Downtown Orlando

In spite of my sunny attitude, it rained yesterday. I'm not talking a little shower my friends, I'm talking hard rain for nearly an hour. What's more, it's a long story, but it took us longer than normal to set up, and less than four hours later, we were sadly, having to close down.

All the while Dana was guiding cars into their spaces for loading, which was making me a tad nervous due to the thunder and lightening. Fortunately, Mr. Bruce had the foresight to put a few rain walls up which kept everything relatively dry, mind you I said relatively! Actually we did fine, it just takes so darn long when it's raining. Before the deluge I took a few photos for the weekly album:

I'm not much of a mango fan, so I've no idea if they should have all this darkness on them, but it does add a little something to the photograph. The berries, who doesn't love berries and cherries?

And, of course, every week I'm loving the look of the peppers,

Mr. Bruce left way early this morning, like maybe 4:45? I woke briefly as he was saying goodbye, and then again soon thereafter. Looking at the clock it read, 5:15! Because I was awake anyway, I got up, briefly considered a day trip, and thought better of it. Instead, I did my now-normal morning routine, emptying the drainer while waiting on the kettle to boil for my morning tea. And, of course, my bike ride which I'm still thoroughly enjoying. I've just finished cleaning up all yesterday's mess after everything had a chance to dry out in the air conditioning.

Experience has taught me that selling something big and pricey at the market is pretty tough. Because I won't be doing any fall art shows, I decided to hang my big flower in the sun room which I'm thinking works pretty well.

Enough about the weekend. When last we met I wrote that this post would include a bit about downtown. Well, wait a minute, the market is downtown. Okay, that means we are on track!

Friday afternoon I dropped off my calendar submissions at City Hall. As I walked there from my parking spot on Rosalind Avenue, I got a closer look at a very exciting project, our new performing arts center, under construction. To make it all happen, the city bought a block of property which housed a fairly new building belonging to First United Methodist church. In turn, the FUM, built a new building across the street to make up for the one they lost.

Hard to tell it's even church-related. So, down goes the other building:

as shown from the Rosalind side, and here's a look from Magnolia:

You can see the new center going up on the right. It's the story of Orlando--something new torn down for something newer. While at City Hall, I had to go through the whole screening thing--making myself a badge, along with the x-ray screening, all of which took me way longer than my ride up the elevator to the sixth floor and my drop off! I'm not holding my breath over my entries.

Once on Orange Avenue, I saw the construction from this vantage point.

I know my friend Karen will loves those puffy clouds! Because I'm always practicing, I re-take many things I've done in the past. This one, a sculpture in front of the Orange County building, has always been one of Bruce's favorites:

And this one, the colorful sculptures of Dorothy Gillespie in the middle of a parking garage, has always been one of mine:

I hope I haven't overloaded you with pictures today. I'm well aware that blogs are no longer so cool, facebook is losing steam, while the brevity of Twitter is where it's at. That said, although I try my darnedest to keep it short, it's pretty much impossible on most days!

Finally, here is a super cool new tool from Sherwin Williams, called, Let's Chip It! Click on the link and you'll see an image I uploaded, which through some sort of computer magic, turned into a paint color palette! Recently I overheard some folks saying that choosing wall paint colors was the absolute hardest, so what seems like a nifty idea to me is, choose the art work, and then, just, Chip It!