You have to see it to believe it

Last weekend I went to Houston to visit with my old friends Crystal and Elaine. I have talked about both of them here before.

Crystal - Elaine - Me

Crystal recently moved back to Texas after having lived in Colorado for the past several years. Elaine has lived in Houston for a couple of years now. Elaine is an artist - check out her website here - and had a show opening in Houston last Friday night. It is located at the Art League of Houston in case you are interested. This show was like no other I've ever seen before.

Elaine's sculptures are of taxidermied animals (she rescues them off of eBay - she doesn't hunt) that have custom made crocheted sweaters. She totally outdid herself with this show - if I do say so myself.

Not only did Elaine create several new sculptures, she also created habitats for each animal/group of animals, had a gift shop, had brochures, etc. She created everything she would need for:

It was totally awesome. My pictures DO NOT do her exhibits justice. Part of that is my fault - new camera and all - and the other part is ALL OF THE PEOPLE THAT WERE THERE! The place was SO packed Crystal and I couldn't even see Elaine while she was giving her artist talk, let alone hear her.

Elaine, I am so proud of you. I can remember how you wanted to be an artist even when we were kids. It isn't everyday when you have a friend who has followed her dreams. I love to tell people that I have this really cool friend who is an artist.

Congratulations - all of your hard work paid off!

(Do I sound like a teacher or what???)

Houston Children's Museum

On our first day of vacation we went to the Houston Children's Museum. I was pleased with the museum. All of it was hands on and kid friendly. There were several neat exhibits. Meagan is at the point where she wants to read everything and really learn about stuff and Garrett is at the stage where he wants to run around and do the hands on stuff without caring why things do the things they do. Does that even make sense? To sum it up, Meagan wanted to travel through the museum slowly and read everything, and Garrett raced through touching everything.

This is the front of the museum. I think it looks really cool.

Here we are in front of the museum. Garrett has that funny, no smile, the sun is in my eyes, are we done yet look on. Unfortunately, he has that look on his face in most of the pictures from this vacation.
Meagan and Garrett created this path for a ball to roll down. It was neat to watch them test the maze and then fix it as needed. (The object is to get the ball to roll from the top to the bottom without falling.) They had a good time moving the pieces around to create a maze that worked. Yes, they actually worked together!

There were these neat phones that looked like pay phones but also had a video feed so you could see the person you were talking to. They also had a huge robot looking man made entirely of telephones and telephone parts. Cool. Very cool.

Phone robot - too cool