatever art they do. I think there's plenty of inspiration. I wonder what Georgia O'Keeffe would have done with a month or two out here? ;)

Anyway, the skies around here really can't be beat. Something about a long day during harvest that's capped off by an outstanding cloudscape... perfection. :)

I took the above photo just a few nights ago. We've been having quite a bit of smoke from in the air from fires in the Mountain West. Smokey air is not idea, but it creates beautiful sunsets. Like this one. The entire sky was cotton-candy pink and just glowing. See? Find the positive. Silver linings and beautiful sunsets.

Do you have any great sky photos from Montana or wherever you live? What inspires you?  If so, let me know and I would be happy to post them in another Thankful Thursday post! You can email me or tag me in Facebook or on Instagram. :)

Have a great week, everyone!

D.C. Fly-In, Part Three: Art and Design Experience

The re-cap blog posts I have done on our Washington D.C. trip have been really popular. Thanks everyone for reading! The third and final installment of my Washington D.C. Re-caps will focus on art and design that I experienced in the city. I was actually an Apparel Design major in college, and love art and design in general. Cities are really great for me to fill the art and design void that sometimes is a little harder to fill living where I do. Thanks to my husband for indulging my want/need to visit art museums every time we go to large cities!

We did spend a very brief hour or so in the National Gallery while in Washington. I had been there once before, but was again impressed with the scope of works we as a nation own. So cool to be able to see priceless masterpieces for FREE!! Two paintings that I really loved on this trip were this harbor/boat scene by Joseph Mallord and William Turner, and of course, the Van Gogh.

The Van Gogh has really lovely colors and movement, as many of his paintings do, and is actually an impression of a wheat field. As a wheat farmer, this was appealing to me, too. This painting was a recent acquisition by the gallery, and a really lovely one at that.

Photos of paintings are somewhat pointless-- simply don't do justice to a masterpiece. 

I also love modern sculpture, and DC had a lot of it. The spiky tower thingy (probably not the actual name of this work... sorry!) in front of the Air and Space museum is really great, and also a nice meeting point if you're meeting up with friends or a group. 

Can you spot Jeff? 

I also wrote in the last post that I really, really enjoyed the Air Force Memorial. I just think it is such a graceful, beautiful structure. Again, photos don't do justice. And, it's maybe harder to see at night? In person, I actually thought the way it was lit up at night made it look even more beautiful.

Something about this giant monument was very tactile, too, even though it was huge. I just kept feeling the want to touch it. It's made of a very, very smooth metal of some sort.

I also took a lot of photos of landscaping and plants. Many of the public sidewalks and right-of-ways were landscaped beautifully and thoughtfully, and maintained very well. I color combination I saw a lot of was reds and greens together, in various iterations.

Our return trip from DC went well, too, even though we had a very, very tight layover in Salt Lake. For the second time in my life, I found myself literally running through the airport in order to make the flight. Jeff got to the gate ahead of me and let them know we were there. Our flight from DC to SLC had arrived late, and thankfully the good people of Delta at the Salt Lake airport, actually held the plane from SLC to Great Falls just for us! Even so, we barely made it on time. Pretty glad it worked out.

We landed in Great Falls at about 10:00 p.m. and were greated by... SNOW! Some welcome back to Montana, huh?! We drove home in a wintry mix for the next 2.5 hours. The next morning I snapped this photo of the Sweetgrass Hills:

SNOW?!?!

Hard to believe just a few days prior to this photo being taken, we were sweating it out in 95 degree heat and humidity!

It's always so great to get a city fix when traveling, but it's also always so wonderful to be home. Montana is so beautiful, in every season.

Wideness and Wonder of the World

Happy New Year, Everybody!

I hope the holidays have treated each of you as well as they treated me.

And now comes the customary reflection on the year that was, followed by a look into the year now unfolding.

2012 was a year of learning, in what will be a lifetime of learning. I learned a lot about how to live in and appreciate my Montana home, how to adapt to this lifestyle, for which I was completely unprepared, but nevertheless carried by my curiosity.  I am quite certain this will be a lifelong occupation.

We had it pretty good in 2012, in every sense.  Personal, familial, career success abounded. In light of tragedies in the latter months of the year on a national scale, the year of the Sandies: two hurricanes of very different nature, our successes, joys, and triumphs, no matter how simple, seem even more significant. A good harvest. Strengthened relationships with friends and family. Personal growth. Each give great cause to be thankful and happy.

All of this was on my mind as I literally turned the page on 2013 by flipping to the first page of my Page-A-Day calendar.  The subject of my calendar this year is "1,000 Places to See Before You Die," or, as I like to call it, "Katie's New Travel List." Jeff always teases me that there are so few places I would not travel to, if given the opportunity.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013 featured a place called Chimney Rock, located in Ghost Ranch, NM, USA.  The locale has been the subject of and inspiration for Georgia O'Keefe works. The American painter spent time in this area she was so inspired by, praising it as "the wideness and wonder of the world as I live in it."

Image source: www.lonelyplanet.com
Open landscape from the Ghost Ranch area.

O'Keefe's quote reminded me of my home on the northern Montana prairie.  The January 2 quote in my calendar by American Poet Richard Wilbur was, "The eye is pleased when nature stoops to art." How appropriate that this nugget should follow the O'Keefe statement from January 1.

We can find inspiration everywhere, all around us. Even empty spaces, Ghost Ranches, and wide open prairie can offer solace and peace. Perhaps 2013 will be a year to approach our surroundings with wonder, and appreciate all we have.