Do you ever feel like the best weather always comes when you’re at work, and the rain and cold comes over the weekend? Well here is proof of that. To determine which days I will be cooped up in the office and which days I will be at Artsfest, just look at the weather icons. The days marked with thunderstorms coincide with the days I’ll be at Artsfest (except for Thursday when it appears we will have an upside-down tornado).

Artsfest is this weekend so for anyone who enjoys pottery, photography, art, or just festivals in general – you should come up to Springfield. The past few days have been a flurry of excitement around the McCoy household doing some last minute preparations. I’ve been framing and matting lots of new prints to take in anticipation of selling at least a few of them!

Here are a few examples of my newest works:

A big 24x36 of a bug and some flowers.

One of my favs - a cool mountain stream. Note: Emma's coloring books sold separately.

And here is one for the ladies.

Another significant improvement over last year is that I have a tent with real sides so that when it pours rain my stuff won’t be ruined like last year. I decided to do a trial run of the new tent, but since it was raining and windy outside I thought I would try it inside. Funny how you think a room is really big until you try to setup an exhibition tent inside it.

While I did manage to get it assembled, I could not raise it up or attach the sides.

I spent most of this weekend constructing a new deck that adjoins the old deck by the pool. This is phase 27 in the 4 year long backyard project. Building the small deck was surprising easy. I wasn’t 100% sure I possessed the skillz necessary to do it on my own, so I recruited dad to help devise the plan, acquire materials, and get me started. I enjoy showing how things are done, so here is how to build a simple deck:

Normally you would start by setting some concrete posts for the deck to rest on. Since there was already concrete underneath several of these posts, I skipped this step and went straight into building the frame. Make sure it's level and square. If your building in a predetermined space which happens to be off-square, then you'll have to deal with that as I did.

Next, use those deck brace things and attach the cross bars, which probably have a real name besides cross bars.

If your deck is awesome like mine and has to go in a space that is not square, you will have to cut at least one board at an angle. I decided to make it the next to the last one, both for aesthetics and to hopefully prevent the narrow end from splintering over time.

Now all that's left to do is screw in the planks across the top and trim them to length with the skill saw. Now the deck is done!

The last step (not pictured) is the call mom and ask her to power-wash the existing deck since it now looks worse than ever with a nice new deck connected to it.

I enjoy trying to capture small things in nature that we don’t often notice or pay attention to. Small moving subjects are extremely difficult to shoot because they are small, unpredictable and the depth of field in these shots is extremely shallow. I’ve shot many insects in the last couple years and here is my latest attempt, one of my better ‘bee’ shots I’d say.

Bee’s tend to hop from flower to flower and don’t stay very long at each one. Chasing the bee from flower to flower is frustrating so I have concluded the best way to take their photo is to pick a flower and hope the bee comes to you.

I have yet to get a decent photo of a bee (or anything) in flight, but that is high on my list of photo “to-do’s”. I am thinking I may have to pre-set the focus and wait for a bee to not only come into the frame, but into the focal plane as well. Here is the ‘best’ in-flight shot I’ve managed to get so far:

This photo was just a matter a millimeters away from being a pretty cool shot. If the focus ring would have been adjusted just ever so slightly, or I would have waited an additional nano-second the bee would have been in perfect focus.

This Easter weekend was filled with beautiful weather and good times with friends and family. It started with a trip to the lake where we participated in a shoreline cleanup project. We picked up a small mountain of trash from the shoreline near the house, including several huge blocks of styrofoam, half of a kid’s 3-wheeler, a syringe, a dozen tennis balls and about a thousand glass and plastic bottles.

Here is Emma in her Easter dress.

We had a great lunch at Steph’s grandma’s and Emma got to pickup Easter Eggs. Who ever came up with the concept of a giant rabbit that hops around and lays pastel colored eggs filled with treats anyway?

Sunday night we had a dance party at Mom + Dad's. The girls thoroughly enjoyed it!

Mom and Dad got some tricycles for the girls. As it turns out they would rather push them than ride them!

When you think of spring flowers on trees I would expect things come to mind like Dogwood, Redbud, or the ever so popular Bradford Pear. But pretty much every tree flowers in one way or another… it has to in order to perpetuate it’s species. It’s just that not all of them do it in such a showy fashion.

Take for example Maples. No one ever associates Maples with flowers. Here is a Norway Maple in my front yard. At a glance it appears that the tree is simply pushing out this year’s set of leaves. Closer inspection reveals that it’s actually the maple’s bouquet of flowers, it’s offering to would-be pollinators. I have no idea what those pollinators are, but I’m sure it’s some kind of insect.

And here we have a Norway Spruce. Apparently someone of Norwegian descent must have lived here decades ago and attempted to recreate their homeland. I assume these are the starts of flowers, but I could be wrong. Spruces and Firs often have red, purple or bluish colored flowers and I believe most conifers tend to rely solely on the wind for pollination as they produce exorbitant amounts of pollen.