I like to carry my sketchbook with me and now include some watercolor pencils which are very handy for quick sketches. Often I think that I should draw something besides the view out over the valley, but those Sonoma Mountains are so compelling for me that at the end of the week, I have pages and pages of sketches of them in different light. I was born and raised in Petaluma, and my earliest visual memory is the view over the Petaluma valley from the front porch of our little house, seeing those violet hills. So the view from Bishop's Ranch touches me at a very deep place. Someone once said (I think that it was Camus) that an artist usually spends his whole life trying to recapture his first visual memory, and I can relate to that. That vista is irresistible to me.