Working. Honest.

It's kind of funny. One of the things I expected when I decided to spend January in Cleveland was that the skies would be gray and I would feel cold all the time. Sure, there are more gray days than blue here, but DANG. It's been downright balmy compared to home. WeatherBug says it was -14 F in Salida this morning. Here along Lake Erie the temperature hasn't varied but one degree either side of freezing in the last 24 hours. Crazy.

Yesterday was one of those delightful blue sky days, so a downtown Cleveland jaunt was on the schedule. After a slow start (guess whose immune system is finally faltering in the face of perpetual onslaught.... I've got a bit of a c-o-l-d), we wandered down to the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. My Denver museum membership got us in for free (hooray!), which was a nice surprise.

The CMNH is a nice place, although a goodly number of the exhibits could use some upgrading. The bird hall in particular could benefit from a change of mounted specimens and better lighting. If you disregarded the variety of shapes and sizes, all the birds could have been female house finches: Just gray-brown and streaky.

Still, I liked the cultures hall, which exhibited artifacts of human cultures alongside the plants and animals that shared their ecosystem. And I was delighted to discover an aspect of Ohio I knew nothing about: the earthworks created by the area's indigenous peoples. And... there is an outdoor area with live native Ohio animals. It would have been a good place to draw, but the weather-wimp- fighting-a-cold didn't want to be outside too long. Another day....

It was a fun surprise to run across this display board in the dinosaur hall. I have done some work for the Garden Park Fossil Area in Cañon City (which is what this display is about), including some curriculum development and web content for their education offerings at Hands on the Land. Can't wait to send this shot off to my client.


After that, we made a brief foray to the Tremont arts district, where we discovered a place not unlike Salida on a winter's day. Half the galleries were closed and none of the restaurants were open until 5:00pm. We were hungry, so we visited the places that were open and then went back to Tower City to get something to eat.

Today Cleveland's back to gray and I am back to work. Got my Zicam, got my box of tissues, got my Halls cough drops in assorted flavors... hot tea and warm slippers. I'm set. It's a good day to stay in and work on this gigantor illustration for an interp panel that overlooks the Garden of the Gods in Colorado Springs. The panorama of the Front Range will be 6 feet long... so I'm working on it in chunks. Southern section on the table just now, ever-so-slowly resolving itself into an image.