Persistence...
Possibilities...
and Pepperoni!

I got for a walk in the woods this morning on the trails near the house with a friend. The weather has been terrible all week and we were just so glad to get out and walk instead of using a treadmill or doing workout DVDs!

There is this one stump that we pass on our walk where there are always squirrels or chickadees like this little one. They are wonderful reminders not to take problems to seriously and to just get on with the actual living of life.

Today was a great day... though my head feels a bit like it will explode. I worked on the book dummy a bit more making some changes to layouts and then started on one of the more complex full size sketches. When you draw for a project like this, you actually create the pictures twice as large as they will appear in the final book. This way, you not only have the room to put in more detail, when the image is reduced, everything looks crisper and cleaner. If you have to enlarge something, ever mistake is magnified, but if you reduce it, things that seem to jump out at you in the full size version are often harder to see and details are much tighter.

It is so satisfying to plunge back into the hours of drawing, even if I still guard against being too critical with myself. Fun to have the iPod playing my favourite tunes, though I hate the ear buds. I’m trying to save up for a dock so that we can just pop the iPod into something that acts as a stereo for it, but mundane things like computer cartridges and groceries keep getting in the way!

Today was also about possibilities... and that was what made my head feel like it would burst. I spent almost an hour on the phone with my ISP guy this morning learning about PHP, CMS and all the possibilities for websites that are out there now or coming down the line that will evolve how we set things up on the web. I’ve been toying around with making further changes to my site, removing some of the heavy content that I wrote in SimpleText and eventually evolving it to keep pace with how my freelance illustration and other projects are merging with my identity as a cross stitch designer. The possibilities out there are rather mind boggling! Aren’t vertical learning curves FUN?

One thing that I keep noticing though, is how definite I am in my visual tastes. iWeb has been driving me NUTS with the lack of ability to change the templates around or even just alter colours. I like the look of one version, but orange has to be one of the colours that I dislike the most of the whole colour spectrum. It’s probably because I look so horrid when I wear that colour and only learned to like pumpkin pie as an adult!

Finally, today was also about Pepperoni. I just love alliterations and couldn’t resist throwing that one in since it was a late night stumbling block. No, I did not get into an eating frenzy... rather the opposite. After finally getting the girls to bed, the laundry away, the dishes done from when we threw everything in the sink to race out to Bethany’s Sparks meeting and her “fly-up” to Brownies, I had to make lunches as well. If this week has taught me nothing else, it has made me realize just how lucky I am to have married a partner!

I went to make Bethany a pepperoni roll up and all we had is whole wheat tortillas. If she can get used to spaghetti being brown, maybe she won’t notice that her tortilla has changed colour? My youngest is very definite in her tastes. There must be NO mustard, margarine or mayonnaise in her wrap, just pepperoni, all beef salami and a bit of grated cheese. Not sliced... but grated. I stood there laying out the little circles on a larger circle and had a crazy moment of wanting to make a face with cheese hair or neat pattern. Does the creative image loving part of my brain ever truly go to sleep? I also marveled at the fact that I used to adore that meat and now find it difficult to even handle. Perhaps it is because I am getting picky about what is in my food. Meats like this are just too suspect. What gets chopped up and stuffed back into that shape?

At least, tired as I am tonight, I could still think about making pictures with whatever was at hand... even if it was pepperoni!