"Elyse in Contemplation"

I created this from a photo I made this afternoon at Stone Mountain Park while Mommy and Jessica were inside Customer Services getting their pictures taken for their membership cards:

Spring Sing

Every spring, Elyse's current preschool puts on a concert called the Spring Sing. This year's was today, and their theme was Under the Sea, as you can see from the jellyfish and submarines and octopuses in the pictures below:

Rock City and Fairytale Nights

Today we drove up to Chattanooga to visit Rock City. We go there a lot, but we always love it, and today was certainly no exception.

This area is used on the weekend for formal pictures with the Easter Bunny, but today it was open to anyone:

This year they're doing a new evening Spring Break event called Fairytale Nights, which we went back for. (Fortunately, our annual pass got us in to it for free.) It was kind of like a fairy tale-themed renaissance festival, with characters in costume greeting you and trying to engage you in conversation throughout the trails. Here Snow White talks to a little girl who isn't Jessica or Elyse:

And here she talks to Jessica and Elyse (and Mommy too):

Elyse got her face painted:

(This was taken at the hotel, with Elyse in her nightie.)

We enjoyed the afternoon at Rock City; the Fairytale Nights evening was fun, but it gave Jessica a lot of anxiety knowing there were characters around every turn who were going to talk to her, and extra anxiety knowing there might be monsters lurking about. (We never did see the Giant that Jack warned us about. Thank goodness!) I'm glad we did it, but especially glad we didn't have to pay to get in.

Lots of Recent Faux-Paintings

I've been working on various techniques for transforming photographs into painting-like images in Photoshop Elements. Here are some of my most recent efforts:

These two are from pictures I took on a daytrip to Madison, where Anna and I lived while I was in graduate school at GCSU, last Sunday:

The last four are from a long drive I took on Wednesday, going east on U.S. 78 almost to the South Carolina border: