One last stop in La La Land

After saying goodbye to everyone, kisses, hugs, and buckets of tears, Scott drove us 100 miles from Bellingham to the Seattle airport. Our flight had a L-O-N-G stopover in Los Angeles, where Curt's brother lives, so we arranged for him to pick us up at LAX and spend the day together.

His brother Kevin is a commercial artist in LA and has made a living at it for the last 30 years. He used to do mostly illustrations (for book covers, greeting cards, advertisements, etc.) but now does more murals and fine art (paintings). Curt is an engineer by day, but an artist at heart, and he is always excited to see the latest work in Kevin's studio.

Before we could get too excited about Kevin's paintings, however, we had an important errand to do: We had just discovered my mom's car keys in Curt's pocket. Oops. This is not where they were supposed to be. This is not the first time that Curt has possessed keys that he shouldn't have. Remember the time he went to work with both sets of keys and left me stranded? What is it with him and keys??? Regardless, we needed to mail them back to her, and decided to do it from LA rather than waiting to mail them from New Zealand which would take longer and cost more. So we were off to the post office with our little package. Sorry about that, Mom.

As we were walking throught the shopping district, we stopped at a card shop and I had an interesting discovery.
Kevin was looking for ideas for a Valentines card to make for his wife. Apparently, he paints a card for her every year, and she has collected them for the last 30+ years. OK. You can probably see how this interesting discovery would lead to an interesting conversation that goes something like this:
me - Curt, I have 2 problems with you neglecting to honor St. Valentine (and me) year after year: a. Kevin gives his wife a Valentine's Day card every year and 2. he paints it himself.
Curt - Oh.

Now back to the artwork: Kevin is the one who introduced Curt to Yupo, a synthetic watercolor paper, and in fact Kevin now works almost exclusively on Yupo. Curt, too has become a Yupo convert. His painting of sunflowers in blue watering cans is done on Yupo, as is his larger painting of me standing in a field of sunflowers. I can remember him working on that painting years ago: my dress was blue with a little white flowered print, and he "painted" the little white flowers by lifting off the blue paint with a cotton swab.

Kevin's website is www.watercoloryupo.com if you'd like to see some of his work. While we were there, we got a painting of sunflowers to go in our kitchen with all the other sunflower paintings.

Too soon, our visit with Kevin was over and he took us back to LAX. There, we had a strange experience: We happened to be entering the airport at the same time as somebody famous named Sasha. The poor thing was protected by her handlers, but still surrounded by paparazzi. People were yelling "We love you Sasha." Only in LA. We saw her again later, beyond the security area, and she was blissfully paparazzi-free. What puzzles me is that we had no idea who she was. Perhaps someone out there can clue me in? Is there a singer named Sasha? Or an actress? She looked like she was in her twenties, and was tiny and waif-like, but that describes almost everyone in Hollywood. Her boyfriend had a LOT of tatoos. We were clueless.

After that bit of excitement, we were off. Away from America and its Hollywood stars. Away from snow and into summertime!