It’s Memorial Day, which means we fly our flag on the front porch and The Big M has the day off work. This year our children’s school district made Memorial Day a makeup day for a snow day we had in the winter. Which means… free babysitting! We chose to celebrate with wine and steak. Our 15th wedding anniversary is coming up next month, and we picked today to break […]
Today I started working on recreating the lemon painting (see post below) with a real still-life. I bought and cut up some lemons, then went about the tricky task of setting them up with the lighting and viewing angle and background done as closely to the original painting as possible. I had some help, fortunately. Here’s my first painting copied from an original by Helen van Wyk: Here’s what the […]
When I last posted about the lemon painting, I wasn’t very far into it. It’s now finished, and I’ll try to explain the steps I took to get there. It took longer than I thought it would. I’m learning that painting is a lot like writing. It doesn’t make sense to write in every single detail of a scene — what every single thing looks like, sounds like, smells like, […]
The ball of fur I adopted from the animal shelter decided it would be a good idea to wriggle her way through a wrought iron safety rail and jump four feet down onto a pile of river rocks in my back yard. She did not break any bones, but she did some damage to the spay the animal shelter had performed just five days earlier. Consequently, her parental unit had […]
Our first grader lost another tooth and found a new hobby. She is sending increasingly detailed questionnaires to the tooth fairy. Here are the questions and answers. Just so you know, I am not the tooth fairy. He is much funnier than I am.
I have a new toddler wandering around my house, putting her mouth on things it shouldn’t be on, whether it’s electrical cords, baseboards, or shoes, and struggling to discern the difference between my carpet and a toilet. Her name is Joanie. We picked her up from Town Lake Animal Shelter on Tuesday afternoon. She is named for another beautiful redhead, Miss Joan Holloway of Sterling Cooper. She’s darling, and a […]
We saw this sign yesterday morning and had to stop to take a photo with my phone. It’s a little hard to see — it says, “God wants spiritual fruit, not religious nuts.” I was going to post it as just plain funny, but now, in light of last night’s news, it seems oddly prescient. Osama bin Laden is dead. Praise be to God.
Flabby Brain 